Michael Frost Archives - Bob on Books

To Alter Your World, Michael Frost and Christiana Rice. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017.

Summary: Explores a different metaphor for the church’s role in God’s mission, that of midwife to what God is birthing, and how this might change the ways we engage with our world.

One of the dominant metaphors for Christian cultural engagement today is that of battle, whether of spiritual warfare, a war to “reclaim” the culture, or retreat, because of perception that either we’ve been fighting the wrong war, or that we are seriously losing and need to re-group and re-build. A more sophisticated model is that of “changing” or “transforming” the world. Yet as James Davison Hunter points out in To Change The World, this has often been an exercise in starry-eyed naivete’ and a prescription for burnout when the world doesn’t easily or quickly change.

Michael Frost and Christiana Rice, two missional practitioners and theorists have come together in this book to suggest a different model, a different way of “joining” God in the mission. Their inspiration is drawn from Isaiah 42:14:

“For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.”

Their contention is that it is God, through his work in Christ, who is birthing a new world and our role is akin to that of the midwife. They write:

“If God is groaning like a woman in labor, and if a new world is being born before our very eyes, being pushed forth through the cracks of our broken world, our job isn’t to hurry it along. Rather our job is to join God and partner with him in the delivery room and to stop imagining we can birth the new world with our own strategies and methodologies. Indeed, our attempts to usher in the new order in recent years haven’t produced the kid of restoration, redemption or reconciliation in this world that we believe God envisions” (p. 17).

Frost and Rice don’t stop with a new metaphor or a new paradigm but press this out in the practical work in which teams of missional people engage. They challenge us to forego our colonizing and rootless efforts at church planting that fail to listen to and attend to communities and develop wholistic ministry in partnership with its people. Instead they elaborate the metaphor of midwife, both in ancient Israel and contemporary practice.

Midwives neither give birth to the child for the mother nor “make it happen” according to a plan but attend women during their pregnancies. They make space for a birth to happen to remove all barriers to giving birth and welcoming new life. They study place, they notice signs, they look at physical space. They act flexibly and fearlessly to the changing circumstances of the birth process. They don’t spend lots of time arguing the importance of midwifing, but quietly live that narrative with the women they attend. Rice and Frost work out practical applications of these principles.

They also see that collaboration to effect change is a multi-level process: with individuals, interpersonally in small groups like families, in community, in institutions and in structures and systems. Much of this happens not just through “church” activities but through a transformed vision of our work that things about our work societally as well as individually.

Place and space is a big part of what they talk about, and often overlooked. They draw on the work of the Project for Public Spaces to identify seven principles for creating great spaces that missional communities in a space need to consider:

The neighborhood is the expert.
Craft a place, not a design.
Look for partners.
You can see a lot just by observing.
Have a vision.
Money is not the issue.
You are never finished.

The concluding two chapters concern the missional person. Not only do they attend to the changes God would birth, but they are changed themselves in the process. Often this comes through suffering. Change is disruptive and there will be push back. To love a place and its people and to persist in all this is hard and we will be changed through it.

The call of this book is not to quietism as opposed to human-centered activism, a kind of can-do, we can make it happen spirit. The midwife, is active, but in a different way, and this is what I most appreciate about the theme and approach of this book. It offers, to people who have begun to think they must make something happen to advance the mission of God, the insight that God has something God would give birth to in the world. Perhaps most striking is that this is a distinctively female metaphor–one of a woman attending to another giving birth, and God uses it of God’s self! Many of us who are fathers went through childbirth classes that taught us how we might attend and accompany our wives, perhaps in the presence of an obstetrician or midwife, in the incredible process of birth, one we could only support as our wives labored. Perhaps we might begin to draw upon that to understand and become skillful midwives in the birthing process of the new creation.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement, Michael Frost. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

Summary: Frost explores what it means to be incarnational people in an “excarnational” world, one marked by increasing focus on disembodied, virtual experience, and disconnection from physical community.

We are becoming a culture that increasingly disengages from embodied experience, that objectifies others and encounters the world via a computer or smartphone screen. This has significant implications for the church, which is also shaped by this “excarnate” culture. Michael Frost explores this “excarnate” world we are increasingly fashioning for ourselves, how excarnate life has unhelpfully shaped Christians and the Christian community, and what it we can learn from Jesus about becoming truly incarnational people.

He explores the fascination of this culture with zombies, and the morally ambiguous state of being the walking dead. All this stems from a mind-body dualism that detaches what we think and experience mentally from what we do through our bodies. It explains how people can embrace immoral behavior and not think it affects anything about their spirituality.

True Christian faith is different in that the central figure was an embodied Messiah who calls people to follow and for whom believing and behaving walk hand in hand. Because we are desiring creatures (drawing on the work of James K. A. Smith) the central matter in discipleship is not merely believing certain things but the ordering of desires and our behaviors along the lines of our beliefs. We become what we worship, for better or worse. Mission then, which is a big focus for Frost, becomes a move beyond click activism to embodied presence. The challenge is not growing bigger churches, but Christians living out faith in all the dimensions of “silos” of life–economics, agriculture, education, science and technology, communications, arts, politics, and family life. This is aided by living as “placed” people, who settle down in a physical community and become part of its life for a long time.

The concluding chapters focus on the missional, communal, and spiritual practices that nourish an incarnational life. At the same time, Frost includes some important warnings about the difference between healthy and unhealthy religion, using the Jim Jones cult as an object lesson, because in fact at the start they were pursuing an incarnational ministry, first in Indianapolis and then San Francisco. What is chilling is how often unhealthy ministries are organized around “taking a stand” rather than training people to think for themselves, inviting us to be humble about what we think we know, focuses on what we are for, and stays in tune with reality. The epilogue concludes with the rhythms of life of a community, the value of liturgies and embodied practices of life together.

Frost provides an insightful glimpse into contemporary culture and the ways it leads to disembodied, excarnate expression in the church. It even made me stop and muse about blogging on books rather than simply getting together with some friends over beverages and good food to talk about what we are discovering. Actually, I do that as well, and so don’t feel so bad about sharing the riches online. But I do find myself wondering about online community supplanting the particular place and space and people I live among. He also challenges the kind of click activism that makes you think you’ve done something simply because of what you’ve done online. And yet these tools have aided recent political revolutions that have resulted in embodied change. It seems the challenge is how to use these tools incarnationally rather than to eschew them altogether, and how to lay them aside when we need to do so.

Thanks, Michael Frost, for this reminder that we are incarnation people and the difference this can make in an excarnate world.