To Alter Your World - by Michael Frost & Christiana Rice (Paperback)

About the Book

With groundbreaking ideas and practical illustrations from around the globe, Michael Frost and Christiana Rice introduce the metaphor of a midwife to depict us as God's birthing attendants, partnering in God's restorative mission.

Book Synopsis

God is altering history, birthing the new creation all around us, and we have been invited to join God in that task. With groundbreaking ideas and practical illustrations from around the globe, missional leaders Michael Frost and Christiana Rice introduce the metaphor of a midwife to depict us as God's birthing attendants, partnering in God's restorative mission.

Review Quotes

"This book had me at chapter one. Using Isaiah's provocative metaphor of God crying out like a woman in childbirth, Mike and Christiana help us imagine ourselves as midwives, assisting God in the birthing of a new creation. This book is as bold as it is beautiful."

"A bold and beautiful call to steward God's good news for the world. A must-read for anyone who longs to wade into the deep and ride the current to personal and global redemption. A deeply biblical glimpse of a deeply personal God inviting us into a deeply beautiful journey."

"Frost and Rice pair principles with stories in ways that make this book sing. We get a 3D picture of what it means to live the future kingdom now, as individuals and as congregations. Their central metaphor of our role as midwives in God's process of renewal is fresh, intriguing, confounding, and disruptive. To Alter Your World will make you slow down, muse, question, and celebrate. It's not likely to leave you unchanged."

"In an over-messaged world, To Alter Your World cuts through noise with compelling narrative that describes our invitation to participate in kingdom transformation as a midwifing process rather than an engineering one. In a world experiencing searing pain with ever-deepening fault lines of injustice and income inequality, Christiana and Michael call us to question our traditional starting points for mission. With the stakes so high, they urge us to tap into Christ's imagination rather than summon our human determination. This is a wonderfully insightful book that honestly recounts sobering realities but also hopefully describes encouraging signs of how God is at work among us."

"In this outstanding book, my comrade Michael Frost further develops his pioneering ideas on how we ought to follow the way of our incarnate Lord-only here he partners with an exemplary practitioner of incarnational mission, Christiana Rice. The result is a piece of writing that is as illuminating as it is inspiring. Wonderful!"

"Leave it to a male-female collaboration to mine the often neglected but indispensable richness of feminine metaphors for God. In To Alter Your World, coauthors Michael Frost and Christiana Rice portray God groaning like a woman in labor and believers (both individually and corporately) serving as midwives in the birth of God's new creation. That distinctly female metaphor frames the entire book and entrusts to every reader a strategic role in the birthing process. The book itself is packed with wisdom for how we can sensitively and wisely participate in what God is doing. It speaks realistically about the challenges ahead without diminishing the hope and expectation of the joy that accompanies such a blessed event."

"Most of us ache to see our messed-up world altered for the good, yet too often we unintentionally create more problems by pushing our own agendas. In To Alter the World, Mike and Christiana give us an insightful and timely metaphor that helps us detect the impulses of the Spirit so we can humbly inhabit our neighborhoods and birth new kingdom realities."

"One of the many things I love about To Alter Your World is how Rice and Frost encourage the reader to see themself as one who will actually partner with God to help birth a wonderful new world. What an awesome and humbling responsibility!"

"Pioneers. Adventurers. Explorers. Leaders. Missiologists. Those are the words that commonly come to mind when we consider our role as we engage with the Great Commisson in post-Christian contexts. But midwives? Seriously? Yes. They stand at the threshold of new life in all its raw vulnerability and potential. Occasionally they stand tenderly alongside the grieving, mourning lost joy and promise. Leading with sacrifice and strength, their role is never about them; they're simply present to serve as needed. In this book, Frost and Rice recognize that as we engage with what God is birthing in our world, a fresh posture is required. Yep, it's time to call the midwife; our world is waiting."

"Rejecting withdrawal or simply joining with the world, Frost and Rice ask the question all over again: How can we Christians transform the world? Moving beyond the old, tired Christendom habits, they offer the church a fresh way to inhabit, take up roots, and let God birth his kingdom in the neighborhoods of our lives. Their book To Alter the World truly alters our imagination for the practice of church, and I am so pleased to recommend it."

"This beautiful book by Michael and Christiana reminds us that the entire creation is groaning, aching for a new world, like a mother giving birth. Pregnancy means labor, sweat, tears, blood . . . but in the end it also means new life! So roll up your sleeves and get ready . . . a new world is coming. We get to be the midwives."

About the Author

Michael Frost is an internationally recognized Australian missiologist and one of the leading voices in the missional church movement. He is the vice principal of Morling College in Sydney, Australia, and the founding director of the Tinsley Institute, a mission study centre located at Morling College. A popular speaker around the world, he has written more than a dozen books including The Shaping of Things to Come, Exiles, The Road to Missional, and Incarnate. An expert in church planting, Frost cofounded the Forge Mission Training Network with Alan Hirsch. He remains an international director of that movement which is now based in the United States.

Christiana Rice is an on-the ground practitioner and visionary voice in the missional movement, serving as a coach and trainer with Thresholds, a community of player-coaches who help people create spaces of discovery and communities of transformation. She leads a neighborhood faith community in San Diego. Christiana grew up in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter and granddaughter of missionaries to that country. Whether teaching and coaching global leaders, engaging the deeper spiritual longings of her neighbors, or embracing the sacred mundane of daily life with her family and her community, Christiana seeks participate in God's restorative mission in all things.