An article I wrote in 2023 is finally seeing the light of day, or getting published, as the case may be. I had delivered a paper at a joint conference of the Evangelical Missiology Society and the International Society for Frontier Missiology in October 2022 (read it here). That was my second draft of thoughts I had entertained for three years at that point. The first draft was a book proposal written to the main editor (Prof. Kirsteen Kim) of the series, "Theology and Mission in Global Christianity," at Brill Publishing (Leiden, The Netherlands) already in 2019. Her answer was a tentative green light ("Let's have a look at it when you've finished").
It all started at the end of 2018 and the beginning of the next year. Protests were exploding in many parts of the world and spilling out into the streets as people aired their grievances about economic hardship, but most of all about the lack of government transparency and oppressive policies enacted without any regard for their own wishes and demands. In other words, they were witnessing a rise in autocracy. Pictures of crowded protests and brutal police repression filled the pages of the news media reporting on places like Hong Kong, Chile, France (the yellow vests), Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon, and more. [see my blog post of March 2020 on this, and my 2-part series on the massive protests in Algeria where I lived for nine years in the 1970s and 1980s ("Algeria and the Postcolonial Straightjacked"; "Algeria: The Hirak Phenomenon").
Was God the Holy Spirit stirring the hearts of people and, building on deep aspirations instilled in them at creation, was he pushing the needle toward greater democracy? In terms of political theology, is there a connection between human flourishing, good governance, and the values of God's Kingdom as announced and lived out by Jesus Christ -- values to be fully implemented in the New Jerusalem that one day will come down from heaven? The last two chapters of the Bible describe the nations of the world pouring into that city and contributing their own unique gifts for the well-being of all in this completely renewed creation of God, where tears, sorrow, disease and death are no more, and where God takes up residence for the first time.
This article lays out the main themes of the book, which is now being reviewed and should be published in 2026 (The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and Global Governance). The article's title is "Mission and Global Governance: Convergence of Pneumatology and Human Flourishing."