05/10/2026
Faithfulness doesn't require a home-field advantage. 🏟️❌
Our “world” is changing, and the Church is moving from the center of culture to the edges. For many of us, this feels like losing ground—but what if it’s actually an invitation?
As the Church of the Nazarene in USA/Canada navigates a culture that feels increasingly distant from the Church, Dr. T. Scott Daniels offers a timely perspective: We are a people meant to be in the world, but not of it. Discover why "Embracing Exile" is the key to our formation, our holiness, and our future.
Embracing Exile: The Leader Who Teaches the Church How to Live Faithfully Away from Home
By Proudly Nazarene follow our Community Nazarene Journal
In Embracing Exile, a book written before he became General Superintendent, Dr. T. Scott Daniels wrestles with a reality many churches are still trying to come to terms with. The Church no longer stands at the center of culture in the way it once believed it did. Influence has shifted. Society has changed. In many places, Christianity now speaks more from the edges than from the middle.
That thought is difficult to ignore because many believers still connect faithfulness with visibility. Strength is often measured by influence, recognition, and the ability to shape the culture around us. Yet the deeper one moves through Scripture, the harder it becomes to hold that assumption without questioning it.
Peter addressed believers as “strangers and exiles.”
Not rulers. Not owners of the culture. Exiles.
That language changes the atmosphere completely.
Let me give you a little context.
In June 2023, during the 30th General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene in Indianapolis, Indiana, Dr. T. Scott Daniels was elected as General Superintendent. Before that election, his ministry had already moved through several spaces within the life of the Church pastor, theology professor, seminary dean, writer, preacher, and speaker. At the time of his election, he was serving as senior pastor of Nampa College Church of the Nazarene in Idaho.
But the interesting part is not simply the number of roles he held.
It is the kind of thought he carried into those spaces.
Because exile is not the kind of language churches naturally gravitate toward.
Most churches prefer the language of growth, victory, expansion, and influence. Exile sounds uncertain. It sounds uncomfortable. It almost sounds like weakness.
Yet the Bible repeatedly returns to it.
Israel knew exile in Babylon. Jeremiah wrote to people learning how to remain faithful in exile. Daniel discovered that faithfulness sometimes means standing inside a foreign system without allowing that system to redefine who you are. Even the early Church learned how to live as a people who belonged to God while surrounded by societies that often misunderstood them.
And perhaps that is what makes Dr. Daniels’ emphasis feel important at this moment.
Not because the Church is disappearing, but because many believers no longer know how to live faithfully once Christianity stops feeling culturally secure.
Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail in 1963, warned about a Church that had become too closely tied to comfort, power, and social approval. He feared a Church that had lost its distinctiveness. Reading those words now, it becomes difficult not to notice how easily faith can begin seeking acceptance instead of faithfulness.
That becomes even more complicated in a global church.
The Church of the Nazarene now exists across more than 160 world areas, stretching through cultures, languages, economies, and political realities that do not all experience Christianity in the same way. In some places the Church speaks publicly and freely. In others, believers live more quietly and carefully. Some churches experience influence. Others experience pressure.
A church like that cannot think from only one cultural perspective.
And maybe that is where exile becomes more than a biblical image.
Maybe it becomes a way of understanding Christian identity itself.
Jesus said in John 17 that His followers are in the world, but not of it. That sentence has always carried a strange balance to it. Christians are not removed from society, yet they are also not meant to dissolve completely into it.
The Church lives inside cultures without fully belonging to them.
That is exile.
And this may also explain why Dr. Daniels’ life and ministry feel significant beyond leadership titles alone. His work has moved between congregations, theological education, publishing, ethics, and global church leadership. He has taught theology in universities while continuing to pastor ordinary church communities. There is something meaningful about that combination, especially at a time when many churches are struggling to think carefully about what they are becoming.
Because exile requires more than passion.
It requires formation.
A church without theological depth can easily confuse popularity with faithfulness. But a church disconnected from ordinary people can become intellectually sharp while slowly losing its spiritual warmth. The harder task is learning how conviction and compassion can remain together without weakening either one.
John Wesley once described Christians as “a people who think and let think.” That sentence feels important here because it carries both confidence and humility at the same time. Conviction remains, but so does patience. Belief remains, but so does grace.
That kind of spirit feels increasingly necessary.
Especially now, when many conversations inside the Church quickly become struggles for control instead of opportunities for discernment.
And perhaps exile exposes that more clearly than anything else.
It reveals whether the Church has learned how to remain faithful without needing to dominate the culture around it.
Over time, exile begins to look less like the loss of a place and more like the discovery of what truly holds a people together once familiar forms begin to change.
That may be why Peter spoke to exiles with language shaped more by hope than by panic.
And perhaps that is the deeper question underneath all of this.
Can the Church still remain holy, thoughtful, compassionate, and faithful when it no longer feels fully at home in the world around it?
Because history seems to suggest that some of the Church’s clearest moments did not happen when it was most powerful.
They happened when it learned how to live faithfully without needing the world’s approval.
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