Beyond silver-bullet strategies

The Royal Priesthood and the Glory of God

David Schrock

What is a priest’s purpose? Schrock assembles the Biblical evidence and finds that priests are called to sanctify God’s holy place, sacrifice God’s offerings, and speak God’s covenant. As a royal priesthood, Christians are charged with making the Church holy by offering their bodies as living sacrifices in service to God and one another. This is all powered by reading and hearing Scripture and speaking to God in prayer. Ultimately, says Schrock, individual believers are priests to God because they are united to His Son, their Great High Priest who cleansed the Temple, offered Himself to God through the Spirit, and said “This is my blood of the New Covenant.” Jesus, says Schrock, is “a royal priest who radiates the glory of God.”

Rethinking Global Mobilization: Calling the Church to Her Core Identity

Ryan Shaw

Convinced that God is “changing the face of global mission,” missionary Ryan Shaw spent years in study and prayer to produce this book, which attempts to cast a compelling vision for a global mission that’s changed for the better. Shaw’s main point is simple: Every Christian ministry needs to move mobilization up the priority list. Most Christians don’t actually believe that they personally need to be evangelizing and making disciples of the people around them. Shaw tries to describe what would happen if even 20 percent of Christians made it their business to be laborers in the harvest field. The picture is gratifying, but the challenge it presents to the Church is immense. Only the Lord of the harvest can mobilize like this—so pray to Him!

No Shortcut to Success: A Manifesto for Modern Missions

Matt Rhodes

Clearly exhausted by studying Arabic and exhorting himself as much as his readers, Rhodes insists that if you don’t speak someone’s language, you can’t evangelize or disciple. Thus, the “silver-bullet strategy” of converting a few local people who then proceed to do all the missions work in their spare time is not viable. Missionaries must be skilled in language, theology, conversation, and teaching. In fact, they need to be professionals at those tasks, because “how shall [the world] hear without a preacher” who speaks their language? Rhodes is persuasive: He himself is in the trenches in Muslim North Africa; he quotes regularly from the book of Proverbs, something very few missions books do; and he presents piles of evidence that sturdy churches grow from decades of self-sacrificial labor.

Redeeming our Thinking About History: A God-Centered Approach

Vern Poythress

Is it possible to discern God’s purposes in history? Absolutely, argues Vern Poythress. To deny that God’s purposes can be discerned ultimately results in the absurd conclusion that one cannot see the Almighty’s hand in a person’s conversion. So far, so compelling. But Poythress does not work in any examples for the reader. At the beginning of the book, he discusses a case he was personally involved in during the 1970s, the Norman Shepherd controversy at Westminster Seminary Philadelphia. But he never returns to discuss what divine purposes a devout historian might discern in that event. Poythress is correct to argue that we can know God well enough to guess what He might be doing—but also correct to be wary of getting too specific.