Why Church?: A Basic Introduction

• 2020 Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year ("Also Recommended," Church)

Is a church just something we create to serve our purposes or to maintain old traditions? Or is it something more vital, more meaningful, and more powerful? This can be hard to believe when we look at what happens in any one congregation or denomination. Certainly not all churches act like Jesus in the world, and many individual churches in the West are dying. When it's so easy to be confused, frustrated, or simply apathetic about the church, how should we understand its purpose today?

In this appealing introduction to the nature of the local church, set in the context of Christian history and global diversity, historian and missionary Scott Sunquist shows us the church in motion. Why Church? clarifies the two primary purposes of the church―worship and witness―and unpacks what the church is (and ought to be) using five movements of worship:

• come together
• stand to praise God
• kneel to confess
• sit to listen to the Word of God
• go out into the world

Packed with stories and insights from experiences in churches around the world, this book explores cultural contextualization, the meaning of conversion, worship in both personal and communal aspects, and how mission combines telling the good news with being good news as a community.

From Fuller Theological Seminary's renowned church-planting program, this primer is well suited to leaders and their core teams to read together and share with new attenders as they catch the spirit of the dynamic gathering that is the local church.

Scott W. Sunquist (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Previously, he was a professor and dean of the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, taught missiology and Christian history at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and lectured at Trinity Theological College in Singapore. Sunquist is the author of Explorations in Asian Christianity, Understanding Christian Mission, and The Unexpected Christian Century, and a coauthor of A History of the World Christian Movement.

Richard J. Mouw (PhD, University of Chicago) is a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Religion and Politics at Calvin University. He previously served as the president of Fuller Theological Seminary (1993–2013) and directed their Institute of Faith and Public Life (2013–2020). In 2007, Princeton Theological Seminary awarded him the Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life. He is the author of over twenty books, including UncommonDecency, Adventures in Evangelical Civility, Restless Faith, and All That God Cares About.