JESUS MANIFESTO & Michael Spencer (the iMonk)

I’ve been answering questions about Jesus Manifesto lately on the blog. The last post was titled, Why Jesus Manifesto is Not a Recipe Book.

Summarizing that post, I tweeted this the other day:

JESUS MANIFESTO is deliberately “show” rather than “tell.” It attempts to deliver a vision rather than a recipe. A song rather than a system.

Finally, I’d like to say a few words about my friend, Michael Spencer (the iMonk). I never met Michael in person, but we corresponded regularly, became good friends, and supported one another’s work.

Tragically, Michael passed this past April after battling cancer. But before he did, he finished his first book, Mere Churchianity, which officially released recently.

Michael kindly asked me to endorse the book, and I was happy to do so. Here’s what I wrote:

As someone who has been writing for years on the supremacy of Jesus Christ and its relationship to his church, I found the Christ-centeredness of this book to be profoundly refreshing. We have lost a choice servant of God in Michael, but heaven is the richer. I’m thankful that he left us this excellent contribution.

(Quick clarification for the confused. Unfortunately, Michael defined me as a “house church” guy, which I’m not. The “organic expression of the church” and “house church” are two VERY different things, as I’ve stated repeatedly in books, messages, and blog articles. But trying to get the masses to separate the two, despite innumerable attempts, is like nailing Jell-O to a wall.)

Before Michael passed, I was corresponding with his wife and asked if he would like to endorse Jesus Manifesto. He wanted to, but he was just too ill. Yet here’s what he wrote about the online essay that preceded the book:

Sweet and Viola, who are hardly theological twins, have detected something seriously amiss in the post-evangelical/emerging church understanding of the Gospel: the centrality of Christ. I think I have a nose for this sort of thing, and I know it can be very rhetorical, but Sweet and Viola are crucially and significantly right. And not just about Christianity becoming politics, but about theology that puts Jesus into an assigned “place” in someone’s version of Christianity and doesn’t make him the “all” of the Gospel. As I will say in one chapter of my book, unless you do great damage, there’s not going to be any escaping the narrowness of Jesus when it comes to putting the focus onto himself rather than anyone else’s agenda. So whatever we have to say about “narratives,” or “sources” or “confessions,” we must be a people radically identified with Jesus. No “Jesus Disconnect” allowed. July 24, 2009, www.theinternetmonk.com

And of my book, From Eternity to Here, he had these kind words to say:

I was taken aback with how much I liked this book [From Eternity to Here]. I read it quickly, and I’m going to read it again. Why? Because if there is a book on the Jesus-shaped church that I could recommend to everyone who identifies with my description of that journey, this has easily cleared the bar as my first choice. Not because I would sell all that I have and follow Frank Viola into the organic church movement, but because the way in which Jesus Christ dominates the ecclesiology is exactly what so many of us are searching for in the evangelical wilderness. February 27, 2009, www.theinternetmonk.com

All that to say that Michael and I had the same vision when it comes to the supremacy of Christ.

I’ll miss him.

The body of Christ will miss him more.

Get his book today and write a review for it on Amazon.