Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City
Faith believers are called to understand and respond to the cries of their neighbors facing social and economic struggles in inner-city neighborhoods. In To Live in Peace, Mark Gornik shows us how Baltimore’s New Song Community Church can be used as a model for approaching community organizing and peacemaking within the context of Scripture. A testament to the power of a daring witness, the publication guides the church forward with proposals to overcome barriers to urban ministry and human flourishing.
PLT Director Charles Marsh reviews:
“This groundbreaking book offers us the most pervasively theological account to date of community building in an urban context. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Strength to Love, Mark Gornik’s To Live in Peace is theological writing born of intense human struggle and conviction, a stunningly imaginative and powerful work. Gornik shows us, through both theological analysis and gripping narrative, that biblical faith matters greatly to the social existence of Christians: to the way we locate ourselves in towns and cities as well as to the way we respond to the challenges of civic responsibility and the brokenness of creation. . . I regard Gornik as one of the church’s most exciting theological thinkers, the kind of organic theologian we academics dream about but very rarely find. He’s the real thing.”
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Mark Gornik is the director of City Seminary of New York. Mark has spent the last 25 years of his life as a pastor, community developer and researcher in African churches in NYC and beyond. His other publications include Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City (2011), co-written with Andrew Walls.