This book begins with an account of Dave Andrews' excommunication from the Evangelical mission group YWAM. This account in itself is a courageous undertaking. YWAM is a large mission group with a broad and popular constituency. But Mr. Andrews is not afraid to name them and in doing so he breaks with an Evangelical tradition of remaining silent as to the sins of the Evangelical community while being loudly vocal about the sins of those who are not Christians! Andrews does not write this story in order to point out the log in a mission group eye however. He writes this account of his excommunication to begin with a personal account of how injustice can be done in the name of Jesus Christ by even the most well intentioned Christians.

These injustices are done any time a Christian is more concerned with the number of people it can influence (power) then with an individual person. As Christianity becomes institutionalized in forms such as YWAM, it sees the collective, it sees the masses, and so as Jacques Ellul describes this process, it has no solutions or answers to such huge problems and huge numbers. So Christians seek political answers to these political problems. And in doing so the individual gets swallowed up in the Great Sea of the Masses, and is drowned. This is what happened to Dave Andrews when he was excommunicated from YWAM. Andrews is honest about his shortcomings and faults in the situation and humble enough to have waited 20 years to publish his account and only after personal attempts at reconciliation with members of YWAM who were involved.

Next the book moves to a brief account of a history of Christianity. This history is narrated as a history of tragedy: Christians changed the radical, nonviolent, anarchist gospel of Jesus Christ into an impersonal, violent tool of whatever government they happened to serve.

This short history is to short and does not always do justice to that history. For instance, Andrews speaks of Christian involvement in the Holocaust. One problem is his example of the Nazi's Julius and Vera Wolhauf, who spent their honeymoon killing Jews in Miedzyrzec Poland. But there is no evidence given that these two people were church going folk, or that they did this with any religious motivations of Christianity at all. His case could have been made much stronger had he given an account of a pastor, theologian or even a Christian lay-person who committed these atrocities. The case also would have been much stronger had Andrews been a less brief and tried to be a bit more detailed in his account. But Andrews is correct, the Nazi extermination of Jews and non-Jews during that time with the moral, physical and silent assent of Christians is yet another example of the justification of cruelty in the name of Christ.

I found this history to have given me a few leads to study on (who are the Paulicans or Bogomils? for example), but I think that Jacques Ellul's Subversion of Christianity, which Andrews quotes from several times, would be worthwhile for a more detailed and thorough examination of this history and the causes. But all in all, the brief account given by Andrews when taken in the whole of the book served its purpose. I'll get to that in a moment.

After this brief history, Dave Andrews writes briefly that these people who have done these atrocities were not exceptionally evil people, they are not exceptions to the rules of Christianity. He believes that these atrocities are intrinsic to the nature of the Christian religion. The "expansion of Christianity" in the form of YWAM or any of the institutional forms it has assumed over the millenniums will have just as disastrous effects as it always has caused and supported.

What Andrews goes on to try and do is to show that Christians have misunderstood who Jesus is and what he is about. We have misunderstood what Jesus wants us to do with our lives as a result. Jesus was not about instutionalizing a religion in which his followers get to forgive on their own terms and come out on top in the process.

Dave Andrews describes himself as "a bit of an activist." As such he does not seem to wrestle with this activism as Ellul and Vernard Eller have (and have caused me to do!) He simply assumes that "activism" is what Jesus calls his followers to do. At times in the book he explicitly addresses the activists not to lose hope, etc and it seems as if the word almost is used interchangeably with "Christi-Anarchy." John Howard Yoder made helpful distinctions of the different ways in which the church responds to the world, 1) the activist church 2) conversionist church and 3) the confessing church. I think this book would have been much stronger if he had defined more clearly this activism and taken into account Yoder's distinctions.

The activist church, which looks like many liberal protestant and conservative Evangelical churches, looks outward seeking to make the world a better world rather than a better church. The activist church joins movements already in existence because it sees God at work in all movements of social and political change.

The conversionist church, which also looks like Evangelicalism including YWAM, looks inward. It is the soul of the person that matters. The social structures of society cannot be changed because of the power of sin. Sinful people cannot embody the example of Jesus in their own lives. So what happens is that they end up underwriting whatever regime happens to be in power, because it can't be changed. They try to choose the lesser of the evils, but still do evil!

The confessing church rejects both of these models. It is not a middle ground that synthesizes the thesis (activist) and antithesis (conversionist) models. The confessing church model rejects the equation of being faithful with being effective (which means that both conversionist and activist church's set at least one principle above simply being the church.) The confessing church seeks to simply be an alternative community, to worship Jesus Christ at all cost. Dave Andrews could have used this distinction to show that his new vision seeks to convert people to these alternative "anarchist" "self-directed" "intentional communities" and to influence the world by being such an alternative community.

I think this is where Dave Andrews intended to go however. He describes his new vision of following Christ as a complete rejection of the Christianity as anti-Jesus. His communities hold "all things in common", seek to be and to help the poor, to endure the suffering that inevitably comes with such being, and to be inclusive and embracing of those who do not confess Jesus as their God. His communities do not seek to dominate each other or those outside of the community.

He uses various concrete examples to show what these alternative communities look like. One example is the Catholic Workers. He quotes Jim Dowling and Ann Rampa, two Catholic Workers as saying:

What a beautiful and wonderful example. Andrews uses this and a few other examples from Australia to show that it is possible to move beyond 'Christ as an idol,' "Someone we would like to be like, but know we will never be like," to Christ as model, "Someone we would like to be like and do our best to be sure we are like." (pp. 114) The Radical new vision Andrews names "Christi-Anarchy" and which Jacques Ellul simply calls "X' in The Subversion of Christianity is not something that is just inspiring. This book calls for a complete conversion to these Christian Anarchist communities so as to be salt in the earth and to actually effect change and not simply underwrite whatever "liberation" movements or regimes that happen to be in vogue.

This book is worth purchasing and reading. It is written in the tradition of Vernard Eller and Jacques Ellul. Andrews has his own style of writing, and works through concerns in his own way. For those of us who truly wish to use Christ as our model not as our idol, this book gives concrete examples of how we can do so. But the call is not an easy one to swallow; it is a bitter pill to cure the sicknesses we have. I am challenged by the examples to flesh out these things in my own life. Time will tell if I am merely a spectator, a "fan" of these Christian anarchists or if I can embody it myself.
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Andrew Baker currently works with the mentally disabled in New York City. He is a Mennonite and is active in his local congregation. He has a BA in theology from Wheaton College and is currently considering seminary studies.