Book reviews
Reviews of the books shaping mission thinking and practice. Page 4 of 40 · 954 in all.
The New Testament in Color: A Multi-Ethnic Bible Commentary
The New Testament in Color was the vision of African American New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley. Lamenting the lack of Black voices in biblical scholarship, McCaulley also realized that other marginalized voices were also missing from conversations in biblical studies.
Sacred Courage: Thinking Biblically about Fear and Anxiety
The book is a call for Christian courage for believers (including missionaries) who are afraid and anxious in this scary world.
Single-Minded Service: Recovering the Essential Role of Singles in Kingdom Leadership
The book argues for the valuable role that singles play in the expansion of God’s kingdom, contending that they are not uncredentialed nor under-qualified for essential kingdom work simply because they have no spouse.
Living Out Loud: Letting our Love for God Flow into Your Everyday Language
The book seeks to provide a new vision for spiritual engagement, which can help readers “move away from feelings of fear and awkwardness and toward the freedom of letting your love for God spill into your everyday language” (page 16).
Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations: Creating Contexts Where People Flourish
Whether organizational leadership occurs within a cross-cultural environment or not, the challenge is always to create a healthy environment. In his four-part book, Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations, Justin Irving touches on the most critical elements of organizational leadership that can be applied in…
Character Theology: Engaging God through His Cast of Characters
In Character Theology: Engaging God through His Cast of Characters, authors Tom Steffen and Ray Neu introduce an approach to teaching the narrative portions of the Bible that focuses on drawing out truths of Scripture through the lives of the Bible characters.
Hear Ye the Word of the Lord: What We Miss If We Only Read the Bible
“Can a Westernized, twenty-first century reading of Scripture – even with the benefit of scholarly exegesis – provide sufficient understanding of what Jesus said and people associated with him heard two thousand years ago?” (181).
Impacting Eternity: A Practitioner’s Guide for Sustained Movement Expansion
The literature addressing Jesus movements is narrow, crowded, and prone to repetition. However, Robert M. Reach’s latest volume attempts to move beyond compelling testimony and lists of multiplication factors to consider the overlooked issues of movement structure and sustainability.
Propelled by Hope: The Story of the Perspectives Movement
If you were to try to be the first to design a way to strategically impact and accelerate global evangelization, to mentor and disciple laypeople and the next generation of missionary leaders, and finally, to “awaken God’s people to his purpose, mobilizing his church to strategic engagement
The Missionary Movement from the West: A Biography from Birth to Old Age
Andrew Walls (1928–2021), an innovative missiologist and influential historian, envisioned this project, which tells the story of Protestant missions before his death, but realized it would not be possible (xv).
Transformational Change in Christian Ministry
Confronting a culture of individualism, Wan and Raibley argue that personal and communal transformations occur through relationships. Based on the relational nature of the Triune God, the authors’ framework, relational interactionism, suggests that Christian formation leads us into the likeness of the Trinity.
Social Research Methods: For Students and Scholars of Religious Studies
To remain relevant, theological studies must engage in social science research, argues Joshua Iyadurai in Social Research Methods. Often, however, students of theology and religious studies are ill-equipped for such a task. This book seeks to fill that gap.
The Journey Concept: Rethinking Organisational Strategy in the Global Context of God’s Mission
I have long been uncomfortable with the competitive military and sports imagery in mission literature and the prevalence of corporate strategic planning and evaluation models. Many practitioners feel the assumptions of these concepts do not fit well with the contemporary, complex, fluid realities of global mission…
Faith Adrift Christianity: How Can We Avoid Drifting Away from God?
This book is the fruit of more than 20 years of research, reflection, and observation by Cecil Stalnaker, a missionary who served in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. Stalnaker was shaken by research finding that in Sweden, for each non-religious person that starts going to church, 26 others raised in…
Facing Danger: A Guide Through Risk
The task of reaching the least reached is increasingly accompanied by risk. Anna Hampton, drawing on her years of experience in Afghanistan, helps guide the reader through risk in the second edition of her book Facing Danger, originally published in 2016.
Christ Among the Nations: Narratives of Transformation in Global Mission
What is the role of narrative in global mission today? Through biblical, historical, and contemporary stories, the authors of Christ Among the Nations demonstrate that narrative holds a unique power for global mission transformation.
From Banned Book to Bestseller: Bible Mission in Contemporary China
The book “aims to tell the journey of the Bible in China through a range of Bible missions the Lord has miraculously performed among the registered churches” (page xv), as a reference to the Chinese Protestant Churches under the umbrella organization of the Chinese Christian Council/Three-Self Patriotic Movement.
The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World
The book presents a discipleship framework that seeks to equip and empower pastors to lead, evangelize, disciple, and preach differently in today’s post-everything (post-pandemic, post-truth, post-Christian) world.
Islamic Law Meets Christian Apologetics
Suheil Madanat’s “evidential apologetics” (17) provides an original and objective approach to persuade Muslims on the authenticity of the New Testament and its testimony of a crucified and resurrected Jesus. Madanat’s approach is unique in that it is not a conventional apologetics based on Western common law but one…
Unlocking Creativity
I had the privilege of studying under Brian Schrag in 2008 as he developed the ideas that eventually became Creating Local Arts Together. As I prepared to write this review, I read this new second edition and stifled smile after smile. If you have ever talked with Brian, you cannot read this book and not hear his…
The Essence of Translation
The purpose of this volume, Islam and the Bible, is to assess the nature, impact, and value of Muslim Idiom Translations of the Bible (MITs). It is a compilation of 20 articles by 20 authors from various backgrounds, ministries, and continents.
Understanding Islamic Terms and Practices
Islam is the world’s second most widely practiced religion, with “over 1.6 billion followers” (xx). Christians all over the world, in nearly every community, are forming relationships with Muslims but often do not understand the religion’s terminology and practices.
Breaking Barriers to Evangelism
In his book Gospel Issues for the Global Church, Brent H. Burdick addresses “gospel issues,” which he identifies as concerns that pose a hindrance to “effective global evangelization today” (xi).
Fashioning Mission Frameworks
The Mission Matrix is not a theology of mission. Instead, it offers a framework for thinking theologically about mission. How are we to understand our God-assigned mission in our specific context and time? This book aims to help both students and practitioners answer that question.