The Kingdom of God

Summary: We see how we were broadly in line with the resurgent attention given to the kingdom among evangelicals, during the 1970s. This helped us establish our identity and legitimacy, as taught in our FOM seminars. Nevertheless, many Navigators did not internalize the profound implications of the kingdom until much later. We look at how the kingdom influenced and expanded our vision, culminating in the Spirit leading us to express The Core.

The Lord reigns forever; he has established his throne for judgment. He will judge the world in righteousness; he will govern the peoples with justice.
Psalm 9:7-8

Contents

Early Navigator Perspectives on the Kingdom
Developments in 1974 to 1978
Influential Perspectives on the Kingdom, 1980s and 1990s
Eight Characteristics of the Kingdom
Reflections on Our Navigator Calling

Early Navigator Perspectives on the Kingdom

At our Overseas Policy Conference in 1961, Jim Downing emphasized the pursuit of Jesus’s prediction that “this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations” (Matthew 24:14). But the focus of The Navigators was centrally the Matthean version of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), yet without exegeting the complete power and authority invested in King Jesus.

Jim Petersen’s study of the kingdom began around the end of 1965, in Brazil. As he later1 wrote:

I began reading the Bible to understand the kingdom of God. . . . I realized that here indeed was the key to many primary issues. I would never understand the Church until I could see it in the context of the kingdom of God. I would never have the freedom to participate in taking the Gospel to the nations until I understood it. It took me several years to come to even a rudimentary understanding that could be of help in the practical matters of our ministry.

Lorne Sanny did not preach the implications of the kingdom, before he introduced the Fundamentals of the Navigator Ministry (FOM, 1978). Indeed, he told his leadership team in 1970: “If you want a good one-chapter summary on the kingdom, I don’t think you could do better than the first chapter of John Stott’s book Basic Introduction to the New Testament. For me, at least, it says it all and it says it succinctly.”

Judging by the papers submitted to the first Lausanne congress in 1974, the kingdom was hardly mentioned in the formal sessions.2 The only plenary speaker who gives it much attention was René Padilla.3 He declared at one point in his paper that:

Salvation is wholeness. Salvation is total humanization. Salvation is eternal life—the life of the kingdom of God—life that begins here and now. . . . Jesus personifies and proclaims a new alternative—the kingdom of God. To say that Jesus is the Christ is to describe him in political terms, to affirm that he is king. His kingdom is not of this world, not in the sense that it has nothing to do with the world, but in the sense that it does not adapt itself to human politics. It is a kingdom with its own politics, marked by sacrifice.4

Surprisingly, Waldron Scott’s acclaimed introductory slide show at Lausanne on “The Task Before Us” does not mention the kingdom.5

However, in 1974, Jim Petersen returned from Brazil to work with Lorne Sanny on the FOM. Sanny had also been influenced by E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973) who wrote extensively on the kingdom during his missionary experience in India.

Why so little attention to the kingdom in our earlier days? Several reasons. Some of our leaders had grown up in a dispensationalist environment, in which the kingdom of God is for and of the future. Others were nervous because an emphasis on the kingdom might lead us into what was seen as a liberal preoccupation with social and political justice, as Stephen Nichols shows in his essay on “The Kingdoms of God: The Kingdom in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.”6 He writes: “There are about as many interpretations of the kingdom as there are theologians addressing it.” He argues that “like the tentacles of an octopus, how one understands the kingdom of God reaches and stretches out to all other areas of doctrine.”

As Dallas Willard wrote: “The error of the liberals was to preach the kingdom without Jesus . . . but the error of the conservatives is to preach Jesus without the kingdom. The Gospel of the kingdom is a Gospel that leads naturally to discipleship.”

Sanny called together a philosophy of ministry conference during August 1975. The purpose was to test the biblical research that had been done by Jim Petersen, with assistance from Dave Hicks, Raja Tanas, and Roberto Blauth, by exposing it to experienced field leaders7 who represented a cross-section of our worldwide work. Joining Lorne and Jim were: Jim North, PAN; Marvin Smith, EMA; Jim Chew, PAN; Al Andrews, USA; Gert Doornenbal, EMA; and Chuck Singletary, USA.

Two principal questions were the focus: What should the aim of the Navs be, and what are the irreducible minima of a Nav ministry? They began with the kingdom of God “as the broadest, most encompassing expression of the aim of God. It is with His plan and purpose that the aim of the Navs must be in harmony and be directly related. Only as the Navs are a movement vitally aligned with the one true movement, the kingdom of God, will there be a perpetuation that will not die out.”

“The kingdom of God is a significant concept that is worthy of being preached,” said Sanny. When a person enters the kingdom of God, he also becomes a member of the Church, the Body of Christ which is God’s agency in this age. The Church is made up of the people of God and manifests itself in the world in various forms. Two organizational structures of the Church are the “local church” and “specialist groups.” Both are legitimate expressions of the Body of Christ whose antecedents were the priestly and prophetic functions of the Old Testament and which are seen in the New Testament as local gatherings and apostolic teams. They can both be traced through church history to the present day.8

Developments in 1974 to 1978

Sanny and Petersen worked on the FOM during 1974 to 1978,9 when edition 1 of the FOM was published. Edition 210 contained some refinements and was distributed in 1982. It spoke comprehensively of the kingdom as “the absolute reign of God over all that exists” (Colossians 1:16). It described his sovereignty—his right and power to do what he wants.

Our approach was to establish the reality of the kingdom from several Old Testament passages such as Psalm 2:6, which says: “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain”; and Psalm 103:19, which reads: “The Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all”; and 1 Chronicles 29:11, which says: “. . . yours, O Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.”

However, the kingdom comes into its own in the life of Christ, the anointed king: it was the first (Mark 1:14-15) and the last topic (Acts 1:3) about which Jesus Christ spoke.

As the FOM pointed out, Jesus referred to the kingdom more than eighty times in the Gospels, often in enigmatic terms:

It is present, yet it is future (Luke 17:20-21 and 22:16-18).
It is revealed, yet it is a mystery (John 3:3-5).
It is among us, but not of the world (John 18:36).
It is like a small seed, yet it pervades everything (Luke 13:18-21).

The FOM sought to demonstrate how practical the kingdom is. As the text says:

The kingdom lifts us out of sectarianism. We are not merely working for a perishable organization nor are we in competition with any other laborers in God’s harvest. We are serving the King of an unshakable kingdom. Our labors are never lost nor in vain” (Hebrews 12:28).11

Because we are citizens of the kingdom our primary allegiance is to King Jesus rather than to The Navigators. We have access to a new way of life in which substantial healing, reconnected to Christ, can become the norm. Jesus is Lord.

Nevertheless, one observes that the kingdom was one of the least discussed segments of the FOM. With a focus on the legitimacy of our ministry and the component parts of our Calling, we tended to move quickly into the segment on Church and then into our specific responsibility of raising up laborers. This was in part because we were still largely working within cultures at least nominally Christian and because our pragmatic bias drew us into the “what” of our ministry. Many of us had a degree of insecurity vis-à-vis the rest of the family of God. Some suggested that we were merely “para-church.” Thus, the FOM concentrated not on the kingdom but on how we formed a valid identity as part of the Church.

Influential Perspectives on the Kingdom, 1980s and 1990s

Although this is not an essay on the theology of the kingdom, but a summary of how Navigators experienced it through the years, it seems helpful to quote some bracing words by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church:

The kingdom of God is wherever Jesus is king! If Jesus is king in your heart, then the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). Because Jesus is king in heaven, then the kingdom of God is also in heaven (Psalm 103:19). While Jesus walked the earth, He used miracles to announce that the kingdom of God was with them (Luke 11:20), and when the reign of Christ is fully realized on earth, then the kingdom of God is on earth (Revelation 5:10).12

During the process of preparing for the Scriptural Roots of Our Ministry (SRM, 1990) in the late 1980s, we recognized that the kingdom is a powerful lens for us and, indeed, is the point of integration for a hermeneutical community. Paul Hiebert writes:

The kingdom of God is always prophetic and calls all cultures towards God’s ideals. . . . Citizens of the kingdom are to form living communities that manifest the nature of the kingdom. In such communities, understanding the Word of God must be an ongoing and living process that leads to discipleship, under the lordship of Christ in every area of life.13

In his study14 on “The Kingdom and the Church,” Jim Petersen pointed out that “it is impossible for us to understand the Church or The Navigators without seeing both in the context of the kingdom. We tend to become competitive and sectarian, trying to decide what are tares and what is wheat, when the kingdom is not in our thinking.”

He adds:

An understanding of the kingdom is key to indigeneity. We do not export an Americanized Christianity, nor do we Brazilianize Christianity. Both would be sub-Christian. There is a third option: the kingdom culture. It transcends them both, calling on both to live like citizens of the kingdom of God and to beware of the leaven of human precepts that would rob us of our uniqueness.

Our collective perception of the centrality of the kingdom had to wait until the late 1980s. As Mike Treneer suggests:

I would trace it to the SRM study on the kingdom and the interests stimulated by that. I’ve not pressed Jim Petersen and his team on why they focused on it, but my assumption is that it came out of wrestling with the positioning of the identity of the people of God or those who were coming to Christ in the Muslim world or from John R.’s work in India. . . . I think they were struggling for an identity different from church.”15

Another influence that had brought the kingdom to the fore in the late 1980s was our need for authentic access to restricted countries and our realization that churchly activities were hardly enough. We had known this, of course, but the circumstances of the day brought it to the surface. As Al Bussard commented:

Without an understanding or theology that has place for the kingdom of God, it’s very difficult to gain the inner freedom to spend so much time working on creating a business or building a school or getting a baseball diamond set up. If one doesn’t understand the kingdom of God in its biblical and broad sense, then you give up on those things because they take a lot of time, money, and energy. Someone has to come to the place where they believe that if you are giving a seminar on sales techniques for a bank, that’s just as important and as much a part of God’s interest as anything else.16

The SRM was finished in January 1990. It was a comprehensive program of biblical research designed for our staff around the world. In brief, whereas the FOM had been taught around the world as an interactive seminar, the SRM offered Scriptures and asked questions through extensive study guides. Section 2 focused on “God and His Kingdom.”17

Papers18 on aspects of the kingdom were provided for the task force by:

The Kingdom (Paul Williams)
The Kingdom (Ralph Ennis)
The Kingdom (Rusty Rustenbach)
Kingdom Values (Kim Gustafson)
Kingdom Abuses (Paul Williams)
Building the Kingdom (Paul Williams)

Mike Treneer greatly appreciated an illustration that Dallas Willard used that linked the kingdom back to Genesis 1 and 2: to fill, subdue, and rule. “It’s part of the redemptive work of the Gospel in restoring in us that God-given impulse to fill, subdue, and rule a kingdom as his regents, as an extension of his kingdom, in every part of life. . . . The Gospel brings the life dynamic of transference from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of the Son.”19

The vital importance of the kingdom influenced us progressively throughout the 1990s. By the time that the Spirit gave us The Core20 (the Navigator Calling, Values, and Vision) in 2002, it was a crucial theme among our leaders. Thus, the opening phrase in our statement of Calling was “to advance the Gospel of Jesus and His kingdom” and the opening paragraph of our Vision looked forward to the time when “Workers for the kingdom are next door to everywhere.”

Here are a few comments extracted from my Interviews:

Bulus Silas Bossan: “The kingdom . . . is the realm of God’s reign. When manifested in people, it takes on the form of being citizens of the kingdom, having values of the kingdom, manifesting the character of the kingdom. It also seeks to make a difference in the totality of life. . . . Lordship is not just what I do for a reigning Lord, but a king has a responsibility to his subjects . . .”
Jim Chew: “We have grown in our understanding of the kingdom, but we are not yet obsessed. We need to be.”
Skip Gray: “My theology is that the kingdom of God is a perennial and every human institution is an annual that needs to be replanted. Jim Petersen saw, understood, and articulated this.”
Dave Grissen. “The kingdom helps us minister among Muslims. Whereas speaking of church can lead to confrontation, speaking of the kingdom provides more methodological and theological space.”
John R.: “The kingdom came alive for me during the year 1986 in which Jim Petersen was putting together the SRM with Paul Williams and Dick Fischer and Bill Swan. For me, it was a year in the Scriptures. The kingdom was the clue that we had not yet had, as regards Muslims and Buddhists.”

Eight Characteristics of the Kingdom

During the process of drawing out what became The Core, we were absorbing the paramount significance of the kingdom, in at least eight ways. We variously saw21 that the kingdom:

Elevates and amplifies the Gospel: Too often, we have reduced our message to a single and basic need, the need for forgiveness. But life is more than being forgiven and grace is greater than guilt. There is a marvelous spaciousness. “Your eyes will see the king in His beauty and view a land that stretches afar” (Isaiah 33:17).

Orients us to the lordship of Christ in every area of life: This includes commerce,22 the arts, education, family, leisure, politics. The future is breaking into the present. As Eugene Peterson wrote: “Jesus announced the presence of the kingdom of God. The word was often on his lips. At the end, he accepted the title King. He clearly intended that everyone know that the rule of God was comprehensive, established over body as well as soul, over society as well as individuals, in our external behavior as well as our internal disposition, over cities and nations as well as homes and churches.”23 Salvation is thus not merely a matter of personal piety, not an escape from the created order, but rather the restoration and regeneration and reconstitution of the cosmos. Redemption includes the recovery of the creational imperatives, alignment to the responsibilities of our cultural mandate.

Opens up the frontiers: We do not carry a Gospel of the Church, but of the kingdom. Our concern is not to advance what is often called Christendom or to build the institutional Church. We seek allegiance not to Christianity but to Christ our king. Thus, there is space, in such a Gospel, for Muslim or Hindu believers to follow Jesus and remain in their contexts, without being extracted. Institutionalism and traditionalism cannot stand against the kingdom.

Deepens our experience of salvation: The Gospel of the kingdom reminds us insistently that we offer hope, in Jesus, to the broken and the blind and the vulnerable and the marginalized, to human beings and to societies and to all of creation. The root meaning in Hebrew of ‘salvation’ is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge. It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined, and cramped. Salvation is the plot of history. It is God’s determination to rescue his creation; it is his activity in recovering the world. It is personal and impersonal, it deals with souls and cities, it touches sin and sickness. There is a reckless indiscriminateness about salvation (Eugene Peterson).24 Salvation is spiritual, physical, social, relational, political. It is the Trinitarian gift.

Curbs our pride: My kingdom is the arena in which I have control. God’s kingdom is the arena in which He has control. Jesus, in Matthew 28, told us that He had been given control over everything. So, He has a claim on the totality of our lives. When we forget this, we easily slip into idolatry.

‘Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1:6). [They were] trying to jam a universal order into a nationalistic mold! They didn’t reject the kingdom, they reduced it! . . . We too have reduced it. We have made it innocuous by reducing it to ecclesiasticism, the Church is the kingdom; denominationalism, the particular denomination is the kingdom; the nation is the kingdom. . .” (E. Stanley Jones).25

Offers righteousness and justice to a disordered and twisted world: “The LORD reigns forever; he has established his throne for judgment. He will judge the world in righteousness; he will govern the peoples with justice” (Psalm 9:7-8).

“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; love and faithfulness go before you” (Psalm 89:14).

“Say among the nations, ‘The LORD reigns.’ The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it; let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy; they will sing before the LORD, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his truth” (Psalm 96: 10-13).

Here is a judgment that produces joy. How can this be? This judge is righteous and just. We can safely entrust ourselves to His wisdom and mercy. Furthermore, and most importantly, God’s justice has been satisfied for us by our Lord Jesus Christ. This is indeed Good News.

Promises peace to the nations: Jesus, as Isaiah tells us, is the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). The peace or shalom of the kingdom is far more than the absence of war. Shalom comes when people are in harmony and the community of relationships is complete. When we experience shalom, we are spiritually and physically healthy, we are whole, we are rightly related to God and are living according to His specifications.

Most of all, King Jesus is our peace. As Paul tells the Ephesians, He has destroyed the barrier and broken down the dividing wall of hostility, bringing reconciliation through the cross.

The New Testament theme of peace ties the kingdom directly to Jesus Christ. To know Jesus is to be in the kingdom. At Jesus’s birth the angels announced, ‘Peace on earth,’ as the meaning of Jesus’ coming (Luke 2:14). Jesus is the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6); like Melchizedek, He is king of peace (Hebrews 7:2). God reigns through Jesus Christ, and the meaning of that reign is peace (Howard Snyder).26

So, the Gospel of the kingdom speaks to us of the healing of nations…of the end of tribal rivalries and nationalistic fervor and political hostilities…of embrace instead of exclusion. The only hope for the kingdoms of this world is that they be peopled with men and women who live out the Gospel of Jesus and His kingdom. King Jesus is Lord of history.

Shapes how we pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Lesslie Newbigin, lecturing at Cambridge University, called us to think of these words from the Lord’s Prayer, declaring that, “Every concept of the kingdom has to be continuously tested in the light of the revelation of the kingdom given uniquely and once and for all in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.”27 To pray this prayer protects us, because, “We are far too easily consumed with contemporary agendas that are culturally conditioned and culturally situated.”28

Now, by way of casting more light on the centrality of the Gospel of Jesus and His kingdom, which our Calling seeks to advance, we may consider the power of the three prepositions29 in our Calling. We want to advance:

Into the Nations

The idea here is reaching deep, entering fully, gaining complete access. We will overcome barriers. We are urgent for the mainstreams.
Jesus, our model, asked that we pray “to send out workers into His harvest field” (Matthew 9:38).

Through Spiritual Generations

The idea here is persistence, longevity, permanence. We are in this for as long as it takes to ensure a true transmission. Generations will come from lasting spiritual transformation. The chain of faith binds us to those who follow. We stay until the seed flourishes and in turn produces other seeds.
Jesus, our model, prayed “for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in me, and I am in You” (John 17:20-21).

Among the Lost

The idea here is to be fully present, socially connected in a web of relationships, integrated within our contexts, functioning naturally as insiders.
Jesus, our model, said “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).

This Gospel is the reality that we must reveal, the energy that we must unleash, the message that we must communicate.

It is the good news that Jesus is king, Lord, master. As Warren Myers used to say, “He is the blessed controller of all things.” What was the earliest creed? “Jesus is Lord.” And it was a dangerous creed within the boundaries of the Roman Empire.

Jerry Bridges has a challenging statement in his book The Gospel for Real Life:30

The reality of present-day Christendom is that most professing Christians actually know very little of the Gospel, let alone understand its implications for their day-to-day lives. My perception is that most of them know just enough Gospel to get inside the door of the kingdom. They know nothing of the unsearchable riches of Christ.

God placed His glory on His son, Jesus, and gave Him authority to reign as king. Although rampant evil still surrounds us, Jesus is at work today, putting all things right. Satan and evil have been judged. Satan is still taking down as many and as much as he can, but his time is short. God has already sentenced all evil to destruction.

Consider the “Parable of the Weeds” in Matthew 13:

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. . . . The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. . . . The Son of Man will send out his angels and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.

Thus, as we know, the kingdom has been launched by King Jesus but will not be fully realized, fully exposed, until He comes again in glory.

The kingdom of God means that God is sovereign and acts in history to bring history to a divinely directed goal. We know His plan from the Scriptures. Despite the daily mess of reality, we can by faith chime with the worshipful words of King David:

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all (1 Chronicles 29:11-12).

We Navigators are in business to help people discover and begin to act on this, to take up their rights and responsibilities as citizens of the kingdom.31 The good news for us as men and women who have been given the light of Jesus is that, “God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14).

Reflections on Our Navigator Calling

Why does our Calling refer to Jesus, not Jesus Christ?

Because Jesus is the human name of the Son, the name by which his family would have called Him. It speaks of His life on earth, walking the dusty roads of Galilee, the Word that had astonishingly become flesh.

The term Christ, however, communicates the kingly power of the Son. Christ means anointed, chosen by the Father to continue and conclude the royal line of King David. The kings of Israel were called the anointed or christoi of God. The term was even applied to the pagan King Cyrus in Isaiah 45:1. He was anointed and appointed to carry out God’s purpose.

So, our Calling brings together the human and the divine, the man Jesus and the God who is the king of kings.

To speak of Jesus Christ and His kingdom would almost be redundant.

The Gospel of the kingdom is the announcement of what God has done and will do. It is His victory over His enemies. It is the good news that Christ is coming again to destroy his enemies. It is a gospel of hope. It is also the good news of what God has already done. He has already broken the power of death, defeated Satan and overthrown the rule of sin. The gospel is one of promise but also of experience, and the promise is grounded in experience. What Christ has done guarantees what He will do. This is the Gospel which we must take into all the world (The Gospel of the Kingdom, George Eldon Ladd).

Our Calling

To advance the Gospel of Jesus and His Kingdom
into the nations
through spiritual generations of laborers
living and discipling among the lost.

See also articles on:

A History of Our Calling
Fundamentals of the Navigator Ministry
Contextualizing
Scriptural Roots of our Ministry
Fundamentals of Navigator Missions
Church Planting
The Approach to The Core

By Donald McGilchrist

Endnotes

Quoted from The Time of my Life, Kuala Lumpur, 2007, p. 15.
This first congress on world evangelization, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, brought together 2700 participants of whom twelve were Nav staff. Waldron Scott provided the opening audio/visual presentation on “The Task Before Us” and Leroy Eims presented one of the many workshops.
At that time, Dr. Padilla was associate general secretary for Latin America of IFES, based in Buenos Aires.
His plenary was entitled “Evangelism and the World.” See page 130 of Let the Earth Hear His Voice, World Wide Publications, ed. J. D. Douglas, 1975.
Incidentally, it is also surprising that Samuel Escobar’s plenary on “Evangelism and Man’s Search for Freedom, Justice and Fulfillment” hardly mentions the kingdom. Escobar was then general secretary of the IVCF of Canada.
The Kingdom of God, ed. Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson (Crossway, 2012), p. 26.
Jack Mayhall attended most of week 2; Waldron Scott participated one evening; Paul Hensley (Malaysia) was present for the final few days. The conference was held in an apartment complex in Colorado Springs, August 4-16, 1975.
Taken from an account of this August 1975 conference by Marvin Smith.
The first presentation of the evolving FOM was given by Sanny to our staff in West Germany in May 1976. He told his team afterwards that “I brought four messages on the Fundamentals of the Ministry. Since I was a little dubious about starting off with either the kingdom or the Church, I plunged right into the Aim. After a disturbing start, the series gradually began to clarify and was very well received.” Source: Letter to Dear Team of May 30, 1976.
FOM 1 issued in November 1978, FOM 2 in April 1982. Edition 1 comments, rather plaintively, that “Somehow we don’t seem to talk about (the kingdom) much anymore. We talk about the Church instead. Perhaps this is because it is a theme the sects have so often abused to serve their own ends. We too could abuse it . . .” This comment does not appear in edition 2. However, the latter adds an important paragraph II on “What is the Kingdom?” which presents material in four segments: the kingdom of Israel; the restoration of all things through the cross and resurrection; the citizens of the kingdom who make up the Church; the final judgment by Christ leading to God’s eternal rule.
FOM 2, p. 4.
Foreword to The Kingdom Life: A Practical Theology of Discipleship and Spiritual Formation, edited by Alan Andrews, NavPress, 2010, p. 7.
Source: “Metatheology: The Step Beyond Contextualization,” Paul Hiebert, 1988 in Kasdorf & M?ller, eds. Reflection and Projection: Missiology at the Threshold of 2001, p. 394.
Jim’s observations in this paper are undated. It may have been written in the approach either to the FOM or to the SRM.
McGilchrist interview with Mike Treneer, September 13, 2012.
McGilchrist interview with Al Bussard, October 25, 2011.
International SRM, p. 23-50. A simplified and illustrated version 2.1 for our US staff was published in 1992 in which The Kingdom of God is pages 57-84. Also, an Africa version was published in February 1991.
Source: Completed biblical research at January 1989 in SRM consultation papers of September 1989, gray notebook.
McGilchrist interview with Mike Treneer, September 13, 2011.
Calling, Values, Vision.
See McGilchrist paper on “The Kingdom of God and Missions” for our Malaysian staff in April 2005, adjusted in November 2010.
Note: Seeking the Kingdom was book 3 in Global Commerce Network’s original Scriptural Roots of Commerce, prepared by Jim Petersen with additions by Donald McGilchrist, published in 2003. It was revised by the new Global Commerce Network in 2015, newly entitled Life in the Kingdom and edited by Glenn McMahan.
Source: Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 118.
Source: Loc cit, p. 153.
Source: The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person (Abingdon Press, 1972), p. 29-30.
Source available through the US History Department.
Signs Amid the Rubble, in the Henry Martyn lectures.
Nichols, loc cit, Page 8.
See McGilchrist reflections on “Into . . . Through . . . Among” dated October 21, 2002.
NavPress, 2003, p. 15.
As an illustration of the diversity of context in which we minister, John Ha has commented that, in South Korea, mention of the kingdom is heard as a political statement. See November 2002 IET note 5.2.