Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola have recently issued A Magna Carta of Restoring the Supremacy of Jesus Christ, a.k.a. A Jesus Manifesto for the 21^st Century Church. They argue in the preamble that Christianity is nothing more, nothing less than Christ, but that in the church today there is a serious danger of the person of Jesus being marginalized in the interests of fashionable political causes, labelled variously ‘justice’, ‘the kingdom of God’, ‘values’, and ‘leadership principles’. So they have issued this manifesto not merely in order to promote their new books but to bear witness to the ‘primacy of the Lord Jesus Christ’.

ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, is a call to a renewal of spirituality and discipleship centred on Jesus; it describes what that renewed spirituality and discipleship might look like; it tells some powerful stories about spirituality and discipleship. It’s a wonderful book. Quintessential Frost and Hirsch.

But it is not really a book about Jesus. The authors expressly excuse themselves on this point. They are not endeavouring to outline the contours of Jesus’ teaching because ‘so many books have done a better job of that than we can possibly accomplish’; rather they are trying to find the ‘spiritual centers’ of the ‘lifestyle and faith that Jesus taught and exemplified’ - ‘to touch the wild and primal energy that radiates out of Jesus’ (41).

Over the past few months, I’ve noted a pattern:

(This was originally a comment attached to the ‘Why the historical Jesus matters‘ post.)

Is there an identity crisis for this website? Can’t waste any time here if there is…

The question of whether by historically contextualizing the Gospel story we make Jesus largely irrelevant to the church and the world today has been a recurrent one - indeed, for me something of a thorn in the flesh. It was recently posed rather articulately and forcefully by samlcarr and shiert on the ‘New creation and the kingdom of God’ thread. I realize that I appear to belabour the point far too much, and the impression is easily given that I think that Jesus is of no more than antiquarian interest to us today. That is not the case, and I will try again to explain, too briefly, what I’m getting at and why, because I think we have a lot more to gain than lose by learning to trust the narrative shape of our theology.

I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’ and ‘We have to go back, but not to square one’).

There is a fully understandable desire abroad - as a reaction against big church, as a reaction to the distintegation of the Christendom mentality - to recover the immediacy and humanity manifested in the community of followers that Jesus gathered around himself. Sometimes this is expressed as a strong preference for this model of radical, itinerant, liminal community against the seemingly more institutional form of the Pauline churches.

Tonight was the last instalment of four of BBC’s The Passion, showing on television over holy week. It was an unusual departure for the normally resolutely secular BBC, and much talked up by faith communities. I had decided to give it a miss, having been disappointed by previous efforts to represent Jesus on screen or in drama. But I got drawn in – mainly because I wanted to know what people would be talking about.

Over the past several decades, with the aid of media technologies, some Christian pastors have attained a celebrity status. We see this not only with the televangelists of the 1970s and 1980s, but even more recently we see that some Christian pastors have gained followers and advocates, especially through the publication of books and through their use of the Internet. The celebrity pastors and their advocates form quarreling factions of self-declared believers in Jesus the Christ.

A great many years ago there was born, in an obscure village of Palestine, a babe; and its parents were so poor that this little child came into the world among the cattle and was laid in a manger upon a couch of straw.