Lately, I've noticed a jumble of books hitting the shelves that have to do with "radical" Christian living. Personally, I think that they have to do with real Christian living, but that's another topic for another time. Personally, I'm enjoying these books. I just finished Crazy Love (for the 4th time), and am in the middle of David Platt's Radical.
I know people are reading these books because they turn up in the Christian book section of Wal-Mart. Only very popular Christian books turn up there.
More than reading these books, I pray that people are convicted by them and are repenting. My first romp through Crazy Love dropped me to my knees, and I've been in two other groups who have studied it now. I know what a book like that can do to a person who has betrayed Christian ideals for the safety and comfort of our American lives.
What I also pray is that we are teaching these books to our kids; discussing them and doing what they prescribe. I say this because I'm convinced that tomorrow's Christian leaders will live in the ways that are described in these books. Tomorrow's Christian leaders will throw off the compromise that we have lived with between the world and our faith. They will live in radical obedience to God and lead a movement of radical obedience to God.
I'm a student of history, so I don't believe that the things discussed in these books have never been discussed before, but I truly believe that we are faced with a time in which our technology and state of information overload are allowing more and more Christians to come into contact with the ideas that people like Chan and Platt are writing about.
We have an opportunity, given our "new" awareness of the Christian life, to explore and integrate this teaching into our programs. We have the opportunity to model this kind of life to our students and practice this kind of life with our students.
Thank you, Francis Chan and David Platt, and all of those like you, for being the modern day prophets that we need, and for calling us back to the truth. Now, for the rest of us, lets take that truth, live it, and teach it.
Training Tomorrow's Leaders Today,
Matt
