How can Christians effectively engage today's world while staying true to Scripture? Calling us to listen well to both the Word and the world, John Stott shows how Christianity can preserve its authentic identity and remain relevant to current realities. In this practical book, Stott presents a biblical portrait of the church as a covenant community at the center of God's purposes.
How do we understand Jesus' present activity in a challenging, post-Christian context? Leading thinkers in pastoral theology, homiletics, liturgical theology, and missiology consider how to recognize the divine presence and join in what God is already doing in all areas of church ministry. With deep theological reflection, personal stories, and practical suggestions, this is a compelling interdisciplinary conversation.
Despite the current evangelical focus on justice work, evangelical theologians have not adequately developed a theological foundation for this activism. In this insightful resource, evangelical academics, activists, and pastors come together to survey the history and outlines of liberation theology, opening a conversation for developing a specifically evangelical view of liberation that speaks to the critical justice issues of our time.
Is a church just something we create to serve our purposes or to maintain old traditions? Or is it something more vital, more meaningful, and more powerful? In this introduction to the nature of the local church, historian and missionary Scott Sunquist brings us a portrait of the church in motion, clarifying the two primary purposes of the church: worship and witness.
New expressions of church, including so-called insider movements, are proliferating among non-Christian religious communities worldwide. Drawing on the growing social-scientific work on emergent theory, Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness explore how all Christian movements have been and are engaged in a "reverse hermeneutic," where the gospel is read and interpreted through existing cultural and religious norms.
Christianity is not only a global but also an intercultural phenomenon. In this third volume of his three-volume Intercultural Theology, Henning Wrogemann proposes that we need to go beyond currently trending theologies of mission to formulate both a theory of interreligious relations and a related but methodologically independent theology of interreligious relations.
"Are we for them or against them?" In this wise, practical book on the refugee and immigrant crises around the world, Kent Annan explores how fear and misunderstanding can motivate our responses to people in need. Instead, he invites us into stories of welcome, laying out simple practices for a way forward across social and cultural divides.
In this case study of Kenya's Nairobi Chapel and its "daughter" Mavuno Church, Wanjiru M. Gitau offers analysis of the rise, growth, and place of megachurches worldwide in the new millennium. This engaging account centers on the role of millennials in responding to the dislocating transitions of globalization in postcolonial Africa and around the world, gleaning practical wisdom for postdenominational churches everywhere.
In this fifth volume in the History of Evangelicalism series, Brian Stanley offers an authoritative survey of worldwide evangelicalism from the 1940s to the 1990s. He makes extensive use of primary sources and covers a range of key topics, issues, trends and events, along with prominent and lesser-known figures from the era.
Millions are on the move in today's world, and Christians have a unique perspective on this migrant crisis: after all, Jesus was a refugee. Patrick Johnstone and Dean Merrill help us understand what's causing today's refugee crisis, explore Christian theology and tradition on migration, and show us how Christian workers around the globe are opening their hearts to embrace these modern outcasts.