Böcker av Scott W. Sunquist

While understanding history has always been an essential task for God's people, rapid changes within the past two generations of Christianity have challenged many of our assumptions and methods for studying the past. How should thoughtful Christians--and especially historians and missiologists--make sense of global Christianity as an unfolding historical movement?Scott Sunquist invites readers to join him for a capstone course in historical thinking from a master teacher. Highlighting both the continuity and the diversity within the Christian movement over the centuries, he identifies three key concepts for framing church history: time, cross, and glory. These themes shed light to help us discern how the Jesus movement developed from the first century to the present, through an explosion of contextual expressions. Tracing these concepts through the centuries, we learn from the stories of Christians reflecting the glories of God's kingdom--and from their failures.Filled with historical case studies and stories from Sunquist's teaching around the world, The Shape of Christian History offers a framework for how to read and write church history. Even more, it demonstrates how the study of history illuminates God's mission in the world and sharpens our understanding of how to participate in that mission faithfully.

Is a church just something we create to serve our purposes or to maintain old traditions? Or is it something more vital, more meaningful, and more powerful? In this introduction to the nature of the local church, historian and missionary Scott Sunquist brings us a portrait of the church in motion, clarifying the two primary purposes of the church: worship and witness.

In 1900 many assumed the twentieth century would be a Christian century because Western "Christian empires" ruled most of the world. What happened instead is that Christianity in the West declined dramatically, the empires collapsed, and Christianity's center moved to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. How did this happen so quickly? Respected scholar and teacher Scott Sunquist surveys the most recent century of Christian history, highlighting epochal changes in global Christianity. He also suggests lessons we can learn from this remarkable global Christian reversal. Ideal for an introduction to Christianity or a church history course, this book includes a foreword by Mark Noll.

This comprehensive introduction helps students, pastors, and mission committees understand contemporary Christian mission historically, biblically, and theologically. Scott Sunquist, a respected scholar and teacher of world Christianity, recovers missiological thinking from the early church for the twenty-first century. He traces the mission of the church throughout history in order to address the global church and offers a constructive theology and practice for missionary work today.Sunquist views spirituality as the foundation for all mission involvement, for mission practice springs from spiritual formation. He highlights the Holy Spirit in the work of mission and emphasizes its trinitarian nature. Sunquist explores mission from a primarily theological--rather than sociological--perspective, showing that the whole of Christian theology depends on and feeds into mission. Throughout the book, he presents Christian mission as our participation in the suffering and glory of Jesus Christ for the redemption of the nations.

This collection of essays explores the legacy of Lesslie Newbigin's classic work, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, critically analyzing the nature of Western pluralism and discussing the influence of Newbigin's work on the field of missiology. By looking backward, this volume advances a vision for Christian witness in the pluralistic world of the twenty-first century.