10 | Outsiders

This is excerpt is from our chapter on missional living:

"One of the many beautiful scandals about Jesus of Nazareth was that he earned the cutting nickname “Friend of Sinners.” Gladly for us, the slander was apt. The fact that Christ came to seek and save grimy, unlovable, lost sinners, and not moral, likable, highly-functional people is central to the good news of the gospel, and so it should be central to our identity and practice. Yet strangely, as John Stott put it, “there has always been a strong tendency for Christians to withdraw into a kind of closed, evangelical, monastic community.” Fighting that tendency is one of the hardest tasks before us."