Well, it’s finally out! It’s hard to express the sense of relief when I finally sent off the fully revised, updated, edited, checked and re-checked text of The Mission of God 2nd edition to the publishers (InterVarsity Press). That was earlier this year, and at last the book sees the light of day this month, with its publication date 21st October. It is the culmination of almost three years of work, which just goes to show how much the general field of “missional hermeneutics” has expanded in the past nearly twenty years (the 1st edition of the book came out in 2006).
Missional hermeneutics is the phrase that describes a wide variety of biblical thinking, writing and discussion around the challenge of reading the Bible as the story of the mission of God himself, and what that means for our own mission as the people of God. So my 2nd edition tries to take account of all that additional literature and to respond to some of the reviews and critiques of the 1st edition. I haven’t changed my mind on any of the core convictions in the book, but there is a lot that is freshly stated or newly included.
Read the InterVarsity Press promotional article >>
Of course, I had made a few additions to that growing missional literature myself in the intervening years, with more popular-level books like The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Zondervan, 2010), and The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission (Baker, 2023). And most recent of all, Langham Partnership has brought out a Study Course that I’ve prepared based on that last one, called Understanding Mission. You can check that out, and get your church on board with it, at www.understandingmission.org.
So what’s next for me on the writing front? Well, first of all, nothing on the scale of The Mission of God! Working with a text that ended up more than 700 typescript pages on screen and nearly 306,000 words is not something to contemplate doing again! Life’s too short! No, something much more manageable and congenial, like my little series (so far) on Hearing the Message of… Daniel, Ecclesiastes, Habakkuk (all with Zondervan). So I’ve started work on Hearing the Message of Deuteronomy. That’s a book I used to teach years ago in India and then again at All Nations Christian College. Sadly neglected by so many Christians, it has been called the John’s Gospel and Romans of the Old Testament. It really is foundational for the faith of biblical Israel, and indeed of Jesus and the Apostle Paul. So…that should keep me busy for a year or so!
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