In case you missed it: Janet Epp Buckingham, “Ban the Mob, Not the Bible: Christians are the victims of hate in some places and the targets of hate speech laws in others. How can believers advocate for nations to address both threats in a consistent, principled way?” Christianity Today (June 6, 2024).

Dony Donev, “Theological Framework Centered on Neo-primitivism” Cup & Cross (October 25, 2025).

Mark D. Bjelland, “Charity Begins with Zoning Reforms” Christianity Today (November/December 2025).

This online article has the subtitle, “Stewarding our neighborhoods is part of Christian hospitality” and appeared in the print issue with the title, “Erasing Red Lines.”

In case you missed it: Hazel Southam, “The Quiet Revival: Gen Z leads rise in church attendance” Bible Society (April 7, 2025).

This report opens with this byline: “Church decline in England and Wales has not only stopped, but the Church is growing, as Gen Z leads an exciting turnaround in church attendance.” 50% growth in church attendance in 6 years? Yes, this is a quiet revival.

In case you missed it: “How adults are rediscovering Christianity through baptism” YouTube (September 30, 2025).

This special report from CBS Mornings about Gen Z men turning to Christianity is introduced: “In her series ‘The State of Spirituality,’ Lisa Ling looks at the rise in adult baptisms after the pandemic. At a time when many are leaving organized religion, some Americans are choosing to deepen their Christian faith.” One PneumaReview.com editor commented, “What is happening is so significant that even the secular press is taking note of it.”

David Livermore, “Which of the Six Global Leadership Types Best Describes You?” DavidLivermore.com (November 6, 2025).

Thought leader in Cultural Intelligence and PneumaReview.com author, David Livermore, introduces this article on global leader archetypes with this: “90 percent of leadership literature is biased toward one kind of leader—decisive, assertive, fast-paced, and individualistic. Yet most of the world prefers a different kind of leadership style.”

Image: Johannes Plenio

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From Pneuma Review Fall 2013.

Alan J. Delotavo, Back to the Original Church: The Secret Behind Church Movements (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2010), 100 pages, 9781556355660.

Regular and careful Bible readers inevitably piece the Bible story together until they have a sense of the grand sweep of things. We do the same with the history of the church. Sometimes unconsciously, we jump from the Book of Acts directly to Martin Luther, then to Azusa Street, and finally to the present day. Delotavo fills in some of the blanks to draw out a valuable lesson that can only be seen from an overview.

Back to the Original Church is Delotavo’s University of Pretoria ThD thesis in popular form. This conversation about the flow and progress of church history calls us to see church movements as gifts to the wider church restoring something neglected and not stopping points or ends in themselves.

Delotavo provides examples of church movements that attempted to restore an essential part of church life or faith, but which became bogged down to the point of needing their own renewal. The Reformation era focused on the recovery of the gospel in view of accumulated abuses and theological “defects.” This gospel recovery included the teaching of “the priesthood of the believer,” that each Christian had direct access to God without the need of clergy. Delotavo points out that this set up a division between laity and Protestant clergy and also spawned a divisive spirit throughout the Reformation. Further splits occurred till today denominations around the world number into the thousands. The Lutheran church became State church (protected by law and supported by taxes) and fell into the sorry state of doctrinal correctness with experiential coldness. The Reformation had become an end in itself. To recover what was needed, Pietism arose about a century later. This was an attempt to bring vital Christian experience, including conversion, assurance and holiness back into the Lutheran state church. Once more the renewal movement, although truly helping many, lost its way. Splitting many ways, some parts impacted world missions and future movements, other parts become theologically liberal, and still other parts become radical or revolutionary.

Delotavo’s excellent point bogs down, however, in historical omissions and stretches. He jumps directly from the early church to the Reformation period. The era of the main church councils (AD 325—787) he considered a breakdown of Christianity due to political connections to the Roman Empire. The “Dark Ages” or better, the medieval church, is thought to have no value. He sees the church largely pursuing the expansion of Christian civilization at the expense of “genuine experience of salvation.” Delotavo seems to ignore that in the West, the church was living through the crushing of the Roman Empire under “barbarian” invasions; that in the East, Constantinople was rising to power as the new center of the Roman Empire; and that Islam was racing across North Africa, into Spain and southern France. He could have pulled examples of church movements from these periods that prove his point, but he did not. Does he not recognize the value of that period of the church’s life?

The way forward for Delotavo is found in American Evangelicalism. He noted that several awakenings or revivals had occurred in American history from colonial times, each a church movement in itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, modern Liberalism rapidly set in resulting in the backlash of Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century. In its original form, Fundamentalism was truly a church movement to recover much that was being lost; however, it degenerated into anti-intellectualism and a belligerent separatism. In the 1940s, a corrective movement, Evangelicalism, arose to call the church back to theological basics, to academic engagement, and to a loving spirit. Here, Delotavo believes, is the apex of church movements, breaking down all barriers, and penetrating all denominations and traditions. Here is what the church was meant to be at last! Delotavo forgets his own warning: church movements are means to an end (renewal for the entire church) not ends in themselves (the final best expression of the church). Is this the climax of church history?

Jennings, former academic dean and now theology and black church studies professor at Duke Divinity School, tells the story of how our contemporary Christian imagination has become so deeply shaped by a racially divided understanding of the world—a world formed by the forces of modern colonialism. This racial imagination, in turn, has become the deformed lens through which we see “reality.” At one level, this is not a new thesis, although it is surprising how easy we forget this (almost like fish swimming in an ocean are oblivious to an alternative reality) even as it remains sadly true that many members of Jennings’ primary audience—Christian academics, scholars, theologians—still have not seriously grappled with the theological implications of this claim. Those of us in evangelical and renewal traditions who are restorationists or primitivists at heart generally tend to also lack historical consciousness or sensitivity. We ask, why bother with a fallen Constantinian history anyway? And therefore, we are all the more liable to dismiss this argument or at the least ignore or minimize its pertinence and consequences.

Beware: those without at least some level of graduate education will find the theological argumentation dense in various places. Yet, the four narratives that structure the three-part movement of the book help those who embark on the journey. Section one, “Displacement,” unfolds the mid-fifteenth century beginnings of slavery in dialogue with accounts left by Prince Henry of Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara (1410 – 1474), and complements this with sixteenth century developments as seen through the life and works of Jesuit theologian to the New World Jose de Acosta Porres (1540 – 1600). “Displacement” argues first that the modern world was founded on the theological and even Christological creation of race: black and brown, fit for enslavement following in the steps of the suffering Christ, and derivatively, white, fit for being the purveyors of the gospel of the risen Christ to the rest of the world. As a corollary, this first part also unfolds the theological anthropology that underwrote the colonial ideology of whiteness that empowered the displacement of black African and indigenous Americans from their lands, and that justified their exploitation (or their redemption, from the white Christian perspective).

The second section, “Translation,” shows how this narrative of displacement was complicated—both subverted and perpetuated, simultaneously—in the lives of both colonists and slaves. John William Colenso (1814 – 1883) was the first Anglican bishop of Natal (South Africa), mathematician, theologian, Biblical scholar/translator, and social activist who came to see things at least in part from the perspective of the black African, although he was too steeped in the colonial project to make a substantive difference during the nineteenth century. Olaudah Equiano (1745 – 1797) was one of the first slaves to have gained his “freedom” and published his own autobiography; in the end, though, it appears that he mastered the white man’s tools, including his theology, only to have resigned himself to the “white order of things.” “Translation” shows that acts of resistance, even at the theological level, are impotent against emerging market forces of the early modern world—for land, resources, and cheap or free labor.