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1
Kim, Joo-Cheol. God the Father and God the Mother: Sermon. [Gyeonggi-do, Korea]: Melchizedek Pub., 2008.
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2
Paul, Greg. God in the alley: Being and seeing Jesus in a broken world. Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2004.
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Moltmann, Ju rgen. God for a secular society: The public relevance of theology. London: SCM Press, 1999.
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God for a secular society: The public relevance of theology. London: SCM Press, 1999.
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God for a secular society: The public relevance of theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.
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Nottingham, William J. Origin and legacy of the Common Global Ministries Board: A history of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in world mission. Nashville, Tennessee: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1998.
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God for the World-Church for the World: The Mission of the Church in Today's World. Bridge Resources (KY), 2001.
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Russian world in China // Русский мир в Китае. Moscow, Russia.: Vostochnaya literature, 2013.
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Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time. MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING, 2015.
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Peter, Donald, Storrar William, and Morton Andrew 1928-, eds. God in society: Doing social theology in Scotland today. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2003.
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12
Shadle, Matthew A. Interrupting Capitalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190660130.001.0001.
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Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy traces the history of Catholic thinking about economic life from the Second World War to the present, from the perspective of a “theology of interruption.” God interrupts history through the Incarnation and the continued mission of the church, but in an increasingly pluralist society, Christians must learn to see God’s presence in the religious other and in the poor and vulnerable, as well. Faithful to God’s call, the church’s social teaching provides a way for Christians to interrupt capitalism, to live out economic life faithfully in the midst of the global economy. The book traces official Catholic social teaching on the economy from the Second Vatican Council to Pope Francis, but also looks at four important voices in recent Catholic theological reflection on economic life: liberation theology, progressive Catholicism, neoconservative Catholicism, and communitarianism. Of the four, the communitarian perspective appeals to those aspects of the church’s social tradition that are most vital to living out the Christian vocation in contemporary American economic life. The book also turns to critical realism and institutional economics—two perspectives from the social sciences that can help the Catholic social tradition understand the global economy, including the relationship between local practices and broader social structures and institutions.
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Paul, Greg, and Greg Paul. God in the Alley: Being and Seeing Jesus in a Broken World. Shaw, 2004.
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(Editor), Kevin Ward, and Brian Stanley (Editor), eds. The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999 (Studies in the History of Christian Missions). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.
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Abreu, Savio. Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190120696.001.0001.
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This book is an ethnographic study of Christian groups in contemporary Goan society that come under Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity. Most studies on the Pentecostal movement in India are from a theological perspective. This book is an attempt to fill this gap, to satisfy the need to understand the rapidly expanding and overtly evangelistic movement of Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity within pluralist, non-Christian societies, both as a social process and as an embodied everyday practice, as well as its sociocultural implications in the twenty first century. It assesses the impact of religion on society and analyses how the symbols, beliefs, ritual practices, and the organizational structure of two different living strands of Pentecostal Christianity in Goa, namely, the independent neo-Pentecostal sects and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) shape and influence religious and sociocultural identities, world views, and the everyday life activities of individual adherents. This study is specifically an ethnographic exploration, into the religious journey of a neophyte from their conversion and initiation into the new movement to their religious life, worship patterns, world view, and life cycle rituals till death. Several important interrelated themes such as mission, conversions, Christian fundamentalism, the Pentecostalization of the Catholic Church, Charismatic habitus, sacred spaces and time, prosperity gospel, and gender paradox are discussed threadbare in this book to arrive at a mosaic understanding of contemporary Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity. This book is an important contribution to the growing field of new religious movements in India, characterised by their distinct modes of interaction with mainstream religious establishments and their specific religious identities, beliefs, rites and rituals.
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Moltmann, Ju rgen. God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1999.
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17
Robin, Barbour, ed. The kingdom of God and human society: Essays by members of the Scripture, Theology and Society Group. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993.
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Church: Community for the Kingdom (American Society of Missiology Series). Orbis Books, 2002.
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Larsen, Timothy. Congregationalists. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0002.
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The nineteenth century was a period of remarkable advance for the Baptists in the United Kingdom. The vigour of the Baptist movement was identified with the voluntary system and the influence of their leading pulpiteers, notably Charles Haddon Spurgeon. However, Baptists were often divided on the strictness of their Calvinism, the question of whether baptism as a believer was a prerequisite for participation in Communion, and issues connected with ministerial training. By the end of the century, some Baptists led by F.B. Meyer had recognized the ministry of women as deaconesses, if not as pastors. Both domestic and foreign mission were essential to Baptist activity. The Baptist Home Missionary Society assumed an important role here, while Spurgeon’s Pastors’ College became increasingly significant in supplying domestic evangelists. Meyer played an important role in the development, within Baptist life, of interdenominational evangelism, while the Baptist Missionary Society and its secretary Joseph Angus supplied the Protestant missionary movement with the resonant phrase ‘The World for Christ in our Generation’. In addition to conversionism, Baptists were also interested in campaigning against the repression of Protestants and other religious minorities on the Continent. Baptist activities were supported by institutions: the formation of the Baptist Union in 1813 serving Particular Baptists, as well as a range of interdenominational bodies such as the Evangelical Alliance. Not until 1891 did the Particular Baptists merge with the New Connexion of General Baptists, while theological controversy continued to pose fresh challenges to Baptist unity. Moderate evangelicals such as Joseph Angus who occupied a respectable if not commanding place in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship probably spoke for a majority of Baptists. Yet when in 1887 Charles Haddon Spurgeon alleged that Baptists were drifting into destructive theological liberalism, he provoked the ‘Downgrade Controversy’. In the end, a large-scale secession of Spurgeon’s followers was averted. In the area of spirituality, there was an emphasis on the agency of the Spirit in the church. Some later nineteenth-century Baptists were drawn towards the emphasis of the Keswick Convention on the power of prayer and the ‘rest of faith’. At the same time, Baptists became increasingly active in the cause of social reform. Undergirding Baptist involvement in the campaign to abolish slavery was the theological conviction—in William Knibb’s words—that God ‘views all nations as one flesh’. By the end of the century, through initiatives such as the Baptist Forward Movement, Baptists were championing a widening concern with home mission that involved addressing the need for medical care and housing in poor areas. Ministers such as John Clifford also took a leading role in shaping the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’ and Baptists supplied a number of leading Liberal MPs, most notably Sir Morton Peto. Their ambitions to make a difference in the world would peak in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century as their political influence gradually waned thereafter.
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Laing, Catriona. Anglican Mission amongst Muslims, 1900–1940. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199643011.003.0017.
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On paper, Anglican mission to the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century was a failure. Compared with other missionary efforts, conversion rates in the Muslim world were low. Despite rising hostility towards Western presence in the region, and especially in Egypt, this mission field attracted some of the brightest and most ambitious missionary minds of the early twentieth century. Among then was Constance Padwick, who travelled to Egypt with the Church Missionary Society to develop the evangelistic potential of Christian literature in the Muslim world. Through her work with the printed word and her encounter with the prayers and popular devotion of ‘ordinary’ people, Padwick used the ‘kinships’ she identified between Islam and Christianity to propose a new approach to Christian mission: one that called for prayer, print, and presence among Muslims.
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Ukah, Asonzeh. Expansion. Edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198729570.013.54.
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Religions expand via many pathways, including mission activities, transmission of faith, conversion of non-members, and the constitution of new communities of believers. They also expand through military conquest, revival, and migration. Religions may expand geographically or doctrinally and ritually. In both ways, mission and revival activities are important strategies of expansion, which often incorporate migration and mobility of religious believers and preachers. Technologies of transportation and communication as well as a free market of goods and beliefs facilitate religious expansion. The Muslim group Tablīghī Jamā’at, founded in India in 1927, exemplify religious expansion by revival; while the Christian group Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in Nigeria in 1952, illustrate religious expansion by evangelism. Increased democratization of religious authority means that believers generally, rather than leaders, are taking up the responsibility of spreading religious beliefs and practices around the world.
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Jones, Sarah Rowland. Episcopé and Leadership. Edited by Mark Chapman, Sathianathan Clarke, and Martyn Percy. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199218561.013.36.
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This chapter considers understandings and expressions of episcopé, the ministry of oversight, across the Anglican Communion. Drawing on reflections on the 2008 Lambeth Conference, and examples from around the Anglican world, it reviews contemporary practices of, and challenges to, church leadership not only of bishops—acting personally, collegially, and communally—but more widely in the mission and ministry of the whole people of God. This includes clergy and laity formally in synods and church structures, and in many informal ways, as well as ecumenical dimensions. How Anglicanism’s long-standing commitment to appropriate local adaptation of episcopé is exercised today, over hugely diverse contexts, is considered in the light of scripture and of historic emphases on episcopacy as the focus of unity, teaching, eucharistic presidency, and pastoring. God’s calling, guiding, equipping and empowering is stressed as foundational above all else.
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Kolapo, Femi James. Anglicanism in West Africa. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199643011.003.0006.
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This chapter examines the course of the transformation of the Anglican mission into an indigenous West African Anglican Church after the First World War. In general, coinciding with the wane and demise of European imperialism, paralleled by the withdrawal of the dominance of London Church Missionary Society and European missionaries, West African Anglicans have sought more or less successfully to redefine the identity of their local church to fit ever more closely with its new African locus. The specific contexts in each West African country where the Anglican Church has been established played significant roles in the nature of the process and its outcome. By the close of the period under analysis here, West African Anglicans have come to fully own their Church, taking full charge of its culture, structure, and doctrine, and are asserting a global leadership claim in the Anglican Communion.
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Peterson, Derek R. The East African Revival. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199643011.003.0010.
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The East African Revival was a Christian conversion movement that began in northern Rwanda and southern Uganda in the mid-1930s and spread throughout eastern Africa during the 1940s and 1950s. Learning from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—which was foundational literature in Anglican mission stations—converts engaged in radical acts of self-editing. They disavowed kin relationships, disposed of their possessions, and confessed their sins without regard to propriety. Other Christians thought them a menace to the whole social order. This chapter studies the contentious process by which the Revival was domesticated. Through the reconfiguration of legal codes, by the operation of church discipline, heedless converts were, over time, made members of civil society. There was a great amount of disciplinary work that had to occur before the Revival could safely become a source of inspiration in the field of World Christianity.
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Womack, Deanna Ferree. Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474436717.001.0001.
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The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American Presbyterian missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda (or Arab renaissance), from 1860 to 1915. Drawing on rare Arabic publications, the book challenges histories that focus on Western male actors. Instead it shows that Syrian Protestant women and men were agents of their own history who sought the salvation and modernization of Syria while adapting and challenging missionary teachings. These pioneers included scholars, poets, novelists, activists, school teachers, Protestant pastors, evangelistic preachers, Biblewomen, and public speakers. Such Syrian Protestants established a critical link between evangelical religiosity and the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda, making possible the literary and educational achievements of the American Syria Mission and transforming Syrian society in ways that still endure today. Locating Syrian Protestant narratives within American, Ottoman, and global histories, this book brings Middle Eastern Studies into conversation with the field of World Christianity and explores questions of American-Arab relations and gender roles in the Islamic world.
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Silva, Bráulio Lobo da. A Dimensão Eclesiológica do Batismo na Lumen Gentium. Brazil Publishing, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.31012/978-65-5861-357-2.
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The present work aims to present the ecclesiological dimension of baptism in Lumen Gentium, in view of an ecclesiology of communion. God in his magnificence creates all things in view of the salvation of the cosmos. To make this, he relies on the contribution of human action. From human freedom God wants to save by making them the sign and sacrament of salvation for other humans. Hence, he has constituted a people to be the light and presence of God inside of humanity. This same people constituted, as God's property, had been prepared to receive Jesus Christ to fulfill salvation, generating from within themselves the new people of God who is the Church. Thus, baptism constitutes the human being as a new creature regenerated in Christ, forming the new people of God, making him a child of God and a member of the Church. As the mission of God continues in the Church and in every baptized person, all the people of God have the privilege of helping in salvation. In this way, every baptized person has his radical equality in virtue of the dignity of baptism, where all are missionary disciples. Thus, as a people of God, the laity is an ecclesial subject and a missionary disciple because he is a baptized, participant in the divinity of Jesus Christ and the director of the kingdom and salvation of God in the world.
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Harlow, Luke E. Social Reform in America. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0019.
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Any discussion of nineteenth-century religious Dissent must look carefully at gender. Although distinct from one another in important respects, Nonconformist congregations were patterned on the household as the first unit of God-given society, a model which fostered questions about the relationship between male and female. Ideas of gender coalesced with theology and praxis to shape expectations central to the cultural ethos of Nonconformity. Existing historiographical interpretations of gender and religion that use the separate spheres model have argued that evangelical piety was identified with women who were carefully separated from the world, while men needed to be reclaimed for religion. Despite their virtues, these interpretations suppose that evangelicalism was a hegemonic movement about which it is possible to generalize. Yet the unique history and structures of Nonconformity ensured a high degree of particularity. Gender styles were subtly interpreted and negotiated in Dissenting culture over and against the perceived practices and norms of the mainstream, creating what one Methodist called a ‘whole sub-society’ differentiated from worldly patterns in the culture at large. Dissenting men, for instance, deliberately sought to effect coherence between public and private arenas and took inspiration from the published lives of ‘businessmen “saints”’. Feminine piety in Dissent likewise rested on integration, not separation, with women credited with forming godly communities. The insistence on inherent spiritual equality was important to Dissenters and was imaged most clearly in marriage, which transcended the public/private divide and supplied a model for domestic and foreign mission. Missionary work also allowed for the valorization and mobilization of distinctive feminine and masculine types, such as the single woman missionary who bore ‘spiritual offspring’ and the manly adventurer. Over the century, religious revivals in Dissent might shift these patterns somewhat: female roles were notably renegotiated in the Salvation Army, while Holiness revivals stimulated demands for female preaching and women’s religious writing, making bestsellers of writers such as Hannah Whitall Smith. Thus Dissent was characterized throughout the Anglophone world by an emphasis on spiritual equality combined with a sharpened perception of sexual difference, albeit one which was subject to dynamic reformulation throughout the century.
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Randall, Ian. Baptists. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199683710.003.0003.
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Early in the nineteenth century, British Quakers broke through a century-long hedge of Quietism which had gripped their Religious Society since the death of their founding prophet, George Fox. After 1800, the majority of Friends in England and Ireland gradually embraced the evangelical revival, based on the biblical principle of Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the effective source of salvation. This evangelical vision contradicted early Quakerism’s central religious principle, the saving quality of the Light of Christ Within (Inward Light) which led human beings from sinful darkness into saving Light. The subsequent, sometimes bitter struggles among British Quakers turned on the question of whether the infallible Bible or leadings from the Light should be the primary means for guiding Friends to eternal salvation. Three of the most significant upheavals originated in Manchester. In 1835 Isaac Crewdson, a weighty Manchester Friend, published A Beacon to the Society of Friends which questioned the authority of the Inward Light and the entire content of traditional Quaker ministry as devoid of biblical truth. The ensuing row ended with Crewdson and his followers separating from the Friends. Following this Beacon Separation, however, British Quakerism was increasingly dominated by evangelical principles. Although influenced by J.S. Rowntree’s Quakerism, Past and Present, Friends agreed to modify their Discipline, a cautious compromise with the modern world. During the 1860s a new encounter with modernity brought a second upheaval in Manchester. An influential thinker as well as a Friend by marriage, David Duncan embraced, among other advanced ideas, higher criticism of biblical texts. Evangelical Friends were not pleased and Duncan was disowned by a special committee investigating his views. Duncan died suddenly before he could take his fight to London Yearly Meeting, but his message had been heard by younger British Friends. The anti-intellectual atmosphere of British Quakerism, presided over by evangelical leader J.B. Braithwaite, seemed to be steering Friends towards mainstream Protestantism. This tendency was challenged in a widely read tract entitled A Reasonable Faith, which replaced the angry God of the atonement with a kinder, gentler, more loving Deity. A clear sign of changing sentiments among British Friends was London Yearly Meeting’s rejection of the Richmond Declaration (1887), an American evangelical manifesto mainly written by J.B. Braithwaite. But the decisive blow against evangelical dominance among Friends was the Manchester Conference of 1895 during which John Wilhelm Rowntree emerged as leader of a Quaker Renaissance emphasizing the centrality of the Inward Light, the value of social action, and the revival of long-dormant Friends’ Peace Testimony. Before his premature death in 1905, J.W. Rowntree and his associates began a transformation of British Quakerism, opening its collective mind to modern religious, social, and scientific thought as the means of fulfilling Friends’ historic mission to work for the Kingdom of God on earth. During the course of the nineteenth century, British Quakerism was gradually transformed from a tiny, self-isolated body of peculiar people into a spiritually riven, socially active community of believers. This still Dissenting Society entered the twentieth century strongly liberal in its religious practices and passionately confident of its mission ‘to make all humanity a society of Friends’.
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Shadle, Matthew A. The Aggiornamento Framework. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190660130.003.0006.
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The official social teaching of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council embraced secularization—what they called the “legitimate autonomy” of the world. It also recognized the intrinsic value of human work and humankind’s increasing mastery over the created world. The “aggiornamento framework” proposed in their teaching envisions the church as open to the modern world. This framework proposes a humanistic vision of development, including the human person’s material, social, and spiritual dimensions. The aggiornamento framework also presents a historical view of social development, recognizing both that humankind can transform the institutions of society and that God is present in history and leads humankind onward through history to the Kingdom of God.
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Butler, Melvin L. Island Gospel. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042904.001.0001.
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For Jamaican Pentecostal Christians, music is a form of worship that opens pathways to the Spirit and brings about deliverance from sin. It is also a way of drawing and transcending boundaries, as practitioners sing about what they believe and identify where they stand in relation to cultural and religious outsiders. This book explores these ritual functions as they are fulfilled within Jamaican church services and concerts. It highlights the ways in which Pentecostals cultivate feelings of collective distinctiveness by rendering gospel music with an island flavor and by patrolling stylistic boundaries between a holy “home” and a profane “world.” This dichotomy is destabilized through the transnational flow and appropriation of popular culture and “American” media. What emerges are the strategies of musical worship through which Pentecostals embody their religion and seek spiritual transcendence while navigating the crossroads of local and global practice. Pentecostals describe themselves as “in the world, but not of the world,” meaning that while they live and work in the broader society, they strive to be “sanctified” from it by upholding a distinct moral code. This narrative of worldly renunciation prompts believers to abandon prior habits of conduct while embracing newer, localized identities as children of God. This book uncovers how gospel music, as a dynamic cultural practice, complicates these theological affirmations and reveals the shifting foundations of Pentecostal identity in Jamaica and its diaspora.
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Vatter, Miguel. Divine Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190942359.001.0001.
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The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed political theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jürgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian political theology, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty.
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Wright, Almeda. The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190664732.001.0001.
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The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans unearths the ways that African American Christian youth separate their lives and spirituality into mutually exclusive categories, with the result that their religious beliefs and practices do not directly impact their experiences of communal and systemic injustices. Yet this work argues that youth can and do teach the church and society myriad lessons through their theological reflections and actions. This book takes seriously the harsh realities of African American youth, who are often marginalized and even dehumanized within society and religious institutions. It draws upon in-depth theological reflection with adolescents and recent research on adolescent spirituality to examine the crucial role of spirituality in adolescent identity formation and the practical ways that youth negotiate the world around them. Listening to the voices of young African Americans, including activist and poets, pushes us to consider specific examples of fragmentation, including how young African Americans can reconcile their faith in God with their experiences of police brutality and ongoing violence. In conversation with young African Americans, this book also mines the resources of African American religious and theological traditions, and shows how collectively they can help youth to navigate fragmentation and respond to systemic injustice. In particular, abundant life, or choosing the way of life abundant, offers a vision of life and hope for young people who are too often surrounded by death. This work concludes with a critical pedagogy for integrating spirituality and fostering abundant life with African American youth.
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Smith, Gary Scott, and P. C. Kemeny, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190608392.001.0001.
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Presbyterianism has a rich, robust, resilient history. Since Presbyterianism began in Scotland in the early 1560s, its adherents have spread to Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. In some locales and eras, Presbyterians have flourished; in others, they have struggled; in still others, they have experienced both triumphs and defeats. The essays in this handbook explain the historical roots and development, challenges and problems, and successes and failures of Presbyterians all over the world. During their history, Presbyterians have developed a distinctive theology, style of worship, and polity. As a body influenced by John Calvin and other Swiss Reformers, Presbyterianism has emphasized the sovereignty of God, the election of individuals for salvation and service, and the necessity of continual reform to remain faithful to the Scriptures and to adapt the gospel message to various cultural settings. Presbyterian worship has centered around the preaching of God’s word, typically based on the exposition of Scriptural passages, and the celebration of the sacraments of communion and baptism. Presbyterian polity establishes three officers—pastors (teaching elders), ruling elders, and deacons—to lead the church and a series of graded courts to govern their ministry. Differences over doctrine, polity, liturgy, and social issues, as well as ethnic, racial, class, and gender issues, regional factors, and personal conflicts have often produced controversy and even schism among Presbyterians. Presbyterians have also adopted differing theological positions based on their understanding of Scripture, natural theology, philosophy, and life experiences. Throughout their history, Presbyterians have often had an influence in society that exceeds their numbers because of their generally high levels of education, wealth, and status. This continues to be true today for the world’s thirty-three million Presbyterians who belong to hundreds of denominations in more than seventy-five nations.