Customer Reviews

The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out

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This is one of the most refreshing and engaging books on church/culture that I've read, and is probably THE best book I've read from a leader in the emerging church.

Driscoll contends that as believers we must be concerned about three things: the gospel, the church, and the culture. When we neglect one of these three elements, we fall into one of three errors:

The Church + The Culture - The Gospel = Liberalism

The Church + The Gospel - The Culture = Fundamentalism

The Gospel + The Culture - The Church = Parachurch

I think this is slightly reductionistic, but it still provokes reflection. Driscoll's book is a plea for the church to be faithful to the gospel within the culture - not by isolating itself from the culture. He says, of course, that faithfulness to the gospel involves some measure of separation. As Christians, we are different - called out of darkness into light - and this will affect our life-styles and ethics. But Driscoll also contends that Christian liberty must be maintained in areas where Scripture is silent - and that our liberty should be used for the sake of reaching culture.

Of course, culture looks different in Seattle than it does in the Midwest, where I minister. Driscoll's church looks different than ours, with lots of tattooed, pierced, young Christians decked out in Gothic clothing and make-up! But Driscoll rightly argues that becoming a Christian doesn't necessitate a conversion to wearing business attire (like a middle-class, white suburban American Christian), but rather a conversion to Christ and His kingdom. As I said, this is a thought-provoking book.

Be warned, however: reading this book will probably provoke a variety of deep and intense emotional responses, including laughter (Driscoll is hilarious), shock (Driscoll breaks all the conventions that you would expect of a Christian author), and (hopefully) excitement, as you hear of what God has done in his life and through his life and ministry in the lives of others.

Started attending Mars Hill Church, where Mark Discoll is the head teaching elder, a little over a year ago. Only very serious problems can keep us away on Sunday. I'm twice the age of the average member/attendee, but Mark preaches old time religion applied to today's culture and I and about 2,500 others seem very comfortable with both. Mark is very real, sometimes shocking and shows real grace. Week after week my wife and I ask each other "Is that the best sermon we've ever heard AGAIN?"

What you get in RR is what I see happening at Mars Hill, along with Mark's humor and wisdom that's beyond his years. I've been a believer for 35 years and I'm as excited about Jesus as I've ever been and due in no small part to the vision you read about in this book. Would I feel the same way if I wasn't watching Mark practice what he preaches up close and personal? Maybe not, but when I read it, I could honestly say I saw RR being worked out and it's authentic.

Read RR, log on to the MHC web site, stream the sermons, praise God and have a blast.

Driscoll's sense of humor is rather twisted. His willingness to say aloud what others forbid themselves to even think is refreshing. His views are thought provoking. His concepts in practice are enlightening. Some people "will" find parts of Radical Reformission offensive. My parents were offended by the copy I gave them. But they are now buying more copies and recommending it to everyone. RR will show you how to use your freedom to set others free. Thank you Jesus for Pastor Driscoll.

Mark Driscoll's work on living on the balance of syncretism/sectarianism is critical to the church as we struggle between moralism and 'selling out'. His work has had a profound impact on his church and church pastors across the country. This book is a must read whether you are an 'emerging' pastor or if you have been in the ministry for decades. I pray it is a wake up call to a radical but necessary place of tension.

Mark Driscoll wrote this book so that Christians will step out of our comfort zones and share the gospel with those outside our front door. Radical Reformission is "a radical call for Christians and Christian churches to recommit to living and speaking the gospel, and to do so regardless of the pressures to compromise the truth of the gospel or to conceal its power within the safety of the church" (pg 20) We Christians must repent of our lack of love for our fellow man when we have failed to share the truth of the Gospel just because people do not match our cultural preference. For this, I heartily appreciate and agree. However, I must say that I also have some concerns.

Some of Driscoll's helpful insights:
- We Christians should be "building friendships for the purpose of showing and sharing the love of Jesus with lost people...evangelism is done by the whole church." (pg 66)
- We Christians must repent of self-righteousness and cling to God's "power of the gospel of grace." (pg 77-78) We must be clear that we do not "impose man made rules in the name of achieving holiness", which is in effect Pharisaical (pg 140).
- We Christians must be careful and attentive to our "church cultures" (pg 101). We must recognize that we may have "different personal convictions that are not necessarily sinful" according to biblical prescription (pg 103).
- Like Jonah and the plant, we Christians cans love THINGS that God has provided "more than our great cities and the spiritually blind people who annoy us." (pg 106)
- Addressing the need for heart transformation (versus mere behavioral change), Driscoll says, "...if we aspire to seek any change in our culture, we must resist the temptation to first change the culture. Instead, we Christians must begin by bringing the gospel to people so that they can be given a new heart out of which a Christian life flows. As more people live out of their new heart, new families, churches, businesses, and governments will result that together will transform culture." (pg 110)
- For us Christians, "...too often the evangelistic task of speaking about Jesus is promoted as a work or something we must do, rather than as an overflowing of joy within us that explodes out of us because we have met God in Christ." (pg 143)
- Finally, Driscoll provides a short but very helpful list of Biblical Principles for Cultural Decision making (pg 104). I would prefer to have seen an exposition and "fleshing out" of these texts instead of some of the extraneous stories that seem to serve as shock effect.

Some of my concerns on this work:
1.) Is it necessary that the Gospel must be "contextualized" to make it "accessible"? (pg 55-56) The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation for both Jews and Greeks (Rom 1:16-17). In our sinful flesh, we Christians can so easily replace the power of the Gospel message itself with culturally-attractive gimmicks. "Do you dig Jesus?" is no replacement for explaining a sinner's dire predicament before a holy God and His provision in Jesus Christ's substitutionary atonement.
2.) To what degree do we immerse ourselves into culture to faithfully share the gospel? Is it necessary or advisable to listen to a "sexual talk program" or read "Cosmo Girl magazine" (pg 131) to successfully engage the culture with the gospel? Can we cross the line and speak in an inappropriate manner according to Scriptural standards in order to capture the attention of culture? The subtitle of this book is "reaching out without selling out." One way that we can "sell out" is by substituting the priority of Scriptural faithfulness with a desire to be culturally relevant. In one portion of the book, Driscoll appropriately chides churches that try to appease the preferences of different age groups. He makes the valid observation that people are highly complex and cannot be pinned down as a monolith according to particular age generalizations (pg 128). I would argue that we should extend Driscoll's conclusions to culture-at-large. Culture is complex and always changing and is, thus, a "moving target." I would argue that a Christian should engage but NOT be consumed with riding "the next wave of culture." Instead, the Christian's focus should be on Jesus Christ and His all-sufficient word which are always relevant.

It is one thing to be able to write with humor, it's another to offer sound biblical principles to your message, but to do so while living out the message you preach is the main catalyst to the success and influence this book has.

I have the pleasure of being the preaching elder of a daughter church that Mars Hill is funding and helping to guide and plant here in San Diego, and I can say with full confidence that the reason this book is gripping (even after hearing many of these great stories and principles in our network) is because it is not some pie in the sky ideology about missional living, or some cold, removed, theological discussion with no connection to Christ. This message which Pastor Mark brings is absolutely critical as we face a post-Christian, post-modern, post-everything, culture which sees the church at times better than we do. We need to return to the often chanted and rarely applied mantra of semper reformanda. And we must be willing to cut dead weight from our traditions, and kill innovative programs for the sake of pragmatism, so that we can return again to the one, true God who reigns over history and has commissioned us to preach the God glorifying, sin crushing, people freeing gospel in our day.

David Fairchild

Having read this book, I have come away with four major points to ponder:

First, if Driscoll is the "godfather" of the emergent movement, so to speak, then the entire emergent movement (to the extent I have been able to read) has completely missed the point he was trying to make in this book. From Driscoll's own statements in the book, the emergent movement as it exists today is nothing more than heresy. Heresy! That seems a far cry from what he originally proposed. One of my good friends said that from what I told him it sounded like emergents took Driscoll's ideas and "ran wild" with them. That's exactly what I think after reading through this book. Talk about an "adventure in missing the point!"

Second, if Driscoll is correct in what he says, then we have to completely overhaul our ecclesiology. We've got to see if we've become so entrenched in our traditions that the Gospel becomes irrelevant, or if we've gotten so fancy in our innovations that we compromise the Gospel and again make it irrelevant. The second half of that statement is exactly why I think the emergent movement has completely missed the point.

Third, if what he says is true about me, I've got some further sanctification to get cracking on. I've been convicted by some of the things I've read in here, and roundly encouraged towards a goal by other things I've read in the book as well.

Fourth, some of the people who have reviewed the book need to get a life and grow a sense of humor. This guy is funny. Funny. I did not in the least feel his handling of Scripture was irreverent; then again maybe my sense of humor is different from most other people's. But I have never gotten such a knee-slapping laugh out of a book other than Christopher Moore's "Lamb," and that one was a parody of the Gospel! Much less, I have never laughed while reading a serious book like "Reformission." When you can thoroughly enjoy someone laying some serious sanctifying smackdown on you, you know the book is good.

So, I'd recommend this book heavily to everyone who asks me about it. I'd recommend it over Brian McLaren any day.

Mark Driscoll's book "Radical Reformission" is still haunting me and this is good. There needs to be a changing of the guard in the American church and it is being done by real people in real churches who are in love with a real Jesus. Mark points to the church of today and it is either Sectarian or Syncretist but it is to be neither. It must be very Biblical and involved in culture without being conformed to culture. His best chapter is six "The Sin of Light Beer: How Syncretism and Sectarianism Undermine Reformission," and how he explains beer drinking and at the end has a man, who is a Christian, and owns a brewery explain his Christian walk. Driscoll explains very clearly from the Bible why drinking is not wrong but can be used wrongly just like anything else in this world. We need to repent, and I did, of my wrong attitudes and views of the Bible through the eyes of my culture. May I see more Biblically as a result of being challenged by this book.

I'm coming late to the party. Radical Reformission was published 6 years ago, and has been debated every which way since. Even Missouri Baptists have grown tired of arguing it, which should indicate that I am very late to the party. However, it is more recently that I have become more interested in what Mark Driscoll is saying than in what people are saying about Mark Driscoll. Those two things seem to be very different, so I decided to pick up this oft-quoted book and read for myself.

By now, you are probably tired of the Driscoll drama as well. If you are newer than I am at this party, don't bother stirring it up now. I have no intention on listing surprising descriptions of biblical events, or presenting an argument for church brewed beer. Despite all I have heard of this book, those really weren't main points. Evaluating a book by skipping the main thesis is a worthless project, that I won't undertake.

So what is this book? For starters, it's a harsh critique. It's a harsh critique of the separated fundamentalist and of the culture-adapted liberal theologian. It's a critique of modernism and post-modernism. Driscoll knows that sin effects any culture, any model, and any philosophy, so he doesn't advocate one over the other. Thus, if mission is to be reformed, that reform would be radical.

Driscoll carefully shows the treatment of three components: Gospel, culture, and church. Where the challenge is for the church to take the Gospel to the culture, many fail. Some churches embrace the gospel, but reject culture. They do this out of the mistaken idea that the church is culture and that all that exists outside of it is something foreign that will soon pass. Others reject the Gospel and embrace culture. They do this out of a desire to be relevant, never realizing that without a message, there is no point. The challenge here is to view the church as a missionary and where we live as a mission field.

To cut through opposing views to find something else entirely takes a sharp knife. Dricsoll hacks away with the sharpest of swords: God's word. His arguments throughout the book are well-founded in scripture. Say what you will, this book has more scripture in it then most best selling Christian books. What Driscoll argues for is not one approach or the other, but simply taking the Gospel to culture. Proclaiming it loud and clear while we still can. He reminds us that a day will come when the Kingdom of God will be complete. When sin-effected culture will be erased. Until then, we live in sin-effected culture, so its there we are to carry the Gospel.

When a successful pastor writes a book explaining his philosophy, it seems to be only natural than many will read it and attempt to copy the pastor. There are far too many attempts to clone Saddleback and Willow Creek that we don't need a cloning of Mars Hill. I live and preach in South Central, rural Missouri. Most of what Driscoll describes as culture sounds like a travel log of some faraway land. To copy what works in Seattle in my church would be, at best, comedic, and at worse, tragic. Instead, the real lesson here is to look deep into culture and see how it is all tarnished by sin. With this understanding of my culture, I am better equipped to take to it the hope of the Gospel.

This book is controversial, so there is a temptation to suggest that although I found it beneficial, I don't recommend it. However, I find that Driscoll's ideas are challenging and well founded in scripture. I recommend this book, not to weigh in on arguments, or even to search for off-color descriptions of people in the Bible, but to be challenged toward the Great Commission.

Having plowed through at least 50 Christian books this past year, I have to say that Radical Reformission was one of my favorites. It was a fresh look at evangelism, and how we treat our neighbors. The prose flowed smoothly, and was enjoyable to read.

If you're looking for a book that will help refocus you and your church, as well as a book that is challenging, please read Radical Reformission. I took a lot away from this book. While most Christian books seem to be regurgitations of each other, this book is not.