Not My Circus

Autorentext

Mark Batterson

Klappentext

**The pressure is unmistakable—conform or get cancelled. New York Times bestselling author Mark Batterson invites you into a different way of living in the digital age with a call to Christlike nonconformity that doesn’t withdraw from the world but transforms it.
**
“In Not My Circus, Mark Batterson pastors us through a cultural moment and relational challenges with wisdom, kindness, and conviction.”—Annie F. Downs, author of That Sounds Fun

Social media rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Algorithms decide what you see and who you hear. Mob culture stands ready to silence anyone who steps out of line. And the pressure to pick a side—and stay there—has never been greater.

No one is immune from conformity bias, including those who follow Jesus. Somewhere along the way, many have traded holy courage for social comfort, spiritual discernment for tribal loyalty, and amazing grace for the same culture of cancellation they claimed to oppose. The result is a faith that looks less like Jesus and more like whatever side of the aisle we happen to sit on.

Mark Batterson issues a rallying cry for a different kind of nonconformity—not withdrawal from culture but engagement with it on entirely different terms. In Not My Circus, he draws on Romans 12:2—“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed”—to show how to resist cultural pressure without retreating from cultural engagement.

After nearly thirty years pastoring just steps away from the halls of power in Washington, DC, Batterson brings hard-won wisdom to the defining challenge of our moment. You’ll learn how to cultivate a non-anxious presence by developing

• holy courage—the boldness to stand firm in your convictions without being controlled by others’ opinions
• spiritual discernment—the sense to know which battles are yours to fight and which ones aren’t
• amazing grace—the ability to engage those you disagree with, maintaining your witness without taking on their anxiety

For anyone ready to stop reflecting culture and start transforming it, Not My Circus offers a road map to escape the cult of conformity—and live for the applause of nail-scarred hands.

Zusammenfassung
In a culture that touts tolerance but cancels for anything less than conformity, New York Times bestselling author Mark Batterson shows us how to rise above the shaming and blaming with holy courage, spiritual discernment, and amazing grace.

The world has changed faster in the last twenty years than in the previous two hundred. Social media, AI, and endless outrage have reshaped how we relate to one another. The cultural pressure is unmistakable: conform or be shamed.

The call to nonconformity is choosing faith over fear, truth over trends, and compassion over cancelling. It's rejecting popular opinion, peer pressure, and political correctness when those are at odds with will of God. The fear of man is epidemic, but there is a cure—the fear of God that sets us free from every other fear.

Exhausted by a culture that demands we fight every battle and weigh in on every issue? Not My Circus is Mark Batterson's rallying cry against the status quo. Drawing on Romans 12:2—"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed"—Mark reveals how to resist cultural pressure without retreating from cultural engagement.

You'll learn how to cultivate a non-anxious presence by developing:

• Holy Courage – boldness to stand firm in your convictions without being controlled by others' opinions
• Spiritual Discernment – the sense to know which battles are yours to fight and which ones aren't
• Amazing Grace – the ability to engage those you disagree with without absorbing their anxiety or abandoning your witness
  For anyone ready to stop reflecting culture and instead transform it, Not My Circus offers a roadmap to escape the cult of conformity and live for the applause of nail-scarred hands.

Leseprobe
1

Sleeping Through a Great Revolution

On March 31, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC—­the last sermon he would ever preach. Four days later, he was gunned down at a Memphis motel. Last words carry weight, and Dr. King’s last sermon—­“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”—­is no exception. His opening story was a prophetic retelling of “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving.

“The most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years,” said Dr. King, “but that he slept through a revolution.”1 When Rip went up the mountain to take his twenty-­year nap, a portrait of King George III hung outside the village inn. When Rip came back down the mountain, it was a portrait of George Washington. Of course, Rip “knew not who he was.” Rip went to sleep a loyal subject of the British crown, but he woke up to a very different world—­a new nation, a new constitution, a new currency.

“While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain, a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history—­and Rip knew nothing about it.” Is it possible that some of us are peacefully snoring through a similar revolution?

Just in case you’ve been sleeping for twenty years: The world has gone wild. And I mean that in every way imaginable. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have Uber or Instagram, Venmo or DoorDash. How wild is that? A cloud used to be cirrus or cumulus—­now it’s a place to store 17,214 selfies. Oh yeah, we didn’t have selfies. Cookies used to be chocolate chip, not digital sticky notes. Trolls lived under bridges, reels were for fishing, and friends were people you’d actually met.

Imagine yourself Rip Van Winkle, falling asleep twenty years ago. When you went to sleep, we didn’t have deepfakes, doomscrolling, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, or emojis. We didn’t even have Apple Pay because we didn’t have iPhones. You woke up to cancel culture, viral outrage, virtue signaling, echo chambers, and algorithmic clickbait. Anything else? Along with toxic levels of political polarization and racial tension, we’re experiencing a loneliness epidemic and mental health crisis.

The tectonic plates of technology, ideology, and morality have shifted, which begs the question: How do we navigate this cultural moment? It’s not by retreating to our ideological corners and yelling at each other online, that’s for darn well sure. And the three-­ring circus of shaming, blaming, and faming has to stop.

There is a more excellent way—­the Jesus way.

There is a radical middle—­full of grace and truth.

There is a road less traveled—­the journey to nonconformity.

“All too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change,” said Dr. King, “yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses that the new situation demands and they end up sleeping through a revolution.”

This book is a wake-­up call—­“Awake, O sleeper, rise up”! If we don’t wake up soon, we may not wake up at all. I know that sounds alarmist, but it’s now or never. The world is in chaos, but God is still on His throne. And we are here for such a time as this. The days ahead will require holy courage, spiritual discernment, and amazing grace, but that’s the only way to rise above the shaming, blaming, and faming that pervade this cultural moment…