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Books I Have Read: The Heart of Church and Mission

I’m forever banging on about books that I believe that church and mission leaders should read. This one is short, cheap and absolutely essential reading. I seriously can’t imagine an excuse why you would not buy it.

Some of the books that I mention on Kouyanet are unlikely to interest lots of people; they can be too long, too expensive or too geeky. However, as far as The Heart of Church and Mission goes, no such excuse can be allowed. It’s just under 80 pages long and can be obtained for just over a fiver (or less if you shop around).

However, don’t let the slimness of the volume put you off, this is quite simply the best book available on the subject of how churches and agencies can and should work together in overseas mission. It covers, in a practical way, some of the ground that I covered in recent blog posts (here and here for example).

It’s not comfortable reading for agency leaders – so they’d better all read it and it is fairly unsettling for churches – so they’d better read it too.

There are three chapters;

  1. The Intentionally Missional Church
  2. Putting Mission at the Heart of the Church
  3. Putting the Church at the Heart of Mission

These are followed by an epilogue which predicts how the church and world mission will look in 2050.

The blurb on the back of the book says:

This book brings together a passion for the church and a passion for global mission. It looks at the heart of the UK church, asking whether and how it beats for mission and explores the passion of the mission community, and asks how it involves the local church. You might be forgiven for expecting that the heart of the church and the heart of mission would be interwoven and closely linked together, but that has not been the case.

This is a book which should be widely read by church and mission leaders; it is important, timely and easily within the reach of people who have neither the time, nor the money to spend on longer books.

In the interests of transparency, I should point out that I was provided with a copy of The Heart of Church and Mission by the author. I also made comments on the original manuscript and was asked to write a commendation for the introduction (which I forgot to do – my fault, not the book’s). 

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