The Month in Reviews: August 2015

September 1, 2015August 31, 2015 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

This month’s reading began with the adventurous growth of global Christianity and ended with the struggle of an adventurous couple to live in the cutting edge while setting down roots in midwestern America. A couple of my books explored the follow of war–the illusion that World War I would be over before the leaves fell in autumn and the kind of frenzy of rhetoric and aroused passions that prevailed before the American Civil War. Back to back, I read a book for entering college students on academic faithfulness, and a guide to meaningful retirement. Mixed in this month was a book on mentoring, a collection of Charles Spurgeon sermons, and more! One of the more unusual was a gift from my wife–the story of a cattle rancher in the Great Plains that converted to buffalo ranching. I enjoyed it so much I immediately started reading the sequel.

1. Kingdom Without Borders, Miriam Adeney. Adeney, a professor of global and urban ministries, chronicles the global spread of Christianity through stories of sacrificial and courageous Christians in the Majority World.

2. Interpreting the Prophetic Books: An Exegetical Handbook, Gary V. Smith. This is a concise guide for those preaching from Old Testament prophetic texts covering issues of genre, themes, interpretation, preaching, and contemporary application.

3. The Relational Soul, Richard Plass and James Cofield. Our relational capacity is essential to being human but often hindered by the false self that struggles with trust, but may be transformed through God’s gracious intervention, often through other people, that allows us to receive the gift of discovering our true self.

4. Home Before the Leaves Fall, Ian Senior. This is a new account of Germany’s invasion of France at the beginning of World War I, describing how it almost succeeded and why it ultimately ended in stalemate.

5. An All Around Ministry, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. A collection of messages given by Charles Haddon Spurgeon as President of the Preachers College during their annual conferences.

6. Launch Your Encore, Hans Finzel & Rick Hicks. A guide to living purposefully from 60 onward, which many call “retirement” but the authors consider our “encore”.

7. Learning for the Love of God, Donald Opitz and Derek Melleby. Written for undergraduate college students who are Christians, this book explores the idea of academic faithfulness as an integral part of the student’s discipleship and how this is cultivated.

8. Ecstatic Nation, Brenda Wineapple. Ecstatic Nation explores the period of 1848-1877, and the heightened feelings and frenzy of a country contending over slavery, going to war with itself, and then engaging in the conflicts of westward expansion and Reconstruction.

9.Deep Mentoring, Randy D. Reese and Robert Loane. Deep Mentoring proposes that the development of Christian leaders of integrity is a lifelong, God-driven process that mentors play a crucial part in through attentiveness and focus on the spiritual and character formation of rising leaders.

10. Global Evangelicalism, Donald M. Lewis and Richard V. Pierard, eds. This collection surveys the global growth of evangelicalism from historical and theological perspectives, including case studies of growth in each region of the world, and special concerns of ecumenism and gender issues.

11. Buffalo for the Broken Heart, Dan O’Brien. Part memoir, part nature-writing, this book describes the story of a cattle rancher who hits bottom, and makes the transition to herding buffalo for economic and ecological reasons.

12. This Ordinary Adventure, Christine Jeske and Adam Jeske. The Jeskes describe what happens when their quest to live a life of “amazing days” meets up with the realities of returning to suburban America, parenting, regular work–and routine.

Best Book of the Month: Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart stood out as a spare but compelling account of ranching in the Great Plains, weaving ecological insight of the symbiotic relationship of buffalo, land, and other creatures in the Great Plains, and the human community trying to eke its life out on this unforgiving land.

Best Quote(s) of the Month: I’ll give you two, the first being from O’Brien’s book:

“Was the increase in bird life on the ranch a partial result of a different, evolutionarily more compatible kind of grazing? Did the buffalo’s way of moving quickly from one part of the pasture to another affect the grass more positively than the wandering of domestic livestock? Was the entire matrix of the ranch’s ecosystem improved by the simple conversion back to large herbivores that had evolved to live here? In my heart I was coming to believe that the answer to all these questions was yes. I wanted to shout it to the skies, but I had learned long before that when profound questions are asked of the heart, the answers are best kept to yourself” (p. 168).

The second was from Spurgeon:

“We must cultivate a cogent as well as a clear style; we must be forceful. Some imagine this consists in speaking loudly, but I can assure them they are in error. Nonsense does not improve by being bellowed.”

Look for reviews in the coming days of a book on evangelical universalism (is this an oxymoron?), a historical fiction piece on the battle of Agincourt, the sequel to Buffalo for the Broken Heart. I’ll also be wading into some essays on the works of C.S. Lewis, and the Zaleskis’ The Inklings. With his passing, an Oliver Sacks book just found its way to the top of my TBR pile as well.

With cooler days approaching, I hope you’ll find some good books to curl up with along with a warm drink!

[Links in this post are to the full reviews in Bob on Books. In those reviews, you may find links to publishers websites.]

Review: Kingdom Without Borders

August 4, 2015August 3, 2015 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Kingdom Without Borders, Miriam Adeney. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009.

Summary: Adeney, a professor of global and urban ministries, chronicles the global spread of Christianity through stories of sacrificial and courageous Christians in the Majority World.

Philip Jenkins has studied the spread of Christianity in the southern hemisphere and majority world. For many this is a study of statistics and demographics. Miriam Adeney tells a similar story, not so much through demographics as through people, some deeply spiritual, some taking great risks, and some suffering great loss, and achieving great glory and the spread of the gospel.

In her first chapter, on the spread of global Christianity, she observes:

“…the future global church may not be Western-led, and that’s OK. Let the mantle pass. We in the West can learn to follow, can’t we?” (p. 40).

The remainder of the book is the story of some of those who we may follow, or at least learn to work with in humble partnership.

She begins with the rapidly growing church in China, and the persecution that has and still occurs and the courageous witness of house church leaders and rural pastors. She then alternates chapters on peoples or even continents with themes like “Word” focusing on Ann Judson’s pioneering Bible translation efforts and the continuing importance of this work. She turns to pentecostal Latin America, and then the spirituality of Sadhu Sundar Singh. She turns to the Muslim world, and particularly Iran where there may be as many as 800,000 Christians facing everything from losing their jobs to losing their lives.

She explores the catastrophe of global poverty, the mistakes often made in development efforts and the creative programs that are fostering sustainable development in various parts of the world, particularly uplifting women. Then she tells the stories of Christian mission in the Hindu world and the challenge of contextualizing the gospel without compromising it in this context. She considers “song” and the necessity of music in the heart languages and musical idioms of majority cultures.

She explores African Christians who “go through fire”, facing the challenge of Islam in some countries, the challenge of prosperity gospels in others. Her concluding two chapters center around the death and resurrection life of Jesus–the real thread of persecution and suffering and death that runs through many of these narratives, and the vision toward which the church lives of the new heaven and new earth where the nations are gathering into “the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ.”

This book is less a tight intellectual argument and more an exuberant travelogue around the theme of the growth of global Christianity. It is not a book of strategy but of stories that challenge, inspire, and exemplify vibrant Christian faith. In particular, it can serve to lift the eyes of westerners caught up in our intramural controversies and cultural captivities to see the moving of the Spirit of God and the faithfulness of Christians. Hopefully this book might awaken us to what God is doing beyond our own borders (and how silly we must look to some of our brothers and sisters). And that would be a good thing.

Review: The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott

June 11, 2014June 12, 2014 / rtrube54 / 3 Comments

The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott by Brian Stanley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title of this book proposes an ambitious project and I am impressed with how well Brian Stanley pulls this off in under 250 pages of text. While focusing on the evangelical landscape in the U.S. and U.K.(hence Graham and Stott), he gives us a helpful overview of the global spread of the evangelical movement from 1945 to the year 2000.

He opens with exploring the dynamics of this period–communications, the spread of evangelicalism in the English-speaking world, and the growing evangelical influence of the majority world. He then goes back to the beginning of this period and explores the differentiation of evangelical from fundamentalist in its US, British, Canadian and Australian forms, marked most notably in the US with the establishment of Christianity Today as the print organ of the forming evangelical consensus.

The next chapter on missions, evangelism, and revival focuses on the development of Billy Graham’s global ministry, the World Evangelical Fellowship, the Evangelical Fellowship of India, and the East Africa Revival, and finally the work of Scripture Union in Africa. “Scholarship, the Bible, and Preaching” focuses on the beginnings of an evangelical effort to engage the biblical scholarship of the day and produce scholarly work consonant with an evangelical view of scripture, including the New Bible Commentary. Stanley explores the British controversy over inspiration and the later American one centered around Fuller Seminary over the issue of inerrancy. The chapter concludes with profiling the development of expository preaching as an expression of evangelical biblical conviction in the ministries of Martyn Lloyd Jones, John R. W. Stott, and James Boice.

Chapter 5 profiles the major evangelical apologists of the period beginning with Cornelius Van Til, Carl F.H. Henry, Edward J Carnell, Francis Schaeffer, and Leslie Newbigin. He also cites the philosophical work of Alvin Plantinga, and the appropriation by evangelicals of High Church Anglican, C.S. Lewis, whose approach to the Bible was anything but evangelical. Chapter 6 explores the history of world missions consultations and the increasing social justice emphasis beginning from a bare mention at Berlin 1966, to a greater majority world presence and emphasis at Lausanne 1974 and the increasing integration of evangelism and social justice efforts since.

Chapter 7 covers the global spread of pentecostalism and that rapid growth of pentecostal movements in the majority world. This often gets short shrift in Western contexts but is critical to understanding global evangelicalism. Then the book concludes with raising the disturbing question of whether evangelicalism is simply diffusing, or in fact disintegrating as a cohesive movement with a coherent theological stance. The book ends with the provocative idea that this may not be something decided in the West but in the Majority world.

I found this book a fascinating overview of this decisive period–how decisive, the next 50 years may tell. It makes one give thanks again for the vision and character of so many profiled in this book, notably John Stott and Billy Graham, but also many other scholars, pastors, evangelists and missionaries of this period. At the same time, I think the book shows evidence of, but fails to diagnose the critical issue of the lack of consensus with regard to what is meant by the inspiration, authority, and inerrancy (or infallibility, or trustworthiness) of the Bible that was oft fought over and also the source of an interpretive pluralism that could lead to disintegration of this movement. Does final authority lie with the individual interpreter, within “interpretive communities”, or in the tradition of biblical interpretation? This is an issue discussed at length in Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason (reviewed here). Perhaps an exploration of this issue in detail would move beyond the descriptive character of this work and yet this issue is important in what seems a growing movement of frustrated evangelicals to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. That being said, Stanley has given us a masterful overview of the development of evangelicalism up to the turn of the century.

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