Approaching us in sovereign freedom, God comes alive to us, we come alive to God, and all creation comes alive as a sign pointing to God. In the gospel of Jesus Christ, God gives and discloses himself in this immediate way as our ultimate context and host, within the provisional medium of creation. This life-giving gospel is met by blindness, however, among those who live today in a collapsing Western culture. This is because their imaginative world is shaped by habitual assumptions and practices that lie--largely unacknowledged--deep within that culture, and that preclude openness to the gospel. Moreover, Western Christians themselves widely share these assumptions, betraying the gospel into cultural captivity. God calls for the conversion of Western culture to the living gospel. Crucially this must include, as Lesslie Newbigin recognized, a repentance from modern Western assumptions about knowledge. Part One explores seeking, knowing, and serving God, as providing a true paradigm for understanding all human enquiry, knowledge, and action. Part Two examines ten resulting "hot spots" where conversion from prevailing cultural assumptions is vital for authentic mission to Western culture.

Who is to be the primary evangelizer of Asia? What Asian forms of worship and prayer are both authentically Christian and culturally appropriate? In Our Own Tongues is reading for anyone interested in the emergence of "world Christianity" and its future in the 21st century.--From publisher's description

INSPIRATIONAL

How can biblical authority be a reality for those shaped by the modern world? This book treats the First World as a mission field, offering a unique perspective on the relationship between the gospel and current society by presenting an outsider's view of contemporary Western culture.

In The Gospel in the Western Context, Gert-Jan Roest focuses on discerning a Western contextual gospel, an endeavour that is very relevant to the current state of Christianity in the postmodern and post-Christendom West. After giving an in-depth analysis and synthesis of how Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton read the Western context and contextualize their Christology, he develops a gospel-centred model for reading the context. Meanwhile, he makes a creative and much-needed attempt to connect the two disciplines of systematic theology and missiology and convincingly shows that both disciplines cannot only enrich one another but also can give church practitioners insight and wisdom for their tasks.

How can Christians live faithfully at the crossroads of the story of Scripture and postmodern culture? In Living at the Crossroads, authors Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew explore this question as they provide a general introduction to Christian worldview. Ideal for both students and lay readers, Living at the Crossroads lays out a brief summary of the biblical story and the most fundamental beliefs of Scripture. The book tells the story of Western culture from the classical period to postmodernity. The authors then provide an analysis of how Christians live in the tension that exists at the intersection of the biblical and cultural stories, exploring the important implications in key areas of life, such as education, scholarship, economics, politics, and church.

In The Gospel in the Western Context, Gert-Jan Roest presents how Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton read the Western context and contextualize Christology. In "dialogue" with them he presents a Western gospel for mission in the 21st Century.