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So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church

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Almost 3 years ago, I heard Len Sweet talk about the MRI Church during our first advance for my D. Min. program. In his new book, So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church, Len explores and explains the importance of this idea.

In the book, Len talks about the implications of practicing APC Churches: Attractional, Propositional and Colonial churches. APC churches create members, believers and consumers. However, the MRI Church (Missional, Relational and Incarnational) creates missionaries, disciples, and world changers.

The book is quite thick at over 300 pages. In addition, there are only five chapters, including the introduction. Each of the MRI topics are covered in an individual chapter, along with an introduction and epilogue. Each chapter, however, is broken up into sections that make it easy to take a break in the midst of 40-70 page chapters. I knew this book would be big back in September as Len told me at dinner that each of the topics were 100 pages each and his editor would have to get it down to a manageable size.

Despite it's size, however, it is not a difficult read. But you do have to put your thinking cap on. Len's verbal imagery is very real. He reframes word meanings based on origin and use quite a bit. It is will cause you to pause and consider how you use language yourself. In addition, this a book that draws from a great myriad of sources, as most all of Len's books do. You get a true education by reading Len's book, not just in ministry and life topics, but in science, literature, history, etc.

Content

In the book, Len calls on people and churches to blend together the three MRI strands into one beautiful life.

In Part 1: The Missional Life, Len speaks of God's "going". God is a God of motion, movement and mission. Mission is not an activity of the church but part of the character of God. He is a missionary God. Disciples of Christ are mission-shaped. Every vocation is a missionary vocation. In this section, he fleshes these concepts out in a clear and compelling way.

In Part 2: The Relational Life, Len describes a life where the primary reality is relations and relationships. All of life is about relationships: with God, ourselves, others and creation. In this chapter, he describes the primacy of Relational Truth over Propositional Truth. This is a particularly interesting and needed discussion. I appreciate greatly how he unpacks this concept.

In Part 3: The Incarnational Life, Len describes how instead of pulling people and concepts out of their context, we need to be entering other contexts and in doing so localizing the church within that context. One particular thought that I found very compelling and helpful was this: "Jesus was at home everywhere, but naturalized nowhere. The incarnational life pays homage to context by celebrating regionality, by honoring particularity, by domesticating the missional and the relational. God didn't choose to send us a Superman. God chose to send us an Everyman - `Joe, the Plumber,' `Jesus, the Carpenter' - one like ourselves in every way." (pg. 153) He speaks on how the genius of Christianity is its ability to integrate pagan customs with Christian faith and practice. It uses those customs to communicate itself through indigenous and local expressions of worship.

The final chapter, the Epilogue is practical. It gives you a mirror with which to look at your life and church to see if you are a MRI church. In the epilogue Len provides ten ways to know if your church is MRI. This is a strength of the book.

Additionally, the book is not anti-APC as much as it tries to note the primacy of the MRI over the APC.

Final Thoughts

In a world when most of the attention goes to large, attractional churches, who are by their sheer size considered successful, it is encouraging for someone with such influence noting the need for a different way of being the church. Len does a remarkable job in this book of reframing the idea of church and being vs doing church. It creates energy to infiltrate the world and the marketplace and be the church. It also creates the theological and practical energy for that as well.

Having gotten to know Len over the past 3 years, I admit a bias. But I truly believe that this is one of the best books on being the church and on being a church that influences the context in which we live. It would be a foundational book were I teaching a class on Missional Theology and Practice.

So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church by Leonard Sweet comes with mixed emotions neither good or bad, just undecided.

To summarize the book with one quote from page 162, "When the one lung breathes in the Missional (God's Power) and the other lung breathes in Relational (God's Presence), the body comes alive and exhales the risen incarnate life of Christ."

Leonard paints a picture throughout the book of this DNA of MRI or Missional, Relational, and Incarnational. Nothing new, right?

Some think that this is a new way to look at the church or an old way recently discovered. Many people are searching for a meaningful body of Christ that not only worships on Sunday morning, but breathes with a mission, that extends to relational communities, and takes the message of Christ out into their everyday life or what Sweet calls MRI.

This is a very wordy book. I am not into repeating oneself. Sweet early on even mentions that if "you have not noticed I am saying the same thing in a different way (paraphrased)". One can simply turn to the book of Acts and read about this Missional, Relational, Incarnational way of the church. Sweet is humbly putting modern words into a language that some seem to have forgotten.

Keeping with the Sweet writing pattern he weaves multiple quotes throughout the book that unites everything together in a seamless manner. If you desire to have a renewed vision of the church reread Acts first and then read So Beautiful by Len Sweet. If you have not begin to ponder a deeper meaning for the body of Christ this may jump start your engine. Enjoy Len's words as he casts a vision that needs to be renewed for the body of Christ so others will begin to know, see, and hear that God is really among us (I Cor 14:25).

Prolific author, speaker and professor of evangelism at Drew University, Leonard Sweet just keeps getting better. Widely lauded as one of the "50 Most Influential Christians in America," Sweet's disarming style and candid approach on matters of life and the church are both contagious and welcoming. His newest offering to fans and newcomers alike will delight, captivate and challenge formerly held assumptions about what it means to "do church" American-style.

Sweet opens his text with an introduction to acronyms...and very cunningly leads into his own, which describes the So Beautiful, or MRI, church on which this text is focused: "M" = Missional, "R" = Relational and "I" = Incarnational. Formerly (currently?), many churches operate under the APC Christianity style, or the ABC Church: Attendance, Buildings and Cash. As Sweet notes, "[S]ome things can be good for you for a short time but bad for you over the long haul." He spends the next couple hundred pages helping fellow Christ followers understand, define and take a much closer look at their faith lives and how it works itself both within and without the confines of a church setting.

The author quite engagingly admits that, through his travels he is finding, "God is 'up to something,' stirring part of the body very slowly to rouse the rest." Exciting. Daunting. Challenging. Eye-opening. Yes, to all of these adjectives.

Beginning with a description and overview of the Missional Life: God's "GO," Sweet tells believers that as soon as they become Christians and tell Jesus they're "in," he turns right around and tells them you're "out." This means to go OUT into the world, don't stay clustered inside a stuffy church building where members only congregate and bewail the woes of the larger world. Go, and be part of that world because we all belong together in it.

Sweet then shares the nuts and bolts of what a Relational Life: God's "YES" looks like...and yes, it's all about getting close to people and making life connections that count. He interestingly notes that to predict those with economic success, look for people who have strong social connections. To predict sound mental and physical well-being, look for close family ties and high-quality relationships. Similarly, those individuals who enjoy spiritual well-being also have tight-knit relationships. As Sweet notes, all of life is about relationships, one to another, and everyone to God.

Closing up this work, Sweet details the Incarnational Life: God's "NO," in which he discusses how "Incarnants" are "those who are in touch with the culture but in tune with the Spirit, embracing and estranging the culture simultaneously." Yet, this is a good thing as believers need to "disturb the world" but do so in love and with a commitment to serve, stand alongside, and bring redemptive repair.

Readers will find great value and a highly practical resource in SO BEAUTIFUL. Be prepared to be challenged, encouraged and motivated to start living an MRI lifestyle.

--- Reviewed by Michele Howe

It seems that books on the church are a dime a dozen these days. Everyone has a way of doing church, being the church, and leading the church.

So what makes this work by Leonard Sweet stand out?

It's like he intercepted the pass of our current church climate and went the other way for a score.

So Beautiful examines three strands that biblically make up the church: missional, relational, and incarnational.

As he describes it in the introduction:

"Missional is the mind of God. Mission is where God's head's at.

Relational is the heart of God. Relationship is where God's heart is.

Incarnational is the hands of God. Incarnation is what God's hands are up to.

A so-beautiful world requires a Trinitarian logic of thinking, loving, and doing." (pg. 29)

So Beautiful is a breath of fresh air. It's insightful, whimsical, and well-researched. In fact, there are 45 pages of notes at the end of the book yet you'd never know it. Sweet has a way of weaving in the thoughts of others with his own to describe what many of us have been sensing for sometime. That the church is more than an organization to be better run, but rather an organism who can better love.

This landmark book is both timely and timeless and is a must-read for all followers of Jesus wanting to live out what they believe.

Have you ever had an MRI exam? I have. As a radiographer (RT-R), I have studied about MRI machines, how they work,and what they show in the human body. But I had never thought about the MRI and the Christian life until reading Len Sweet's wonderful book, "So Beautiful". Sometime after reading the book, I read a comment about the power of magnets posted by LW on Dr. Sweet's Facebook page. Suddenly, I began to see. Cool! An MRI unit is, in part, a high powered magnet(Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The type of living that Len Sweet writes about in "So Beautiful" is MRI living : Missional, Relational, Incarnational. If we are in relationship with the Main Magnet (Christ said: "If I be lifted up I will DRAW all people to myself"), then we can assist the Main Magnet to do the type of work an MRI does - helping the sick and injured visualize the cause of pain or illness. Next we can be a part of the treatment team as we help bring each other to the Great Physician.

All of Dr.Sweet's books are filled with wordplay, metaphors, imagery and challenges that initiate "Ouch!", and "Hmm" and "Wow" from thoughtful readers. "So Beautiful", about the divine design for life and the church, has brought another word to mind for me: Alleluia!

In an age of privatized, commercialized, and culturalized Christianity, Leonard Sweet heralds a much-needed call to rediscover the biblical life, power, and purpose of the church. Contesting the "if you build it; they will come" model so prevalent in the church today, Sweet demonstrates that the future of the American church does not rest on understanding and appropriating the latest trends, techniques, or methodologies but on the recovery of this biblical truth: The church is a community whose faith and witness is authenticated and formed in relationships that incarnate the life and love of Jesus Christ, and whose activity is missional--purposed and ordered by God's redemptive mission in the world. In what may be a pivotal moment in the history of the church, this book serves as a potential tipping point in her much-needed reformation and renewal.

S. Michael Craven

President of the Center for Christ & Culture; author of Uncompromised Faith: Overcoming Our Culturalized Christianity

Leonard Sweet has written an engaging and challenging book in "So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church". He paints a vivid picture of the DNA of the church as three essential complementary strands of Christian life - missional, relational, and incarnational. He weaves together this view drawing from Scripture, the life of John Newton, the biological wonder of life, along with an engaging writing style that helps us better understand the nature of the church and how we may live more like Christ. The key contrast in the book is between a modern style of church that is becoming an increasingly poor fit with culture, and one he believes is closer to the intent of God. The style he cautions against is APC - Attractional, Propositional, and Colonial, while the one he proposes is MRI - Missional, Relational, and Incarnational, better reflecting God's interaction with the world and His hope to reconcile man back to Himself. He addresses in a considerate way some significant challenges facing the local church today but without calling us to abandon it - he pulls together the needs to serve both within and beyond the church. (An approach I appreciate very much, there's no shortage of books focused on bashing down the church itself.) For example, Sweet notes that in the Gutenberg era the watch phrase was: everyone is called to be a minister, your baptism is your ordination into ministry. In today's Google world, "everyone is dispatched to be a missionary. Your baptism is your commissioning as a missionary. We are both ministers and missionaries. Every disciple has a ministry to the body and a mission in the world. Your baptism is both an ordination certificate and a passport to a missional life, spent in being sent to live and dwell in diaspora, in Babylon not Zion."

The five chapters unpack the missional life (God's going, and calling us to go, or be present as we go), the relational life (and goes beyond typical discussions of the need for community), the incarnational life, and an epilogue that calls us, and calls our church to be MRI - and gives us some ways to know if we are. Another way he pulls these together: "Missional is the mind of God. Mission is where God's head's at. Relational is the heart of God. Relationship is where God's heart is. Incarnational is the hands of God. Incarnation is what God's hands are up to."

The writing style is unique, quite deep and not avoiding large words, and yet remarkably clear and witty. To say it's thought-provoking is an understatement. Sweet combines a theological approach that centers on Christ and the trinity, but is not afraid of describing things in new ways. This is no dry academic treatise... at the risk of offending, Sweet asserts that "The church needs to rediscover the missionary position, a posture that forces us to look at the world eye to eye and face to face without turning our backs. The missionary position tries to get together with the world in a healing and so beautiful way. It doesn't view the world as a market but a mission." If that makes you upset or angry, this book probably isn't for you. But if you like reading about a fresh perspective on missiology for today's culture (as with The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church (J-B Leadership Network Series) or other books by Reggie McNeal), this is definitely one to check out.

Len Sweet offers his MRI church as a picture of what could be a church (and therefore Christ-followers) that is "So Beautiful."

M-Missional

R-Relational

I-Incarnational

From book jacket, "Sweet calls for the re-union of these three essential, complementary strands of the Christian life. Far from a novel idea, Sweet shows how this structure is God's original intent and shares the simply beautiful design for His church."

I "read" this book as an mp3 on my ipod. I like reading better since I like to re-read sentences I don't get the first time. It's just such a rich read that you can't just blow through it and expect to get the full impact. Maybe I'll listen to it again.

This morning, I finished Leonard Sweet's new book, So Beautiful.

I'm still basking in the afterglow and the best words I can use to describe it is: "So Beautiful!!"

I've read several of Sweet's other books, and must say that this is the best by far. In a witty, candid, and thought-provoking style, Sweet grabs the reader immediately and doesn't let go until the last paragraph.

The basic premise of So Beautiful is that congregations need to re-think their values and priorities. The old APC approach: Attractional, Propositional, Colonial (or ABC: Attendance, Buildings, Cash) won't cut it for churches that desire to reach this present generation.

Instead of APC/ABC, Sweet suggests that followers of Christ, as individuals and congregations, capture an MRI ethos:

Missional

Relational

Incarnational.

He then unpacks each of these concepts in detail. It's dynomite!

"Just as DNA's three strands make life possible, three other elements work in harmony to make life not just pretty, but beautiful. And it's in the church where we find the greatest expression, and ultimate fulfillment, of these three components to a beautiful life."

I found myself exclaiming, "Yes! Yes! That's what I want! That's IT! That's Absolutely Beautiful!"

One of the things I like best about Sweet's writing style is that he draws from a wide variety of sources, and packs each page full of pithy phrases, poetry, inspiring quotes, and engaging stories.

There's a ton of grist for the sermon mill! I must have written a dozen pages of notes in my journal -- which will certainly be processed and find their way into my blog, messages and other communications.

This book is "sweet"!

Yeah, I know that's corny considering the auther is Leonard Sweet, but I am quite serious. It hit the "sweet" spot. Wow, I did it again.

I had the privilege of downloading the audio book for free from Christian Audio. They feature a free download every month, which is "sweet" as well! I just can't help myself.

Anyway, I don't listen to too many audio books, but I am glad I had this book. On Mother's Day, I drove for 12 hours to visit my mom in Minden, LA. During the drive, I put my iPod ear buds in and listened to the "So Beautiful" audio book. It was refreshing and engaging.

His three points? Missional, Relational, Incarnational. Simple, profound, and, yes, so beautiful.

Len didn't just throw these out as cool buzz words either. He unpacks them in a fresh and relevant story that will sting the heart of the disengaged and rally the broken in spirit.

God is missional. He is actively engaged in history redeeming a people for Himself. The church, whatever form she finds herself in, must be about the Father's business.

God is relational. He is real, loving, embracing. Relationships are central to the Gospel and a key component to being human.

God is incarnational. He became flesh and is still being fleshed out. We must live in the world. We must be in the world, not of the world, and defiantly out of the world. We must "re-inhabit" our world. We are here to bring Him here. Oh, this is "so beautiful."

This is my first Len Sweet book, but it shall NOT be my last.

Thanx!