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Getting To Know The World Church: 2

Some suggestions for reading and places to look if you want to know more about what God is doing in the world today.

In the first post in this series, I set out some principles about getting to know the world church and made one practical suggestion. In this one, I’d like to direct you to some resources that may be of help in getting to grips with the diversity and complexity of God’s family. I know from the start that this list will be incomplete and I would welcome further suggestions in the comments below. If you’d rather add your own suggestions to a Twitter thread or on Facebook, could you also include them in the comments so that future readers of the blog can benefit from your ideas?

A key question to ask in this is who is telling whose story? Ideally, we should read things by people telling their own stories rather than relying on Westerners telling the stories of other people. That’s why I’m not convinced that missionary publications are a good source for learning about the church around the world; they tend to have stories told second hand (I go into this in some detail in my analysis of mission agency use of social media on the downloads page – though you do have to pay for it). That being said, some of the resources on this list do break this rule.

Top of the list is Whose Religion is Christianity? by Lamin Sanneh. This short book is rather odd in that it is developed as a Socratic dialogue (questions and answers). However, it is vitally important for anyone who is trying to understand what God is doing in the world today. If you have not read it, you should.

Overviews

The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins is another must-read. It charts the changes in the church around the world and clearly plots the shift in the centre of gravity of Christianity that we are living through. I’d also strongly recommend The New Faces of Christianity by the same author (if you can find a copy). On a more popular level, The Church is Bigger than You Think by Patrick Johnstone (of Operation World fame) is a good overview of the shifting patterns of the church. Kingdom Without Borders by Miriam Adeney is an inspiring series of stories from around the world, which is well worth a read. I’ll be writing a fuller review of Christianity as a World Religion by Sebastian and Kirsteen Kim in the next few days. To my mind, this is the best of the overviews that I have listed in this section.

Specific Books

I don’t want this post to be too long, so I’m simply going to list a number of books that I have found helpful over the years. If you click on the links you should be taken to a page on Amazon which will give you some background.

Publishers

Books about the world church and mission are rarely published by the more popular Christian publishers, so if you want to browse good material from outside of your normal world you will need to look at specialist publishing houses. I’d recommend these three:

  • Regnum Books: The publishing arm of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies
  • Langham Books: The best place for finding majority world theology.
  • Orbis Books: Another good source of Non-Western authors.

Websites

Just a couple to mention: Vinoth Ramchandra’s blog should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the church around the world. It is particularly valuable for its insights into Western Christianity seen from the outside. Don’t expect to be comfortable reading it. From Every Nation is a new initiative by my friend Chris Howles; these are early days, but I’d encourage you to sign up for his podcast and emails.

Lastly, if you don’t want to spend money on books, you could at least read my essay “Reading the Bible With the Global Church” which is available on my downloads page (it’s free).

Please, add your comments below.

2 replies on “Getting To Know The World Church: 2”

Also have a look at the Global Church Project, theglobalchurchproject.com, which interviews a number of Majority World thinkers, available as videos, podcast, and written up as a book. There’s also a blog with lists of Majority World theologians.

Thanks Eddie. You’ve packed a lot of great resources into a brief blogpost!
Cardoza-Orlandi & Gonzalez’s book “To All Nations from All Nations” is worth adding to the list. Their final chapter contains 9 mission challenges for the 21st century. You could spin off a blogpost for each of them!

On publishers, IVP USA have a series “missiological engagements” – covering a wide range of topics by a diversity of authors.

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