Abstract
General works
Referencing historical, theological, and functional aspects of how mission has been carried out, as well as analyzing its impact on the evangelical movement, the author identifies that mission always develops with positive and negative tensions. Emphasizing an understanding of current missions which include traditional, networking, and emergent models and how they can be combined, interconnected, and interchanged, the author proposes a way that ensures the suitability for every mission context.
In Global Church, Hill engages with more than 100 high-profile Majority World Christian leaders to find out what they can teach the West about mission, leadership, hospitality, creation care, education, worship, and more. He challenges the Western church to move away from a Eurocentric and Americentric view of church and mission, and calls the church to construct global missional conversations.
Painting a picture of evangelism and church planting in our urban and global world, Crossroads of the Nations utilizes contemporary data that, blended together with missionary accounts—both actual and recent—tells a story of transnational missions impacting our world.
Biography
In addition to serving as bishop of Chichester, Bell was an internationalist and ecumenical leader, one of the great Christian humanists of the 20th century, a tenacious critic of the obliteration bombing of enemy cities during World War II, and a key ally of those who struggled for years to resist Hitler in Germany itself.
Church renewal
This book provides both the theory and practice of making the successful transition from committee- to team-oriented congregations.
Communication
This book documents an unprecedented three-year research study centered on the story of the encounter of Jesus with a Samaritan woman. The study involved a unique partnership of committed and creative ordinary readers, expert teachers and pastoral leaders, and Bible and theology scholars representing many countries in five continents.
Living Mission Interculturally integrates sociology/anthropology with practical theology, reminds us that good will alone is not enough to effect change, and points to a way of intercultural living underpinned by faith, virtue, and a range of new and appropriate skills.
Education
Since 1993, 49 theological seminaries have created opportunities for high school students to participate in on-campus High School Theology Programs (HSTPs) that invite them to engage in serious biblical and theological study. What has made these programs so successful? In this book thirteen contributors investigate answers to this question. They examine the pedagogical practices the HSTPs have in common and explore how they are contributing to the leadership of the church.
History
Based on interview transcripts and other primary sources, this book intimately describes the personal struggles of individuals responding to the call to be a missionary, adjusting to life in Japan, learning Japanese, raising a family, and engaging in mission work.
Methods
Hull shows why our existing models of evangelism and discipleship fail to actually produce followers of Jesus. He looks at the importance of recovering a robust view of the gospel and taking seriously the connection between conversion, answering the call to follow Jesus, and discipleship, living like the one we claim to follow.
Core Concepts in Cultural Anthropology is like an annotated glossary of the terms and concepts that anthropologists use in their work. The book prepares students to read ethnography more effectively and with greater understanding.
Religions
By drawing insights from the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and theology, Iyadurai develops an interdisciplinary model from a phenomenological perspective to explain the conversion process that incorporates religious practices and social-psychological factors while giving a central place to religious experience.
Two friends, one a Christian theologian, the other a Buddhist-Christian theologian, explore how a conversation between Christians and Buddhists can clarify and support a spirituality that is experientially real (mystical) as well as socially engaged (prophetic). Paul Knitter and Roger Haight explore Buddhist and Christian notions about ultimate reality, human nature, spiritual practice, and the question of work for peace and social transformation.
Accommodation and Acceptance is a work in both promoting interreligious dialogue and exploring the turbulent history of Christian faith and identity in Asia through the years. From the reaction to missions, often inextricably linked with the practice of colonialism, to the rise of religious pluralism, Ambrose Mong examines the relationships between the leading faiths of Asia up to the present day.
Shenk invites readers to both bear witness to the Christ-centered commitments of their faith while also reaching out in friendship to Muslims. Through stories of his conversations with Muslim clerics, visits to mosques around the globe, and pastors and imams who join hands to work for peace, Shenk offers tested and true paths to real relationships.
Social aspects
In this provocative book, theologian and blogger Hart places police brutality, mass incarceration, anti-black stereotypes, poverty, and everyday acts of racism within the larger framework of white supremacy. Leading readers toward Jesus, Hart offers concrete practices for churches that seek solidarity with the oppressed and are committed to racial justice.
McNeil guides us through the common topics of injustice and inequality in our lives and in the world. With reflection questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, she draws the reader into discussion past the bumpy social terrain and political boundaries that will arise.
Spirituality and worship
Running to the Fire focuses on the turbulent year the Bascom family experienced traveling in revolutionary Ethiopia. The teenaged Bascom struggled with his faith and his role within the conflict as a white American Christian missionary’s child. Reflecting back as an adult, the author explores the historical, cultural, and religious contexts that led to this conflict, even though in doing so he is forced to ask himself questions that are easier left alone.
Van Opstal provides biblical foundations for multiethnic worship with practical tools and resources for planning services that reflect God’s invitation for all people to praise him.
Theology
This concise introduction explores the major issues involved in rethinking theology in light of the explosion of world Christianity. Combining the voices of a Western and non-Western theologian, it integrates Western theological tradition with emerging global perspectives.
Christians in Latin America and other parts of the world are seeking innovative ways of envisioning ethics from their marginalized and discriminated social locations in order to find other possible ethics, ethics that are not universal and not based on eternal truths or principles, but rather contextual and historical and take into account real-life realities. By May’s exploring the implementation of contextual ethics, a matrix of marginalized voices is lifted for the benefit of all.
Through close readings of Karl Barth’s theological work from 1916 to 1929 this book offers an exposition of Barth’s doctrine of sanctification in his earlier theology, arguing that from his earliest writings after 1915 the doctrine of sanctification was one of the key theological components used in describing the encounter between God and man in a positive and concrete manner. This book both fills an important gap in Barthian scholarship and responds to the appeal by other recent interpreters of Barth’s theology for a more balanced and careful exposition of his work.
Yong’s pneumatological and missiological imagination offers a model for Christian theology of mission suitable for the 21st-century global and pluralistic context even as it exemplifies how a missiological understanding of theology itself unfolds amidst engagements with contemporary ecclesial practices and academic/theological impulses.
Africa
This book suggests that it is better to be rooted in faith in Christ than in so-called secularism. This books draws on anthropology, linguistics, and theology, as well as the author’s experience of living in Africa. Harries shares an autobiographical account of personal grassroots ministry and proposes a revision of widely held understandings of linguistics pertaining especially to the relationship between the West and Africa.
Christian Warfare in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe examines the history of the Salvation Army in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe and its relationship with the state and with the rest of the church. The book explores the enmeshment of this Christian mission in the institutions of white rule and the painful process of disentanglement necessary by the late 20th century.
Asia
The Headman Was a Woman presents the gender concepts, roles, and relations of the highly egalitarian Batek of Peninsular Malaysia. Based on long-time fieldwork, the book describes the lives of Batek men and women in the tropical rainforest and includes discussions of fieldwork, hunting and gathering, social organization, religion, gender, nonviolence, and cultural persistence in the face of a changing landscape.
In The Spirit Moves West, Rebecca Kim uses South Korea as a case study of how non-Western missionaries target Americans, particularly white Americans. She draws on four years of interviews, participant observation, and surveys of South Korea’s largest non-denominational missionary-sending agency, University Bible Fellowship, in order to provide a look at this phenomenon.