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    Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People
    Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People
    Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People

    By Michael Frost

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Sharing your faith doesn’t have to be complicated.
    Christians are called to be a witness for Christ in daily life, to surprise people around us with the good news of the gospel. Yet putting that mission into regular practice can seem overwhelming. Author Michael Frost, a renowned expert on evangelism, offers refreshingly simple tactics to make evangelism fulfilling, exciting, and effective.

    Surprise the World teaches clear and practical tools for making evangelism part of your daily life. This short and easy read covers the BELLS method, along with thought-provoking questions and prompts for applying each habit. You’ll learn about each of the five habits:
    • Bless others
    • Eat together
    • Listen to the Spirit
    • Learn Christ
    • Understand yourself as Sent by God into others’ lives
    Ideal for personal use or training groups on evangelism, the inspiring lessons in this book will transform your view of evangelism in daily life.

    “A timely wake-up call for believers. A concise and helpful encouragement to those seeking to live on-mission in their communities.” —Ed Stetzer, author and pastor

    “Eminently doable, entirely practical, and exceptionally effective!” —Felicity Dale, author of An Army of Ordinary People

    “If every believer developed a lifestyle that included these 5 habits, I’m convinced a great spiritual awakening would take place.” —Al Engler, mission director of Nav Neighbor
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTyndale House Publishers
    Release dateJan 14, 2016
    ISBN9781631465178
    Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People
    Author

    Michael Frost

    Michael Frost is an American author, engineer, math and science nut, who lives with his wife and a growing collection of green things thriving in his house (apparently, their acquired tomato plant is asking for food now; however, do not turn your back on it).A published author with over 32 years of writing experience under his keyboard spanning a multitude of genres, Mr. Frost has landed with Belen Books Publishing to release his horror novel, Sowing Seeds. Having published his first short story at the age of 17, Mr. Frost has gone on to write more than 200 short stories, 40 novellas and 12 completed novels, and now he shares them with you.To quote Mr. Frost: "I wouldn't look under the bed if I were you."

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    4.5/5

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    • 3/5
      It's a good book that teaches how to live an evangelical life but some of the teachings I think were forced to fit the author's topic. For instance the last supper according to Paul. I think this was pushed to fit in.
    • 5/5
      Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result. We Christians at the beginning of the 21st Century should recognise that kind of insanity: if we expect our usual patterns of worship, however contemporary and relevant, to continue to draw people into Christ, then we shall continue to be disappointed by the Church. There is a place for ministry to aging Baby Boomers using traditional worship, but every member of the congregation is aware that the mean age of our fellow church-goers is increasing. In other words, Baby Boomers are aging, dying and not being replaced by younger people. Older people in their eighties continue trying to keep up the level of Christian activity that had when younger, and are experiencing burnout and disillusionment. The answer is not more of the same. The Anglican pattern of gathering everyone for the Sunday Eucharist is only 60 years old, going back to the Parish and People Movement of the 1950s. We can dare to envisage new ways of being church. Bunbury’s new Bishop, Ian Stuart, has been circulating copies of Surprise the World! as he visits parishes in his diocese. Bishop Ian states that responding to the Good News of Christ is pretty simple, really. Loving each other so that we want to reach out and love others.He has chosen a book that all Anglicans can use and act on. The book is about “shar[ing] your faith in surprisingly simple ways.” Michael Frost, Co-founder of the Forge Mission Training Network, an Australian evangelist, encourages us to follow is model of B.E.L.L.S.: “We BLESS people, both inside and outside the church. We EAT together, sharing meals with believers and non-believers alike. We LISTEN to the … Holy Spirit. We intimately LEARN CHRIST, … [and] we see ourselves as SENT by God to everywhere life takes us.” The strength of this model is that it does not assume that every Christian is a gifted evangelist. Few Christians are: we are to live our lives so that they provoke questions, “living a questionable life”, and answer them simply and directly as they arise out of our mixing with nonbelievers. Frost emphasises that the B.E.L.L.S. model is not a one-off program, but the cultivation of life-long habits that will feed this evangelistic lifestyle. The model is described is not difficult or complicated, and it sounds fun, social justice will be practised and beauty will be encountered. I am impressed by this little book. As a Franciscan tertiary, my first aim is “make Christ known and loved everywhere”. These habits will speed my steps to opening doors to conversations about the Good News. I am also in ongoing pain, a misfiring of my nervous system. Pain is closely related to depression: if you have pain, the pain will eventually make you depressed. Two spiritual strategies to defeat the depression, and so modulate the pain, are to reach out to others in need and put yourself out in the community (and not hide away in dangerous isolation). B.E.L.L.S. gives me means to do that (Blessing and Eating) and also shows how to nurture these activities through prayer and Bible study (Listening and Learning Christ). There are questions for discussion for each chapter of Surprise the World! These will help readers take in what they have discovered and put the five habits into practise. I am delighted that Bishop Ian recommended the book to me, and that he is encouraging others to discover B.E.L.L.S. and whistles (no whistles actually!) I read the book in three hours. Now I want to find three people to meet with, discuss the book, and get busy. Hopefully, B.E.L.L.S. will lead away from insanity!

    Book preview

    Surprise the World - Michael Frost

    Introduction

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    I really didn’t set out to create an international movement. When I came up with the BELLS model described in this book, I thought it was just a simple idea our church could adopt to foster missional habits in our lives. I had no idea that churches right across the world—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and goodness knows where else—would embrace it. But now it seems that everywhere I go I meet folks who tell me they are living out these five simple habits in an attempt to better fulfill the mission of God.

    I partly blame my good friend Alan Hirsch. He regularly mentions BELLS in his lectures and seminars as an example of how churches can encourage missional living within their members. Although I have outlined the model in a couple of my earlier books, I have tended to be more coy about BELLS, preferring to encourage churches to create their own homegrown approach to missional living rather than expecting them to simply adopt our model.

    But when recently the folks at the Exponential church-planting movement asked me to write a manual on how to do BELLS, I figured it was time to abandon my diffidence and go ahead and fly the flag. So the book you’re holding was originally an e-book posted on the Exponential site. I was delighted when NavPress then expressed interest in offering it in a paper-and-ink format, and set about expanding the simple format into a more detailed explanation of the BELLS habits and how they can work in fostering a missional lifestyle. I suspect the reason why people have embraced BELLS so quickly is that it’s such a simple, easy-to-adopt set of habits that do unleash essential missional values: engagement with neighbors, connection with each other, a deeper experience of God’s leading, a stronger understanding of the gospel, and a framework for identifying ourselves as missionaries. (I include a tracking sheet for these habits in the final chapter of the book.)

    I’m not suggesting that BELLS is a magic bullet or anything like that. But it is a really handy tool for mobilizing Christians up, in, and out into mission. That is, up into deeper connection with the Triune God; in to a stronger sense of community with other believers; and out into the neighborhood.

    The fact is that we all recognize the need to live generous, hospitable, Spirit-led, Christlike lives as missionaries to our own neighborhoods. We want to live our faith out in the open for all to see.

    Unfortunately, some of us grew up in churches that expected something less from us. For a start, we were often told we are all evangelists, and we were expected to memorize prefabricated gospel presentations and to go forth and share that presentation with anyone who would listen. For a lot of us this was a mortifying prospect. For a variety of reasons (temperament, lack of knowledge, lack of relationship), we felt inadequate to do so, and we ended up feeling guilty about our lack of evangelistic zeal. Often, those who were confident enough to do it were so obnoxious in their approach that they turned unbelievers away in droves.

    Even when we felt released from the burden of having to be gung-ho evangelists, we still got the impression that all we had to do was befriend our neighbors and colleagues and invite them to church to hear the preaching of the Word.

    I have no doubt that some people have become Christians by being buttonholed by a wild-eyed evangelist with a tract or by being invited to church by a Christian neighbor. But I think both approaches are unfair to us. The former places too high a set of expectations on us—after all, not everyone is a gifted evangelist. But the latter reduces us to church marketers whose primary role is to advertise the church’s benefits.

    Surely there is a way we can see the church as an army of ordinary people,[1] sent out to announce and demonstrate the reign of God through Christ, without expecting ourselves to be something we’re not or something less than we should be.

    That’s where BELLS comes in. I believe the key is to equip believers to see themselves as sent ones, to foster a series of missional habits that shape our lives and values, and to propel us into the world confidently and filled with hope. These are the five habits of highly missional people.

    [1] Felicity Dale, An Army of Ordinary People (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2010).

    1

    Living Questionable Lives

    Before we get to the five habits themselves, allow me to sketch the background. Evangelistic mission works effectively when we are living generous, hospitable, Spirit-led, Christlike lives as missionaries to our own neighborhoods—and when the gifted evangelists in our midst join us in sharing Christ with our neighbors. That’s not just good evangelism strategy. That’s the biblical model.

    A Twofold Approach to Evangelism

    With all the best intentions in the world, some people will tell you that every Christian is an evangelist and bears the responsibility to share Christ with others. I certainly agree with the latter part of that contention (that we bear responsibility to share our love for Jesus with others). But I fear that the first part of that statement (that every Christian is an evangelist) is unhelpful.

    Are we really all evangelists? Certainly the vast majority of Christians I know don’t feel much like evangelists. It’s as if we’re being told that—even though we don’t believe we’re evangelists, and don’t perform very effectively when we act like evangelists—we are nonetheless, deep down in our bones, really truly evangelists who just need to step into our true identities and fulfill our calling to share Christ with others. Is this fair, and more importantly, is it true?

    Contrary to the myth that every believer is an evangelist, the apostle Paul assumes a twofold approach to the ministry of evangelism.

    First, he affirms the gifting of the evangelist—interestingly, not the gift of evangelism but the evangelist herself is the gift (see Ephesians 4:11).

    Second, he writes as though all believers are to be evangelistic in their general orientation.

    Paul clearly places himself in the first category, seeing his ministry not only as that of an apostle but also as that of an evangelist. But it doesn’t appear that he believes all Christians bear the responsibility for the kind of bold proclamation to which he is called. Note his description of this twofold approach in his letter to the Colossians:

    Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim

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