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Into the Fray

Into the Fray

Last updated on: January 4, 2021 at 8:22 pm by Frank Viola

Into the Fray 2021-01-04T20:22:34-04:00 Frank Viola

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Matt Mikalatos has written a new book called Into the Fray: How Jesus’s Followers Turn the World Upside Down.

I caught up with Matt to discuss his new book.

Enjoy!

Instead of asking, “what is your book about,” I’m going to ask the question that’s behind that question. And that unspoken question is, “how are readers going to benefit from reading your book?”

Matt Mikalatos: It’s tempting to read the Bible as a theological guidebook rather than a communication from God. We tend to engage with our minds, leaving our emotions at the door so we can see “what it really says.” Certainly this can be a legitimate way to engage essays and arguments, but the narrative parts of the Bible are meant to be experienced and felt. They are stories. “Into the Fray” will hopefully allow readers to engage with the book of Acts as a story… to experience the wonder, insights and even entertainment that story was meant to evoke in the original readers, and to let that story be transformative rather than prescriptive.

What does the title, Into the Fray, mean exactly?

Matt Mikalatos: Way back in 2006 my wife Krista and I were in Mexico City during (Mexican) Independence Day. The road outside our hotel was blocked off, and the President came down to the square and gave a speech. Tanks rolled by, with coils of bullets hanging from the machine guns. People sold hot, fresh chalupas in the colors of the Mexican flag on the street.

All the tourist attractions were closed, but on the news we saw that there was a big riot going on down at the Zocalo. It’s hard to explain exactly why, but something about that riot was magnetic. So we got on the subway and made our way to the riot, listening to the people chant the name of the man who had supposedly had the election stolen from him. I got my picture taken with an eagle perched on my shoulder. We ate some churros. We watched with some fascination as a shaman from a mountain tribe danced and told fortunes. We dodged the column of police when they showed up. It was a wonderful, enjoyable, thrilling, frightening, life-giving day.

I originally wanted to call the book “Take Me to the Riots.” In many ways, the book of Acts is the story of the Holy Spirit pushing the early church to get out of their hotel rooms and into the wider world around them. Conflict came immediately, not because of some counter-cultural agenda or culture war, but because the message of Jesus was transforming people everywhere they went – sometimes the “wrong” people – and the conflict came more often from within the religious community rather than from the outside.

So the idea of the current title, “Into the Fray” is to say, this is about the followers of Jesus entering into the story of the people around them and stop trying to protect themselves, their communities and their theologies. “Into the Fray” is a reminder that we’re called to never be satisfied inside any four walls, but rather to get out into the real world to tell others the story of Jesus.

Can you describe what this book does specifically? It doesn’t really rehearse what’s in the book of Acts, for example.

Matt Mikalatos: To help modern day readers experience the emotional weight of the book of Acts, each chapter takes a story and retells it as if it happened in the modern day. So, for instance, we have Felipe chasing down a limousine on a deserted highway to talk with an effeminate government official from Africa, and Esteban beaten to death with bricks in the middle of a debate. We have Paul snuck out of the city in the trunk of a Ford Focus under a pile of grocery bags, or sharing Christ with a crowd of Hindus by quoting from the Bhagavad Gita.

Basically, “Into the Fray” reimagines key portions of the book of Acts and places them in our own context, allowing us to sidestep for a moment all the cultural and historical baggage so we can get to the heart of the story. Between the stories I share some thoughts about their significance for the church today, and how the central character of the book, the Holy Spirit, uses these stories to move us forward and outward.

I tried not to shy away from the hard questions (Ananias and Sapphira are in here, for instance), but rather to embrace them and ask, “What was important about this story that caused it to be included?” I’m told the Greek word for entertainment means “to inform with delight.” That’s what this book attempts to do: to entertain the reader with the story of Acts in the most provocative, interesting and life-changing way possible.

Tell us a bit about the experiences that shaped the insights in the book.

Matt Mikalatos: My whole life, I’ve heard God clearest through stories. When I was a kid it was Narnia, Middle Earth, T.H. White and comic books. As an adult it’s Frederick Buechner’s novels, Flannery O’Connor, Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, Steinbeck, Carter Beats the Devil and a hundred others. I’ve studied stories my whole life, torn them apart and put them back together, retold them, shaped them, embraced them. I was a writing major in college. Evangelicals have recently become enamored with story. We’ve largely focused on one school of story theory: Robert McKee’s Story curriculum.

What’s interesting about McKee (translated through Don Miller and any other number of influential Christian essayists) is that his story theory is largely from the point of view of a critic. He’s not a storyteller, he’s an audience member telling the storyteller how to be better. Which is why we like it, I think: it’s still an intellectual exercise.

It still feels like exegesis and good theology. But story is emotional, and messy, and doesn’t give easy answers. So one thing that has shaped me is a love for story itself and a desire to see Acts (or the Gospels, or Jonah, or Genesis) as a story first and a theological handbook second (or maybe third or fourth). I think there is enough power in the story that it doesn’t always need to be explained or dissected so long as it has been experienced.

Second, I would say this. I’ve been on staff with a Christian non-profit for over fifteen years. I’ve spent a lot of time with both believers and non-believers (especially college students) and I’ve been to many, many churches all over the world. I’ve been an elder at my church. Something that consistently amazes me is how complicated we make evangelism.

We have seminars and studies and encyclopedic tomes defending the resurrection, but we rarely talk about the good news the way it’s shown in the book of Acts: this viral story that is transforming everyone who hears it. There’s beauty to that, the idea that the book shouldn’t be called “The Acts of the Apostles” but rather something like “The Holy Spirit Tells a Story.” Everyone knows how to tell their own story, and in many ways that is what the good news is for those who follow Jesus.

People love quoting pithy and thoughtful phrases and sentences of books they’re reading on their Facebook walls and Twitter feeds. Why don’t you give us 3 to 5 of those phrases or sentences from your book.

Matt Mikalatos: Great! Here are a few that are short enough for Twitter or Facebook (I’m @mattmikalatos on Twitter). It’s not possible to include the story bits in such a short form, but here are a few thoughts:

Those who speak of being “gospel-centered” have marked out a bull’s eye that is not the center. Christ himself is the center.
When majority culture in the church neglected the minority the apostles gave authority to minority members of the church.
Those who follow the rules instead of following Jesus eventually wander away from the faith.
God surprises the people of faith by constantly widening the circle of who is “in.”

And for the people who love the longer updates on Facebook (I’m at facebook.com/mikalatosbooks):

We’ve become so adept at telling people what they should believe and how they should act and placing that all in brightly colored package that we call “Christianity” or “gospel” or “church” that we’ve missed the fact that there are people in the world who don’t realize the news about Jesus is good.

Give us two or three insights from the book that would be helpful to Christians.

Matt Mikalatos: We spend a decent amount of time drawing lines and deciding who is “in” and who is “out” theologically. The book of Acts, in many ways, is the story of the Holy Spirit coming to the church over and over and erasing those lines and saying, “The circle you are drawing is too small.” In fact, the Holy Spirit demands his followers go out into the deserts and the byways and the distant pagan cities and bring all those outsiders and outcasts and sinners into the family. The watchmen who guard the entryways are the Pharisees.

Also, there’s a lot of controversy right now about multi-ethnic and multicultural churches, and whether they are of value, sustainable, or even if they are possible. The book of Acts makes it clear that there was only one person who thought a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural church was valuable enough to fight for it. That one person was the Holy Spirit. It took him decades to convince the church, and to be honest, we are still learning the same lessons two thousand years later. We’re still sorting out what is cultural vs. what is “Christian” in our churches, and we’re forcing the Gentiles to get circumcised.

Third, I’d say we’re afraid to contextualize the good news to our audiences. We’re worried that we’ll change the words a little and stray from the meaning. Oh, we say we’ll “become all things to all people” so that by all means some may believe, but in practice we’re “evangelicals to all people so that some people might learn the religious jargon and come to Jesus.”

Paul quoted from poems about Zeus and told the people there was a seed of theological truth in them. Why are we afraid to do the same with pop culture and the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita? Is it possible we could start with Shiva saying “all beings are in me” as well as Paul could start with “in Zeus we live and move and have our being” and have just as compelling, powerful and persuasive gospel presentations as Paul did?

What do you hope readers will walk away with after they finish your book?

Matt Mikalatos: I hope they’d walk away knowing how to tell a story instead of start an argument. I hope they’d be both inspired to talk more about Jesus and less afraid to do so. I hope they’d have new eyes for the outsiders, and a new love and compassion for those who are far off. And I hope they will experience a fresh awareness of how beautiful the good news really is.

What else would you like readers to know about your book?

Matt Mikalatos: Everything on earth has a temperature at which it bursts into flames. Wood, for example, combusts at 572 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat. Oxygen. Fuel. Put those three things together and you have the makings of a fire that will sweep through forests and grasslands and cities.

Imagine a forest. You’re sitting in the woods, lush and green. There are small animals moving about in the underbrush and green-tinted sunlight filtering through the trees. Somewhere an old log catches fire somehow. Maybe it’s the sunlight, or someone has thrown a match. There’s a sound of air being sucked into it, a whoosh, and the whole forest hits the flash point. The flame moves as fast and as powerful as wind, lighting the bushes, the trees, the fallen pinecones and needles. Everything is on fire simultaneously. The air moves, hot and fast, like a wind, and you are caught in the middle of it, scalding hot air, flames, fuel. And it’s spreading.

It was like that. One moment everyone was huddled in an upper room. The next, boom! An explosion. Flames burst into the room, and a sound like wind, and all of them began to tell their stories.

The Holy Spirit was the flame and the oxygen, and they were the fuel. The fire burned and spread and consumed every heart it touched.

That’s where this book starts, two thousand years ago. We can go there again. We can be part of it. Co-workers with the Holy Spirit as he makes way for a new and expanding kingdom. Let’s get caught up in his good story.

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