Dr. Crider Explores Missional Church Planting in Post-Christian America
Planting the Word: Missional Ecclesiology in Twenty-First-Century America, by Dr. Erin Crider, adjunct professor of practical theology and director of church planting, will soon be released by Baylor University Press.
Her latest title addresses fundamental questions about why church planting became increasingly popular in late twentieth-century America: What do American church planters see themselves as actually planting? How has the upswing in the planting of churches impacted common beliefs about church and mission?
Dr. Crider locates the growing interest in church planting within key threads of mid-century missiological debates, in conjunction with major features of the culture and history of the United States. She argues that American church-planting movements uphold the fundamental principle that all churches are called to participate in the missio Dei. Part of that mission, she asserts, is the ecclesial mission to create spaces for contextualized gospel proclamation.
With an eye to increasingly post-Christian, twenty-first-century American communities, Planting the Word offers theological and practical resources to those who hope to understand, evaluate, and/or plant sustainable missional churches. Dr. Crider’s study opens an important larger academic conversation, inviting Christians in the United States to think theologically and contextually about contemporary church-planting strategies and purpose.