Considering how to follow Christ in 'the mundane, concrete and routine'

Best-selling author Scot McKnight, professor of religious studies at Chicago's North Park University, issues a discipleship challenge, aiming to reveal what it means to truly follow Jesus, in One.Life: Jesus Calls. We Follow. 

Raised in a Christian home, McKnight accepted Christ at age 6, but in his teen years he began to grapple in a deeper way with what it actually meant to be a believer.

"I moved from understanding a Christian as someone who accepts Christ into their heart to someone who surrenders themselves to Christ in trust and obedience, so that a Christian, for me, is not someone simply who has accepted Christ but someone who, as the result of accepting Christ, follows Christ," he said.

"That transformed my life when I was 17 years old and through my seminary-study days, when I realized that being a Christian was a revolutionary decision and lifestyle that would impact everything I did."

McKnight, who addressed the topic of love in The Jesus Creed, goes on to examine what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a multitude of ways, offering up topics from justice to sex to vocation to eternity. 

"I want to sketch what the Christian life looks like if we ask Jesus to define those terms and to set the parameters—and Jesus was all into (the) kingdom of God, and He wanted people to be caught up in the vision of what God is doing in this world," he said. 

"And I emphasize church, that this is not just me and Jesus. This is about Jesus and His people and my connection to the church, that this will be a society, a kingdom, a community, a church, a congregation that will have a completely different vision for how to live in this world. 

"It will be an alternative to what our world offers us, it will be an alternative to American culture and society, and it will be a radical vision that will involve terms like justice and peace and holiness and love and surrender and faith." 

Jesus emphasized the kingdom of God, McKnight says, "the will of God displayed on earth to the degree that it's possible," adding that he wants to see it displayed in the everyday life of believers.

"I want to excite people about the vision of Jesus, but I want them to realize that the reality of living that out is a tough challenge, it's a rugged commitment, and it takes place in local, concrete, rather routine ways rather than some kind of dreamy reverie that we get lost in when we're in our car listening to our favorite music. 

"I like the excitement of the dream, but the dream has to take foothold with hands and feet in the real world serving our neighbors rather than some Platonic ideal of loving the world. So I'm really into the dream that Jesus calls us to have, but I want that dream to be seen as something that is lived out in the mundane, concrete and routine world."