Unarmed Empire

Shunned. Condemned. Controlled. Describing church, believers and nonbelievers deploy stinging terms to define an imperial, culturally privileged, and powerful American force. Church has become synonymous with shame, exclusion, and hostility. This is not the church of Jesus. American Christians are victims of a deliberate and shortsighted scheme designed to identify and defeat religious, cultural, and sexual Others. From the language of ""makers and takers,"" to ""if you're not for us, you're against us,"" to the continual suggestion that we are soldiers in a constant series of wars--the war on women, the war on the family, the war on Christians, the war on Christmas, the war on terror, and much more--Christians are near the heart of enmity. The New Testament, however, seeks to create an alternative community--a community devoid of fear, wherein God's love and acceptance are mediated to all people through the grace of Jesus. In Unarmed Empire, Sean Palmer reclaims the New Testament's vision of the church as an alternative community of welcome, harmony, and peace. Unarmed Empire is for everyone who's been misled about church. It's for everyone who feels blacklisted by believers, everyone who has been hurt. It's for everyone longing for a purer experience of church. ""Sean Palmer has made a beautiful discovery. He discovered a pearl of great price buried in the back yard of Christianity. He wants to share that treasure with you through his new book, Unarmed Empire. If you share in this discovery, you'll discover why he is so passionate about it. You'll want to share it too."" --Brian D. McLaren, author of The Great Spiritual Migration ""Sean Palmer is a skilled storyteller, a deep thinker, an insightful writer, and a faithful follower of Jesus. In Unarmed Empire, Palmer sagely assesses the church--both as it was intended to be, and as it is. While acknowledging the church's faults, flaws, and failures, Palmer nevertheless casts a hopeful vision of the church as it can be, reminding us that no matter how lost we are, we can always find our way Home."" --Sarah Thebarge, author of The Invisible Girls and WELL: Healing Our Beautiful, Broken World from a Hospital in West Africa ""Brilliantly weaving together story, memoir, cultural criticism, biblical exegesis, and theological commentary, Sean Palmer has written the best book about the church I have ever read. By turns pastoral and prophetic, Unarmed Empire is a manifesto for the church, an urgent plea to become God's 'beloved community.'"" --Richard Beck, author, blogger, professor of psychology, Abilene Christian University ""This book is frustrating. It's frustrating because it chafes against our fallen nature's quest for power. It's frustrating because it confounds conventional wisdom's preservation of status quo. Mostly, it's frustrating because it's so biblical and Christ-centered that there's no way for a follower of Jesus to dismiss it. Caveat Lector: Let the Reader Beware! This will not be easy to absorb, but it is necessary if we ever hope to become the beloved community imagined in Scripture."" --John Alan Turner, Church Consultant, Author of Crazy Stories; Sane God ""We modern evangelicals have long been proponents of 'defending the faith, ' but rarely have we stopped to ask 'Defending it from what or (maybe more appropriately) whom?' and when the faith has been adequately defended, 'Who was defeated in the process?' Sean invites us into a better story, an unapologetically biblical story that has been there all along. It's not about acquiescing to culture, it's about the way of Christ, which is laying down our lives for those around us."" --Shane Blackshear, Writer and host of the podcasts Seminary Dropout and OnRamp Sean Palmer is a thoughtful, provocative writer, speaker, and podcaster who has been named by Christian Standard magazine as one of its ""40 Under 40"" leaders. Sean is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston, a