Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ
Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola
Thomas Nelson (June 1, 2010)

Years ago, as a rather insignificant young pastor in a large denomination, I fearlessly (too fearlessly, as it turned out) stood before some 10,000 delegates to propose we change the order of our denomination’s statement of faith and move our No. 3 article of faith, “The Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ,” to the top of the list and the then No. 1 article, “The Scriptures Inspired,” to the No. 3 slot. Was not interested in changing the language of the articles, just their order. My motive was pure, I thought. I believed that Christ, as the Bible said, should “have the preeminence in all things”; especially, one would think, in a Christian creedal statement. To my shame, I was jeered off the floor. One colleague later scolded me and said he was “ashamed” of me. It took years for me to live down a reputation of being “renegade” and “liberal” (I was neither). Yet here I am, some thirty-plus years later, more convinced than ever that my proposal was a good idea and I have just found vindication in a new book by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola: Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ. (Where were these guys when I needed them?)

Occasionally, despite all my pious religiosity, I get the uneasy feeling that Jesus has left the building. I, like you, have a tendency to become wrapped-up, even obsessed, in whatever my pet issue is at the moment. It may be anything from evangelism to the environment to end-time prophecy. This is understandable since every year hundreds of titles flood the Christian market dealing with every topic imaginable and we sometimes find ourselves swept up in the current hot topic. But in the end it all comes back to that elemental question Jesus once asked Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” When Christ ceases to be the nexus of our faith and we become absorbed in all the stuff “about” Jesus, and not in Christ himself, we lose our focus.

“The Christian life properly conceived and experienced,” affirm the authors, “is simply a reproduction and a reliving of the life of Jesus.” But Christianity is not just a matter of striving to be “like” Jesus. If that is our sole aim, we are doomed to failure. No one has done or can do it. Rather, we must “be” Christ. Don’t jump to conclusions by that statement. The authors go on to say, “Jesus doesn’t want us to be ‘like’ him; he wants to share his resurrection life with us, [not just] imitate him. Christ wants to live in and through us. The gospel is not the imitation of Christ; it is the implantation and impartation of Christ. We are called to more than mediate the truth. We are called to manifest Jesus’ presence.” Or, as George MacDonald prayed, “O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. Take me and make a little Christ of me.” Quoting Bishop Ryle, with whom the authors agree, “Christ is all. Those three words are the essence and substance of Christianity. If our hearts can really go along with them, it is well with our souls. If not, we may be sure we have yet much to learn.”

Author’s Bio
Leonard Sweet currently occupies the E. Stanley Jones Chair of Evangelism, serving from 1995 to 2001 as Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Theological School at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. A Visiting Distinguished Professor at George Fox University in Portland, Oregon, and President Emeritus of United Theological Seminary, he is a weekly contributor to the online preaching resource, Sermons.com. Author of more than two hundred articles, twelve hundred published sermons, and almost forty books, Sweet is currently working on two textbooks: one on preaching, Giving Blood, and one on evangelism, Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who is Already There. His most recent book is So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church and his weekly podcast is “Napkin Scribbles.”

Frank Viola is a best-selling author and international conference speaker. His books include Revise Us Again, Reimagining Church, The Untold Story of the New Testament Church and the best-selling From Eternity to Here.

Seth Godin’s book Tribes has been out for a while but it’s well worth the read.

With the new year often comes a New Year Resolution. These resolutions come in all kinds of forms. We all made them and most of them have been broken. It seems to be an endless cycle. One of the resolutions that followers of Jesus often make is a resolution to read the Bible through during the next year. That too, often falls by the wayside. One of the reasons is the call to move from hardly any consistent reading to a commitment to read for the next 365 days and not only that but read it, the text of Scripture, in a chopped up and very fragmented way. Read Genesis 1-2, then Read Matthew 1 or some other routine that tears at the very core of the storyline of the Bible.

So, here’s an alternative, Read the Bible Without Additives in 100 Days (or 200 or 300). What’s the difference you say? Read it as a story using a text of Scripture that has removed all the chapters and verses. Read it in a more chronological fashion. Set the number of days you want to read. Don’t start on January 1, don’t make it a New Years Resolution, pick another day, be intentional, but start soon.

How do you do this? I have prepared a reading guide using The Books of the BibleTM that you can receive every week that provides a suggestion of reading beginning with Genesis and working your way through Revelation on your own time schedule.

Where can you find this information? Just click on the following link and read the information and signup. It’s free!

Reading the Bible Without Additives in 100 Days

It’s a great story, you should read it. Read it again for the first time.

I am part of a book club at the community of faith that I participate with. We are reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. This was one of the books we read as a cohort in the DMin program at George Fox. The following is one of the responses that I posted on our community book club reading board. I had listed several question from chapter 1 of the book and then reflected on one of them.

Here’s one of the questions that I am continually reflecting on:

“How does it feel to be a part of a community that is living “between the times,” (the concept of liminality, i.e., between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by history) and knows it?”

When one stops to think about the time we live in, we usually think “present” time versus “past” or “future” time. The NT provides us a concept that we really live “between the times.” The time we live in is referred to as “this present evil age” and it fits between the “first coming” of Jesus and the “second coming” of Jesus. We don’t live in the “past” or in the “future” but in the “presence of the future” a “between the time” time.

Let’s apply that concept to now. We live between the cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity. We actually live in neither all the time. We are influenced by both modernity and postmodernity at the same time, a “between the time” time. There is a slight difference. Modernity has not disappeared and neither has Christendom. Postmodernity (or what ever it will be called by historians 1000 years from now) is not fully here. On has not replaced the other. It took modernity 1000 years to replace the middle ages. So we live in the tension of the “between the times” time.

As my wife, Donna Faith, stated to me, different personality types respond differently to life. Thus there is not a “single” answer to the question. There is only how one feels about it.

Personally, I love the tension. I seem to thrive on it. It excites me to think about some “older” things passing away and some “newer” things coming into existence. I love “older” things, after all I am one. I often wonder what wonderful things that my children will face in the years to come that aren’t even a part of my imagination in the present. The only constant thing is change and that is what living “between the times” brings. After all, nothing stays the same. I look at my hand and say, “yep, that is a hand,” but a year from now it will be completely new. Every cell in my hand today will have died and been replaced by new ones, while my hand looks “static” it is not. My hand lives “between the times” of being what is and becoming what it will be. Such is the destiny of VCC. She lives today as she is becoming what she will be tomorrow.

I think VCC knows she is a “between the time” community. She holds on to the “older” things that are not hindrances to creating “newer” things, a blessing from her creator.

Here is a link to the concept of Liminality by one of the authors of Missional Church. The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality (Christian Mission and Modern Culture) by Alan J. Roxburgh.

The following books have been assigned by Len Sweet to read for his fall course in my DMin program at GFU. I thought you might like to get a taste of what we are reading. Should be fun!

• Mark Chaves. Congregations in America (Harvard UP, 2004) 304 pages.


• Brett P. Webb-Mitchell. Christly Gestures: Learning to Be Members of the Body of Christ (Eerdmans, 2003) 320 pages.


• Howard Gardner. Changing Minds (Harvard Business School, 2004) 288 pages.


• Peter Senge. Presence: Human Purpose and The Field of the Future (Society for Organizational Learning, 2004). 304 pages.


• Telford Work. Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Eerdmans, 2001) 343 pages.


• Craig Hill. In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (Eerdmans, 2002) 192 pages.


• Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge, 2003) 312 pages.


• Michel Henry. I Am the Truth (Stanford UP, 2003) 282 pages.


• George Lakoff and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 1989) 230 pages.


• Penny Tompkins and James Lawley. Metaphors in Mind (Developing Press Company, 2000) 336 pages.


• Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. 2nd Edition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2003). 336 pages.