Bravo! An excellent and highly readable introduction to the metaphor of exile to describe the church's place in contemporary Western culture. Lee Beach challenges us to come to terms with the church's identity as exiles in post-Christendom, to embrace the challenge for creative theological reflection funded by a prophetic missional imagination, to drastically break with traditional models of church life and to bravely launch ourselves as the people of God into this new world.
-Michael Frost,
author of Exiles, The Road to Missional and Incarnate
In this outstanding book, Lee Beach invites us to discover Scripture's rich theology of exile, forged in the experience of Israel and the early church. But he also challenges an increasingly marginalized church in the West to come to terms with its own situation of exile. Lee Beach argues persuasively that the biblical motif of exile can help Christian communities to reimagine their identity and mission. For Beach, exile is a place of reorientation and hope, which demands an adventuresome faith. Academically sound, but with a strong practical orientation, this timely book has the potential to revitalize how we live out God's mission in a new cultural landscape. Christian leaders and local congregations alike need to hear and heed its challenge.
-Dean Flemming,
MidAmerica Nazarene University
With great care and serious scholarship, Lee Beach writes about the demise of Christendom and what Christians should do about it. Read this book and weep . . . or see the church with new hope like you've never seen it before. For me, I ended up with the latter and am extremely grateful for having read it.
-David Fitch,
Northern Seminary
This is a realistic yet profoundly hope-filled account of contemporary, post-Christian, fragmented society and the nature and role of the church in its exilic state. Grounded in thorough biblical exposition, Beach normalizes this state, and in fact suggests that the church is most healthy and most true to its missional identity when it 'digs the ground' it is on! Lee Beach has made a significant contribution to the 'church in exile' literature by fleshing out what it means for said church to live into its true identity. All church leaders should have this book in their arsenal!
-Ross Hastings,
Regent College
Beach's assessment is surely correct. His book invites church leaders to recognize where God has now put the church. The work of new leadership - in terms of hope, imagination and missional vision - is to be about the business of 'defining reality' in ways that violate, subvert and transgress all old definitions of reality. Specifically this means to contradict the dominant definitions of reality that oppose gospel truth. Such leaders will anticipate that such new definitions of reality will be vigorously contested, outside the congregation and within it. Anything less than that work will end in irrelevance and despair. This book is a rich exercise in hope!
-From the foreword by Walter Brueggemann,
Columbia Theological Seminary
With profound biblical scope and theological depth, Lee Beach provides wise counsel for a church in exile. Rooted in a serious re-engagement of the biblical motif of exile, Beach engenders an exilic imagination that suggests creative ways for the church to find its identity anew. Here we find a biblical scholarship in service of the church and a church in service of the creation-wide renewal of the world. Exile is both a deep threat and an opportunity for the most creative theological reflection and communal praxis. Beach helps us to navigate these treacherous waters with a compelling pastoral sensibility.
-Brian Walsh,
Christian Reformed Church campus minister, University of Toronto
Moving from the center to the margins is an increasing reality for the church in the West. Beach develops a thoughtful theology and praxis of what it means to live as the people of God in exile. If you desire to be a community that is 'intrinsically missional,' then apply the wisdom Beach gives us in developing a prophetic imagination, a responsive theology and an exilic identity as we engage our context in light of God's future.
-JR Woodward,
national director, V3 Church Planting Movement
Instead of pining for a lost Christendom, Lee Beach offers the North American church a deeply biblical model for ecclesial identity and mission that is addressed to our contemporary situation of 'exile.' His nuanced exegesis of Old Testament diaspora tales, his exploration of the mission of Jesus in the context of Second Temple Judaism and his profound analysis of 1 Peter speak powerfully to the church in a post-Christian context. We have much to learn from Beach's insights about holy, missional and hopeful Christian living from the margins.
-J. Richard Middleton,
Northeastern Seminary, Roberts Wesleyan College
