Those may seem like quite different topics - but, yes, I have a chapter in each of these recently published, edited publications.
More than a decade ago I researched and wrote an academic article on the early life and ministry of Herbert E Randall, a Canadian Holiness Movement Church missionary to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century (1899-1906). In that article I recorded Randall's spiritual shift from the Holiness tradition to the Pentecostal tradition via his Holy Spirit encounter at the Hebden Mission in Toronto, one of the birthplaces of Canadian Pentecostalism. Randall served as an early ministry colleague of the founding fathers/mothers of Canadian Pentecostalism (1907-1911) and then returned to Egypt as a Pentecostal missionary (1912-1938).
The article has gone on to have a life of it's own, particularly amongst Canadian and Egyptian Pentecostal scholars, as a kind of origin story. I feel quite honoured to have this article included as a slightly edited chapter ("From Holiness Church to Pentecostal Mission: Transitions Among Early Canadian Pentecostals") in this new volume from Brill Publications, The Canadian Pentecostal Experience, edited by Linda Ambrose and Michael Wilkinson.
The second book recently published is Beyond Multiculturalism: Intentional Intercultural Churches as an Expression of the Kingdom. This is an edited volume of papers (editors: Charles Cook, Lorajoy Tira-Dimangondayao, Lauren Umbach) presented in 2021 at the JaffrayAng Symposium hosted by Ambrose University in Calgary. I had the opportunity to present a keynote paper: "Multicultural Churches as Counter-Narrative in Pluralist Canada," which is included as Ch. 2. This article focuses on the need to develop theology and praxis for telling a different story about who we are as communal agents of the kingdom of God -- who has removed the dividing wall between our differences. Using Newbigin's language of churches as sign and foretaste of the kingdom, only if we can live out the reality of reconciliation across those differences.
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