Vince Antonucci’s Guerrilla Lovers (Baker Books, 2010) describes how everyone in their church was handed an envelope with a Random Act of Kindness to fulfil that week.

Actually, they called them ‘Acts of Guerrilla Lovers’ – loving friends, strangers, enemies, anyone in the name of Jesus.

Antonucci’s book is a page-turner: he’s a brilliant conversational writer, always interesting, challenging, inspiring – and sometimes earthy. (His humorous ‘below the waist’ asides will shock some ‘over-fifties’). He combines a passion for loving others with an entrepreneurial leadership style and a ‘with-it’ mastery of contemporary culture. A law school dropout, he went to seminary (but I can’t recall him quoting any leading theologians in this book: the closest he gets is to cite a story from one of my favorite preachers, Barbara Brown Taylor), had a few pastoral appointments before starting a church in the Las Vegas ‘strip’ with no one else but his wife. His heroes – Jesus (of course), but also ‘crazies’ like the prophet Isaiah who wandered around naked for a few years, and Ezekiel who slept in the middle of town on one side, and cooked his dinner with cow pats!

Throughout his ministries Antonucci encouraged his people to do what Jesus might do – like having church ‘services’ in a pub (and one of the hard-drinkers wanted them to come and do that in his back-yard for all his mates. That church service must have been doing something right!).

The stories are quite amazing: a Jesus-follower surrendered his wallet to a knife-wielding teenager, but then offered his coat (‘you might get cold holding up people tonight’) and invited him to a restaurant-dinner. A young woman was attacked by a man in Haiti, but escaped to a nearby house. When the would-be rapist was released from jail, she made contact with him: and, yes, the senior woman-householder and the attacker both became Jesus-followers. Then there was a homeless man in Las Vegas who slept for nine months in a field, and for a long time never bathed: he stank so much that other homeless people avoided him. But when he wandered into a church, a Christian lady greeted him: ‘You look as if you need a hug’ – and gave him one… and there and then began his journey ‘into the kingdom’.

A nine-year-old boy, Austin, saw a video about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, where hundreds of thousands of kids are left orphans. Austin wanted to help, so he phoned a charity organization. The man asked him ‘What’s your favorite sport?’. ‘Basketball’. ‘Well, figure out a way to use basketball to make money to help the orphans in Africa.’ Result: hundreds of thousands of dollars raised through ‘Hoops of Hope’ (check it out at hoopsofhope.org).

At one Antonucci’s churches they wanted to evangelize an ‘unreached people group’ so prayerfully chose one of the most difficult mission-fields in the world: a mountain-tribe in a ‘communist South Asian country’ where it’s forbidden to preach. There they provided drinking-water facilities, health-care, computers for the school etc. And only evangelized when asked questions by the recipients of this ‘guerrilla love’.

Somewhere else today I read this Danish fable: ‘A spider slid down a filament of thread from the rafters of a lofty barn and established himself on a lower shelf. There he spread his web, caught plenty of flies, and grew sleek and prosperous. One day, wandering around his premises, he saw the thread which stretched up into the unseen above him. “What is that for?” asked the spider, and snapped it. And all his little house of life collapsed about him’.

Without love – for God and for others – the thread is broken, and our churches become lifeless self-absorbed clubs for the religious…

The approach here is similar to that of Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne. It will appeal to younger Christians who have not lost their idealism and settled into a risk-free comfortable church culture.

Give it to your church’s youth leader, and encourage him/her to do some of this. It will be revolutionary.