The Global Church Era · c. 1990-present · N. America, UK, then global (digital)
The Narrative-Kingdom Renewal (the Bible as one story fulfilled in Jesus)
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About This Movement
A way of reading the Bible as a single story, running from creation to Jesus and outward from him, has spread across evangelical and mainline churches since about 1990 without ever becoming an organization. Lesslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) set the terms by asking what the church is for in a culture that has heard the story and moved on. Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy (1998) put the kingdom back at the centre of discipleship. N. T. Wright's academic volumes — The New Testament and the People of God (1992), Jesus and the Victory of God (1996) — and his popular ones, Simply Christian (2006) and Surprised by Hope (2008), carried it to a general readership. Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel (2011) argued the point about the gospel itself. And BibleProject, co-founded in 2014 by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, animated it: short videos, a podcast and a free classroom, reaching an audience that runs into the tens of millions.
Sources
- Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989); Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (1998) (primary) — The missional and kingdom-discipleship roots, dated.
- N. T. Wright: The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992); Simply Christian (2006); Surprised by Hope (2008) (primary)
- Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Zondervan, 2011) (primary) — This current's gospel-as-story thesis at its most explicit.
- BibleProject, founded 2014 by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins; video, podcast and classroom materials (primary) — The 'tens of millions' reach figure comes from the platform's own self-reported metrics, not an independent count.
- No standard monograph yet treats this current as a current in its own right; related literature includes Guder (ed.), Missional Church (1998), and journal engagement with Wright and McKnight (secondary) — That there is no dedicated scholarly treatment yet is itself worth noting honestly.
- CHC vol. 9 (reference) — Provides background context only; this current mostly developed after the period this volume covers.