Abstract
General works
William Dyrness brings a blend of cultural and theological engagement to his reflections on insider movements. Dyrness explores the following questions: Could it be that our own understanding of what God is doing in the world is culturally shaped and needs recalibrating? How might the story of Israel and the early emergence of Jewish followers of Jesus provide helpful perspective on what we are seeing today? What is God already doing amidst a culture and people before the missionary arrives? Moreover, how might US Christians need to rethink the nature of religion?
The first few chapters of Bertil’s Ekström’s text are dedicated to a biblical and theological reflection on the Gospel, church, and mission. It includes Old and New Testament studies on the theological implications of the biblical narrative. The second part deals with a variety of contemporary missiological issues related to the broader theme of church and mission. Different perspectives from current discussions and dialogues around the globe are included, covering both ideological reflections and practical aspects of being a mission-shaped church.
Jayson Georges and Mark Baker help decode the cultural script of honor and shame. They assist in reading the Bible anew through the lens of honor and shame. In addition, they offer thoughtful and practical guidance in ministry within honor-shame contexts.
Essays from biblical and missiological scholars address reading the Scriptures missionally, i.e., using mission as a key interpretive lens. Five introductory chapters probe various elements of a missional hermeneutic, followed by sections on the Old and New Testaments that include chapters on two books from each to illustrate what a missional reading of them looks like. Essays in two concluding sections draw out the implications of a missional reading of Scripture for preaching and for theological education.
Alan Hirsch’s paradigm-shifting classic shares significant insights and new examples of growing churches, and reflects on the last 10 years of the missional movement. The book explores the factors that come together to generate impactful growing, and spiritually vibrant Jesus movements in any time and context. The new edition has been thoroughly updated and revised throughout, including charts, diagrams, expanded glossary of terms, new appendices, and index.
Douglas Jacobsen describes global Christianity and provides a framework for understanding the varied experiences of Christians around the world. Focusing on the five big continents of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, Jacobsen recounts their differing histories, contemporary experiences, and cultural theologies. The text contains numerous maps, charts, and illustrations that aid comprehension.
The text surveys anthropological explanations for humanity’s dependence on culture, and shows that each explanation provides only a partial explanatory scope. The most satisfying explanation, according to Nehrbass, is that a major functional aspect of bearing God’s image is engaging in culture, since the Trinity has been eternally engaged in cultural functions like ruling, communicating, and creating. Each chapter contains a summary and questions about what it means to be a world-changer in the twenty-first century.
Marvin Newell provides a biblical theology of culture and mission, mining the depths of Scripture to tease out missiological insights and cross-cultural perspectives. This text is organized canonically, revealing how the whole of Scripture speaks to contemporary mission realities. This book is intended to be a resource for students and practitioners of cross-cultural ministry and mission.
In this book, five leading voices representing a range of Christian traditions engage in a conversation as they present and compare their perspectives on the mission of the church. Each contributor offers his or her view and responds to the other four views. Contributors include Stephen B. Bevans, Darrell L. Guder, Ruth Padilla DeBorst, Edward Rommen, and Ed Stetzer.
The goal of this text is to reflect on how mission is done in the twenty-firstst century, especially in light of the new layers of complexity that globalization brings. While the contributors engage in new aspects of mission and cultural encounter unique to the twenty-first century, the underlying issues of each chapter are age-old topics – priorities in mission, power struggles, perspectives on cultural others, and contextualization.
Charles E. Van Engen discusses the constant innovations and changes of the world and the growing global church. He explores the developments and transformation in the study and practice of mission. Looking both backwards – especially over the first half-century of the Fuller Theological Seminary School of Intercultural studies – and forwards, the contributors to this volume chart the current shape of mission studies and its prospects in the twenty-first century.
Biographies
Neighbors. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016. 221 pp. $17.99, paper. 9-780-3115-2783-1.
Russell Jeung’s spiritual memoir shares the joyful and occasionally harrowing stories of his life in East Oakland’s Murder Dubs neighborhood – including battling drug dealers who threatened him, exorcising a spirit possessing a teen, and winning a landmark housing settlement against slumlords. The text weaves in narratives of longing and belonging as Jeung retraces the steps of his Chinese-Hakka family and his refugee neighbors. In the face of forced relocation and institutional discrimination, his family and friends resisted time and time again over six generations.
In Preacher Girl, the first full biography of evangelist Uldine Utley, author Thomas Robinson shows that Utley’s rise to fame was no accident. Utley’s parents and staff carefully marked out her path early on to headline success. Not unlike Hollywood, revivalism was a business in which celebrity equaled success. Revivalism mixed equal parts of glamour and gospel, making stars of its preachers. Utley was its brightest. In his chronicle of Utley’s life, Robinson highlights the power of US revivalism to equal Hollywood’s success as well as the potentially devastating private costs of public religious leadership.
Communication
This text serves as a model for effective personal relationships in a multicultural and multiethnic world. On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, this book has been thoroughly updated to reflect Sherwood Lingenfelter’s thinking on the topic and to communicate with modern readers, helping them minister more effectively to people of different cultural and social backgrounds.
Through stories, biblical insights, leadership research, field-tested methods, and practical models of effective leadership development, Leading with Story offers insights for cultivating leaders that will inspire and challenge any who want to raise up or to be raised up as Christ-centered leaders in this storycentric generation.
Methods
David Fitch offers a vision for the witness of the church in the world. He argues that we have lost the intent and practice of the sacramental ways of the historic church, and he recovers seven disciplines that have been with us since the birth of the church. Through examples and stories, he demonstrates how these disciplines can help the church take shape in and among our neighborhoods, transform our way of life in the world, and advance the kingdom.
This volume is an update of Kraft’s classic work Appropriate Christianity. It contains presentations of previous articles and new insights into topics such as insiders (followers of Jesus outside the religious culture of Christianity) and the exploration of spiritual power.
This book explores the categories of mega-changes and the impact they are making in world mission. The text highlights several real-life examples from ministries, non-profits, and businesses to help understand how to put the tools presented into practice.
In this first volume on intercultural hermeneutics, Wrogemann introduces the term “intercultural theology” and investigates what it means to understand another cultural context. In addition to surveying different hermeneutical theories and concepts of culture, he assesses how intercultural understanding has taken place throughout the history of Christian mission. Wrogemann also provides a discussion of contextual theologies with a special focus on African theologies.
Religions
This text aims to evaluate and discuss the concept of a multifaith society, which has flooded public discourse in recent decades. According to editors Ruth Nicholls and Peter Riddell, the simultaneous study of multiple faiths has not only great currency in terms of present interest and relevance but also speaks into past history in important ways. Public policy makers today can learn important lessons from the history of interaction among the faiths.
This text features global perspectives on current Christian engagement with Islam, equipping readers for mission among Muslims. Evelyne Reisacher aims to help readers move from fear to joy as they share the gospel with Muslims. Reisacher surveys areas where Muslims and Christians encounter one another in the twenty-first century, highlighting innovative models of Christian witness in everyday life. Drawing on insights from global Christianity, this survey takes account of diverse conceptions of Muslim–Christian relations.
Social aspects
Spanning several continents and drawing on the stories of young migrants, Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age provides an account of the widespread and growing but neglected global phenomenon of child migration and child trafficking. It looks at the often insurmountable obstacles we place in the paths of adolescents fleeing war, exploitation, or destitution; the contradictory elements in our approach to international adoption; and the limited support we give to young people brutalized as child soldiers. Part history, part in-depth legal and political analysis, this book challenges the prevailing wisdom that widespread protection failures are caused by our lack of awareness of the problems these children face, arguing instead that our societies have a deep-seated ambivalence to migrant children.
Understanding Institutions proposes a theory of social institutions that combines the insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala combines the features of three views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules. Specific institutions such as money, private property, and marriage are explained to develop unification of equilibrium- and rules-based approaches. Outlining and discussing various implications of the unified theory, Guala addresses venerable issues such as reflexivity, realism, Verstehen, and fallibilism in the social sciences.
Theology
Practical in Theology in Church and Society reflects on the practice of ministry in both church and society. This book attends to the practices as individuals in ministry, to corporate practice as congregations in ministry, and to practice as Christians within the wider social and natural world. Bush addresses two perspectives on practical theology. One is the view through the wide-angle lens of justice-oriented action, which hopes for liberation. The other perspective takes the narrower focus of the action-reflection model as it focuses on individual actions and particular practices of ministry such as pastoral care. The purpose of the book is to integrate these two perspectives on practical theology.
This book explores the role of emotions and affections in the Christian tradition from historical and theological perspectives, especially related to the work of the Holy Spirit. By retrieving the complex discussion about affectivity in Christian tradition and bringing its many voices into dialogue within a contemporary ecumenical context, the contributors also point toward a number of new research trajectories.
Americas
Becoming Black Political Subjects offers insights into the changing landscape of race and Latin-American politics, provoking readers to adopt a more transnational and flexible understanding of social movements. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Tianna Paschel shows how, over a short period, black movements and their claims went from being marginalized to become institutionalized into the law, state bureaucracies, and mainstream politics.
Asia
Through an examination of Methodist mission to Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, this broad-ranging book unites the history of globalization with the history of Christian mission and the history of Southeast Asia. The book explores the international connections forged by the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Malaysia Mission between 1885 and 1915, putting them in the context of a wave of globalization that was sweeping the world at that time, including significant developments in Southeast Asia.