Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement, By Michael Frost alt

Incarnate

The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement

by Michael Frost

Incarnate
Ebook
  • Length: 239 pages
  • Published: February 10, 2014
  • Imprint: IVP
  • ISBN: 9780830884056
  • 12th Annual Outreach Resource of the Year Recommendation (Missional Church)
  • 2014 Best Book of Missional Theology, from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore

The story of Christianity is a story of incarnation—God taking on flesh and dwelling among the people he created. God appointing and sending people as his body, his hands and feet. Disciples of Jesus bearing the good news even as they bear the marks of his passion. Whatever Christianity is, it is at least a matter of flesh and blood and the ends of the earth. And yet so much of contemporary Christian culture is rooted not in incarnation but in escape—escape from the earth to heaven, escape from the suffering of this world, escape even from one another. Christianity is increasingly understood as something personal, conceptual, interior, private, neighborless. If Jesus was God incarnate, the church is in danger of being excarnate.

Michael Frost expertly and prophetically exposes the gap between the faith we profess and the faith we practice. And he offers new hope for how the church can fulfill its vocation: to be the hands and feet of Christ to one another and to our neighbors, to the ends of the earth and to the end of the age.

"In a culture obsessed with practices, technologies and forms of entertainment that distance us from what is most real-and-true human experience, Michael Frost wisely takes us back to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Incarnate teases out the real-world implications of the embodied presence of God in Jesus Christ as the missional key for the body of Christ. Essential reading for faith communities seeking to follow Jesus into loving God by loving neighbors."
"We are all facing it--the rootless, disembodied, cyber-based existence of today's modern world. We are struggling to live amidst flat landscapes that separate mind from body from soul. In Incarnate Michael Frost shows us how this world defies the incarnation. He unfolds the glories of returning to the body as the place where God has come in Christ to restore our lives. His writing couldn't be more inspired. His book couldn't be more timely."
"God has always desired to have his presence with us--the wholeness of his presence in and among us. It is sin that interrupts that presence. But in redemption that interruption has been removed. Incarnate will take the Christian community to the cutting edge of where the Spirit of God is pulling us to go. It is a significant book for a significant time."
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CONTENTS

Introduction: Defleshing the Human Experience
1 Rootless, Disengaged and Screen Addicted
2 The Schizophrenic Sense of Self
3 Wandering Aimlessly in a Moral Minefield
4 The Moral Ambiguity of Our Time
5 Religion as an Embodied Experience
6 Learning Embodiment from the Master
7 Desire, Idolatry and Discipleship
8 We Are Spirited Bodies
9 Mission in the Excarnate Age
10 Defying Church-World Dualism
11 Placed Persons
12 Adopting an Incarnational Posture
13 The First Page of the End of Despair
14 Getting There
Epilogue: Christ in Us and We in Christ
Notes

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Michael Frost

Michael Frost is an internationally recognized Australian missiologist and one of the leading voices in the missional church movement. He is the vice principal of Morling College in Sydney, Australia, and the founding director of the Tinsley Institute, a mission study centre located at Morling College. A popular speaker around the world, he has written more than a dozen books including The Shaping of Things to Come, Exiles, The Road to Missional, and Incarnate. An expert in church planting, Frost cofounded the Forge Mission Training Network with Alan Hirsch. He remains an international director of that movement which is now based in the United States.