Brett McCracken's Blog, page 7

The Most Radical Mission for Christians May be the Most Mundane

Christians must not conceive of mission as only that which takes us far from home or into harm’s way. Too often, would-be missionaries are energized by the possibility of going across the world to minister to unreached people groups but are not energized by the prospect of going across town to engage in cross-cultural mission with local unreached immigrant or minority communities.

Young, restless church leaders are writing books and attending conferences about urban ministry in London, New Yor...

We Are Stones

One of the ways western individualism informs how we think about church is that we conceive of “fit” in terms of how a church fits us. Does its worship style, architecture, preaching, values and demographic makeup fit well with our personality and preferences? This approach puts the burden on the church to adapt or perform to our liking if it wants to keep us around. But what if we have it backwards? What if the biblical approach is actually that we should fit ourselves into the life and miss...

The 40 Most Uncomfortable Things About Church

My new book, Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community, argues that the discomfort of church is actually good for us; the stretching outside of comfort is how we grow. When we learn to love the church in spite of its awkwardness and our frustrations, we become less like isolated consumers and more like a covenantal community, committed to one another and to the gospel of Jesus Christ, through thick and thin.

This doesn’t change the fact that there are lots of ve...

“Uncomfortable”: Out in Stores Now!

My third book, Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community, is officially out today, September 30, 2017.  

To write a book is to pour much of oneself into a singular thing for many months and often years. And so to release a book, to send it out into the world on its own for the first time, is both exhilarating and unnerving. One prays that it connects; that the words and ideas in it resonate widely. 

And in the case of a book called Uncomfortable, one hopes it lea...

When to Leave a Church and How to Find a New One

One of the assumptions of my new book Uncomfortable is that church is hard.

Discomfort, frustration and pain are inevitable. But another assumption of Uncomfortable is that these are not necessarily reasons we should leave a church. On the contrary, I argue in the book that discomfort in church community is actually a huge part of how we grow. Discomfort stretches us and it draws us out of me-centered consumerism. It forces us to rely more on God and cry out to him for help. It binds us togeth...

10 Churches, 10 Uncomfortable Challenges

In preparation for writing Uncomfortable I wanted to get a sense for what proves most uncomfortable about Christianity in real churches today. I emailed a number of pastors from around the world and asked them about what aspects of Christianity or church life proved to be especially uncomfortable, challenging or offensive in their particular congregations and contexts. Here are 10 of the responses I received:

Tithing

Rev’d Blake Schwendimann (St. Matthew’s Church, Newport Beach, Calif.): “We pr...

No One Wants a Church That is Embarrassed by its Churchiness

Seeker-friendly Christianity tried to revive the church by infusing it with the logic of the marketplace. Hipster Christianity tried to revive the church by obsessing over newness and relevance. Both of these approaches were efforts to address Christianity’s PR problem, attempting to convince an increasingly secular population that Christianity isn’t as weird, stodgy, traditionalistic, legalistic, homophobic, judgmental, anti-intellectual, regressive and conservative as they thought it was.

An...

The First Frontier of Mission: Holy Living

I know plenty of Christians who get far more excited about mission “out there” than they do about their own personal holiness: passionate church planters whose marriages are a mess; progressive Christians engaged in social justice but disengaged from their own spiritual vitality. But mission and morality are not two separate categories. Christopher Wright says (in The Mission of God’s People) that our holiness is “as much a part of our missional identity as of our personal sanctification.” If...

"Uncomfortable": The Endorsements

My new book, Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community, comes out the last week of September but is available for preorder now. If you are curious about what others are saying about the book, below you can read some of the very kind words that have been offered as endorsements of the book:

“What if not only our answers but our questions are wrong? We think we know what we want, but as Brett McCracken explains with persuasive wit and wisdom, Jesus knows better. U...

Church People are Weird. But I Love Them.

There are some weird people at church. If you’ve spent any amount of time in a church, you know this. Some of the “weird church people” types I have had the hardest time with over the years include:

The bro who always calls me “boss”The overaggressive huggers who always bypass side-hugging for the full-on hug, and the under aggressive people who never know whether to hug you or shake your handThe Baby Boomer who isn’t confident enough to dole out wisdom to Millennials like meThe know-it-all in...