The Suburban Captivity of the Church

Tim Foster

The Suburban Captivity of the Church: Contextualizing the Gospel for Post-Christian Australia
Melbourne: Acorn, 2014.
Available here or on kindle.

Amidst all the talk of planting churches in highly secular cities of the west, my colleague Tim Foster has written a commendable volume on the strategies needed to engage a post-Christian culture. Although speaking primarily from and into the Aussie context, the volume will have immediate relevance for North America, the UK, and Europe too.  Foster shows that the Christian message is frequently domesticated to fit with the values of an aspirational middle class and has not effectively engaged other groups nor tackled the big questions that cultural elites are raising.

Here’s the blurb:

For far too long, evangelicals have proclaimed a gospel loaded with the cultural baggage of suburbia: personal security, individual salvation and an other-worldly focus. Is this message really a set of timeless truths with universal application? Or have we injected Jesus’ message with our own values? The Suburban Captivity of the Church calls us to venture beyond the picket fence and engage with the cultural narratives around us, to see how God’s big story meets them with both challenge and hope. Whether we are reaching a new culture, or trying to bring the gospel to our own in a more biblically faithful way, this book will equip us for the task.