My Thoughts about Banished

Opening a book to read is like swinging a door open. Each book I read leads me to a room where the author creates a certain environment by stringing words together. Some rooms, I like to stay a while and then leave. Some rooms I kept visiting. Some rooms, I decided, I’d never enter again. And then, there are rooms in my shelf that are still waiting to be opened. 

When I got my hands on Banished, I knew the kind of room I was getting into before I even started reading it. Pastor Joshua has a way of making me uncomfortable when reading his work. Somehow, as in the books he wrote in the past, he makes me rethink my life and my witness. Halfway into banished, he did not disappoint. I was right.

In Banished, Pastor Joshua takes us back to the events surrounding the birth of Jesus and helps us look at it with the lens of the present time. In my opinion, the west has sanitized our image of Christmas that it is almost easy to overlook how scandalous the circumstances were, just as disgusting as the stories we have in the present day. He then seamlessly brings us to look at Jesus’ life and teachings in contrast to how we, the church, live it today. Are we "walking the talk" of the sermon on the mount? To answer, read the book. 

As a student of the Bible, Banished sparked an excitement in me as I savored the author’s own take of the scriptures, the snippets of history he dashed here and there, the laborious research he put into his work --- it was compelling! 

As a Christian involved in ministry, he rattled my convenient way of ministering. Suddenly, I am thrown into a puddle of information, opening my eyes even more keenly on the plight of the OFW, the struggles of those in the margins, and  the unbridgeable gap between the Lazaruses and the Rich Men of today’s world. In one of those pages, I came to the realization that many of the theories we teach in missions, in the Bible Schools, or those we even observe from ministers ahead of us in the field, are no longer applicable in the age we live in. Many of our strategies are coated with agenda.  Pastor Joshua writes “Authenticity and integrity are the key to transformative evangelism and discipleship.”  He talks extensively of humility as an integral virtue in the ministry --- something many, I observed, have dispensed of in exchange of militant, aggressive, number-driven Christianity.

As an adult finding my place in the world, a new sense of adventure  was planted in me in the last few chapters of Banished. The author talks about living our witness in public spaces, understanding first the perception of those outside the Christian tradition. We often fault ourselves in gagging those outside the ‘faith’ with Bible verses and doomsday revelations, instead of listening to them – finding out where they’re at, and taking them along in the journey of knowing Jesus.

Pastor Joshua concluded the last chapter with a voice of hope. I closed the book, my thoughts still easing through the discomfort of knowing that my actions as a Christ-follower have not always been in congruence with my talk. I am plagued with questions.  I just left a room that made me uncomfortable. But, like many who met Jesus – along dusty roads and polished palaces, in sinking boats and atop feeble tree branches --- discomfort is the way to discovering the truth; to live in perpetual discomfort of the mind, the heart and the body, until you come to the resolve that Jesus is truly, truly, the only One that satisfies them all.

Get the book. Get into that room. Get uncomfortable.

Book is available through Central Logos https://www.facebook.com/centralogosofficial .