Radiant Church: Restoring the Credibility of Our Witness

God is giving us all a poignant prophetic wake-up call for us to live credibly into our destined radiance. The amazing powerful prayer of lament in chapter 1 sets the spiritual tone and prepares our hearts.   Leach claims she is a “prisoner of hope” looking to a positive future even though the American white evangelical church seems to have lost its way.  You will be motivated by Leach’s conversion story, better understanding of evangelism (chapter 6) and the constant grounding in countercultural kingdom values of the Sermon on the Mount.  Leach has a gentle way of poking at our blind spots and does not shy away from addressing the church’s scandals of our day.  Rather than putting the church down, she keeps trying to pull us upward to see that we can be so much better than we are.  As a teenager she was so anxious and focused solely on winning first place in each sports competition.  But now her dad sees a major problem.  He sits her down for that serious talk.  Life is NOT just about winning or losing.  What really matters is character!  And so it is with the church!  Leach warns us of the quest to achieve success using the metrics of the world.   Many are now skeptical of those who claim belief in Jesus because in reality they hardly act like Him.  Leach, was once a champion swimmer and who finished her core training for the Chicago triathlon only to find out that the many hard hours of preparation in a pool were futile because the actual competition was being conducted in the turbulent waters of Lake Michigan. To restore credibility to our witness, the church must adapt to the context and seriously take into account the shifting demographics of the cultural environment. The Radiant church is an attractive witness to outsiders.  Leach, who is a non-sports fan, recently felt attracted by the contagious joy and camaraderie of the Cubs fans who were crying and dancing in the streets after winning the World Series.  In another chapter Leach fondly remembers her grandmother’s polaroid camera that instantly snapped and developed photos, but always looked slightly blurred.  We have unknowingly been living according to all these different distorted views of God.  Recently, pastors have suffered so much because of the “nationalistic god.”  One quote is: “American Christians are confused about what is American and what is Christian, and the desire to wed the two has thwarted the church’s mission and tarnished its witness.”  The foundation of Scripture throughout the book is interspersed with current life testimonies.  I think that the encounter and racial awakening and reconciliation that Leach experienced with her seminary classmate Tiffany and Kim’s style of life evangelism are especially powerful.  Becoming a Radiant Church, is not impossible because it is Jesus’ idea and the Spirit empowers us.  Shining radiantly is going to depend on whether we are willing and ready to do the hard work (confess, lament and repent), and in doing so, we will see our best of days.  Our practices will be radiant (ch. 8) as we radically imitate Jesus, living the future kingdom now in the present.  Leach continues to proclaim: “We are called to live as an emboldened and radiant people of God in a weary world.  We are emboldened not by our own power, of an elitist god, we see the God who stoops low, chooses downward social mobility and takes on the cup of suffering.  Instead of a partisan-politics god, we discover the God who doesn’t fit into worldly ideologies and instead calls us to be citizens of a different kind of kingdom—one where political parties mean nothing and the way of Jesus as Lord is everything.” (p. 194)