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    How God Saves the World: A Short History of Global Christianity
    How God Saves the World: A Short History of Global Christianity
    How God Saves the World: A Short History of Global Christianity
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    How God Saves the World: A Short History of Global Christianity

    By Timothy C. Tennent

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    About this ebook

    In a world awash with mission statements, the Christian mission is increasingly becoming white noise, lost in a sea of marketing language and organizational best practices.

    How God Saves the World takes a look at the mission of the church in a way you might not have understood it before. Rather than exploring the history of global Christianity through a long series of countless names and events, Timothy Tennent presents this remarkable journey in the three-act model of a true epic play.

    Complete with a world in turmoil, heroes and heroines of all shapes and sizes, and the ultimate Guide leading the way, this short book will remind you of the small, yet significant role we play in a much larger story that spans both time and space.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeedbed
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9781628243710
    How God Saves the World: A Short History of Global Christianity
    Author

    Timothy C. Tennent

    Timothy C. Tennent (PhD, University of Edinburgh, Scotland) is President, Professor of World Christianity at Asbury Theological Seminary.  He is the author of Building Christianity on Indian Foundations and Christianity at the Religious Roundtable. Dr. Tennent and wife, Julie, reside in Wilmore, Kentucky, with their two children, Jonathan and Bethany.

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      Book preview

      How God Saves the World - Timothy C. Tennent

      Copyright 2017 by Timothy C. Tennent

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

      Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

      Printed in the United States of America

      Cover design by Strange Last Name

      Page design by PerfecType, Nashville, Tennessee

      Tennent, Timothy C.

      How God saves the world : a short history of global Christianity / Timothy C. Tennent. – Frankin, Tennessee : Seedbed Publishing, ©2016.

      xi, 123, [1] pages ; 21 cm

      Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-123)

      ISBN 9781628243697 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      ISBN 9781628243703 (mobipocket ebk.)

      ISBN 9781628243710 (epub ebk.)

      ISBN 9781628243727 (updf ebk.)

      1. Church history. I. Title. II. Series.

      BR145.3 .T46 2016   270   2016955397

      SEEDBED PUBLISHING

      Franklin, Tennessee

      Seedbed.com

      To my dear friends David and Peggy Harvey, who have embodied God’s Unfolding Story around the world.

      Contents

      Introduction

      Act One

      Seven Turning Points in the History of Missions before 1792

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: Unnamed Disciples from Cyprus and Cyrene

      Chapter 2: St. Thomas Preaches the Gospel in India

      Chapter 3: The Tale of Two Monks: Alopen and Augustine

      Chapter 4: Raymond Lull and the Challenge of Islam

      Chapter 5: From Padroado (1493) to Propaganda Fide (1622)

      Chapter 6: Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf and the Moravian Mission

      Chapter 7: The Odd Origins of Korean Christianity

      Act Two

      The Great Century of Missions, 1792–1910

      Introduction

      Chapter 8: Holy Subversion: The Birth of the Protestant Missionary Society

      Chapter 9: The Word Made Text: Vernacular Bible Translations

      Chapter 10: The Legacy of Women Missionaries

      Chapter 11: Indigenous Ingenuity: Church Planting in the Great Century

      Chapter 12: Global Collaboration: The Birth of World Christianity

      Act Three

      The Flowering of World Christianity, 1910–present

      Introduction

      Chapter 13: Pentecostalism in Latin America

      Chapter 14: The African Indigenous Churches in Sub-Saharan Africa

      Chapter 15: Muslims Who Are Following Christ

      Chapter 16: South Indian Missionaries to North India

      Chapter 17: The Non-Registered House Church Movement in China

      Chapter 18: The Korean Missionary Movement

      Chapter 19: Post-Christendom European Christianity

      Notes

      Hymn: The Spreading Flame words by Julie Tennent

      Introduction

      Two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, sat in their dorm room at Stanford University and pledged themselves to the following mission statement: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The result was Google, the most powerful and widely used search engine in the world. Today, it seems that large and small businesses are all adopting mission statements. Even businesses with an unambiguous and widely known purpose—such as FedEx, Barnes & Noble, and Nike—all have mission statements. Nike’s mission statement, for example, is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. The mission craze has even begun to influence the government. Even the U.S. State Department now has a mission statement. Some marriage counselors are now encouraging couples to write up their own personal mission statement. It seems that it is no longer only the church that has a mission. We live in a world awash with mission statements—everybody is on a mission. Clearly the word mission has lost its identity as an exclusively Christian term.

      This little book is dedicated to helping you understand the mission of the church. It is not easy to tell the story of the worldwide mission of the church of Jesus Christ in such a short little book. Before I became the president of Asbury Theological Seminary, I used to teach a course on the history of missions. I would have the opportunity to spend an entire semester with students and unfold the story over many hours, supplemented by thousands of pages of reading.

      I would like to approach this book in a different way. Rather than plowing through countless names and events that make up this remarkable story, I would rather like to invite you out to an evening together. Let’s jump in the car and go see a play entitled God’s Unfolding Story. Like a true epic play, it will be a play in three acts. Another way to envision this little book is to imagine that we decided we didn’t want to go out to see a play, but we just wanted to stay home and look at some pictures together. I will throw a picture on the table of some event in Christian history and then tell the story of that picture. We will spend an evening together looking at pictures through the history of the church. Either way, we will look at the pictures or see the play in three acts or three parts. Act 1 will look at the history of missions from the book of Acts until the year 1792. Act 2 will cover the period between 1792 and 1910, and act 3 will look at the history of the church between 1910 and the present.

      Act One

      Seven Turning Points in the History of Missions before 1792

      Introduction

      Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, is one of the earliest writers to record the ancient myth of Narcissus. According to Ovid, after Narcissus’s encounter with Echo, he fled to a river, where he knelt down to drink. However, as he was about to drink, he caught sight of his own reflection in the water and fell in love. Whenever he tried to drink from the river, the reflection was disturbed. So, Narcissus refused to drink, and he gazed longingly at his own reflection until he died. The myth of Narcissus has been used by modern writers and artists as varied as Keats, Dostoevsky, Freud, and even Bob

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