Book Description

Synopsis: Enormous challenges and opportunities face the Christian church in our globalized, rapidly changing world. It is becoming increasingly clear that the church and its leaders need a missional self-understanding. In this volume, Graham Hill asks: "What does it mean for the church to be truly missional?" This book outlines the thought of twelve leading thinkers, and puts their thinking into conversation with a missional understanding of the church. Most of the missional literature of the past twenty years is practical, telling us how to be a missional church, rather than why certain theological themes compel the church toward a missional self-understanding and existence. This book takes a different approach. It outlines a basic missional understanding of the church by engaging theology and Scripture. It examines some of the key theological themes that are foundational for a missional church, and does this in conversation with twelve leading thinkers. This book provides indispensable foundations for a Christ-centered, gospel-shaped, theologically informed, and systematic missional view of the church. Endorsements: "Graham Hill ranges far and wide in order to construct a viable ecumenical, but distinctly missional, ecclesiology. In so doing, he provides us with a classy, intelligent, and passionate contribution to one of the defining issues of our time." --Alan Hirsch Author of The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church "It is increasingly clear to me that Christian understandings of both the nature and the mission of the church are in considerable disarray today. Graham Hill's highly important book offers the beginnings of a profoundly important exploration of both questions, together. Salt, Light, and a City is must reading." --David P. Gushee Mercer University "Graham Hill writes from a Protestant evangelical perspective, but this is a broadly based study, drawing on insights from all the historic traditions as well as biblical understandings and on case studies that highlight the experience of those who are operating on the missional edge today. This is a significant contribution to the ongoing discussions about missiology and ecclesiology that will take the conversation forward in creative and well-informed directions." --John Drane Author of After McDonaldization: Mission, Ministry, and Christian Discipleship in an Age of Uncertainty "Salt, Light, and a City is no cloying attempt at a simplistic universal model for the missional church. Graham Hill insists we do the hard work of engaging Trinitarian theology, contemporary missiology, and broad understandings of ecclesiology to find a way forward. In brief, it is an invaluable addition to any library of research into the missional paradigm." --Michael Frost Morling College (Sydney, Australia Author Biography: Graham Hill is Professor of Leadership and Pastoral Theology at Morling College in Sydney, Australia (affiliated with the MCD University of Divinity). His ministry experiences include church planting, pastoring in a large growing congregation, and coaching pastors and planters of missional experiments.