Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World

by Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Paperback, 2018

Status

Available

Collection

Description

We live in conflicted times. Our newsfeeds are filled with inequality, division, and fear. We want to make a difference and see justice restored because Jesus calls us to be a peacemaking and reconciling people. But how do we do this?Based on their work with diverse churches, colleges, and other organizations, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill offer Christian practices that can bring healing and hope to a broken world. They provide ten ways to transform society, from lament and repentance to relinquishing power, reinforcing agency, and more. Embodying these practices enables us to be the new humanity in Jesus Christ, so the church and world can experience reconciliation, justice, unity, peace, and love.With small group activities, discussion questions, and exercises in each chapter, this book is ideal to read together in community. Discover here how to bring real change to a dehumanized world.… (more)

Publication

IVP Books (2018), 224 pages

Rating

(5 ratings; 3.3)

User reviews

LibraryThing member hjvanderklis
Too often our theological or intellectual posture is one of power and control. Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Graham Hill wrote Healing Our Broken Humanity - practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World to awake Christians to reject inequality, division and restore justice, peace, and
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reconciliation. Practically written, biblically grounded, sensitive to cultural context, each chapter ends with concrete suggestions for practices, challenges, and small group activities.

This book unpacks nine practices that are relevant to our new humanity in Christ, the church. Renew lament through corporate expressions of deep regret and sorrow. Repent together of white cultural captivity, and racial and gender injustice, and of our complicity. Relinquish power by giving up our own righteousness, status, privilege, selfish ambition, self-interests, vain conceit, and personal gain. Restore justice to those who have been denied justice. Reactivate hospitality by rejecting division and exclusion, and welcoming all kinds of people into the household of God. Reinforce agency by supporting people's ability to make free, independent, and unfettered actions and choices. Reconcile relationships through repentance, forgiveness, justice, and partnership. Recover life together as a transformed community that lives out the vision of the Sermon on the Mount.

We must not root Christian identity in nationalism, ethnicity, partisan politics, sociopolitical-economic status, gender, and other such things. Instead, we must root Christian identity in discipleship to Jesus Christ. The church is intended to be diverse, and it has work to do in terms of becoming less monocultural and more intercultural. A lot of wisdom in this technicolored covered book.
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LibraryThing member deusvitae
An introductory work exploring various ways in which Christians would do well to engage the world to make a difference.

The authors come from very different backgrounds and thus provide very different perspectives: a white male of European descent from Australia and a woman of Korean descent in
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America. They address various issues which exist in our world and how Christians have often fallen short: to see the church reflect its multiracial, multicultural environment, to take up lament, to repent of abuses and sinfulness, to give place and power to others who have not enjoyed it, to work for justice, to welcome in hospitality, to empower those disempowered, to reconcile those who have been alienated, and to share in life together. They discuss the issues, give examples, and end with different action items or practices for a small group to seek to accomplish to reinforce learning.

The material is generally good, although the divergence in authorial perspective can be disorienting at times (and one has to become familiar quickly with Australian idiom). The reader is to be advised that the conversations are much wider than they are deep: this is an introductory, exploratory work, designed more for small groups and things which might be starting out on such a journey. The authors appeal often to works of greater depth, and if one is looking for greater depth in dealing with such issues, they will need to look elsewhere.

In many ways it's a "hip" book, taking advantage of the moment and a lot of the currents swirling around parts of Evangelical Christianity. The work accomplishes its purpose; it just does not go beyond it.

**--galley received as part of early review program
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