Brent Neely

Living among the Breakage

World Religions

“Miller has provided us with frontline research in an emerging sector of World Christianity--the indigenous theology of Christians from a Muslim background. World Christianity, Muslim-Christian relations, conversion studies, or missiology--if any of these are your area of interest, this book is for you. If the mission of God in our world or, perhaps, 'frontier theology' is your concern, Living among the Breakage is for you. In these pages, Miller engages the theology of the globally emerging churches of Christians from a Muslim background (CMB). He approaches the task from several creative angles: field work amongst Iranian diaspora congregations; analysis of CMB books, poetry, and testimonial literature; and the case study of a semi-covert CMB congregation in the Arabophone Middle East. What Miller has done here is compelling in its creative simplicity. Living among the Breakage is a work of contextualization, but a 'contextualization from within': this is a disciplined effort at eliciting, ordering, and analyzing the distinctive (if thoroughly informal and implicit) theology of the growing, sometimes overlooked, CMB churches around the world. Though this is a systematic and analytic piece of research, Miller remains highly attuned to the practical, earthy, and conflicted experience of former Muslims in transition between Church and Mosque, with a foot yet in each world--the 'old' and the 'new.' Living among the Breakage is an original work with an exciting sympathy and sensitive realism towards its subjects--people and communities under pressure, struggling to adapt to new realities, contexts, and identities; believers who for all their experience of liminality are making dynamic contributions to the living texture of tomorrow's global Church.”