This book provides a comprehensive biblical and theological survey of the people of God in the Old and New Testaments, offering insights for today's transformed and ethnically diverse church. Jarvis Williams explains that God's people have always been intended to be a diverse community. From Genesis to Revelation, God has intended to restore humanity's vertical relationship with God, humanity's horizontal relationship with one another, and the entire creation through Jesus. Through Jesus, both Jew and gentile are reconciled to God and together make up a transformed people. Williams then applies his biblical and theological analysis to selected aspects of the current conversation about race, racism, and ethnicity, explaining what it means to be the church in today's multiethnic context. He argues that the church should demonstrate redemptive kingdom diversity, for it has been transformed into a new community that is filled with many diverse ethnic communities.

Author Jarvis Williams provides Christians with a biblical worldview of race and race relations by focusing on the biblical writings of Paul.

Outreach Resource of the Year The Gospel Coalition Book Award The church is at its best when it pursues the biblical value of unity in diversity. Our world has been torn asunder by racial, ethnic, and ideological differences. It is seen in our politics, felt in our families, and ingrained in our theology. Sadly, the church has often reinforced these ethnic and racial divides. To cast off the ugliness of disunity and heal our fractured humanity, we must cultivate spiritual practices that help us pursue beautiful community. In The Beautiful Community, pastor and theologian Irwyn Ince boldly unpacks the reasons for our divisions while gently guiding us toward our true hope for wholeness and reconciliation. God reveals himself to us in his trinitarian life as the perfection of beauty, and essential to this beauty is his work as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The gospel imperative to pursue the beautiful community—unity in diversity across lines of difference—is rooted in reflecting the beautiful community of our triune God. This book calls us into and provides tools for that pursuit.

In a diverse, divided world, pastors and church leaders are faced with the question of how to lead across ethnic lines to bring healing and unity to the body of Christ. How can the church more accurately reflect the vision of God's kingdom, gathering together every tribe and nation? It all begins with leaders whose minds and hearts have been transformed by the gospel. Author Alvin Sanders believes the church is facing a chairos moment--the right time--to address the issue of ethnic division and tension within the church. Through this book, he offers a "how-to" resource for Christian leaders to lead their organizations in a majority-minority, multi-ethnic America. Bridging the Diversity Gap is for pastors and ministry leaders who want a biblical process and principles, informed by the best academic thought on race and ethnicity, to engage with an ethnically diverse church or organization and guide them toward becoming one in Christ.

In this Spectrum Multiview volume five experts in biblical hermeneutics gather to state and defend their approach to the discipline. Contributors include: Craig Blomberg with the historical-critical/grammatical approach Richard Gaffin with the redemptive-historical approach Scott Spencer with the literary/postmodern approach Robert Wall with the canonical approach Merold Westphal with the philosophical/theological approach Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

Christianity Today Book Award winner Imagine the scenarios: a CEO successfully negotiates a corporate merger, avoiding hundreds of layoffs in the process an artist completes a mosaic for public display at a bank, showcasing neighborhood heroes a contractor creates a work-release program in cooperation with a local prison, growing the business and seeing countless former inmates turn their lives around a high-school principal graduates 20 percent more students than the previous year, and the school's average scores go up by a similar percentage Now imagine a parade in the streets for each event. That's the vision of Proverbs 11:10, in which the tsaddiqim—the people who see everything they have as gifts from God to be stewarded for his purposes—pursue their vocation with an eye to the greater good. Amy Sherman, director of the Center on Faith in Communities and scholar of vocational stewardship, uses the tsaddiqim as a springboard to explore how, through our faith-formed calling, we announce the kingdom of God to our everyday world. But cultural trends toward privatism and materialism threaten to dis-integrate our faith and our work. And the church, in ways large and small, has itself capitulated to those trends, while simultaneously elevating the "special calling" of professional ministry and neglecting the vocational formation of laypeople. In the process, we have, in ways large and small, subverted our kingdom mandate. God is on the move, and he calls each of us, from our various halls of power and privilege, to follow him. Here is your chance, keeping this kingdom calling in view, to steward your faith and work toward righteousness. In so doing, you will bless the world, and as you flourish, the world will celebrate.

The true story of mission has been deeper, wider, and far more diverse than many Christians in countries with long histories of church presence have realized. The authors in Reflecting God’s Glory Together: Diversity in Evangelical Mission drive that point home in a variety of ways. From Filipino and Ghanaian missionary work in North American cities, to Canadian work among the Chinese diaspora, to African-American work in Zimbabwe, the authors help us begin to grasp just how many ways evangelicals in mission are truly going from and coming to everywhere as they follow Christ’s mandate to reach the nations. Diverse voices utilizing diverse strategies pursuing a common call: these result in a mosaic whose larger pattern glorifies the God who came to live among us—and who continues to send us out in the pattern God so clearly established. As editors, Beth and Scott invite you to explore the stories embedded in that marvelous mosaic that we have been privileged to collect for this volume.