Happy New Year!

So what’s new in the Chris Wright world of writing? Not a lot at the moment.

The biggest thing recently, as I mentioned in the last update, was the launch, at last, of the 2nd edition of The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, by InterVarsity Press in the USA and IVP in the UK in October. After several years of work revising, updating and expanding it, I was very satisfied and thankful to God to see it finally out there on the shelves! The past few Autumn months have involved a fair bit of travel, so writing has taken a back seat, really.

However, some work that I did a few years ago is finally on its way through the editorial process towards publication. In 2022, I delivered three lectures in the Parchman Lectures series at Truett Theological Seminary in Baylor, Texas. I chose to attempt a missional reading of the three main Wisdom books in the Old Testament – Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. Wisdom tends to get neglected in works on Old Testament theology in general, and even more so in books on a biblical theology of mission. What on earth might there be in Proverbs that has anything to do with Christian mission??

Well, for some time I had been using a kind of grid of six questions that one might address to any biblical book or piece of text, in order to discover what it might have to contribute to our understanding of the mission of God (remember, my strong conviction is that any mission that we engage in must be rooted in the prior mission of God that spans the whole biblical canon). So I had a go at applying those six questions to Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, with some interesting results, and delivered my three lectures accordingly.

Part of the deal, however, was that the Parchman Lectures should eventually be published, and sure enough, after some delays entirely caused by me (mostly the pressure of finishing the work of The Mission of God revision), I was able to edit and prepare the lectures into a short book, and Baylor University Press now have it in their editorial machine. It ought to see the light of day sometime in 2026, under the title, Wisdom in Mission: A Missional Reading of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job.

Next up? Zondervan is happy to extend my little series Hearing the Message of… (so far, Daniel, Ecclesiastes and Habakkuk), so in 2026 I plan to write one on the book of Deuteronomy. I already did a full commentary on that book, originally published in 1996 by Hendrickson in their series New International Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (NIBCOT), now published by Baker in their Understanding the Bible Commentary (a certain failure of imagination in that title, I think, since what commentary series is not about “understanding the Bible”?!). Anyway, this one will be at a more popular level – Deuteronomy as I would preach or teach it (which I have been doing here and there since the 1980s….).

Those six questions? I thought you might be asking that. I’ve put them into a separate article that you can find added to the “Articles and Lectures” page. I’ve also added there a short piece I recently wrote on “Gospel-centred Integral Mission”, in relation to what I consider a mistaken interpretation of Acts 6.

Thanks for dropping in, and (depending on when you happen to open this).

Happy New Year!

Chris