Soong-Chan Rah - Return to Justice: Six Movements That Reignited Our Contemporary Evangelical Conscience

While other recent books on current-day prophetic evangelicalism have focused on individuals, Return to Justice surveys the historical institutional foundations of todays prophetic movement. With sharp discernment and clarity, Rah and VanderPol offer the church an invaluable giftperspective. They show us the decades-long journey and profound influence of evangelical institutions and communities toward justice in modern times. By looking back these authors offer a kind of ecclesial compass for future generationswisdom for the road to justice laid out before us all.

Lisa Sharon Harper , chief church engagement officer, Sojourners

As the social concern among evangelicals grows, it behooves them not only to look at present needs and plan for the future, but also to revisit the stories of pioneers and trailblazers. Return to Justice provides a well-documented historical orientation for an engaged twenty-first-century evangelicalism. In this fascinating narrative we find inspiration, constructive lessons, and pointed challenges for embodying compassion and doing justice. Rah and VanderPol teach us that looking back offers needed perspective for moving forward.

M. Daniel Carroll R. ( Rodas) , Wheaton College

This is an outstanding primer on the resurgence of evangelical biblical justice activism over the past several decades. Its six historical snapshots of this surge, when viewed together, offer just the right kind of historical background to the present-day interest of Gen-X and Millennial evangelicals, especially, in ministry to the poor, marginalized, and oppressed. I pray that it will inspire even more evangelicals to walk the way of Jesus and spend themselves for those in need.

Douglas A. Sweeney , Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Justice has always been an essential part of the proclamation of the gospel. The early followers of Jesus stood out in their communities because they were the ones rescuing discarded female infants from the dung heap. They not only preached the gospel, they were the gospel. Rah and VanderPol have demonstrated that a lived gospel has also been essential to the evangelical movement. If you care about the gospel of Jesus, then you should drink deeply from Return to Justice . It is the gospel.

Frank A. James III , Biblical Theological Seminary/Philadelphia

The story of evangelicalism in the United States, and specifically the exciting story of how many in the modern evangelical movement have increasingly embraced justice concerns in the postWorld War II era, is inspiringbut also complex and underappreciated. In Return to Justice , Rah and VanderPol have done a masterful job, telling six compelling stories, with scholarly rigor and highly accessible prose, of evangelicals rediscovering their nineteenth-century justice heritage. Calling the church to return to its true vocation and embrace biblical justice has been the central motivating force of my own life and vocation. So I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. Return to Justice should be read by anyone who wants to understand evangelicals and Christianity on a much deeper level than the shallow political definitions in the media.

Jim Wallis , New York Times bestselling author of Americas Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America ; president of Sojourners; editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine

In the lifetime I have spent within the circle called evangelicalism the single-most noteworthy development is not the much-discussed shift toward activism among the political Right in the Reagan years, but rather the much deeper stream flowing now with dramatic force into social justice activism on the part of many evangelicals. The resurgence of concern for justice emerges from deep wells in the evangelical tradition, and the story needs to be toldand in fact has now been told in Return to Justice . While this story reveals some unexamined assumptions or activisms, the commitment to justice in all its formssome central and some sadly neglectedis inherent to the deep evangelical tradition. Many who write the history of the twentieth century have ignored these deep wells but they are now visible for all to see.

Scot McKnight , Northern Seminary