Abstract
General works
Frances Adeney explores questions surrounding how Christian women do mission in a complex world. This empirical study shows congruence among women from diverse backgrounds and cultural contexts as they face identity issues, utilize art and beauty in their work, and develop character in the midst of overcoming obstacles. Adeney offers findings and reflection about contemporary women doing Christian mission from nearly one hundred interviews of women in Europe, Asia, Brazil, and the United States.
This text looks into how Christianity has influenced the global south. Although these communities were previously poor and marginalized, Stephen Offutt illustrates how they have grown into socioeconomically diverse, internationally well-connected, and socially engaged societies. Offutt argues that local and global religious social forces, such as the spread of Christianity, as opposed to other social, economic, or political forces, are primarily responsible for these changes.
This anthology brings together scholarly writings on the topic of insider movements. The first book to provide a comprehensive survey of the topic of insider movements, the text is a companion for those who want to understand how insider movements are at work among the peoples of the world in their diverse religious communities.
Church renewal
Based on Will Mancini’s 15 years of church-team facilitation, God Dreams reveals a planning method that will assist in bringing focus to one’s work in the church. First, the author shows how to reclaim the role of long-range vision by providing 12 templates for creating a vision. Second, the author explains how to overcome the fruitless planning efforts that many church teams experience.
History
Christine Heyrman chronicles the first collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Middle East. This book elaborates on how the founding members of the Palestine mission ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria. Heyrman shows their spiritual challenges and triumphs as they debated with Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians. The author brings to life evangelicals’ first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy, and offers insight into how the origins of present-day American behavior toward Islam have developed throughout history.
Interweaving primary documents and new scholarship with a narrative reconstructing the lives of European colonists, Africans, and Native Americans and their encounters in colonial North America, Kidd offers perspectives on these events and the period as a whole.
Alan Kreider delivers a fruitful study, telling the story of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the church grew because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. Early Christians wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, yet the church grew—not by specific strategies but by patient ferment.
Methods
Structured as a narrative rather than a compendium of facts about cultures and concepts, Stories of Culture and Place aims to invite readers to think of anthropology as a series of stories that emerge from cultural encounters in particular times and places. These moments of encounter are illustrated with reference to both classic and contemporary ethnographic examples, allowing readers to grasp anthropology’s sometimes problematic past while still capturing the excitement and potential of the discipline.
This text begins by exploring the notion of culture, touching upon its biological basis and development through time. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of culture such as communication, making a living, family structure, and group organization. Each of these sections includes considerations of societies that range from small-scale groups to metropolitan populations through time and space, and each chapter considers issues of social inequality and gender.
Religions
Luke Cawley shows how Christians can contextualize the gospel in different ways to connect with different kinds of people. Here he unpacks the religious identities of three key demographics: the spiritual but not religious, committed atheists, and nominal Christians. Each group has particular characteristics and requires specific approaches and practices to make the Christian faith plausible, desirable, and tangible to them.
Christian practitioners from 13 different Buddhist cultures share insights gained from their experiences and perspectives. From Sri Lanka to Japan, from China to the Philippines, these women and men, Asian and Western, present on a topic that is often missing in mission literature today. And for readers seeking personal insight into the growing spiritual complexities of their own place in the postmodern world, lessons from these authors will provide practical principles from firsthand cultural encounters.
This volume is an exposition that emphasizes godly attitudes, loving action, and a deep appreciation of God’s grace and goodness as essential traits of any Christian. This text discusses two underlying frameworks that are essential to thinking biblically about Islam: understanding the dynamic of religion in people’s lives through the Genesis account of the world after “the fall” and the idea that Islam inverts the exaltation of Christ above the prophets in the narrative of the transfiguration in Luke 9 and 10. Glaser and Kay examine the themes of the land, zeal, law, and the cross in these chapters of Luke’s Gospel and the Old Testament stories of Moses and Elijah in an attempt to better understand the Bible, Islam, and God’s heart towards Muslims.
Ambrose Mong presents a work in both promoting interreligious dialogue and exploring the turbulent history of Christian faith and identity in Asia down the years. From the reaction to missions, often inextricably linked to the practice of colonialism, to the rise of religious pluralism, Mong examines the relationships between the leading faiths of Asia up to the present day.
Social aspects
In this book, Kent Annan shares practices he has learned from doing the work of justice that will encourage and help practitioners to keep making a difference in the face of the world’s challenging issues.
This text explains the historical context for evangelical reengagement with social justice issues. It tells the story of how, in two generations, Christians have come to rediscover what has always been true: justice is close to the heart of God. The authors provide an overview of post-World War II evangelical social justice and compassion ministries, introducing key figures and seminal organizations that propelled the rediscovery of biblical justice. The book explores the historical and theological lessons learned from evangelical history and offers a way forward for contemporary Christians.
Alexia Salvatierra has developed a model of social action that is rooted in the values and convictions born of faith. Together with theologian Peter Heltzel, this model of “faith-rooted organizing” offers a path to meaningful social change that takes seriously the command to love God and to love our neighbor.
Theology
The Acts of the Apostles provides an advanced introduction to the study of Acts, covering important questions about authorship, genre, history, and theology. Osvaldo Padilla explores fresh avenues of understanding by examining the text in light of the most recent research on the book of Acts itself, philosophical hermeneutics, genre theory, and historiography.
Papandrea helps us see how Logos Christology was forged as the beginning of the church’s orthodox confession. This study of early Christology provides a ground for students to begin to explore the early church and its Christologies.
Americas
Mission without Conquest is a historical narrative of how the Toba Qom people of the Argentine Chaco followed Jesus’ way from the time of their conversion until the formation of an autochthonous church. This texts aims to analyze and embody a new way to approach the church’s missionary task based on the experiences in the Argentine Chaco.
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the K’iche’ Maya community of San Andrés Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States.
In his book, Migrating Faith, Daniel Ramírez argues that because of the distance separating the transnational migratory circuits from domineering arbiters of religious and aesthetic orthodoxy in both the United States and Mexico, the region was fertile ground for the religious innovation by which working-class Pentecostals expanded and changed traditional options for practicing the faith. Based on individuals’ and families’ firsthand accounts from Los Angeles during the Azusa Street Revival in 1906, Ramírez illuminates the interplay of migration, mobility, and musicality in Pentecostalism’s global boom.
Richard Twiss provides a contextualized Indigenous expression of the Christian faith among the Native communities of North America. Twist surveys the complicated history of Christian missions among Indigenous peoples and chronicles more hopeful visions of culturally contextual Native Christian faith. Throughout this text, contextualization is not merely a formula or evangelistic strategy, but rather a relational process of theological and cultural reflection within a local community. Twiss offers perspective into the stories of Native followers of Jesus, but also focuses on theology, spiritually, and intercultural ministry.