Joyful Witness in the Muslim World (Mission in Global Community)


Book Description

This up-to-date textbook features global perspectives on current Christian engagement with Islam, equipping readers for mission among Muslims. Evelyne Reisacher, who has worked extensively with Muslims in Europe, helps 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. The book may surprise those who believe mission among Muslims is nearly impossible. This is the first book in the Mission in Global Community series, which reframes missiological themes and studies for students around the common theme of mission as partnership with others. Series authors draw upon their own global experience and that of their global colleagues to illumine present realities and chart a course into the future. Series editors are Scott W. Sunquist and Amos Yong.




Global Arts and Christian Witness (Mission in Global Community)


Book Description

Veteran missionary-scholar Roberta King draws on a lifetime of study and firsthand mission experience to show how witness through contextualized global arts can dynamically reveal Christ to all peoples. King offers the global church biblical foundations, historical pathways, theoretical frameworks, and effective practices for communicating Christ through the arts in diverse contexts. Supplemented with stories from the field, illustrations, and discussion questions, this textbook offers innovative and dynamic approaches essential for doing mission in transformative ways through the arts. It also features a full-color insert of artwork discussed in the book.




Cultural Insights for Christian Leaders (Mission in Global Community)


Book Description

Christianity Today 2019 Book Award Winner This volume helps leaders and leaders-in-training become students of culture who can then contextualize what they learn for their own organizational settings. Douglas McConnell, a respected leader in the worlds of missiology and higher education, enables readers to understand intercultural dynamics so they can shape their organizational cultures and lead their organizations in a missional direction. This is the latest volume in an award-winning series emphasizing mission as partnership with Christians around the globe.




Engaging Globalization (Mission in Global Community)


Book Description

Globalization is speeding up our world, extending our relationships globally and bringing us closer together in positive and not-so-positive ways. The church and many Christians, however, remain largely unaware of its seductive power, resulting in a failure of vision for mission in today's world. This up-to-date resource by a veteran leader in global development work with World Vision orients readers to the history of globalization and to a Christian theological perspective on it, explores concrete realities by focusing on global poverty, and helps readers reimagine Christian mission in ways that announce the truly good news of Christ and God's kingdom. Diagrams and sidebars that incorporate the voices of global partners are included. This is the second book in a new series that reframes missiological themes and studies for students using/featuring the common theme of mission as partnership with Christians.




The Power of Love for Reaching Out to "the Other"


Book Description

Race is a result of God’s design and not of sin. God loves diversity and sought it. Race biases are normal and come as a result of likes and dislikes; love of “the other” is to be learned. In this book, Bible stories and principles are combined with four intercultural communication skills to help develop love of the other. This book builds on what Sherwood Lingenfelter and Marvin K. Mayers developed for understanding cultural values and diversity of likes and dislikes. Those differences are normal. The problem comes from excluding the other. This book explores a step-wise approach to developing the love of the other. How the person, the leader, and the church see diversity defines the church’s outreach, mission, and gospel fulfillment. Author’s Own Words Book Description The Power of Love book explains how emotions and feelings were part of God’s creation design from before sin entered this world. While departing from cognitive neuropsychology and the latest learning from science this seminar furthers the idea that race relations are not to be understood by sociology and science but by Bible and Christian beliefs. If you want to learn a non-CRT (critical race theory) approach to race relations while risking being, again, convicted of the need to reach out to the other in gospel love—enter into dialogue—with the author by reading his book and let us pray together. If you want to keep it safe and your intercultural relationships as they are—in a tongue in cheek way the author advices to—stay away from this book!




Pathways to Peacebuilding


Book Description

Given the consistent challenge of Islamist acute violence, particularly in Nigeria, this monograph attempts to respond to the question: How can Jesus’s followers pattern response to violence after Jesus’s model demonstrated in his triumph over death, evil, sin, and violence through staurocentric pathways? And how can Jesus’s followers in Nigeria adopt the same staurocentric model in order to not only overcome acute violence within the country but also to extend hands, heads, hearts, and homes of staurocentric forgiveness, hospitality, and other practices toward Muslims? In this study, I posit that peacebuilding contextual theology be grounded on the mystery of the cross (σταυρός–stauros)—a theologico-theoretical framework that the church in Nigeria should espouse in order to position herself to extend hands, heads, hearts, and homes of staurocentric practices, whose appropriation must be undertaken through constructive and critical integration of the God-given African peacebuilding concepts autochthonous to Africa’s mosaic cultural contexts. The pivotal thesis is that the staurocentric model remains the triune God’s instrument for triumphing over violence, and thus should be espoused by Jesus's followers in every era and context for peacebuilding in contexts of violence through a triadic constructive and critical integration of indigenous peacebuilding concepts.




Joyful Witness in the Muslim World


Book Description

Christianity Today Book Award Winner ASM (American Society of Missiology) Book of the Year Award Named one of Ten Outstanding Books of 2016 for Mission Studies, International Bulletin of Mission Research This up-to-date textbook features global perspectives on current Christian engagement with Islam, equipping readers for mission among Muslims. Evelyne Reisacher, who has worked extensively with Muslims in Europe, helps 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. The book may surprise those who believe mission among Muslims is nearly impossible. This is the first book in the Mission in Global Community series, which reframes missiological themes and studies for students around the common theme of mission as partnership with others. Series authors draw upon their own global experience and that of their global colleagues to illumine present realities and chart a course into the future. Series editors are Scott W. Sunquist and Amos Yong.




Engaging Neighbors and Nations


Book Description

Evangelical churches are widely known for their commitment to mission locally and to the ends of the earth. However, in the last century, there have been profound theological and sociological changes that have impacted mission practice. Church and mission leaders have encouraged Christians to respond to the need for mission locally, especially as church decline accelerates in much of the Western world. Yet others are concerned that global mission involvement is being neglected in many local churches. This study explores the factors influencing local church participation in mission both locally and around the world. Through an in-depth analysis of the practices and perspectives among evangelical churches in Australia, the author identifies a range of theological, missiological, and organizational influences on mission practice. Though beliefs about the church, the world, and mission are important, understanding organizational principles, social capital, and the power of relational networks provides invaluable insights into church-mission practice. This book is for those who long to see local churches committed to engaging both their neighbors and the nations in mission, growing our understanding of how to encourage helpful church practices for the sake of Christ.




Faithful Friendships


Book Description

On the necessity of boundary-crossing friendships for Christian discipleship Friendship isn’t always given a lot of thought—and lately, it doesn’t get a lot of time and effort, either. But in a world of busy and isolated lives, in which friendships can too easily become shallow, tenuous, and homogeneous, Dana Robert insists that good friendships are a vital and transformative part of the Christian life—a mustard seed of the kingdom of God. She believes Christians have the responsibility—and opportunity—to be countercultural by making friends across cultural, racial, socioeconomic, and religious lines that separate people from each other. In this book Robert tells the stories of Christians who, despite or even because of difficult circumstances, experienced friendship with people unlike themselves as “God with us,” as exile, as testimony, and as celebration. Jesus was a friend to his disciples. Through Jesus’s life and the lives of his followers down through the ages, Faithful Friendships shows readers how friendship can become life-changing—and even worldchanging.




The Joy of the Gospel


Book Description

The perfect gift! A specially priced, beautifully designed hardcover edition of The Joy of the Gospel with a foreword by Robert Barron and an afterword by James Martin, SJ. “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus… In this Exhortation I wish to encourage the Christian faithful to embark upon a new chapter of evangelization marked by this joy, while pointing out new paths for the Church’s journey in years to come.” – Pope Francis This special edition of Pope Francis's popular message of hope explores themes that are important for believers in the 21st century. Examining the many obstacles to faith and what can be done to overcome those hurdles, he emphasizes the importance of service to God and all his creation. Advocating for “the homeless, the addicted, refugees, indigenous peoples, the elderly who are increasingly isolated and abandoned,” the Holy Father shows us how to respond to poverty and current economic challenges that affect us locally and globally. Ultimately, Pope Francis demonstrates how to develop a more personal relationship with Jesus Christ, “to recognize the traces of God’s Spirit in events great and small.” Profound in its insight, yet warm and accessible in its tone, The Joy of the Gospel is a call to action to live a life motivated by divine love and, in turn, to experience heaven on earth. Includes a foreword by Robert Barron, author of Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith and James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage