No More Shock and Awe

Excerpt from Ed Stetzer post:  Guerilla Lovers

Vince Antonucci is the founder and lead pastor of Verve, an innovative new church for the unchurched on the Las Vegas strip. Vince's passion is creatively communicating biblical truth to help people find God. He is also the author of I Became a Christian and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.


Vince is also part of The Verve Foundation, which does community service to meet needs on and around the Vegas Strip.

His new book, Guerrilla Lovers, is another encouragement to the church to love in "deed and truth." I was happy to have the chance to ask Vince a few questions about the book. He'll be on the blog today answering your questions in the comments.

The name of your book is "Guerrilla Lovers." What does that mean?I think there are two types of war - "shock and awe" and "guerrilla warfare." Shock and Awe is employed when you're bigger and stronger than your opponent, so you stay at a distance, hoping to bomb your enemy into quick submission. Guerrilla warfare happens when you're under-manned, under-resourced. It requires intelligence and creativity. You have to get close so you can pull off ambush attacks. It's a patient strategy where you realize you'll have to hit your opponent repeatedly before they finally decide it's not worth it to continue fighting. In this book I'm advocating that we start relying on guerrilla tactics.

So what does "shock and awe" look like in a church context?
Trying to impress people into the Kingdom - with the size of our buildings, the quality of our coffee bar, and assuming that we can "win the victory" in a single encounter - with one church service, or in one conversation with a stranger on an airplane, or with a big church event.

And "guerrilla tactics"? What do those look like in a church context?
It would be a patient, relational, servant-hearted approach. We love people. Creatively. Audaciously. Consistently and persistently. We love people till they finally have to ask why.

You do this in the book, but can you give our readers a couple examples of Jesus, and/or the Apostles, modeling this approach?
Absolutely. Jesus was the original guerrilla lover. His m.o. was to lead with love. I think immediately of Mark 1 where the leper approaches Jesus, hoping to be healed. And not only does Jesus heal him, he touches him. We see Jesus heal people without touching them, so this isn't necessary. I think it's that Jesus wanted this untouchable man to feel the love of God. And there's Jesus inviting himself over to Zacchaeus' house, when Zacchaeus was probably the most hated man in town. And after Jesus heals the woman who had been bleeding all those years, he calls her daughter. The reason we see the "tax collectors and sinners" always wanting to be around Jesus wasn't because he judged them and pointed out their sins, but because He loved them.

So are you saying no more big church buildings or coffee bars or church events?
No, but I am saying that churches in America have never done that better than they have in the last 20 years, and yet there are experts who estimate that there are 8 million less people going to church in America today than 20 years ago. And there's not a single county in the continental United States where more people are going to church. Shock and awe has not proven effective. And so I think it's time to go back to the strategy I think Jesus authored, and that was so effective in the first century, and more lately in China - guerrilla love.

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