Understanding what God is about in the world is the subject of Christopher Wright’s book, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. The Mission of God won Christianity Today’s 2007 Book Award for Missions/Global Affairs. Two other InterVarsity Press books* won Awards of Merit this year.

Beginning with the Old Testament and the groundwork it lays for understanding who God is, what he has called his people to be and do, and how the nations fit into God’s mission, Christopher J.H. Wright gives us a new interpretative perspective of the Scriptures. He emphasizes throughout this book that God’s holistic mission is the proper shape of Christian missions. God’s mission is to reclaim the world—and that includes the created order—and God’s people have a designated role.

Wright divides his book into four sections: First, he explores how we can read the Bible through a missional perspective. Second, he talks about how God makes himself known in both the Old and New Testaments. Third, Wright discusses how God desires to work in partnership with humanity to reclaim the world. And fourth, he examines the arena of mission and where God wants us to be sharing the gospel within the nations of the world.

“Wright demonstrates with consistent and passionate argumentation that the missionary mandate of the church does not simply rest on the Great Commission in Matthew 28, but that the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is the result of the very nature of God and of God’s people,” said Eckhard Schnabel, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, of Wright’s book.

Christopher Wright is the international director of Langham Partnership, which is known in the U.S. as John Stott Ministries.

*Awards of Merit went to Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity by Edward Gilbreath in the category of Christianity and Culture, and to Evil and the Justice of God by N. T. Wright in the category of Theology/Ethics.