This book is the culmination of several years of pastoring in the lovely city of Portland, Oregon. Portland is proudly progressive and considered highly unchurched. The blessing of this place is seen in the beauty of Oregon’s geography. The snow-peaked Mount Hood looks out over our city like a watchman on a wall as the Willamette and Columbia Rivers flow around us.
There is another beauty within our city, and it is a thriving community of Jesus followers from all stripes and traditions. We are learning how to love our neighbors and serve our city together, not as one church but as “the” church. Within that beauty, however, are large challenges that loom over us. Followers of Jesus are a minority community in Portland, and Portland itself has a strong culture that powerfully shapes how people think and act. One significant challenge is how to be faithful to Jesus when the culture around us has no place for our faith.
The theme of exile came to me from reading many Old Testament theologians. Most prominent was Walter Brueggemann, whose poetic insight into the prophets and ability to see our own local and national challenges in light of Scripture helped me to understand exile as an extremely useful and hopeful metaphor that can frame our understanding of what it means to be the people of God now.
For all its beauty, Portland has become a microcosm of the broader culture. The polarizing categories that divide our nation are amplified in Portland. The daily shouting at one another from our echo chambers has created a lack of the civility required to move forward together as a community. The people of God have an opportunity in the midst of our cultural moment to create civility in the public square. We are called by God to love our neighbor and our enemy, to embrace rather than demonize those whom we disagree with. While Portland appears polarized, there are beachheads of unlikely partners working together for the common good on some of our city’s hardest problems. Like many American cities, Portland has several crisis points: an overloaded foster care system, homelessness, and sex trafficking, to name a few. Yet in these spaces, we are discovering a way to embrace one another, listen to each other with empathetic ears, and actually move forward together to create solutions. We are learning how to build up, not simply tear down. In the pages that follow, I will explain a way of being the people of God in this moment that, if taken seriously, can lead us into a type of citizenship that is faithful to Jesus and a blessing to our local communities. In a moment like ours, the church—if we are faithful to Christ—can be a force for healing and hope.
Ours is a hurting world, and our country is fractured and polarized, but God has chosen this time and place for us to live out our faith and faithfulness. That is no accident.
What I hope to do in the following pages is to provide a framework for understanding the moment in which we are living and to help us see within that moment the possibilities God has for us.
In the first few chapters of this book, I will introduce the theme of exile and explain why I think it is both helpful and powerful for understanding where we fit in society today and how we fit best into that society.
In the second half, I will introduce you to spiritual practices that I believe have a threefold power for those who practice them. The practices that I propose have the power to transform us personally in a way that leads to faithfulness to Jesus. They also have the power to preserve our identity as followers of Jesus in a culture whose powers of assimilation are at work on us every day. Finally, these practices have the power to be both a blessing and a witness to our neighbors, communities, and nation. I realize this sounds like a huge oversell of these practices, but in reality, they are simply ways in which we have been called by Jesus to live our lives. Our homes, our work, our money, and our worship create the shape of our lives as individuals, families, churches, and communities. When we enter into these practices, we enter into rhythms of God’s grace that lead us to life as he means for us to experience it.
My prayer is that together we will discover what it means to be the people of God now, right here in our fractured moment, and that with this discovery we will become the salt and light the world so desperately needs.