It’s been a decade already, but Greg Leffel’s book Faith Seeking Action: Mission, Social Movements, and the Church in Motion continues to find its way deeper into the conversation at the intersection of faith, social change, and theo-politics. Based on case-studies of the early 2000s Antiglobalization movement against international corporations and finance, public policy, and their detrimental effects on labor, the environment and culture; the 1980s Sanctuary movement sheltering undocumented refugees from the war zones in Central America; and a movement of house churches beginning in the 1970s, Faith Seeking Action remains relevant to the many questions about faith in public life in an age of Trump, Brexit, and xenophobic hysteria.

It’s principal focus is the architecture of social movement mobilization, addressing the six crucial variables that organize and mobilize effective collective action. But it is also a conversation between a new theological understanding of the church and emerging social movement theory.

This is an academic book for sure, but its ideas are finding their way to popular audiences partly through the speaking and writing of Brian McLaren. His 2016 book The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion is Seeking a Better Way to be Christian devotes a chapter to covering the basics of Faith Seeking Action.

Faith Seeking Action: Mission, Social Movements, and the Church in Motion — Gregory P. Leffel, Ph.D.

Available at Amazon.com in paper and Kindle versions.

For a sample from the Introduction, click the headline above.