The Suburban Captivity Of The Churches

For far too long, Australian evangelicals have proclaimed a gospel loaded with the cultural baggage of suburbia: personal security, individual salvation and an other-worldly focus. Is this message really a set of timeless truths with universal application? Or have we injected Jesus' message with our own values? The Suburban Captivity of the Church calls us to venture beyond the picket fence and engage with the cultural narratives around us, to see how God's big story meets them with both challenge and hope. Whether we are reaching a new culture, or trying to bring the gospel to our own in a more biblically faithful way, this book will equip us for the task.

After World War II, America’s religious denominations spent billions on church architecture as they spread into the suburbs. In this richly illustrated history of midcentury modern churches in the Midwest, Gretchen Buggeln shows how architects and suburban congregations joined forces to work out a vision of how modernist churches might help reinvigorate Protestant worship and community. The result is a fascinating new perspective on postwar architecture, religion, and society. Drawing on the architectural record, church archives, and oral histories, The Suburban Church focuses on collaborations between architects Edward D. Dart, Edward A. Sövik, Charles E. Stade, and seventy-five congregations. By telling the stories behind their modernist churches, the book describes how the buildings both reflected and shaped developments in postwar religion—its ecumenism, optimism, and liturgical innovation, as well as its fears about staying relevant during a time of vast cultural, social, and demographic change. While many scholars have characterized these congregations as “country club” churches, The Suburban Church argues that most were earnest, well-intentioned religious communities caught between the desire to serve God and the demands of a suburban milieu in which serving middle-class families required most of their material and spiritual resources.

The history of the Episcopal Church is intimately bound up with the history of empire. The two grew in tandem in the modern era, and as they grew they developed particular ideologies and practices around race. As slavery was carried over into the new political formations of the United States, so too were racially based exclusions carried over in the Episcopal Church. Mission, Race, and Empire presents a new history of the Episcopal Church from its origins in the early British Empire up to the present, told through the lenses of empire and race. The book demonstrates the dramatic shifts within the Episcopal Church, from initial colonial violence to reflective self-critique. Jennifer Snow centers the stories of groups and individuals that have often been sidelined, including Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, women, and LGBTQ people, as well as the institutional leaders who sought to create, or fought against, a church that desired to be a house of prayer for all people.

The Missional Church and Denominations utilizes the missional church conversation as a lens for engaging an important dimension of church life in the United States -- denominations and denominationalism. Denominations have been studied from a wide variety of perspectives, including historical, sociological, and theological, but they have yet to be engaged in light of a missional church understanding. Here each essay helps to bring further clarity to the word "missional" and contributes to the ever-widening conversation. Contributors: Daniel R. Anderson Marion Wyvetta Bullock David G. Forney Wesley Granberg-Michaelson Todd Hobart Alan J. Roxburgh Kyle J. A. Small Craig Van Gelder Dwight Zscheile

2010 Golden Canon Leadership Book Award winner The future is now. Philip Jenkins has chronicled how the next Christendom has shifted away from the Western church toward the global South and East. Likewise, changing demographics mean that North American society will accelerate its diversity in terms of race, ethnicity and culture. But evangelicalism has long been held captive by its predominantly white cultural identity and history. In this book professor and pastor Soong-Chan Rah calls the North American church to escape its captivity to Western cultural trappings and to embrace a new evangelicalism that is diverse and multiethnic. Rah brings keen analysis to the limitations of American Christianity and shows how captivity to Western individualism and materialism has played itself out in megachurches and emergent churches alike. Many white churches are in crisis and ill-equipped to minister to new cultural realities, but immigrant, ethnic and multiethnic churches are succeeding and flourishing. This prophetic report casts a vision for a dynamic evangelicalism that fully embodies the cultural realities of the twenty-first century. Spiritual renewal is happening within the North American church, from corners and margins not always noticed by those in the center. Come, discover the vitality of the next evangelicalism.

The Church in the Public shows how church/state dualism has corrupted the church's social witness and allowed neoliberal and neocolonial ideas to assert control of public and political life. Ahn argues for a public church, one that collaborates and cooperates with other public actors and entities in the promotion of a just social order.