JON TYSON’S SEED OF “BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE”

The book Beautiful Resistance: The Joy of Conviction in a Culture of Compromise has one person in the audience who needs it most – Pastor Jon Tyson.

This latest missive from New York City says, “Feel my pain.” The chapters are like strips of bandage putting the author Tyson back together. He writes that this treatment has worked for him and will work for you. The book itself is a work of beauty that has come out of a life filled with ashes.

No matter where he goes, the pastor finds hurt, despair, and desperation. He traveled to Poland in search for the location of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s school of resistance against the Nazis. The German Protestant’s underground seminary was dedicated to keeping the orthodox Christian faith alive in a small community. The fanatical police, the Gestapo, closed the school in 1935. Though Bonhoeffer was later strangled to death for his resistance to Hitler, he planted “a prophetic seed” that eventually found its way to Tyson’s heart, like it has for many other New Yorkers such as radio host Eric Metaxas.

So in hope, the pastor came looking for the place where the seed was cultivated, a seed that grows a “Beautiful Resistance.” Standing on the Oder River, he contemplated Bonhoeffer’s choices of faith.

There is a type of rose that is called “American Beauty.” The grandly beautiful flower opens up with a cusp of deep pink-to-red and an excellent perfume. Tyson, too, has a precious seed that he is trying to plant in New York City. But the soil in his own heart and his city inclines toward the stony.

Tyson laments that the churches have failed, are shattered with the scandals of celebrity pastors, abuses in the Catholic church, political hijackings, and indifference to humanitarian crises. “We are being thrown out. We are being trampled underfoot,” he writes, citing Matthew 5:13 as an interpretative key. The strangled feeling was well-captured by the Rolling Stones’ song “Salt of the Earth,” a lament over the fate of the working class: “think of the wavering millions who need leaders but get gamblers instead…they look so strange” with their “empty eyes.”

The pastor cries that he lives in a time of decline. In fact, throughout his life, he has felt the whiplash of church disappointment. He recalls, “I have had a complex relationship with the institution called the church.” He wonders if the church is a bride of Christ or a wench for a grasping world. He struggles with the promiscuity of the church in its relationships to the world systems, shudders at its stained reputation and oppression of women, and is aghast at times at Christian exclusivity.

“The scars on my soul came from the church,” Tyson writes. But then adds, “as does the joy that has come to define me.” He has stayed with the church while friends have walked away. In New York City, he observes, “These years have been filled with the most brutal and most beautiful moments of my life.” The book is like an explanation of his path of recovery from the wounds that he has received.

Yet, he still experiences from time to time a paralysis brought on by tension with his existence as a religious believer. Sometime after his German pilgrimage to Bonhoeffer sites, he sat on a bench to test how paralyzed by pain that he had become. As he moved each portion of his body, he marveled that God seemed to love every part of it. He thought that this is how God loves the church: scars and all. Tyson writes, “I set on a bench and consciously moved each muscle slowly, thanking God for my toes, my ankle, my shin, my knee…We suffer from a form of locked-in syndrome.” Some paralysis has happened to him and the church, yet God still inhabits. “Only a portion of our potential is being realized while Jesus blinks out his vision through a fraction of the church.” Somehow thrown up on the shore of New York City, the pastor recounts how he has stayed alive.

The study guide asks the reader to list all of the churches that he or she has attended. Then, it asks, how did they help you? What did they teach you? And, how have they shaped your vision for what it means to “be” the church? These questions can lead to a fascinating time of reflection on the church and its meaning for your life.

But reflecting Tyson’s own concerns, the guide also asks, how did they hurt you?

The book is trying to appeal to the people who have been hurt by the church. Tyson himself often talks about how he has been hurt. However, this question may not be too useful for some people. It brings up reliving old hurts and could leave one stuck there. At times, Tyson seems to be a little bit stuck there too, though his guide opens up a way out through celebration of what churches do well.

Perhaps the most helpful – and challenging, will be attempts to find something good in the churches that hurt one. Otherwise, one is just like a rat going in circles through the same experience. The Good Samaritan principle says look at how your enemy surpasses you in compassion or some other way. Doing this positive exercise seems likely to drain away some of the jaundice from one’s memories. It is not easy to forgive if you can’t find anything positive in the one who hurts. And maybe some doors are more wisely kept shut for the sake of those friends who are not ready to deal with that level of pain.

The long road to New York

When Tyson was a teenager in Australia, the country was in a period of momentous religious change. The 1960s had seen the great crisis of a decline of the mainline churches that has lasted up to this day. In 1977—the time in which Tyson was born, the older establishment churches were dwindling and collapsed into a protective union called the Uniting Churches of the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregations. The Anglican Church was shedding members like dead leaves in the fall. The number of Anglicans precipitously dropped by almost half over the coming years. A number of Australians were jumping on a rising wave of identifiers as non-religious.

There was a pivot toward a new furious style of religion coming out of the new evangelical churches in Australia, particularly the Pentecostal variety.

Pentecostal churches were growing in the suburbs. There, they adopted innovations to address cultural fissures and habits of suburbanites who shop at malls and mega-stores. This approach to church was also happening around the world. Thus, the Pentecostal megachurch movement took off with an orientation to mega-success and global aims. In 1974, Clark Taylor started in Brisbane the Christian Outreach Center which eventually seeded a denomination of over a thousand churches. Later, it changed its name to Citipointe. In Sydney, Hillsong started in 1983 providing pop music famous around the world. And also in Sydney, Phil Pringle established the prosperity gospel-orientated C3. Pringle has also promoted a return to the arts among Pentecostals. The growth of the Pentecostals was spectacular. In 1986, the census found that only 4% of their respondents claimed some “other Christian” identity than the well-known historical ones. But in the coming years, the “other Christians” doubled, tripled, and quadrupled their numbers.

In 1993, Jon Tyson was a restless, bored high schooler. What’s the point? he asked himself. Better to earn some blue-collar wages to fund beer, boarding, and women, he decided. Church, forget about it! The church people all seemed to be waiting to get to heaven before they could live their passions.

Although Tyson recalls his parents fondly, for part of his life he made them spiritually absent. As a teenager, Tyson felt that they were weirdly disconnected from the real world. His Dad made model cars, and his mother loved to garden. In their spare time, “my parents cast out demons.” Jesus was a myth that they believed at their relatively staid evangelical church. 

In the son’s recollection, it seems that the parents had just about lost hope of reaching their son through human intervention. They prayed and prayed for young Tyson.

Then, he met a woman who was insistent that Tyson needed to go to church in order to be with her. He thought, “Whatever.” The young boarder’s drifting along then slid right into the momentous wave of religious change occurring in Australia.

In his high school days, Tyson was a little repulsed by the Pentecostal scene. All of their emotion and Jesus. But he also was attracted. The churches were experiencing over-the-top supernatural experiences fed by international movements like the Toronto Blessing. From an airport warehouse in Canada, South African Rodney Browne presided over ecstatic services that often ended with uncontrollable joy. His audiences were taught that they were receiving the power and call to change the whole world with the joy of Jesus.

The idea that Tyson’s aimless life could be formed into a high powered, world-changing direction must have appealed to the high school dropout.

At an evangelistic meeting at a summer church camp, the teenager was shocked into awareness of purpose. He felt an “electricity through my body.” He awkwardly blurted out his belief in Jesus. The pivot toward spirituality also seemed to be a pivot toward a vocation. “I had this strange sense that sharing God’s truth was a part of my future.” When a youth leader came over to pray over Tyson, he mentioned that God had a great future in store for him. “This prayer opened a door of destiny that I stepped through..,” Tyson writes.

The pastor identifies this moment as an “honor intervention.” He was honored by God’s calling. He became not just another aimless youth but rocketed to the stars.

He saw himself in a great vision of heroic global change. Perhaps, he would be Braveheart, Spartacus, and Jesus all rolled into one! He was a natural leader and now he found a way that he could have the ambition to change the world. It beat learning rote lessons in school!

He developed a burning sense of asking questions like “What is the world?” and “How do you change it?” For answers, his eyes gravitated to the United States, long admired by Australians as the country that leads the world. Tyson was exposed to renowned preachers who were mainly leaders at Pentecostal megachurches in America. He was struck by their effectiveness, vision, and preaching honed with success with large audiences.

He developed a great passion to get to America, but how?

Right about that time, God opened an unexpected door. Tyson was a high school dropout, not a Rhodes scholar. What college would accept him? His parents’ church background once again helped him. Their denomination offered him a scholarship to go to one of their colleges, and it was in Toccoa Falls, Georgia.

Rural Georgia? But it was America, at least! In the back of his mind, the young Tyson was also dreaming of New York City. It was, after all, the stereotype of American culture in Australia: the Statue of Liberty, gritty graffiti and hip-hop, and Broadway. “It was the city of power, the city of influence,” the outlander gushed.  “How cool is that? The city of the Harlem Globetrotters.”

Fortunately, he left the Australian Pentecostal scene before a mighty wave of disputes and bad feelings washed over the churches. Some of the spiritual practices of modern Pentecostalism veered off into the ditch. However, some of his old mates, who remained in Australia, experienced the fighting and left the church out of disillusionment. Some Pentecostal movements like Hillsong steered around the controversies by channeling their ecstasies into song, a relatively safe and non-destructive pathway.

So, Tyson was grateful for the peaceful beauty of the campus in Toccoa Falls and met his wife there, but was soon searching for a more intellectual approach to theology. He moved to Trinity College in Tampa, Florida before ending up at Criswell College in Dallas, Texas. There, he entered into the heart of the conservative reform and megachurch movement of the Southern Baptists.

W. A. Criswell was one of the key leaders of the conservative reform movement in the Southern Baptist Convention. After a career of publicly defending racial segregation, he put aside his racism in order to promote his brand of conservative evangelicalism. He announced his shift of perspective in a famous sermon “Church of the Open Door.”  

From his pulpit at First Baptist Church, the pastor prepared the groundwork with hundreds of highly circulated sermons. In a sermon on Isaiah 4, he famously declared, “And I am a Calvinist.” Although the reformers were from a variety of theologies, Criswell prepared his young reformers with Calvinist convictions at the college which he established in the 1970s. They won the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention with their candidate Adrian Rogers in a showdown in Houston, Texas.

It can be puzzling to the outsider that Calvinism could have such an impact on young Christians, many whom like Tyson had only been Christians for a few years. The main reason seems to be that evangelicals and Pentecostals as a whole were desiring a more intellectual approach to belief and action. Calvin was the 16^th Century Protestant Reformer who spent the first part of his theological classic Institutes of Christian Religion on a finely wrought discussion of knowing and knowledge. In the late Twentieth Century, “reformed thought,” as it is commonly called, emphasized that all of life, including scholarship, the arts, and science, are highly valued by God. Reformed theology also cut against the grain of the extreme pragmatism of American culture and the theological movements which it inspired.

Tyson flourished in Dallas while he was learning the Reformed-tinged theology. The young Australian also met up personally with the big vehicle that American Christians had invented to change the world: the megachurch. The California megachurch pastor Rick Warren once said that it was Criswell who got him started” thinking big.” The young Australian learned to think bigger by serving in several megachurches in the South. But his dream was always to come to New York City. A catastrophe drew him in.

As the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, started U.S. and allied soldiers cartwheeling around the world, it sent Christians scrambling toward New York City. Sometimes, they came under the belief that there were fewer churches in the city than there were in Afghanistan. Franklin Graham brought his relief efforts here, declaring, “We knew that there were no churches in the city so we needed to come to help.”

In fact, New York City was in the midst of an unnoticed growth of churches, but the process in Manhattan was still in its early phases. Further, there were already some growing churches that were connected up to national church networks. For example, Brooklyn Tabernacle on the Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn had grown from 20 members huddled together in a collapsing building with little idea about what to do, and praying for revival in the 1970s to a megachurch by 2001. The church was well known for laying a foundation of prayer to make way for the church recovery.

Unknown to Tyson, Brooklyn Tabernacle had actually started its new beginning with the encouragement of another Australian (or maybe New Zealander) pastor who impromptu preached to a small group at a prayer meeting in the early 1970s. Although no one can recall the name of the pastor, his talk made quite an impression. The unknown pastor observed, “You can tell how popular a church is by who comes on Sunday morning … You can tell how popular Jesus is by who comes to the prayer meeting.” Brooklyn’s pastor Cymbala remembers that the meeting of the 15-18 people as making a pivotal impression that led to intense prayer that was followed by Brooklyn Tabernacle’s dramatic success.

In 2002, another Australian came to Brooklyn Tabernacle with a group from Nashville, Tennessee to learn how to pray through the disaster. Tyson’s group couldn’t help but notice that there were more Christians than they had thought. Brooklyn Tabernacle was already famous for its size, choir, and impact, but the visitors imagined that the Tabernacle was sort of like an Ark of Noah in a dark and stormy sea. Yet, they noticed that there were hundreds of newly minted churches. It was a surprise.  Tyson returned back home with a growing conviction that maybe he could come back to found a church.

By 2005, Tyson came with a team to plant Origins Church in Manhattan. The name was somewhat mysterious, implying a venture into the beginnings of the universe. The whole culture of the new church plant reflected Tyson’s wanderlust to find new avenues to explore. He decided to revert back to his surfer days of beach campouts and wild excitement. 

He shucked off his suburban pretensions, losing his tucked-in polishers [shoes], khaki pants, topcoat, and portions of his hair. He had a chin pierced with a spike, gauged earrings — the big ones, and a Mohawk.

The church opened its doors in the Spring 2006 in a bar on 106^th Street and West End Avenue. Although it had modest success, only a small crowd dug the bar, Mohawk, tattoo, earring scene. Many people came for the novelty but didn’t come back. Tyson faced rejection, failure, and shame before his sponsors. He had to wonder about his conviction that God had sent him to New York City. In a crisis, he turned up at the door of a friend at Redeemer Presbyterian’s church planting center. His colleague looked askance at Tyson’s style of church, not because of uneasiness with the Mohawk, but because it seemed so passe to trends in Manhattan.

With his friend’s help, Tyson realized that he was actually like a foreigner who didn’t really understand contemporary New York City. He was living with images in his head. His image of the city was way off.

He thought punk rock, CGBG, and warriors in the street. Despite Tyson’s belief that his edgy church and Mohawk warrior send-up would leave other churches in the dust, the city had already left the punk era for the modern jazz era. The Twenty-first Century city was more like a city of professionals, aspiring hedge fund techies, internet dweebs, and designers who wanted to make a living. Even artists and musicians were exploring more subdued sunny styles like Norah Jones’ album “Feels like home” produced in 2004. He was not the guy who fit in but was seen as a relic stepping out of the 1979 film on the Bronx called “The Warriors.”

Tyson proceeded to change course. He changed the name of his church to Trinity Grace. The theme was stability, classical Protestant tradition. An almost a 180-degree turn. Tyson wrote, “history trumped ministry,” meaning a romanticized past prevented engaging with the real present.

“Basically, we went through a whole personal crisis about contextualization and all that,” Tyson recalls. People started sticking around at his church.

Trinity Grace began growing fast and started over a dozen neighborhood churches. However, the administration of the churches proved to be unwieldy, and the network spun off the churches as independent and self-governing. After a pause, Tyson founded the now fast-growing Church of the City in Midtown Manhattan. The church offices and a chapel are in Hell’s Kitchen. Along the way, Tyson has learned some lessons on how the power and glory of New York City can creep into one’s heart and push out God.

The son has come to appreciate his father’s observation that troubles can seep deeply into one’s heart. Although Tyson doesn’t write about casting out demons, he follows Reformed pastor Tim Keller’s counsel of uprooting personal and cultural idols from his heart. “Right worship,” Tyson says, “has the power to put our lives back on course, and, in the process, expose the misplaced priorities of a culture gone rotten.”

So through every twist and turn, Tyson keeps coming back to the church. Rather, he comes back to the altar, and not just any altar to any god but to the God of the Bible. In those moments of encountering God, he finds beauty and rest, a loveliness in an ordered life. Disorder shucks away at the still small point where the knees touch the floor.

As an example of his own idolatry, the pastor recounts an uncomfortable experience with The New York Times. He so much wanted to be seen as credible to the city, so he agreed to cooperate with a reporter in the production of an article. Tyson ended up disappointed, even struck down. He recalls that the article “treated us as sophomoric outsiders, naïve well-wishers who hadn’t really come to terms with what we were doing or what the city wanted.” The feedback to Tyson was “harsh.”

“This caused an interior crisis the like of which I had never experienced before—a crisis of approval. How would we reach people if we were not taken seriously? What were we doing wrong that made the city dismiss us so easily.” Tyson’s reaction was seriously misguided at first. He rushed to conform to what he thought the Times would want.

“Over the next few months,” he writes, “the idol of approval formed in my heart…Is this offensive to New Yorkers?” He became “city-focused,” not “Jesus-formed.”

Everything that he did and felt was strangled by the disapproval from the Times and his imagination about the feelings of its readers within his circle of acquaintances.  “One Sunday, during a worship service, I sat at the back of the room,” Tyson recalls. It seems like he was re-reading the Times in his mind as he watched. “I was angry and frustrated. The service felt too kitschy, too Southern, too out of place in a neighborhood like this…” The pastor began to weep. He felt that God was being strangled out of his life.

The theologian James K.A. Smith wrote that worship tells the powers that you can’t be bought. But what if your worship style was bought and paid for by the approval of The New York Times?

Tyson was exhausted, burnt like toast, and regrouped.

In chapter 3 of Beautiful Resistance, the author talks about the need for rest without distraction to recuperate from cultural attractions. Get off your schedule, ditch your engines of efficiency, and techniques of public relations, Tyson indicates. In rest, he advises, you will come upon the unbearable weight of your own individual conscience. You will be thrown down before God.

No longer can you think of yourself as the center of action. Tyson identifies with the disciple who was maligned as “the son of thunder.” John, who became an apostle, craved to be at the center of the action. As a dear friend of Jesus, he was there for all the miracle-making. He was energized by it all to be a driven evangelist. However, Jesus’ foretelling of his death wasn’t translated into John’s plan of action. In his whirlwind of ministry, John became numb to the actuality of God’s work through failure. His heart craved action and success; Jon’s heart craved this too.

The pastor now says that his generation of church leaders is held in demonic bondage. He and his church people have responded to the dangers of rejection by New Yorkers by unleashing a whirlwind of conjectures, organizing, and direct actions. So, “we have turned to disputes and theories. We have formed coalitions and alliances and networks. Meanwhile, the decline accelerates.” Disordered, confused, and numb, Tyson and his fellow Christians have frittered away their existence by latching onto inessential things.

For Tyson, such compensations seem to include the New York infatuation for the perfect dish to eat and other fine consumables like cigars. The good-eating chokes us, the pastor thinks, by distracting us from our real emptiness in the heart devoid of an enriching presence of God’s Spirit.

The recommended medicine for our pitiful existence is fasting. In a sort of cultural cold-turkey, Tyson believes that fasting undermines the hold that cultural idols have on our hearts. Great culture, consumed as an escape, can become the demonic seizure of one’s heart. Is it any wonder, Tyson writes, that the Devil was threatened by Jesus’ fasting and came out to tempt him back into the way of the world? The crafty evil-doer thought that he was actually touching Jesus just at the point where his will would be weakened by hunger and even more by a desire to feast. In fact, fasting made the heart iron-clad for God.

Tyson recounts how a fast in desperation preceded his conversion. As a teenager, Tyson was tormented by restlessness, rage, and rebellion. He had shucked his parents’ faith as a quaint relic with prison-like effects on teenage life. The son proceeded to cause plenty of heartburn by demonstrating his independence. His father’s preaching fell on stony ground.

Desperate perhaps, Tyson’s father set out to fast and cry until his son came back to faith. And in six months—after what must have been buckets of tears, the son entered a church and confesses Jesus at a youth camp. This experience has become a touchstone for Tyson getting out of trouble in New York City.

Fasting takes him out of the city busy-ness and cuts the ties woven by the need for approval of The New York Times.

In his book, we continually find Tyson coming to moments of aloneness and contemplation that calms his soul and opens a path for his feet. Whether it is observing Bonhoeffer’s place of shelter across the Oder River, a taking-in the streets from a park bench, or the city from the roof of his home, Tyson is always watching and imagining how he can live with God in this world. He is like the prophet Habakkuk, who in memorable words told God, “I will sit upon my watchtower to see what you have to say to me.”

One time, he combined his watching places into one high observation post over New York City. Going up to his roof in Hell’s Kitchen, he stared out at the city. He recalled his identification with Boenhoffer on the Oder River. The German pastor considered staying safe in New York City but felt duty-bound to return to Germany to help his people.

Tyson writes, “I must have been there for some time, staring out as I do.” He settled back into a determination to resist the evils of the city as he painted “the outline of the city with my hand.” He concludes for the reader, “That at times things are hard and my faith falters but I sense the hunger to press on.” He is still here while many have left.

A pastor must have a fear that after his work in the establishment of a church that it will someday just empty out and disappear. Tyson has a well-appreciated ability to gather people around him. But keeping them around in this city is hard. Schools are graduated from and careers change, so young people move in and out of New York City. A pastor in Manhattan is always dealing with strangers, only half-known congregants who leave just at the moment you think you really know who they are.

Today in the midst of a pandemic, some people fear that it is not just the churches that will empty out but the whole city. Tyson’s chapter on “Hospitality must resist fear” provides one antidote to the fears of abandonment.

Welcoming others even temporarily into one’s life dispels isolation and estrangement. The churn of the city’s population may actually be an opportunity to get to know other people with whom one has diffracted out of one’s vision because of some uneasiness. The church in the city has people from all walks of life and cultures entering for respite. Hospitality is like a nurse who comforts and roots out fear between strangers and friends. The incense of fellowship covers over the unpleasant regard for some “others.” And even more than that.

Jesus did not call people to tolerate one another. We don’t merely put a sweet-smelling clothe over our nose to be able to pass the time with our smelly (to us) neighbors. Jesus calls for something more: loving one another; and loving one’s enemies. How does one do that?

For one, you can honor someone for the good qualities, actions, ideas, or products that they bring to life. Jesus celebrated the Samaritan who helped a crime victim as an example. In those times, Samaritans were not well-liked by their neighbors. The Jews disliked the Samaritans for their apostasy from Judaism, alleged polytheism, intermarriage with people from other religions, and their occasional killing of Jews who passed through their territory. Yet, Jesus told his fellow Jews, do you want to know about love? Look at how a Samaritan loved a crime victim. Tyson suggests, “Maybe, we have to learn to identify and celebrate the good and learn to resist a culture of cynicism.”

From Tyson’s teaching, we can add a little wrinkle to the parable. The follower of Jesus should be able to see into the future the exemplary life that others could live if set upon the right path. One should not fail “to see the possibility and destiny that others carry…, ” he writes. The future is not set by rejection but by empathetic love.

All religious leaders now have to deal with the brutality and contempt that overflows from our politics, soaring social disorder, and racial divisions. Tyson proposes that honoring “others” resists our inclinations to mutual contempt. Quoting James Baldwin, the pastor writes, “The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other peoples’ pain.” On the contrary, the recognition and esteem of the value of someone else create cultural norms that are more like those of heaven – forgiving, patient, and kind.  

Citing Paul’s multicultural ministry, Tyson points to the apostle’s letter that he wrote to the Romans (chapter 2, verses 4-5): “Do you show contempt for the riches of this kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?” And that is the point: the overflowing love of God persuades people more than the hatred of God. Contempt for this “soft approach” to “the other” will quench the Spirit’s gifts to the believer. Contempt goes against the “honor system” that is the Kingdom of God.

Does this mean wholesale acceptance of “the other” and all his or her ideas and acts? Some may feel that Tyson ends up over-emphasizing a joyful God at the expense of a God angry against injustice and other evils. No, Tyson says. We need to titrate out only what is good in “the other.” This means that a celebration of the good works is more effective in draining out contempt and cynicism from our hearts.

For ambitious New Yorkers, the reversals on the way to success can throw shade on one’s life. How does one carry on? Tyson says plant his seed of Beautiful Resistance, and you will see flowers growing under a heavenly light at the end of the tunnel.

Looking out over the Hudson River to Manhattan, we can contemplate the possibility that Tyson has planted a beautiful seed of resistance against the cruelties of our time. We can wonder how he would address some of our acute problems. Lately, Tyson has been observing that though he immigrated from Australia, the legitimacy of his presence is never questioned. He then guiltily notices that African Americans have lived here for generations but encounter more rejections and snide remarks. In the last few months, Tyson seems to be trying to come to some sort of “Wokeness.” Will this come as another discombobulation of Tyson’s heart into a spiritual crisis? Maybe, that will be the subject of his next book. Let us contemplate the possibility. In the meantime, cultivate your soil, plant the seed of Beautiful Resistance, and see what God will bring to you through this.

Get Jon Tyson’s book Beautiful Resistance: The Joy of Conviction in a Culture of Compromise

Go to Tyson’s Church of the City New York