Companion to the Poor This paradigm-shifting book has become a best-selling classic, translated into six languages, republished yearly for 30 years. It keeps upending the lifestyles of each decade of idealist seekers for genuine spirituality. Over a thousand workers have ended up in the slums of the world's mega-cities after reading it. It is the story of a young man's struggle in the slum of Tatalon, Manila. A struggle to find a way to live among the poor, preach good news to the poor, and transform the poverty. Entering into poverty, struggling with sickness, rejection and the many experiences of engagement in a dark place, out of it came the formation of a faith community and the birthing of a new pattern of evangelical theology of preaching grace, forming communities of faith and love, effecting economic change and doing justice. The fruit of those struggles has been a plethora of movements of incarnational workers living among the 1.3 billion urban poor of the global slums. This book encapsulates the core of new paradigms of evangelical theology - justice-oriented, while proclaiming good news, caring for those on the margins while growing communities of faith, oral theology based versus book-based, apostolic versus inward, with a spirituality of both quietness and the emotional celebratory spirituality of those who must release the pains of oppression weekly, seeking transformion on this earth as a progression to the coming reign of Christ.

This book is a study in a missions theology underlying both process and goals of "City-wide Transforming Revival." It has been grounded in local realities of Auckland as a representative modern/postmodern city. Global processes among urban missions strategists and theologians have provoked the question, "What is the relationship of the Spirit of Christ to the transformation of a postmodern city?" This book proposes a new hermeneutic (the processes of studying, interpreting and applying the scriptures) of "transformational conversations," an interfacing of faith community conversations and urban conversations.