Miriam Adeney

Review: Kingdom Without Borders

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Kingdom without BordersKingdom 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.

Other People’s Stories

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The Road to CharacterIt just occurred to me this morning that three of the books I am currently reading consist largely in telling other people’s stories. David Brooks’ The Road to Character focuses chapter by chapter on individuals as different as Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, and Augustine. None are perfect by any means but Brooks teases out the growth of their characters as they struggled with the conflict between noble aspirations and fallen nature that besets each of us.

The Religion of Democracy by Amy Kittelstrom focuses on seven classically liberal figures in American religious history and the beliefs and dispositions that shaped their lives. She covers figures as diverse as John Adams and William Ellery Channing (a key figure in the development of the Unitarian movement), to William James and Jane Addams, showing the development of an American liberal creed that was less doctrinal than focused around personal judgment and moral effort that included the benefit of one’s fellow human beings, encouraged within intellectual communities of the like-minded.

The Religion of DemocracyThe last is Miriam Adeney’s Kingdom without Borders which narrates the stories of Christians on every continent past and present who have developed Christian movements through compassionate character, personal sacrifice, and in some cases, martyrdom. For example, she narrates the life of Sadhu Sundar Singh, one of the most profound of India’s Christians.

You can look for full reviews of these books in weeks ahead, but I’m struck by the choice of each of these writers to develop the central themes of their books around telling other people’s stories. In each of these, the writers put flesh and blood on abstract ideas like compassion, moral restraint, or liberal notions of moral improvement. Often abstractions leave us cold, but when we see the stories of people who attempt to embody these commitments and shape their lives around them, it helps makes sense of these both as we relate to our own experiences past, and the life choices before us.

Kingdom without BordersWhat also strikes me as I read these three books is that they present differently grounded moral visions, sometimes within the pages as in Brooks’s book, although it centers around classic Judeo-Christian ideas. Kittelstrom’s and Adeney’s book give a sharper contrast, between the American Transcendalist tradition, and a global evangelical Christian one. One begins to see how different moral groundings sometimes lead to similar, and sometimes divergent ends. And since all of us in some way, either explicitly or implicitly, live toward some vision of a life well-lived, these narratives all help us assess both the beliefs and moral ends toward which we are living.

Is this not why we also read great fiction (if we do)? Whether it is Jane Austen, or Anthony Doerr, or even an Elizabeth Peters mystery, are we not immersing ourselves in a world where convictions, circumstances, and moral choices, and human impulse all come together, for better or worse? Yes, we can read just to be amused, and yet the truth is that the most profound works also hold a mirror up to us quietly posing the question, “how then will you live?”