The Faith of Leap

A decade into the missional movement, a striking paradox had become impossible to ignore. Countless leaders could articulate missional ecclesiology with textbook fluency. They agreed that the Christendom attractional model was broken. They affirmed that the church is sent into the world.

Yet when it came time to act—to dismantle an unproductive program, to redirect resources to the poor, to venture into uncharted cultural spaces, to risk institutional failure—almost everyone froze.

Why? Because the Western church has been shaped by a bourgeois culture that idolizes security above all virtues. We have confused Christian faith with middle-class respectability, emotional comfort, and pension plans. We have turned following an executed, itinerant, rabble-rousing Lord into a sedate lifestyle hobby.

Michael and I realized that you cannot build an apostolic movement with people who are addicted to certainty. Faith requires vulnerability. The early church multiplied across the hostile Roman Empire precisely because believers were willing to risk everything for the cosmic lordship of Christ. If the modern church is going to experience a genuine recovery of movement dynamics, it must undergo a profound conversion of courage.

The Faith of Leap was written as an explosive disruption to our institutional complacency—a theological summons to leave the harbor and embrace the sacred danger of the kingdom of God.¹

The central reframe of The Faith of Leap is that spiritual growth, true community, and apostolic mission happen only in conditions of disequilibrium: God lures us out of equilibrium in order to transform us.

Most institutions operate on the premise that stability is the highest good. When tension, disruption, or uncertainty enters the system, the instinctive response is to restore homeostasis—to get things back under control.

This book turns that logic on its head. In the biblical narrative, God is the supreme disruptor of human security. He calls Abram to leave his ancestral home for a land he will show him. He leads Israel out of Egyptian stability into the perilous wilderness. He calls fishermen to drop their nets and walk into a radically uncertain future.

We reframe risk not as foolish recklessness, but as the essential posture of biblical trust:

• The Idol of Security: The desire for absolute safety is a form of idolatry that attempts to secure the future apart from God.
• Liminality as Spiritual Crucible: Liminality—standing on the threshold between the known past and the unknown future—is the precise space where God refashions human identity.
• Communitas over Cozy Community: Genuine fellowship is never forged in comfortable living rooms drinking tea; it is forged in the crucible of a shared, dangerous ordeal in the service of a mission that lies beyond the group.²

When we eliminate risk from church life, we inadvertently eliminate the necessity of faith. By domesticating the venture, we drive out the Holy Spirit—who is, by nature, untamed and moving like the wind.

The Faith of Leap moves through nine chapters, blending biblical exegesis, anthropological insight, cultural analysis, and cinematic metaphor.

Frames the crisis of the modern imagination. Drawing on Kierkegaard's famous leap of faith and C.S. Lewis's portrayal of Aslan as "not a tame lion," the introduction establishes that following Jesus is inherently an adventure that demands nerve.³

Chapter 2, "The Spirit's Edge: Putting Adventure Back into the Venture" (p. 27), critiques the boredom of modern church life. It argues that human beings are wired for epic quests; when the church offers only institutional maintenance, it loses the most creative and courageous people. Chapter 3, "Jesus Is My Disequilibrium: Where Friends Become Comrades" (p. 51), is a pivotal chapter. It deepens Victor Turner's anthropological concept of communitas—the fierce, sacrificial camaraderie that emerges among people who endure a common crisis together. Drawing on the disciples in the storm (Mark 4:35–41), the chapter shows how Jesus intentionally leads his followers into terrifying disequilibrium to forge their brotherhood.⁴

Chapter 4, "A Walk on the Wilder Side: Overcoming Fear in Pursuit of Wild Hope" (p. 78), confronts the psychological anatomy of fear. It shows how institutional religion exploits fear to maintain conformity, and offers biblical hope as the antidote to dread. Chapter 5, "The Hero's Journey: Becoming Who We Were Made to Be" (p. 102), utilizes Joseph Campbell's monomyth framework to map the discipleship journey. Discipleship is an epic pilgrimage: the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, navigating the abyss, experiencing death and rebirth, and returning with a gift for the world.⁵

Chapter 6, "Getting Over Risk Aversion: Extracting Truth from Dare" (p. 129), examines how liability cultures, bureaucratic committees, and middle-class expectations suffocate apostolic innovation. Chapter 7, "Missional Catalysis: Thinking Differently about the Church and Her Mission" (p. 152), applies these principles directly to church leadership. It demonstrates that catalytic apostolic leaders must learn to manage tension rather than suppress it, functioning as holy agitators who keep the community on the frontier of mission.⁶

Chapter 8, "The Risk of Neighborliness: An Invitation to Take the Plunge" (p. 178), grounds the entire theology in everyday reality. Taking a leap of faith is not merely a grand, heroic gesture; it is crossing the street, knocking on a neighbor's door, offering radical hospitality, and entering the brokenness of real human lives. Chapter 9, "The Beginning of the End: Conclusion" (p. 203), issues a final prophetic summons to choose the adventure of the kingdom over the slow death of institutional maintenance.⁷

The Faith of Leap is the definitive, book-length theological and anthropological development of Element 6 of mDNA: Liminality and Communitas from The Forgotten Ways (2006).

In The Forgotten Ways, liminality was introduced in Chapter 7 as one of the six irreducible elements of Apostolic Genius, drawing on Victor Turner and the Chinese underground church. However, within the confines of that broader survey, it could only be sketched in outline. The Faith of Leap takes that seed and expands it into a comprehensive theology of Christian courage and adventurous discipleship.

The book also serves as the experiential engine for The Shaping of Things to Come (2003) and ReJesus (2008). While ReJesus recovered the untamed Jesus, The Faith of Leap asks what kind of people we must become to walk in his footsteps. Later, in 5Q (2017), the concepts of the hero's journey and systemic disequilibrium would be integrated directly into the archetypal functions of the prophetic and apostolic intelligences.

• The burned-out pastortrapped in the golden handcuffs of institutional maintenance, sensing that safety has cost the church its soul.
• The pioneering leader or church planterfacing intense criticism for taking risks, needing deep biblical and anthropological validation for leading people into the frontier.
• The Christian feeling suffocated by boring, middle-class church lifewondering if the gospel has anything to say to their deep hunger for adventure, meaning, and epic purpose.
• The leadership team paralyzed by decision-makinglooking for a theological framework to help them break free from risk-averse, liability-driven thinking.

For readers who want to explore how liminality and communitas integrate into the broader sixfold architecture of multiplying movements, The Forgotten Ways (2006) is the foundational text.

For those wanting to understand the untamed Christ whose wild, subversive lordship compels us to take the leap in the first place, ReJesus (2008, with Michael Frost) provides the Christological ground.