In the long trek of human history, the adage that there will never be peace among the nations until there is peace among the religions has never been truer. The growing trend toward spiritually inspired violence throughout the emerging global village of the twenty-first century has taken a terrible toll on the lives of thousands of innocent victims. The primary purpose of this book is to address this issue head-on by examining the role that the earth's diverse faith communities can play in stopping the needless hatreds and hostilities that all too often arise from the search for spiritual fulfillment. At this stage of human evolution, nothing is more urgent.

How is religion changing in the twenty-first century? In the global era, religion has leapt onto the world stage, often in contradictory ways. Some religious activists are antagonistic and engage in protests, violent acts, and political challenges. Others are positive and help to shape an emerging transnational civil society. In addition, a new global religion may be in the making, providing a moral and spiritual basis for a worldwide community of concern about environmental issues, human rights, and international peace. God in the Tumult of the Global Square explores all of these directions, based on a five-year Luce Foundation project that involved religious leaders, scholars, and public figures in workshops held in Cairo, Moscow, Delhi, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Santa Barbara. In this book, the voices of these religious observers around the world express both the hopes and fears about new forms of religion in the global age.

Over the past seventy years, World Vision has grown from a small missionary agency to the largest Christian humanitarian organization in the world, with 40,000 employees, offices in nearly one hundred countries, and an annual budget of over $2 billion. While founder Bob Pierce was an evangelist with street smarts, the most recent World Vision U.S. presidents move with ease between megachurches, the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and the corridors of Capitol Hill. Though the organization has remained decidedly Christian, it has earned the reputation as an elite international nongovernmental organization managed efficiently by professional experts fluent in the language of both marketing and development. God's Internationalists is the first comprehensive study of World Vision—or any such religious humanitarian agency. In chronicling the organization's transformation from 1950 to the present, David P. King approaches World Vision as a lens through which to explore shifts within post-World War II American evangelicalism as well as the complexities of faith-based humanitarianism. Chronicling the evolution of World Vision's practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure, King demonstrates how the organization rearticulated and retained its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a narrow American evangelical subculture. King's pairing of American evangelicals' interactions abroad with their own evolving identity at home reframes the traditional narrative of modern American evangelicalism while also providing the historical context for the current explosion of evangelical interest in global social engagement. By examining these patterns of change, God's Internationalists offers a distinctive angle on the history of religious humanitarianism.

How you eat affects the planet - and everyone else on it. What you eat might literally cost the earth. It also has implications for your health, for the grower or producer, and for the way you think about the world. What in God's Name Are You Eating? faces what many of us choose to ignore in the Western world: we, as adults, have allowed a childlike innocence to mask the real cost of the environment in which we are cocooned, while thousands elsewhere find themselves drought-stricken and starving. 'What in God's name are they not eating?' 'Enough' is the simple answer and we are part of the reason why. The price of 'life', as we know it, is high. To those of us who have 'life', there is a moral imperative to enable others to share it rather than suppress them. With its advocacy of a globally responsibly discipleship, What in God's Name Are You Eating? enables us to see how the world's peoples can have life and a long future. While the reflection is rooted in radical Mennonite Christianity, the challenge is to those of faith - and those of none.

What does God’s mission look like? Who is supposed to carry it out—and how? Juan F. Martínez and Jamie Pitts lead us on an inquiry into God’s mission in the world: what it is, what it is not, and who is invited to be part of it. If Jesus is truly God’s mission incarnate, we need to look at what Jesus did and how he did it. Martínez helps readers understand what mission means, why Christians in the past have made missteps, and how we can learn from Christian communities that are spreading the good news of Jesus today. Doing mission in the way of Jesus may look different from what many assume, but it is a call that the church cannot afford to miss.

Together on God’s Mission investigates Southern Baptist history, showing how and why the Southern Baptist Convention came to embrace the vision of a cooperative denomination. It also explores how this vision has shaped denominational identity and structure. This historical study is followed by a discussion of the biblical description of how the mission of God determines the mission of the church. This study shows that God’s mission is not simply furthered by churches working together, but rather that cooperation between churches makes up a key component of God’s mission. Finally, the study concludes that the Southern Baptist Convention is uniquely positioned to enable churches to fully participate in God’s mission to redeem the nations and restore creation from the effects of the Fall.

What is our preconception about Muslims? Do we continue to practice medical missions in a way that is no longer considered an effective means of presenting the gospel to the unreached? Is our gospel message biblically balanced and firmly contextualized in the context that we try to serve? There are numerous questions that we may ask ourselves when we desire to share God’s love with people who are still alienated from it. Christian cross-cultural missions should reconsider the strategies and attitudes that no longer reflect biblical principles. This book brings a lot of insightful thoughts and suggestions from the author’s medical ministry experience in the Arab world to those who want to reach out to the unreached. The theology of shalom enables us to deeply understand God’s ultimate purpose toward the world that he created and to devote our lives to bring people to his kingdom in the humble way that Jesus has presented throughout his life on earth when he was with us. This book demonstrates how Christian medical missions can be manifested in a more biblical way and can serve people who have been physically injured and emotionally broken more effectively.

The dramatic shifts seen over the last few years—from economic to political to moral to beyond—have set the stage for a crisis that will affect every sphere of society. But this crisis isn’t just looming in the United States; all of humanity is at a crossroads like never before. Mike Bickle, director of the International House of Prayer of Kansas City, offers God’s definitive answer to this approaching global crisis. He provides a fresh biblical perspective on: The agenda to secularize and de-Christianize America What the upsurge of secular humanism looks like The rise of ISIS and Islamic extremists The looming financial crisis Readers will overcome fear and confusion in the last days and learn to pray effectively for this nation and the world.

Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant. The New Testament says: ‘We are all equal in the sight of God'. To be sure, this equality applies only to those who acknowledge God's existence. What this means is that alongside the abolition of class and nation within the community of believers, religion introduces a new fundamental distinction into the world the distinction between the right kind of believers and the wrong kind. Thus overtly or tacitly, religion brings with it the demonization of believers in other faiths. The central question that will decide the continued existence of humanity is this: How can we conceive of a type of inter-religious tolerance in which loving one's neighbor does not imply war to the death, a type of tolerance whose goal is not truth but peace? Is what we are experiencing at present a regression of monotheistic religion to a polytheism of the religious spirit under the heading of ‘a God of one's own'? In Western societies, where the autonomy of the individual has been internalized, individual human beings tend to feel increasingly at liberty to tell themselves little faith stories that fit their own lives to appoint ‘Gods of their own'. However, this God of their own is no longer the one and only God who presides over salvation by seizing control of history and empowering his followers to be intolerant and use naked force.

Laurie M. Johnson argues that America’s culture wars may seem to have erupted in the past couple of decades, but they go back centuries. For those who think that Christian nationalism (or right-wing populism) is the problem to be solved, that some people simply need to understand Christianity or politics better and become reasonable, read on. Christian nationalism and other ideological extremes are symptoms of major economic, technological, spiritual, and psychological shifts that have left too many people uprooted, disenchanted, and precarious. There are no easy answers, but Johnson tries to show a path out that enlists not only individuals, but also church and state. Without leadership and structure provided at the levels of the church and state, Christians, and those impacted by them, will remain part of the problem and not the solution. Johnson says to Christians: change is not talk, it’s action, and Christian action can only happen with leadership that creates a context where we can work together, rather than wasting our time in culture wars.