By S. Roy Kaufman,L. Shannon Jung
Rural groups and standard cultures all through North the USA and around the globe are being systematically dismantled through the forces of city civilization. it truly is no new phenomenon. For over 4 millennia, the powers of city civilization were enjoying God, oppressing humans, and exploiting the earth. This lengthy heritage has introduced us to the edge of catastrophe within the present monetary, ecological, and effort crises confronting the dominant worldwide culture.
This publication reads the Bible during the lenses of rural groups. The Bible has anything to assert in regards to the beginning and personality of city civilization and the dynamic of its courting to rural groups. either Israel within the outdated testomony and Jesus within the New testomony have been engaged within the formation of rural groups of religion dwelling as possible choices to the dominant cultures of the city civilizations within which they lived.
It seems that neighborhood, face-to-face groups, either rural and concrete, besides conventional cultures of all stripes, are God’s selected tools for the subversive, nonviolent disarming of city civilization and the therapeutic of God’s earth.
“Healing God’s Earth makes an enormous contribution to our activity of taking care of production. S. Roy Kaufman writes out of a selected Christian culture (Mennonite), vocation (pastor), and social context (farming neighborhood) and in doing so articulates an utilized biblical theology that speaks to all Christians. although Kaufman’s critique of ‘civilization’ is sharp, he provides way more together with his life-affirming imaginative and prescient of shalom in keeping with a cautious interrogation of either Testaments.”
—Ted Grimsrud, writer of Instead of Atonement
“A attractive capstone at the occupation of a loyal rural pastor, Healing God’s Earth retells the biblical narrative championing the agricultural fight for devoted witness to God’s desire for the realm opposed to the backdrop of city dominion. As a corrective to fixations on city ministry, Kaufman ignites an important dialog that is helping rural and concrete dwellers alike to understand the significance of faithfully subversive face-to-face groups as God’s selected brokers of project within the world.”
—David Boshart, government convention Minster, important Plains Mennonite Conference
“Out of the midst of our worldwide, technocratic, and urbanizing civilization, S. Roy Kaufman matters a clarion name to neighborhood, incarnational, substitute group. Healing God’s Earth is an insightful and incisive paintings of prophetic and pastoral biblical theology rooted within the Anabaptist Mennonite narrative. it's also an important textual content for individuals of Christian religion and for every body in every single place as production waits with keen longing to be let loose from its bondage to degradation.”
—Matthew Yoder, Pastor, Menno Mennonite Church
Growing up in a rural neighborhood, and serving 4 rural congregations in Iowa, Illinois, Saskatchewan, and South Dakota over approximately 4 a long time as a pastor of Mennonite Church united states and Canada, S. Roy Kaufman in my view witnessed the dismantling and disintegration of rural groups and church buildings. This ebook is a distillation of 40 years of residing, preaching, and educating with those rural congregations. Kaufman lives in his domestic neighborhood, Freeman, South Dakota.