Unfettered

Mandy Smith

Description

"Smith's sage advice will aid Christians in recognizing the simple joys of practicing their faith."--Publishers WeeklyWestern culture is in a tailspin, and Christian faith is entangled in it: we do kingdom things in empire ways. Western approaches to faith leave us feeling depressed, doubting, anxious, and burned out. We know something is wrong with the way we do faith and church in the West, but we're so steeped in it that we don't know where to begin to break old habits.Popular pastor and speaker Mandy Smith invites us to be unfettered from the deeply ingrained habits of Western culture so we can do kingdom things in kingdom ways again. She explores how we can be transformed by new postures and habits that help us see God already at work in and around us. The way forward isn't more ideas, programs, and problem-solving but in Jesus's surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness. Ultimately, rediscovering childlike habits is a way for us to remember how to be human.Unfettered helps us reimagine how to follow God with our whole selves again and join with God's mission in the world. Foreword by Walter Brueggemann.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 18 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493431144
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Endorsements
“Mandy Smith’s Unfettered helps us discard our Westernized baggage so we can be formed all over again as children in awe of God. With lively prose and a profound wisdom, she teaches us how to dance with God. Open these pages and allow yourself to be drawn in to this childlike way of life with God. Learn the postures of resting, receiving, and responding. Explore knowing God.”
— David Fitch , professor, Northern Seminary; author of Faithful Presence
“Few writers are able to combine cultural criticism and hopeful imagination for the future in the manner that Mandy Smith does. Unfettered is essential reading, a wise guide to tiptoeing into a vibrant, post-Christendom faith. It is a much-needed book, and at the same time a dangerous one, for one cannot read it and remain unchanged.”
— C. Christopher Smith , founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books ; author of How the Body of Christ Talks
“This rare book on childlikeness is written by someone who is herself charmingly childlike in her approach to God, people, and the world. Mandy is a well-informed writer, and she is also a profoundly enchanting one as she pens what could prove to be the manifesto for the always-possible, ever-resurgent, Order of the Eternal Child. Viva!”
— Alan Hirsch , founder of Forge Missional Training Network and the Movement Leaders Collective; author of The Forgotten Ways
“When it comes to getting at the core of the problem of the fractured self, Smith strikes at the heart of the dualism of Western culture with her analysis in Unfettered . Unwavering in her commitment to unravel the quandary that Christianity in the West has trapped itself in and unflinching in her determination to tell the narrative of one who would gather all creation into wholeness, Smith makes a clear case for seeing with renewed eyes and hearing with unclogged ears. Unfettered provides space for reflection where we can find our full humanity and abandon the need to ‘fix’ our lives. It is an invitation to lean into the uncomfortable void and therefore create room where we can exist, grow, and flourish.”
— Phuc Luu , author of Jesus of the East: Reclaiming the Gospel for the Wounded
“We have pastor-practitioners and pastor-scholars, but we need pastor-artists because they help us encounter God as Mystery. Mandy Smith is a pastor-artist. In Unfettered , Mandy invites us to dance a three-step of rest, receive, and respond. She shows us what we can be: human beings deeply connected to God, self, and others. Mandy doesn’t make it sound easy; she just makes it sound so very worth it. She invites us to a dance that lives fully into the goodness of God. I’ve been grateful for Mandy’s voice for a long time now, and Unfettered is an overdue guide for those of us wanting another way.”
— Steve Cuss , lead pastor of Discovery Christian Church, Broomfield, Colorado
“Being quite skilled at the controlling, adultish ways of exegeting Scripture, I was deeply confronted by Mandy Smith’s rest-receive-respond approach. She invites us to divest ourselves of our need to be masters of the text and, like children, allow our senses, our instincts, even our bodies, to contribute to hearing from God. Like Nicodemus asking Jesus how one becomes born again, I found myself regularly resisting, questioning, and doubting Mandy’s new method before being won over by her approach. If you want to contend with the Good News in your heart, mind, and body, read this book!”
— Michael Frost , Morling College, Sydney
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2021 by Mandy Smith
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-3114-4
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedication
For Vera
Contents
Cover i
Endorsements ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page v
Dedication iv
Foreword by Walter Brueggemann vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Rest 17
2. What Gets in the Way of Rest 45
3. Receive 77
4. What Doesn’t Get in the Way of Receiving 93
5. Respond 97
6. What Keeps Us from Responding 119
7. A Theology of Childlikeness 153
8. Rest, Receive, Respond 185
Appendix: Resources for Engaging Scripture 199
Notes 203
Back Cover 213
Foreword
Walter Brueggemann
D o not, dear reader, take up this book unless you intend to be changed, because this book concerns emancipatory transformation. In poetic idiom, Mandy Smith has written a narrative account of her wondrous awakening to the gifts of freedom and grace in her life that have taken her by surprise. Her quite personal account is intended as an invitation and a summons to her readers that they, like the author, might come to live differently in the world.
Smith names and effectively resists “empire,” a stand-in for the seductions of modernity that vie for control, certitude, and predictability. It is clear that this mode of life cannot deliver on our hopes for humanness. Smith has seen that in her own life, her previous practice of faith seduced her into certitude and control that denied her the freedom, joy, and grace to which such “imperial” faith often attested. She found that her imagination had been occupied by and limited to the rigidities of orthodoxy that had become the very enemy of that which it advocated.
Smith is a compelling storyteller. The pivotal story she tells is about the life-changing moment when, during her sabbatical, she observed a flock of flying geese. She saw that without a plan the geese readily formed the shape of a V in the sky: “The shoulders of a goose know how to find the space where the wind is kind. And without conscious effort they are flying in a perfect V.” As she observed this oft-reenacted wonder, Smith resolved, “I want to fly like that.” This book is about her flight lessons and her newly acquired capacity to soar. Her poetic gifts not only bear witness to that new joyous freedom but also invite her readers to take flight.
Another gripping tale she tells is about how the night before a daring meeting to be convened for prayers of healing (which struck her as awkward and a bit embarrassing), she went alone to the church sanctuary to act out her uneasiness about the enterprise. There, alone in the sanctuary, she danced in anticipation and protest and demand:
My shoulder stiffly twitched, as I clenched my eyes shut to avoid witnessing my own awkwardness. I don’t know what it looked like, but I danced. I pictured the faces of those we would pray over in the morning, and I danced for each one. I felt my muscles begin to loosen, my heart open a crack, my longing leak out, and a little joy shyly emerge. By the end, I was sweating, not because my dance was so exuberant but from the exertion of will it took to override my lament, dancing when I felt like weeping. Psalm 30 expresses it this way: “You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy” (v. 11).
At this point Smith was in a new world that was given to her, one that she had not anticipated or chosen. From her deep faith and restless readiness, she has been able to formulate a three-step movement into this new gift.
Rest . It is important that Smith’s notice of the geese that “fly like that” was during her sabbatical, when she was taking a break from the pressures of empire. She knew then and knows now that without such restful attentiveness one is not likely to engage such emancipatory reality. This is a good, strong word for those of us who maintain “religious busyness” in our lives.
Receive. The empire requires us to keep taking initiatives—to manage, produce, and generate. But rest puts us in a posture to be on the receiving end of reality that does not start with us and therefore does not depend on us. In a posture of rest we might receive gifts that are being given by the goodness of God via the wonders of creation. Thus Smith, for the first time, began to pay attention to “the book of nature” that is as revelatory as “the book of Scripture.”
She found all around her wonder, gift, and mystery that have turned out to be buoyant and sustaining. It is therefore not a surprise that Smith finds the mundane of creation to be Spirit-filled in its restorative gifts.
Respond . When we receive, we then can respond. The response to which Smith finds herself committed is a ministry of healing and reconciliation among her neighbors. That ministry in response, however, does not require (or permit) that we be self-starters. As a result, in this sequence of rest-receive-respond there is no risk of burnout or fatigue or excessive managerial burden because the response is enveloped in receptivity.
Smith’s fresh awareness is that we may become “childlike” in awe, wonder, innocence, and trust. She observes that an excessive passion to be a knowing, responsible adult serves the empire of control, certitude, and predictability. She is, moreover, acutely aware of the oft-repeated warning that in becoming “childlike” we should not become “childish.” But she knows very well that being childlike has nothing to do with being childish, so she tersely dismisses that warning. And then in what I