How to Start a Riot

A story about shipwrecks, snakebites, beatings, meetings, and other church events. When was the last time you saw crowd control at a church? If you ask most people--at least Western people--what they think about Christianity, they will probably give you a pretty domesticated vision of church. Almost half of Americans think that religion is at best irrelevant and obsolete, and possibly a way of making the world a worse place. But I have a hunch most of us wouldn't like the world if Jesus hadn't been born into it. From our modern ideas of human rights, to prisons and orphanages and universities...For thousands of years the people who have followed Jesus have been a compelling force for good in the world. The way of Jesus has always been wilder than we think and more dangerous than we'd like. This is a book about what it means to belong to the community of God--a book about how to Support Your Local Jesus Revolution. This is why Acts of the Apostles is so important. The four Gospels are followed by a book about what the people of God did. Because the gospel leads to action. It leads to a different kind of people embodying a different way of life. And as Western Christianity becomes more assimilated into Western culture, it is good for us to notice not just what the earliest Christians said and thought, but what they did. Acts is a manifesto of a people who went all over the known world proclaiming that Jesus is Lord and that God is doing a new thing that is available for anyone.