In The Great Omission, respected missions thinker Robertson McQuilkin answers the question, "How is it--with so many unreached peoples, there are so few Christians going?" He investigates the reasons so few attempt to carry the message of Christ to the multitudes who have never heard of him. Not only is McQuilkin well-versed on trends and strategies in world missions, he also knows how to present the challenge of world evangelism in an unforgettable way.

This book brings together lectures and articles by the renowned historian of world Christianity, making them available, many for the first time, to scholars and students of world mission. While examining the many aspects that have characterized mission, indigenous Christianity, and colonialism in modern Africa, The Missionary Movement in Christian History has a far broader reach. Essays such as "The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture" reveal the paradoxes of the Christian movement as a whole in discussing how different primitive Mediterranean Christianity is from early Catholicism, from Celtic monasticism, from Reformation Protestantism, and from Nigerian Spirit Christianity. Andrew Walls shows how the central question for Christianity has always been one of identity in many different forms, a phenomenon revealed at each stage of its history by the missionary movement. What this means for theology, however, has hardly been explored. This is the subtext of Walls' work, providing extraordinary insights and successful counters to secular critiques of world Christianity.

The Emerging Church movement developed in the mid-1990s among primarily white, urban, middle-class pastors and laity who were disenchanted with America's conservative Evangelical sub-culture. It is a response to the increasing divide between conservative Evangelicals and concerned critics who strongly oppose what they consider overly slick, corporate, and consumerist versions of faith. A core feature of their response is a challenge to traditional congregational models, often focusing on new church plants and creating networks of related house churches. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, James S. Bielo explores the impact of the Emerging Church movement on American Evangelicals. He combines ethnographic analysis with discussions of the movement's history, discursive contours, defining practices, cultural logics, and contentious interactions with conservative Evangelical critics to rethink the boundaries of "Evangelical" as a category. Ultimately, Bielo makes a novel contribution to our understanding of the important changes at work among American Protestants, and illuminates how Emerging Evangelicals interact with the cultural conditions of modernity, late modernity, and visions of "postmodern" Christianity.

HOW CAN WE KNOW WE'LL GO TO HEAVEN? A recent poll indicated that for every American who believes he or she is going to hell, there are 120 who believe they're going to heaven. This optimism stands in stark contrast to Jesus Christ's words written in the Bible: "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Matthew 7:13-14). The truth is that according to the Bible we don't automatically go to heaven. In fact, hell--not heaven--is our default destination. Unless our sin problem is solved once and for all, we can't enter heaven. That's the bad news. But once that's straight in our minds we're ready to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. Jesus took upon himself, on the cross, the hell we deserve so that we could experience for eternity the heaven we don't deserve! THE ONLY TWO OPTIONS There are two possible destinations when we die: heaven or hell. Can we really know in advance where we'll go? John, one of the writers of the Bible, said this: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life" (1 John 5:13). We can know for sure that we'll go to heaven when we die. Do you? To sin means to fall short of God's holy standards. Sin is what ended paradise in the Garden of Eden. And all of us, like Adam and Eve, are sinners. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Sin separates us from a relationship with God (Isaiah 59:2) and it deceives us and makes us think that wrong is right and right is wrong (Proverbs 14:12). Sin has terrible consequences, but God has provided a solution: "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). Jesus Christ, the Son of God, loved us so much that he left the riches of heaven to become a man and deliver us from our sin. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16). He came to identify with us in our humanity and our weakness, but he did so without being tainted by our sin, self-deception, and moral failings (Hebrews 4:15-16). Jesus died on the cross as the only one worthy to pay the penalty for our sins demanded by the holiness of God: "For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). But in victory over death, God raised Jesus from the grave, defeating the consequences of sin (1 Corinthians 15:3-4, 54-57). When Christ died on the cross for us, he said, "It is finished" (John 19:30). In those times "It is finished" was commonly written across certificates of debt when they were canceled. It meant "Paid in full." Christ died so that the certificate of debt consisting of all our sins could once and for all be marked "Paid in full." THE CRITICAL DECISION Only when our sins are dealt with in Christ can we enter heaven. We cannot pay our own way. Jesus said, "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Because of Jesus Christ's sacrificial death on the cross on our behalf, God freely offers us forgiveness. To be forgiven, we must recognize and repent of our sins. Forgiveness is not automatic. It's conditioned upon confession: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). Christ offers to everyone the gifts of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life. "Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price" (Revelation 22:17). There's no righteous deed we can do that will earn us a place in heaven (Titus 3:5). We come to Christ empty-handed. We can take no credit for salvation. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). This gift cannot be worked for, earned, or achieved. It's dependent solely on Christ's generous sacrifice on our behalf. Now is the time to make things right with God. Confess your sinfulness and accept the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on your behalf. You are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person, and heaven is the place. They are a package-- they come together. You cannot get heaven without Jesus or Jesus without heaven. "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near" (Isaiah 55:6). For all eternity you'll be glad you did. If you understand what God has done to make forgiveness and eternal life possible for you, you may want to express it in words like these: "Dear Lord, I confess that I do not measure up to your perfect standard. Thank you for sending Jesus to die for my sins. I now place my trust in him as my Savior. Thank you for your forgiveness and the gift of eternal life."

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

aEspecially valuable for religious studies and womenas studies scholars and sociologists of religion interested in gender and/or women in religious movements.a
--"Nova Religios"

"It is the trend in scholarship these days to argue that women find empowerment in restriction. Ingersoll argues, however, that an alternative interpretation may be that subordinate living may empower a form of relational power."
--"Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion"

"The feminist resistance [Ingersoll] documents, if able to assert itself, could have profound consequences not only for evangelical women but for the rest of us as well, by opening up the door for a detente in our current culture wars."--"The Women's Review of Books"

aIngersoll has done the sociology of religion an enormous service by providing a more nuanced description of the ongoing personal and institutional struggles of the minority of conservative Protestants who identify themselves both evangelical and feminist.a."-- Sally K. Gallagher, Oregon State University

"This highly accessible book should be required reading across all denominations."
--"Christianity Today"

Evangelical Christian Women draws on two years of ethnographic research nationwide to shed new light on the gender conflict faced by women in evangelical Christianity. Julie Ingersoll goes beyond previous attempts to find avenues of empowerment for fundamentalist women to offer a more nuanced look at the challenges they face when they occupy positions of leadership which violate traditional gender norms. She looks where other studies do not--at women who, while remaining entrenched in andcommitted to evangelical Christianity, are also resisting accepted gender roles.

Evangelical Christian Women offers a look at conservative women who challenge gender norms within their religious traditions, the fallout they experience as part of the ensuing conflict, and the significance of the conflict over gender for the development and character of culture. In the face of a growing number of scholarly studies of conservative religious women that argue that submission is somehow "really" empowerment, this book seeks to get at the other side of the story; to document and explore the experiences of the women caught in the middle of the conservative Christian culture war over gender.

A 2001 Christianity Today Award of Merit winner "Arguably, the church's greatest challenge in the next century will be the problem of the scandal of particularity. More than ever before, Christians will need to explain why they follow Jesus and not the Buddha or Confucius or Krishna or Muhammed. But if, while relating their faith to the faiths, Christians treat non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church's message will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism. "Recent evangelical introductions to the problem of other religions have built commendably on foundations laid by J. N. D. Anderson and Stephen Neill. Anderson and Neill opened up the "heathen" worlds to the evangelical West, showing that many non-Christians also seek salvation and have personal relationships with their gods. In the last decade Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have argued for an inclusivist understanding of salvation, and Harold Netland has shed new light on the question of truth in the religions. Yet no evangelicals have focused--as nonevangelicals Keith Ward, Diana Eck and Paul Knitter have done--on the revelatory value of truth in non-Christian religions. Anderson and Neill showed that there are limited convergences between Christian and non-Christian traditions, and Pinnock has argued that there might be truths Christians can learn from religious others. But as far as I know, no evangelicals have yet examined the religions in any sort of substantive way for what Christians can learn without sacrificing, as Knitter and John Hick do, the finality of Christ. "This book is the beginning of an evangelical theology of the religions that addresses not the question of salvation but the problem of truth and revelation, and takes seriously the normative claims of other traditions. It explores the biblical propositions that Jesus is the light that enlightens every person (Jn 1:9) and that God has not left Himself without a witness among non-Christian traditions (Acts 14:17). It argues that if Saint Augustine learned from Neo-Platonism to better understand the gospel, if Thomas Aquinas learned from Aristotle to better understand the Scriptures, and if John Calvin learned from Renaissance humanism, perhaps evangelicals may be able to learn from the Buddha--and other great religious thinkers and traditions--things that can help them more clearly understand God's revelation in Christ. It is an introductory word in a conversation that I hope will go much further among evangelicals." (Gerald McDermott, in the introduction toCan Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?

Western missionaries in China were challenged by something they could not have encountered in their native culture; most Westerners were Christian, and competitions in their own countries were principally denominational. Once they entered China they unwittingly became spiritual merchants who marketed Christianity as only one religion among the long-established purveyors of other religions, such as the masters of Buddhist and Daoist rites. A Voluntary Exile explores the convergence of cultures. This collection of new and insightful research considers themes of religious encounter and accommodation in China from 1552 to the present, and confronts how both Western Europeans and indigenous Chinese mitigated the cultural and religious antagonisms that resulted from cultural misunderstanding. The studies in this work identify areas where missionary accommodation in China has succeeded and failed, and offers new insights into what contributed to cultural conflict and confluence. Each essay responds in some way to the "accommodationist" approach of Western missionaries and Christianity, focusing on new areas of inquiry. For example, Michael Maher, SJ, considers the educational and religious formation of Matteo Ricci prior to his travels to China, and how Ricci's intellectual approach was connected to his so-called "accommodationist method" during the late Ming. Eric Cunningham explores the hackneyed assertion that Francis Xavier's mission to Asia was a "failure" due to his low conversion rates, suggesting that Xavier's "failure" instigated the entire Chinese missionary enterprise of the 16th and 17th centuries. And, Liu Anrong confronts the hybridization of popular Chinese folk religion with Catholicism in Shanxi province. The voices in this work derive from divergent scholarly methodologies based on new research, and provide the reader a unique encounter with a variety of disciplinary views. This unique volume reaches across oceans, cultures, political systems, and religious traditions to provide important new research on the complexities of cultural encounters between China and the West.

Connect your journey of discipleship with a passion for the world to meet Jesus Christ. For many followers of Jesus, discipleship means doing certain things to deepen our connection with Jesus Christ. But our spiritual growth checklists are often disconnected from the mission of reaching a lost world with the gospel message. Taking a holistic approach that unites evangelism and discipleship, Kevin and Sherry Harney demonstrate how God's plan for our spiritual growth is intimately connected to his mission to the world. Based on the teachings and reflection of their book, Organic Disciples, Kevin and Sherry will lead you and your group through the seven markers of spiritual maturity and how these biblical practices can connect us with God's work of reaching people with his love: Bible Engagement Passionate Prayer Wholehearted Worship Humble Service Joyful Generosity Consistent Community Organic Outreach True spiritual maturity will always lead believers outward to engage the world with the good news and truth of Jesus. You'll learn how to overcome the common roadblocks and false narratives that stand in the way of spiritual maturity and how to design a personal pathway of growth to be more like Jesus in character and mission. Used together with the Organic Disciples book and the free video study and online assessment available at OrganicOutreach.com, churches and individuals can better identify where they are in their growth journey and what the next steps are in becoming more like Jesus.

Bartolome de las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion marks a critical point in Lascasian scholarship. The result of the collaborative work of seventeen prominent scholars, contributions span the fields of history, Latin American studies, literary criticism, philosophy and theology. The volume offers to specialists and non-specialists alike access to a rich and thoughtful overview of nascent colonial Latin American and early modern Iberian studies in a single text. Contributors: Rolena Adorno; Matthew Restall; David Thomas Orique, O.P.; Rady Roldan-Figueroa; Carlos A. Jauregui; David Solodkow; Alicia Mayer; Claus Dierksmeier; Daniel R. Brunstetter; Victor Zorrilla; Luis Fernando Restrepo; David Lantigua; Ramon Dario Valdivia Gimenez; Eyda M. Merediz; Laura Dierksmeier; Guillaume Candela, and Armando Lampe.

We are enamored with stories about cops, but rarely do we get a chance to walk in the shoes of one while reading about the personal and spiritual battles waged when one is fighting crime. Jim's narrative will pull you into the moment of each crisis. These stories are the material of movies but they happened in real life. Jim will weave his experiences into the truth taught in Scripture. Whether or not you are part of the law enforcement community, you will be entertained by the adventures. Regardless of your relationship with Christ, you will be challenged to do something with the claims made by Jesus. There is engaging action in this book, but the serious purpose is that it will serve as a challenging devotional guide and bring you closer to Christ.

The Church as Safe Haven conceptualizes the rise of Chinese Christianity as a new civilizational paradigm that encouraged individuals and communities to construct a sacred order for empowerment in modern China. Once Christianity enrooted itself in Chinese society as an indigenous religion, local congregations acquired much autonomy which enabled new religious institutions to take charge of community governance. Our contributors draw on newly-released archival sources, as well as on fieldwork observations investigating what Christianity meant to Chinese believers, how native actors built their churches and faith-based associations within the pre-existing social networks, and how they appropriated Christian resources in response to the fast-changing world. This book reconstructs the narratives of ordinary Christians, and places everyday faith experience at the center. Contributors are: Christie Chui-Shan Chow, Lydia Gerber, Melissa Inouye, Diana Junio, David Jong Hyuk Kang, Lars Peter Laamann, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, George Kam Wah Mak, John R. Stanley, R. G. Tiedemann, Man-Shun Yeung.

"No other man in history was so mightily used of God in revival as Asahel Nettleton. He labored amidst more revivals of religion than Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield One can learn much about how God moves in revival by studying Nettleton's life, therefore this book will be a useful tool for any serious student of revival. Secondly, the role that Nettleton played as a defender of the faith against the 'New Measures' and the 'New Haven Theology' reveals how theology in America shifted from its Puritan roots of Calvinism to a more Federalized man-centered theology" (from Introduction by author E.A. Johnston).