Onward: Book Review

I really enjoy Russell Moore's insightful mind and the way he is able to analyse current affairs in the light of the gospel then communicate his thoughts so well. This book (which I'm half way though) is fascinating and at times makes my head spin, it gives me so much to think about! Even though it is written by an American into American culture, there is so much all other cultures can learn from it too. Here's a summary of the book from it's Amazon page, and below are some extracts with more to follow:

  

Those who were nominally Christian are suddenly vanished from the pews. Those who wanted an almost-gospel will find that they don’t need it to thrive in American culture. As a matter of fact, cultural Christianity is herded out by natural selection. That sort of nominal religion, when bearing the burden of the embarrassment of a controversial Bible, is no more equipped to survive in a secularizing America than a declawed cat released in the wild. Who then is left behind? It will be those defined not by a Christian America but by a Christian gospel.

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If we are not a “moral majority” in this country, then what are we? I would argue that we should see ourselves as a prophetic minority.

 

Seeing oneself as a prophetic minority does not mean retreat, and it certainly does not mean victim status. It also does not confer faithfulness. Marginalization can strip away from us the besetting sins of a majoritarian viewpoint, but it can bring others as well. We must remember our smallness but also our connectedness to a global, and indeed cosmic, reality. The kingdom of God is vast and tiny, universal and exclusive. Our story is that of a little flock and of an army, awesome with banners. Our legacy is a Christianity of persecution and proliferation, of catacombs and cathedrals. If we see ourselves as only a minority, we will be tempted to isolation. If we see ourselves only as a kingdom, we will be tempted toward triumphalism. We are, instead, a church. We are a minority with a message and a mission.

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A siege mentality [that] seeks to catalog offenses of what’s going wrong in the culture, in order to shock the faithful into action. We then castigate the culture because we start seeing the culture as something we “had” and are now “losing,” rather than seeing ourselves as those who have been sent into this culture in order to reach it. A Christian public witness then becomes less of a mission of a redemptive gospel and more of an ongoing session of primal scream therapy.