13 Books for Joining God on Mission

Franz Kafka writes, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?… A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Dead center in the middle of the Torah is the command: Love your neighbor. When Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment, he responds with love God. And then, even though he’s not asked, he adds that the next one is love neighbor, as if the two are deeply intertwined.

When we talk about spiritual formation, we dwell in that space of “love God.” And when we talk about mission, we dwell in that space of “love neighbor,” in your neighborhood, every day. These are two halves of one whole. We attune ourselves to the work of God in ourselves, so that we can attune ourselves to the work of God in the world. We shouldn’t, and we can’t, do spiritual formation work without then being propelled out into God’s activity in the world around us. So, to read a book about spiritual formation in one hand, we should have a book about God’s mission in the world in the other.

Numerous books and writers have shaped my thinking about God’s mission in the world. Here are 13 that have made a particular impact. It’s not an exhaustive reading list. Several of them are books that have come my way as I’ve spent the last four years in a program focused on missiology in changing culture.

Earthing the Gospel: An Inculturation Handbook for the Pastoral Worker by Gerald Arbuckle

We don’t become students of mission without becoming students of culture and students of the people who form cultures. “Inculturation” is a big word for talking about the back and forth between ethnic cultures and the story of God, that is, the Gospel. Arbuckle is a Catholic priest from New Zealand and anthropologist, and much of this work is focused on cross-cultural ministry.

Christianity Rediscovered by Vincent Donovan

Donovan, also a priest, spent 17 years in Tanzania. What he found among the Catholic missions there bore no resemblance to the church he read about in the New Testament. This led him into a deconstruction of faith and re-learning how to tell the story of Jesus in a meaningful way to the Maori people.

Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines That Shape the Church for Mission by David Fitch

I remember while in seminary the first time having a conversation with my pastor about what are the things that Christians do. Fitch is a pastor, church planter, and seminary professor after a similar question, but with a twist: What do Christians do together that define them as “church”? These practices we do as a means of participating in God’s mission in making the world new. (You can read my review of this book here.)

Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith by Eric Jacobsen

In the United States in the 21st century, we are largely a “place-less” people, meaning we rarely, if ever, consider our immediate geography in relation to our place in the world. But the ways that we live in suburbs and cities have a profound effect on how we interact and connect with one another. This is just a little of what Jacobsen, who’s a pastor, is exploring here.

The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods by John McKnight and Peter Block

How do you love your neighbor? How are you a neighbor available to be loved by others? This approaches the questions from more of a sociology and community organizing angle than theological. Most often, being good neighbors involves healthy doses of uncommon sense. Here are some online resources related to this work.

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture by Lesslie Newbigin

Newbigin spent his clerical career as a missionary to southern India in the middle of the 20th century. He retired to his native England to find himself home-but-not-home as he discovered the church marginalized in a secular culture. Having spent his life on the mission field, he found his home country to be a mission field. In this series of lectures, the big question he’s asking is “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western culture?'”

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin

In the early 1990s there was a resurgence of academic study about God’s mission (or missio Dei) based on these works Newbigin had produced in the 80s. This academic work eventually evolved into popular literature about the “missional church.” There’s an essay in this book entitled “The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel” that’s been particularly influential on subsequent writings on church and mission, calling the Church a “sign, instrument, and foretaste” of God’s work in the world. All sorts of Newbigin resources can be found online at Newbigin House of Studies.

The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside Your Door by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon

The authors are pastors in Colorado and relate a story at the beginning about how they’d attended a meeting with their mayor. The question was posed, how can churches help serve their cities? And the mayor responded that most of the city’s issues could be resolved if people were good neighbors. I preached a sermon several years ago referencing the tic-tac-toe grid the authors describe, and people still come up to me referencing that sermon and what they got out of it.

Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood by Alan Roxburgh

I grew up in an evangelical setting that emphasized Matthew 28 and the Great Commission as the springboard for our involvement in “missions.” Roxburgh leans heavily on the work of Newbigin and offers an alternative text for shaping our imagination for mission: Luke 10, Jesus sending the 70. Throughout the book, he unpacks many of the implications of this text as a springboard for our joining God in the places where we live.

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time by Alan Roxburgh

This reads more as a field guide and is a great resource for a small group, missional community, or church plant. Here Roxburgh takes many of the ideas from Missional and breaks them into simple, actionable steps to do together while avoiding making it feel like a program.

Doing Local Theology: A Guide for Artisans of a New Humanity by Clemens Sedmak

Sedmak is a professor in Austria and this brief book unpacks 50 theses for doing local theology. Talking about God, and therefore, loving God, takes on the dialect and accent of a particular local place. Places matter, as we often learn doing ministry in another country. I would have found this helpful when I was 22 and moved from Tulsa to Seattle.

Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus by Chris Smith and John Pattison

Taking cues from the “slow food” movement, the authors explore ways that cultural values of efficiency, consumerism, and individualism that quietly undermine meaningful spirituality. They imagine an alternative. Patience is counter-cultural. In many ways, this provides the theological ballast for a book like The Abundant Community. Online resources related to the book can be found here.

The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community by Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight Friesen

This comes from the work of Parish Collective and explores the notion, “Where is the Holy Spirit at work in our neighborhoods and how do we follow?” The relationship between church and immediate neighborhood is front and center in this book.

May one or more of these books wake you up with a blow on the head, propel you out your front door, and love your neighbor more deeply.