Don’t be put off by the less than creative title. Earl Creps is actually quite culture savvy. In fact, his book OFF-ROAD Disciplines: Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders, takes top-shelf missiology and places it within reach of the average pastor/leader.
Yes, this is another book that deals with “missional” living. But before you dismiss it as another needle in the nebulous missional haystack, know that Creps defines missional and lucidly builds on it: “A missional life, then, means living as an inside-ousider, ‘not of the world any more than He [Jesus] is of the world.’” This definition falls in a chapter that confesses our need to submit our cultural assumptions of ministry practice to the sanctifying influences of Scripture. Some ministry and leadership models are fluid and not right or wrong. When we hold to tightly to our way of doing church we may fail to see that “Jesus did not construct an auditorium and demand that the people come to him. He went to them.” Missional living de-centers us and our methods from the focus of ministry and re-centers everything on Jesus.
This missional undercurrent runs throughout the two-part book, part 1- the personal disciplines and part 2- organizational disciplines. Instead of summarizing each chapter, I will provide a quote that reflects a main idea from each chapter, followed by a critique and contribution summary.
1 (Discipline of Personal Transformation) – “A missional perspective springs from a transformed interior life that gives us moral authority to lead God’s people…”
2 (Discipline of Sacred Realism) – “sacred realism: the discipline of holding the truth in one hand and faith in the other…Most of us think about how we can change the culture. Sacred realism gives culture a chance to change us.”
3 (Discipline of Point-of-View) – one of the stronger chapters, focuses on getting us to consider the various Christian point of views, e.g. modern, pre-modern, post-modern. I especially enjoyed his discussion of the difference between philosophical and cultural postmodernism, during which he points out the significant variations in “postmodernia” calling us to be missionaries with discernment among the various perspectives in postmodernia
4 (of Reverse Mentoring) – “Previously, I understood my role as [mentor] knowing important things, and their [mentees] role as receiving those things form me. Now, I admitted the truth: they knew important things too, and part of my job revolved around grasping those things by way of relentless listening.”
5 (Spiritual Friendship) – Though not the main idea, Creps grapples for new, less offensive, more sensitive language to describe non-Christians: “I suggest that we might refer to lost people not as seekers but as the sought.”
6 (Decreasing) – This chapter best drives home his focus on rethinking personal spiritual disciplines. “Humility is the discipline of decreasing the scale of my own story until it fits inside the Jesus story, until he defines me rather than my defining him…mission without humility tends to make my autobiography seem like the story of the whole world, producing self-centered extremism.”
7 (Missional Efficiency) – “So the first thing Jesus might do is not measure certain things…identification with Jesus always makes the ministry more missional, aiming it for the margins with Jesus at the center, rather than us at the center and Jesus at the margins.”
8 (Harmony) – “I suspect that everywhere brand conflict breaks out, moderates in all the camps tend to get lost in the ‘fog of war’ when exactly the opposite posture better serves the goal of harmony. Spiritual leaders give everyone a hearing but bolster the cause of reconciliation by proactively cultivating moderates rather than reacting to pressure from the margins.”
9 (Discernment) – “…one of the primary tasks [of the church] is fundamentally theological: keeping the ministry accountable to the mission. The purpose of theology is therefore to support the Church in cooperating with the mission of God, not the other way around.”
10 (Making Room) – probably the best chapter contributing to rethinking organizational spiritual disciplines, in this case, evangelism. “Love needs an address…Caring profoundly about the sought and developing venues in which to interact with them creates only the potential for mission…nothing happens without the agency and power of the Holy Spirit.”
11 (Surrendering Preferences) –
Overall this book is very helpful for church and ministry leaders, especially those with more of a modernist, traditionalist framework. At the same time, it is ripe with balanced wisdom for the so-called postmodern pastor. At times, the coining of new terms trumps pedagogical value and opening stories swing between perfunctory and illustrative. Neither robustly theological, nor excessively practical, Off-Road Disciplines offers a synthetic approach of theology-meets-practice, addressing key disciplines, both personal and organizational with fresh insight and aged wisdom.