Preface and Introduction to Mark Sayers' book "The Vertical Self"

In the coming weeks, we will have a look at Mark Sayer's outstanding book and briefly digest the main points of each chapter. If you like the summary of this blog, please consider buying a copy of the book.


We need to Change the Conversation

Christian leaders are engaged in a conversation about what kind of church shape will be most effective in the soil of 21st century Western culture. All our attempts to reshape Church in the West will at best be sabotaged and at worst fail because there is a huge unnamed problem with people inside the church. Slowly, inch by inch, we have replaced the biblical command to be holy with the quest for status. One of the reasons the early church grew at such a phenomenal rate was that the lives of the early Christians spoke so strongly to their neighbours. There was something different about them, something that spoke of another reality, an alternative way of living, to the culture around them. I believe that we need a revolution in how we think about church. But I believe, perhaps more importantly, that we need a revolution of the self.

Introduction
It is so easy to feel discouraged today as a believer in our secular culture, to buy the line that no one really cares about the spiritual anymore. Yet I realized that deep down, each one of us, Christian or not, is searching for that name of the white rock in the book of Revelation. We all crave to find our true identities. Each one of us, at a profoundly deep level, no matter what we believe, is being drawn, cajoled, and beckoned by God to our true selves, to find ourselves as God sees us: redeemed and perfect. Yet at the same time, this desire in us is derailed and sabotaged by our culture, which offers imitations of our true identities - faux identities, pseudoselves, and images instead of the image of God. This book is about the quest to find our true selves. It is rooted in the belief that in God's future we exist totally redeemed, exactly as he wants us to be.

Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.xvii-xxiv