Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76In every age, God’s people need prophets to help us see beyond our blind spots–to expand our vision of what God is about. Jeremiah was a prophet. To a people in exile, caught between the false hope that their God would destroy Babylon and the despair of thinking God had forgotten them, Jeremiah proclaimed a new vision. The old images of God’s faithfulness would no longer suffice. Yes, their God had saved humanity in an ark and washed away the wicked in a great flood. Yes, their God had brought them out of Egypt, drowning Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. But a salvation that requires someone else’s destruction is too small a salvation, Jeremiah proclaimed. To a people in exile, he wrote, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jer. 29:7). You will not be saved apart from your neighbors, the prophet says. Every- one belongs to God. Everyone Belongs to God A leader in the New Monastic movement introduces a new book on mission by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919). J O N AT H A N W I L S O N - H A R T G ROV E Jesus came preaching peace to all people. But he got into the most trouble for showing the religious insiders how the people they counted out often understood the advent of God’s reign better than they did. Take Luke 4. For his first sermon in his own hometown, Jesus took a text from Isaiah, the prophet. And when he said that the great day of Jubilee had arrived for God’s people, everyone rejoiced. But when he pointed out that a Syrian soldier and a Gentile woman had more faith than anyone else in their day, the hometown crowd tried to throw him off a cliff. Your gospel is too small, Jesus said. But no one wants the prophet to speak so directly to them. Better to celebrate that the scripture is fulfilled in our hearing than to grapple with the ways God’s word forces us to expand our imagination. But expand we must. At least, that’s what the prophets tell us. The text of Blumhardt’s Everyone Belongs to God (Plough, May 2015) is over a century old, Do we need to make everyone on the planet into Christians? How can Christians represent the love of Christ to their neighbors (let alone people in foreign countries) in an age when Christianity has earned a bad name from centuries of intolerance and cultural imperial- ism? This provocative book, based on a recently translated collection of one-hundred-year-old letters from a famous pastor to his son-in-law, a missionary in China, will upend many assumptions about what it means to give witness to Christ. At a time when Christian mission has too often been reduced to social work or proselytism, this book invites us to reclaim the heart of Jesus’ Great Commission, quietly but confidently incarnating the love of Christ and trusting him to do the rest. Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt 163 pages, softcover Plough, 2015