Heaven Is Not My Home – Chapter 1
The Church: A Boring Gospel?
This brief opening chapter begins to set the course that Marshall will take through this work. The central question is “Why are we here?” Marshall, rightly, asks: “If we don’t know why we are here, how can we learn how all these parts (parenting, worship, building churches, planting churches, etc., etc.) fit together?” We don’t know yet we still participate in life. While we live, we are unsure why. Add to this uncertainty that Christians tend to flee from participating in culture or worse yet, only participate in the form of boycotting culture (a type of fleeing itself) and you have a recipe for a totally disengaged Christian life. Marshall begins to offer an alternative in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus wasn’t tame or safe. He wasn’t boring and disengaged from culture at all.
Marshall caps off the chapter by briefly the describing the commonly misunderstood eternal future for believers. We are not headed for a disembodied heavenly existence but rather a physical, resurrected eternal dwelling; a city. What we do in and with God’s good created world matters. To see this, chapter two will begin at the beginning: Genesis.
