There is a question hiding inside the title of Dr. T. Scott Daniels’s book Embracing Exile: Living Faithfully as God’s Unique People in the World. What does Christian faithfulness look like when the culture around us no longer feels like home?
Published in 2017, Embracing Exile uses the biblical experience of Israel in Babylon as a way of thinking about Christians who find themselves living in a culture whose assumptions and practices may not fit their faith. Daniels is not saying that every Christian experiencing cultural change is literally an exile. Biblical exile involved displacement, loss, judgment and suffering. The modern use of the word is an analogy.
That clarification matters because the word exile can easily push us toward the wrong conclusion. It can sound like Christians should retreat from society. But that is not where the biblical story takes us.
Exile Does Not Mean Disappearing
Consider Daniel. He was taken into Babylon, trained within its court and given responsibilities inside a foreign political system. Yet Daniel did not surrender his allegiance to God. Daniel 1 and Daniel 6 show him participating in the life around him while refusing to cross certain boundaries when obedience to God was at stake.
Jeremiah gives the same tension another shape. When Israel’s exiles were living in Babylon, they were told to build houses, plant gardens, marry, raise families, seek the welfare of the city and pray for it (Jeremiah 29:4-14).
That is not withdrawal.
Peter later calls Christians “foreigners and exiles” in 1 Peter 2:11, but he immediately connects that identity with honorable conduct among the surrounding people. The Christian is different, but that difference is supposed to be visible in the way the Christian lives among others.
Jesus says something similar in John 17. His disciples are not of the world, yet Jesus does not pray for them to be taken out of the world. Instead, he asks the Father to protect them and then says, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”
So I cannot read exile as an excuse for disappearing. Scripture gives us a different picture: belonging completely to God while remaining present among people who do not necessarily share our convictions.
The Question Behind Cultural Influence
This is where Daniels’s book challenged the way I think about the Church.
It is easy to measure Christian strength by visibility, recognition and cultural influence. When those things weaken, Christians can begin asking how to recover them. But that may not be the first question we should ask.
Perhaps the deeper question is whether we know who we are without them.
The Church of the Nazarene gives me an interesting context for thinking about this. It now serves in 165 world areas, which means there is no single Nazarene experience of culture. Christians in one place may enjoy considerable public respect while Christians elsewhere live with very different pressures. Cultural influence cannot be the foundation of Christian identity when the Church itself exists across such different settings.
The denomination officially describes its identity through Christian, holiness and missional commitments. That is different from defining the Church by its cultural position. Embracing Exile is not an official Nazarene doctrinal document, either. Daniels published the book in 2017, six years before he was elected the denomination’s 44th general superintendent in 2023. I therefore find the book more useful when I read it for its argument rather than simply because of the author’s later office.
But I Also Keep a Caution in Mind
The exile metaphor has limits.
A Christian who feels that society has become less sympathetic to Christianity should not automatically describe that experience as persecution or compare it with the suffering of people who have actually been displaced or marginalized. Israel’s exile was not merely a feeling of cultural discomfort.
There is another caution in 1 John 2:15-17. When John warns Christians not to love the world, he is speaking about desires and pride that oppose God’s will. He is not giving Christians permission to despise everyone outside the Church.
That matters because Christian exile without Christian love can quickly become Christian resentment.
The Question I Keep Asking
After reading Embracing Exile, I keep returning to one question: If Christianity no longer feels culturally central, what kind of people will we become?
Will we become anxious people trying to recover a position we once had? Will we become resentful toward a culture that no longer reflects our convictions? Or will we become more deeply rooted in the character of Christ, free to serve our neighbors without needing their approval to know who we are?
Hebrews 13:14 reminds Christians that we have no lasting city here, but seek the city that is to come. That does not release us from responsibility toward the places where we live. Jeremiah tells exiles to seek the welfare of their city. Jesus sends his disciples into the world. Peter calls them to honorable conduct among their neighbors.
For me, that is the lasting question Embracing Exile leaves behind. Not simply whether the Church is losing influence, but whether we have learned to remain faithful when influence is uncertain.
And perhaps that is why the book deserves another reading. It moves the conversation away from asking how Christians can remain at the center and toward a harder question: Can we belong so deeply to Christ that we can faithfully live, serve and love even when we are no longer sure the culture belongs with us?