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. Stott offers a trustworthy guide for readers to understand the Christian faith and share the good news in a way that connects with people around us.
After the Berlin Wall fell, a group of Christian colleges in the U.S seized the opportunity to help build a faith-based university in Moscow. Told by the school's founder and president, this is the story of the rise and fall of the first accredited Christian liberal arts university in Russia's history, offering unique insight on Russia’s post-communist transition and the construction of a cultural-educational bridge between the two superpowers.
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.
We need a bigger vision for the city. Pastors Neil Powell and John James contend that to truly transform a city, the gospel compels us to create localized, collaborative church planting movements. The more willing we are to collaborate across denominations and networks, the more effectively we will reach our communities—whatever their size—for Jesus.
The story of Methodism is much richer and more expansive than John Wesley's sermons and Charles Wesley's hymns. In this book, Methodist theologian Jeffrey W. Barbeau provides a brief and helpful introduction to the history of Methodism—from the time of the Wesleys, through developments in North America, to its diverse and global communion today—as well as its primary beliefs and practices.
Patronage is a central part of global cultures and the biblical story of God's mission, yet many Westerners misunderstand or ignore this concept. In this resource for ministry practitioners and lay Christians alike, Jayson Georges brings his crosscultural experience and biblical insights to bear on the topic of patronage, with sections on cultural issues, biblical models, theological concepts, and missional implications.
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.