When SINGING IN BABYLON was published and I began blogging, I considered that my slogan might be: “Subversive Christians on the World’s Stage.” This would be my “brand.” (Brand is a current buzzword, something that identifies you with your “tribe,” another buzzword.)

It didn’t seem to impress an editor at a writers’ conference I attended. Subversive might have connotations I didn’t intend. I certainly didn’t mean subversive in the sense of a subversive movement like al-Qaeda. No insurgency that claims innocent lives. No, nothing like that. Nor do I mean the undermining of core Christian beliefs.

I meant something like Walter Brueggemann discusses in Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope. He talks about the baptized community in the Christian West as being in something like exile ” … in consumer-oriented capitalism in the West, where the church is a cultural problem or at least an inconvenience.” (Page 10.)

Perhaps exile is a better term than subversive. We are exiled Christians on the world’s stage. We’re subversives against the worship of greed, power, and self that sooner or later drags down every civilization. We’re subversives in living lives of self-discipline and compassion against the world’s dominant values of self-centeredness and consumerism. We live intentional lives, not ones of passive submission to our culture.