Tullian Tchividjian: Unfashionable

Time for a friendly plug for my buddy Tullian Tchividjian's book Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different. The book was just released. Check out a few of these rave reviews:

D. A. Carson: "It is not easy to stand athwart the tides of the culture and challenge them without sounding either terribly prissy or hopelessly out of date. How can a thoughtful Christian be genuinely contemporary while never succumbing to the merely faddish and temporary? The challenges are enormous - but they are also tied to the most elementary tenets of Christian faithfulness. Tullian Tchividjian is a helpful and engaging guide through these troubled waters."

J. I. Packer: "Plainly, powerfully, and pastorally, Unfashionable gives a birds-eye view of the real Christian life - Christ-centered, church-committed, kingdom-contoured, future-focused, and counter-cultural all the way. It makes for a truly nutritious read."

Kevin DeYoung: "As Christians continue to chase relevance like a dog chasing its own tail, the world around us is quietly looking for something more--something deeper, something less self-aware, something unfashionable. With clear, crisp writing, Unfashionable challenges us to stop imitating the world and start working to renew her. Tullian makes it once again 'cool' to be uncool."

Here's one example of a passage from the book that I appreciated:

"When Christians try to eliminate the counter-cultural, unfashionable features of the biblical message because those features are unpopular in the wider culture--for example, when we reduce sin to a lack of self-esteem, deny the exclusivity of Christ, or downplay the reality of knowable absolute truth--we've moved from contextualization to compromise. When we accommodate our culture by jettisoning key themes of the gospel, such as suffering, humility, persecution, service, and self-sacrifice, we actually do our world more harm than good. For love's sake, compromise is to be avoided at all costs."

Buy the book.