The Kingdom Unleashed is a game-changing book. It devastates many of the tacit assumptions that have shackled the full expression of the Gospel of the Kingdom in the Global North. The biblical dynamics of discipleship, evangelism, the ecclesia, spiritual warfare, and life transformation are alive and well in the Global South, and Jerry Trousdale and Glenn Sunshine cogently examine those contemporary dynamics and boldly apply them to the expressions of Christianity in the Global North. This book inspires, challenges, and convicts, and will drive the reader to greater boldness in prayer and dependence on the power of the Spirit.
Ken Boa
President of Reflection Ministries, Author,
President of Trinity House Publishers
In The Kingdom Unleashed, Jerry and Glenn have laid out a good summary of the principles and ethos that serve as the underpinnings of multiplicative ministry. This is a book worth reading both for those who are wanting to grow in their understanding of this type of ministry and for those who simply need reinforcement and encouragement as they walk this path. I highly recommend it.
Curtis Sergeant
Early CPM Pioneer and Movement Catalyst,
Global Trainer,
Founder of Meta Camp
Be prepared to learn about what God is doing in this world in The Kingdom Unleashed. Be prepared to catch the breadth and depth of the vision of Jesus for the kingdom of God. Be prepared to be changed and to be a change agent in your church and community. Be prepared to take part in The Kingdom Unleashed. Sunshine and Trousdale’s study examines Bible, theology, church history and the lives of ordinary people in all parts of the globe who are living out the kingdom vision. If anything, The Kingdom Unleashed will take you out of your world into the wider world of God’s work.
Scot McKnight
Julius R. Mantey Professor of New Testament, Northern Seminary
Author of many books, including The King Jesus Gospel
What God is doing in the Global South right now, even as many of us note the decline of the church in the Global North, is historic. But God is no respecter of geographic regions. He works across the globe through His people, just as He has throughout history. Sunshine and Trousdale are to be thanked for highlighting the lessons to be learned in studying when and where God has moved both today and in the past, and for reminding all of us that the Kingdom of God is, indeed, unstoppable.
John Stonestreet
President, The Colson Center for Christian Worldview
BreakPoint Radio Co-Host
Over the last twenty years, a great role reversal has begun. Rather than Western Christianity educating the non-West, disciples in Acts-like movements have been teaching the established Christian world what the kingdom of God really looks like. Frustration and dissatisfaction over broken ministry models and human-centered agendas have opened our ears to messages that hearken back to something that feels much more like the New Testament. To effect real change, however, The Kingdom Unleashed calls us to confront the roots of our broken models. Then the authors take a fresh look at Scriptural solutions, illustrated by testimonies of transformed lives and communities on every continent, to shine a light on a path forward. It’s a path any leader, church or follower of Jesus can take back God’s intended design–at the simple cost of our lives and personal agendas (John 12:24).
Steve Smith
Co-Facilitator – The 2414 Coalition 2414 now.net,
Global Movement Catalyst (Beyond),
Vice President of Multiplication (East-West),
Author
In his first book, Miraculous Movements, Jerry Trousdale introduced people in the Global North to remarkable stories of God’s breakthroughs among Muslim and animistic people groups across Africa. In The Kingdom Unleashed, Jerry and co-author Glenn Sunshine pull back the curtains and allow readers to grapple with the question: “If He is the same God here as in Asia and Africa, why are we not seeing the same fruitfulness in the U.S. and in Europe?” While some have allowed their own voids to tempt them to disbelieve, others are open to new possibilities.
This book will challenge you if you live and work in the Global North, rest assured. You likely will not be able to embrace all of its affirmations or recommendations—at least not all at once. Paradigms are ways of thinking which help us understand, but they also filter our sense of reality. They are necessarily difficult to shift. But God is doing things in our world that are prompting many in the Global North to open up to new possibilities. Read the book with benefit. Experiment with its suggestions. But most of all, I urge you to open yourself to what the Word says about the Reign of God. Here are the seeds of change Jesus brought to first-century Judea and here are the seeds of change needed in the twenty-first century. Explore again, for the first time, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…”
John King
Veteran Pastor
Movement Catalyst
Director of Global DMM Training, Final Command Ministries
Books about movements have tended to be either scripture-based, or anecdotal. Finally, Jerry Trousdale and Glenn Sunshine have created an incredible storehouse of knowledge, coupled with actual case studies, that takes disciple-making movements off the page and into reality. In fact, I probably know half the implementers in these case studies personally. Finally we have an instruction manual that provides not only the guidelines, but also extensive history and illustrations for church multiplication movements.”
Doug Lucas,
President of Team Expansion
Founder and Editor of Brigada
Several times while reading The Kingdom Unleashed I found myself praying, “Thank You, Father, someone has written this!” Here are needed voices pointing us not only to the Kingdom, but the Gospel of the Kingdom. In my travels with Trousdale, “Hassan” and others mentioned in this book, I have seen the undeniable evidence of the Kingdom invading the darkness. Neither I nor any other person can fully know or describe exactly what God is doing in these regions, but my eyes have seen enough of this glory, from the western tip of Senegal to the eastern shores of Indonesia, to herald the news, “the Kingdom is being unleashed at a rate hardly imaginable to most in the Global North.”
Nathan J’Diim, Pastor, Founder of TOAG Internships
SKI Foundation Director
I am very excited about this new book, The Kingdom Unleashed, by Trousdale and Sunshine. The amazing reports of Disciple Making Movements have been thrilling for the last several years. But this book makes clear that these kinds of miraculous reports of exponential growth of the Kingdom of God are consistent with Biblical principles. This book helps us see a path forward, some very concrete changes in both our paradigms and practices that can bring similar Kingdom breakthroughs in our lives and ministries.
David Parish
President, World Missions and Evangelism, Inc.
The incredible growth of Christianity in the global south forces us in the global north to re-evaluate ourselves, our message, and our methods. Most importantly, it forces us to examine our hearts and ask, ‘What is God doing without us?’ After analyzing the faltering trajectory of the Western Church, the authors of The Kingdom Unleashed give us a template of ‘Kingdom Movements’ taking root so strongly in the south that ‘Christianity is spreading faster now than at any time in history.’ From the foundation of the teachings and ministry of Jesus, the book overflows with stories and interviews illustrating the power of God’s Word implemented by ordinary people. The book concludes with references to a wealth of resources and practical guidelines to begin replicating the Kingdom values of Jesus in our own communities. This may become the book igniting the next phase of revival in the Western Church.
Dr. William E Brown,
Senior Fellow for Worldview and Culture, The Colson Center for Christian Worldview
Movements! Movements of the Spirit of God! These very words connect deep within us to something we desperately hope to believe is real. Can God so intervene into the affairs of men in such a way that thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands can be swept into the Kingdom in a short time? From places long untouched with the Gospel? Among Muslims? What is happening globally is both historic and undeniable. These questions are answered with a resounding, YES! The question left which shouts for an answer is, if among hardened Muslims, among sheikhs and imams, why not among the peoples of the global North? Can His Kingdom come and his will so be done here too? What is hindering? Trousdale and Sunshine light the lamp to look into church history, into His Word, and into lessons from current movements to bring a prophetic word of hope!
James Forlines
Executive Director of Final Command
A friend recently observed that when you focus on the Kingdom you will get the Church but when you focus on the Church you don’t always get the Kingdom. Jerry and Glenn present a Kingdom-oriented model of ministry that has resulted in the expansion of the Church around the globe through ordinary people who have chosen to obey God. As Kingdom people we emulate Jesus, doing what we see the Father doing (John 5:19) and part of what the Father is doing today is the multiplication of disciple-making movements. In the Kingdom Unleashed, Jerry and Glenn show you how to join what God is doing today.
Mark Fields,
Director of Global and Intercultural Ministry,
Vineyard Church USA
The Kingdom Unleashed offers a corrective to Western Christians, who have lost sight of the Kingdom of God, true experience of discipleship, hope of revival and awakening, and the power of the illimitable Spirit of God. This comprehensive report reminds us that the Kingdom of God is growing and expanding where men and women take Christ at His Word and devote themselves to simple, radical, daily obedience to Him. Read this book, and let it unsettle your settled soul, so that you hunger and strive to know the kind of faith multiplied millions of believers daily experience in lands and places where the shackles of materialism, narcissism, and status quo living have never taken hold. This book is not a call to revolution. It is an announcement that revolution is underway, as it has been for two millennia, and a call for you to take your rightful place in it.
T. M. Moore
Principal, The Fellowship of Ailbe
In countless prayer sessions on several continents, I have witnessed missionaries begging for the Kingdom of Heaven to be unleashed in our lifetime. I was one of those missionaries, who after starting several churches in South America and North America, still struggled with discouragement because our pace of church planting and evangelism did not seem to keep up with world population shifts. At last, hope and inspiration have renewed my spirit as The Kingdom Unleashed presents voices of many ordinary Christians bearing testimony of dramatic advances in the name of Jesus Christ.
Glenn Robb
Missiologist, Disciple Maker,
and Church Planter
Trousdale now with co-conspirator, Glenn Sunshine is like the common cold, he just won’t go away! Obviously this “Movement” thing has infected him and he is out to infect us. Stay away from this book if you want to continue your comfortable existence, especially if you pastor a western church. You are in for mindset shifting that will challenge the foundations of your methodology and force you to rethink its connection to your theology. This book should come with a warning label!
Roy Moran,
Pastor, Shoal Creek Community Church
Author of Spent Matches, igniting a signal fire for the spiritually dissatisfied
As I deal with church health issues in North America, I see many unhealthy churches. Jerry and Glenn have pinpointed some of the reasons: we have failed to make disciples who obey everything Christ commanded; we have substituted professional ministers for the equipping of the whole body to be the ministers; for the most part, our members and churches don’t fervently pray Kingdom prayers from righteous lives; and we settle for mediocre spiritual vitality.
Fortunately, Jerry and Glenn don’t leave us with a gloomy diagnosis of the sickness. They testify to the ways God is working to multiply obedient disciples and vibrant and fruitful churches. God is bringing a harvest from every tribe, language, and nation. It is time for God’s people in the Global North to do our part in obeying Christ’s Final Command and finishing the task of making obedient disciples of ALL peoples to the ends of the earth. The future is pressing in on us. It’s time for the bride of Christ to prepare herself for the wedding with the Lamb.
Claude V. King
Coauthor of Experiencing God
President of the Board of Final Command Ministries
This book is a very important book, especially for disciple making leaders. It describes the spiritual dynamics that must be established in a church or in a network of churches for God to unleash the power of his Holy Spirit for a disciple making movement. I am asking all my friends who lead churches and all the national discipleship leaders I know to read and pray through this book.
Dr. Bobby Harrington,
Executive Director
Discipleship.org
The Kingdom Unleashed is about the partnership between God and His people working closely together in order to see every family and community on our planet transformed by the Holy Spirit through a local body of Believers whose love for God and their neighbors surpasses their fear of failure, relevance, persecution, or acceptance by the greater body of older churches who have forgotten how to represent God and His Kingdom to ordinary people everywhere.
The Body of Christ needs people like Jerry and Glenn who willingly become lightning rods for those who think they have God and His Church figured out. The world is changing, and changing at an ever increasing rate. When we think we have the world figured out, we expose our ignorance. None have seen the full glory of God, and none have begun to touch the complexity of our cities, societies, technologies, and the tribes we use to arrange ourselves and identify ourselves to others. The Kingdom Unleashed begins the conversation about a new era of Disciples of Jesus attempting to understand God and His Kingdom, as well as the actions of the Holy Spirit in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel in a world so complex that before I finish writing this endorsement new paradigms will emerge that no one has yet to encounter, understand or describe.
The first step we take into these uncharted waters is a deepening relationship with God and His people which opens our eyes to see and ears to hear what God is doing today. The Kingdom Unleashed is the first flagstone of a new path which is attempting to understand and exercise our roles in this partnership with God and HIs church that is changing the world.
David Watson,
Pioneer Movement Catalyst,
Coauthor of Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery
“I could not put The Kingdom Unleashed down. This book will open a floodgate that will not be shut–of waves after waves of obedient disciples following Jesus in the Global North. This breakthrough book articulates kingdom movements from countless interviews of ordinary people igniting miraculous movements, and from an unprecedented depth and breadth of research and a historical and theological perspective. The Kingdom Unleashed challenges us to re-embrace our calling to follow Jesus at all costs!”
Mary Ho,
International Executive Leader,
All Nations Family
“Christianity is spreading faster than it has at any time in human history.”
For those living in the Global North (USA and Europe), that is a surprising statement because Christianity is in decline in the Western world. But it is accurate.
Christianity is exploding in the Global South (including Asia, Africa, Latin America). For example, soon China will have a larger Christian population than any other nation. Between 2001 and 2017 there were more than 100 significant Kingdom movements among Muslims, and a movement is defined as at least 100 new churches and 1,000 baptisms within a twenty year period. (See, for example, Jerry Trousdale, Miraculous Movements)
What is the difference? How might we see renewal in the Global North comparable to what is happening in the Global South?
In their new book entitled The Kingdom Unleashed: How Hundreds of Disciple Making Movements in Africa and Asia Can Transform the Church in America and Europe, Jerry Trousdale & Glenn Sunshine with Gregory Benoit address these questions.
The book utilizes the experiences and data from Disciple Making Movements and Church Planting Movements across the globe. Filled with interviews, actual experiences (including some in the Global North), and connections to the best of practices in church history as well as reflection on Jesus’s own practices, they offer a diagnosis of the problems in the Global North and suggest effective strategies from the experience of the Global South.
For example, they believe the West has
Simply put, the church can’t move, that is, grow in spirit and numbers when it pursues this typical Western course. Discipling Movements in the Global South have learned that the church grows when there is
As they appear here these suggestions are sketchy and simple, but they are deeply rooted in biblical theology, practical experiences, and reports of divine blessing throughout the Global South.
This book provides a practical and informed roadmap to see how ordinary believers may see the kingdom come alive in their churches, ministries, and communities.
I read it with profit, and I think you can profit as well.
John Mark Hicks
Professor Lipscomb University Hazelip School of Theology
Author