Daniel was taken into Babylon, trained for service in a foreign court, and placed inside a culture that did not share Israel’s worship. Yet Daniel’s story is not mainly about escaping Babylon. It is about remaining faithful to God while living there. That is a helpful doorway into Embracing Exile: Living Faithfully as God’s Unique People in the World by Dr. T. Scott Daniels.
Published in 2017, the 128-page book uses Israel’s exile to ask what Christian faithfulness looks like when the surrounding culture no longer feels familiar to Christian convictions. The word exile needs careful handling. Daniels is not saying that every Christian who feels culturally uncomfortable has been displaced like the Israelites in Babylon. The comparison is theological. It asks what happens to Christian identity when cultural familiarity and influence become less certain.
That is what I learned from the book: faithfulness is deeper than influence.
The Church When Cultural Influence Changes
Many Christians instinctively connect faithfulness with visibility, recognition, or the ability to shape public life. Those things can be useful, but they are not the measure Jesus gives for Christian identity.
Peter calls believers “foreigners and exiles” in 1 Peter 2:11. Yet he immediately speaks about honorable conduct among Gentiles and responsibilities within society. Exile does not mean disappearing.
Jesus makes the tension even clearer in John 17. He says his disciples are not of the world, but he does not ask the Father to remove them from it. He prays for their protection and then sends them into the world.
That changes how I read Daniels’s argument. If Christians are becoming less culturally central, the first question should not be, “How do we get our influence back?” It should be, “Who are we called to be when influence is no longer guaranteed?”
Exile Does Not Mean Withdrawal
Jeremiah 29 gives an unexpectedly practical picture. Israel’s exiles in Babylon were told to build houses, plant gardens, marry, raise families, seek the welfare of the city, and pray for it.
They were not in their ultimate home, but they were still responsible for the city’s good.
Daniel gives another picture. He served within imperial structures while refusing to surrender his allegiance to God. Daniel 1 and Daniel 6 hold together participation and conviction. His faithfulness did not require him to abandon every institution around him.
That balance matters. Christian distinctiveness should not become contempt for the people around us.
Even 1 John 2:15–17 needs to be read carefully. The warning against loving “the world” is not a command to hate people or reject every part of human culture. John speaks about disordered desires and pride and contrasts them with doing God’s will.
So when I think about exile, I do not hear a call to retreat. I hear a call to remember who we are.
What This Means for Me as a Nazarene
The Church of the Nazarene serves in 165 world areas. That should remind us that Christians do not all experience culture in the same way. One believer may live where Christianity enjoys public respect; another where faith receives little recognition or faces pressure.
The denomination describes its identity through Christian, holiness, and missional commitments. Cultural influence is not the foundation of that identity.
Embracing Exile is also not an official Nazarene doctrinal document. Daniels wrote it in 2017, six years before his election as the denomination’s 44th general superintendent in 2023. The book deserves to be read for its argument, not simply because of his later office. His pastoral and academic background helps explain the question, but credentials do not settle theology.
The book also made me cautious about using exile. Losing cultural influence is not the same as forced displacement, persecution, or marginalization. Christians should not borrow the suffering of genuinely displaced people simply because our cultural circumstances have changed.
Why I Think the Book Is Worth Reading
I think Embracing Exile is worth reading because it asks a question deeper than cultural anxiety: What kind of people are Christians becoming when approval, familiarity, or influence can no longer be assumed?
Hebrews 13:14 says that Christians have no lasting city here, but seek the city that is to come. That does not make earthly life irrelevant. Jeremiah, Peter, Jesus, and Daniel point in the other direction: live faithfully here, serve people here, seek the good of your community, but do not let the surrounding culture become the final definition of who you are.
That is the lesson I took from Daniels’s book. Christian faithfulness is not proved by how much of the culture we control. Neither is it proved by how loudly we complain about losing control.
It is shown in holiness, courage, service, truthfulness, and love.
If you have not read Embracing Exile by Dr. T. Scott Daniels, I think it is worth your time—not because it gives Christians a strategy for getting cultural influence back, but because it invites us to ask a more searching question: Can we remain fully faithful to Christ when we no longer feel fully at home in the culture around us?