INTRODUCTION
In 2015, I published a little book entitled Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People. It was a short manual on how to foster the kind of alternative Christian lifestyle that would be likely to, well, surprise our neighbors and provoke them to ask us about our faith. I was really trying to help Christians develop the habits that would shape them into generous, hospitable, Spirit-led, Christlike missionaries. As I explained in that book, it was their very difference from their dominant culture that made the early church such an intriguing community in its first few centuries of existence. And that intrigue led people to explore the beliefs that cultivated such a winsome community.
Today, church attendance, while becoming ever less popular, isn’t an intriguing act. Indeed, in some quarters, just saying you’re a Christian might conjure the assumption that you’re a fundamentalist right-wing homophobe. It’s become more repellent than intriguing.
Surprise the World was my attempt to help Christians think about what alternative practices, beyond mere church attendance, would arouse the curiosity of others, and to show the overwhelming goodness of the Kingdom of God.
My fear, however, has been that too many churches might have used that book simply to promote the five habits as a short-term project bolted on to the many other programs the church conducts. Many pastors contacted me to say they were doing a Surprise the World month in their small-group ministries and preaching through the contents of the book. Don’t get me wrong, I was delighted to see so many people taking that book to heart. But I’m afraid a month of promoting the five habits won’t yield very much unless we can nurture a more pervasive worldview in our churches, one that sees the inherent weirdness, or strangeness, of the Christian experience. This was the key to my five missional habits: They must be habits. They must be expressions of a genuinely alternative lifestyle, one that shows our neighbors that there’s a different —indeed better —way to be human in this world.
Stanley Hauerwas writes, “Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without.”[1] And here is an important point. If our churches are filled with people living the same way everybody else does, what do we have to commend? Information on how to go to heaven when you die? What about helping people become fully alive now! Our churches need to be full of people who have been truly set free from that which enslaves the world and who can show others how Jesus makes that possible. Learning fresh habits helps. But we also need to be freed from that which we cannot live without. Later in his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, Hauerwas, writing about the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, says,
To be formed in the habits, the virtues, of the prayer we are taught to pray means that Christians cannot help but appear as a threat to the legitimating ideologies of those who rule. Christians do not seek to be subversives; it just turns out that living according to the Sermon on the Mount cannot help but challenge the way things are.[2]
The book you are now reading is my humble attempt to encourage you to challenge the way things are by living a life that has been truly set free by Christ. Consider it a kind of companion piece to Surprise the World, a little less practical, but absolutely essential in cultivating a highly missional people.