John G. Stackhouse Jr. on Why You’re Here

I wrote the following mini review for July 2018’s edition of Highlights, produced by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

John G. Stackhouse Jr., Why You’re Here: Ethics for the Real World (Oxford: OUP, 2018).

In short, ‘why you’re here’ is about vocation, understood as applicable to ‘everyone, everything, everywhere, in every moment’. There is the call of God on every human being, what we were made for. And there is the distinctive call God gives to Christians. Our human calling is to make shalom, our Christian calling is to make disciples. And the sphere in which we work out those callings is, as Stackhouse so helpfully reminds us, the ‘real world’. Living in a time where wheat and weeds grow together until the final harvest, a ‘Christian realism’ trusts God that will work through the various means he has given us, bringing as much shalom as possible but without thinking it’s down to us to build the New Jerusalem. Compelling and accessible, this is essential reading for all those who want to respond in hopeful faithfulness to the call of God on their lives.