From Ched Myers, posted to social media last week in eager anticipation for the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship in Bangor, PA over this so-called “Memorial Day Weekend.”

I want to offer the edited and abbreviated version below of a “rant” I gave at the 2015 BKI Festival for Radical Discipleship here in Oak View, as a paean to this work and to the vision of radical discipleship that animates our mission at BCM, which will be celebrated this weekend at the Second Festival at Kirkridge Retreat Center. May this tradition carry on!

What is Radical Discipleship?

The etymology of the term radical (from the Latin radix, “root”) is the best reason not to concede it to nostalgia. To get to the root of anything we must be radical. No wonder the word has been demonized by the elite and co-opted by marketing hucksters, and that no one in conventional politics dares use the word favorably–much less track any problem to its root. It is also curious and revealing that the notion of discipleship is so marginal in our churches. Curious, because discipleship is unarguably the central theme of the gospels. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between seminary, sanctuary and streets has become in North America.

The prevailing expressions of faith among Protestant churches—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusional economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the “road rarely taken” here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that “cheap grace is grace without discipleship.” Radical Discipleship thus calls us to a double commitment: to reveal the roots of personal and political pathologies that continue to shape our imperial society, and to recover the roots of our biblical tradition: the messianic movement of rebellion and restoration, of repentance and renewal, and of a “Way out of no way” that has been going on since the dawn of resistance to the dusk of empire…

Read the entire post here.