Jason Byassee
Cascade Books, 264 pages
Reviewed by Bob Melone
“Where in the world is Jesus?”
That is the question that Jason Byassee, former pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in North Carolina, now professor of theology at Vancouver School of Theology, attempts to answer in his book “Discerning the Body: Searching for Jesus in the World.”
We regularly hear and read about the “death of the church.” However because the church is Christ’s risen body in the world today – the presence of God in creation – it is safe to say that death is simply not an option! God is not dead, and the Spirit’s holy and mysterious presence will never be absent from creation.
Nevertheless, sometimes the body can be hard to find. Perhaps that is why Byassee states that he has spent much of his literary career looking hard for Jesus in the church and the world, wondering if it was possible to discern the presence of this one who has changed the course of human history. Christ has indeed been found, and “Where?” is the question this book attempts to answer. It is divided into sections, with short articles and essays on how God’s beloved community has been discovered in various corners of the world: in local congregations, in popular evangelicalism, in the church in Africa, among Roman Catholics, in popular culture, in sports, in Christian institutions and even amidst the task of writing.
Byassee tells of his experiences with various local congregations and communities, all being faithfully led by enormously talented people, gifted leaders whose lives are “tied up in preaching the gospel, loving the people of their congregations and neighborhoods, tending to the hurting, trying to make sense of a world that often makes no sense for a people dying a story worth living for.”
In the second part of the book, Byassee discovers Christ in popular evangelicalism — everywhere from communities of the “new monastics” to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Community Church in Houston to the writings of people like Amy Frykholm and Barbara Rossing. Later in the book, he speaks of discovering “astonishingly faithful and creative people” leading portions of the church in Uganda and Sudan, all of which inspired him to, as he puts it, believe “not just in God, but in the human beings with whom God is so unendingly patient.”
The remaining sections of the book attempt to reveal the presence of Christ in all kinds of diverse and creative ways: in everything from the movie “The Big Lebowski” to Duke athletics to the work of America’s countless “Christian” colleges and universities.
Byassee reminds us “the mighty acts of redemption are all around us all the time.” And in a day when people are as divided and polarized as ever, we need this reminder. We need to see that Jesus can be seen in surprising places, in communities that are very much unlike our own, and even in those places that we have written off and deemed to be lost. God’s work is being carried out in every closet and corner of creation — and Jesus surprises us by showing up everywhere! In the end, readers discover that not seeing him is less about God’s absence and more about our blindness.
Bob Melone is the pastor at Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
