After years of hard living, Tullian Tchividjian had come to the end of himself. He got up and went down the street to church. What he found there shocked him–a community of Christians who joyfully and radically lived out the Gospel in ways he’d never seen before. Christ followers are called to embrace a standard that’s “out of this world,” because the only way to make a difference in the world is by being different. Listen as Susie talks with Tullian about his book, Unfashionable. They examine what Gospel-infused priorities would look like in relationships, community, work, finances and culture.
For Tullian, his journey to faith was a rocky one. When he finally came to the end of himself, he was drawn to Jesus through a church that he would deem “uncool” by the standards of the world.
“I can remember waking up one morning after a night of club-hopping in South Beach, waking up one morning having fallen asleep in the clothes that I wore out the night before.
Woke up feeling remarkably empty, realizing it was Sunday morning, realizing that I still had time to get to church… drove to church, made my way up into the balcony, and was so refreshed to enter into a church that was remarkably different from the night clubs I had been in the night before.”
Tullian says he was drawn to the church because it was “radically uncool” according to culture.
“I’ve drowned in a sea of cultural coolness, I need something different, something out of this world. [I] was so grateful that I walked into a church where the people of God were honoring God as God, the transcendent God had drawn near… they just weren’t trying to be fashionable. They weren’t trying to be cool. That’s what captured my heart, was the difference of it all… God used the unfashionable-ness of the church that I walked into to save me, to rescue me and to help me see just how many counterfeit gods I had subscribed to.”
Tullian acknowledges that we live in a tension of being in the world and winning people to Christ while being ‘set apart’ from them in our heart attitudes and motivation. As long as our eyes and focus are on Jesus and how He calls us to live, with humility and brokenness, we can interact with unbelievers and share our faith with them in a way that marks us as distinct without marking us as distant.
Key Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 10:18
Theme Song: Live Like That by Sidewalk Prophets
This program originally aired on August 13, 2012.
