FUTUREPROOF How to live for Jesus in a culture that keeps on changing (Review)

 

Futureproof: How to live for Jesus in a Culture that keeps on changing is very readable. McAlpine is an excellent writer, always keeping the reader engaged. I appreciate the shortish chapters with their various subheadings; like water stations along the route for runners, these are refreshing, encouraging the reader to keep on going. No, the book isn’t a hard slog. It is an easy read. However, call me old fashioned, but I’d like to hear a wee bit more about the “Church Militant” and the “Church Triumphant” than mostly “hospitality evangelism”. Yes, we live for Jesus in a culture that keeps on changing, but how is the “Church Militant” supposed to recapture lost ground apart from, as nice as it is, being nice to single mums, etc.?

McAlpine mentions that the Lord’s return is immanent, while at the same time helping to equip Christians now and for the decades ahead in, what apparently has become, an alien culture. He gives the impression that any success of the Great Commission up till now has peaked and has since been tossed into the dustbin of history. Like Dispensationalism’s errant (and the cruel hamstringing of Christian’s) “Rapture” teaching, apparently Christians are now dependent on the Lord’s return for His Gospel to succeed on earth. So meanwhile, like the WWII troops at Dunkirk awaiting the great rescue flotilla, we are just to be nice to the enemy in friendly engagement during the “culture wars” which we always seem to be losing if we have not already lost.

Doesn’t this earth belong to God? And aren’t those who belong to a culture that keeps on changing not inhabiting and defiling our inheritance as Christians, i.e., the earth? Is the Church Militant not supposed to be “pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God”? Yes, of course, Christians are to do Gospel outreach even over cups of coffee. Or course, Christians are to engage people as they find them wherever they are dwelling in their alien culture. But surely, Christ’s idea is that we, Onward! Christian soldiers… are to transform and reform their deformed culture?

Futureproof is a good book for what it intends, i.e., to give a summary with some brief pointers on how to live for Jesus in a culture that keeps on changing.