IVP - Behind the Books - January 2010 Archives

"I'd Like to Thank . . ."

As the new year begins, it’s awards season—and while we don’t want to blow our own horn, get ready for a trumpet solo.

First, Christianity Today has just announced the 2010 Christianity Today Book Awards. Their judges reviewed 472 books from seventy-two publishers and came up with twelve winners—four from IVP, more than any other publisher!

God Is Great, God Is Good, edited by William Lane Craig and Chad Meister, won in Apologetics/Evangelism.

Deep Church by Jim Belcher won in The Church/Pastoral Leadership.

Longing for God by Richard Foster and Gayle D. Beebe won in Spirituality.

The New Shape of World Christianity by Mark A. Noll won in Missions/Global Affairs.

Following close behind are the honors coming from Leadership Journal—The Golden Canon Leadership Book Awards. Four IVP books made their list of the ten most valuable books for church leaders from 2009, again outdistancing any other single publisher.

Longing for God by Richard Foster and Gayle D. Beebe was on their very short list of books for The Leader’s Inner Life.

Deep Church by Jim Belcher was the best of the best for The Leader’s Outer Life.

Love Is an Orientation by Andrew Marin and The Next Evangelicalism by Soong-Chan Rah were both on the short list for The Leader’s Outer Life as well.

Finally, Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds gave his award for Book of the Decade. The Fabric of Faithfulness by Steven Garber took home the bacon. Read Byron’s heartfelt and thoughtful comment on this very influential book.

(Boy, my lips are sore.)

Evangelicals and Race

We just got back from InterVarsity’s Urbana 09 Student Missions Convention in St. Louis, where 45% of the over 16,000 attendees were non-white. So David Van Biema’s article in the current issue of Time magazine about evangelicals and race is, well, timely.

The article highlights the perennial questions about how segregated Sunday morning worship is, and focuses on one church that is trying to do something about it. In the process, Van Biema quotes three IVP authors. The church, perhaps surprisingly, is Willow Creek, founded by Bill Hybels (Too Busy Not to Pray, Who You Are When No One’s Looking and Making Life Work). Remarkably, in ten years Willow has shifted from being almost entirely white to being 20% minority.

The article notes that the person who got Hybels started down this path was IVP author Alvin Bibbs (Crazy Enough to Care), who was on staff at Willow at the time and gave Hybels a copy of Michael Emerson’s Divided by Faith. Van Biema also quotes the reaction of David Anderson, founder of the multicultural Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia, Md. and author of IVP’s Gracism, who said, “I bet they’ve done it faster and better than anyone else with a church that large starting off as all white.”

Such topics have been an interest of IVP for decades with dozens of books on the subject. For evangelicals as a whole, challenges definitely remain in this realm but such change is encouraging and offers hope and a model for others to emulate.