In a remote village in Cambodia, Christians dressed in black cloth worship God with indigenous songs and a tribal dance, accompanied by rhythmic clapping. In a congested city in South Korea, a large congregation lifts a solemn hymn while crying out loudly to God in prayer. Meanwhile, in a church building in Poland that houses 60 Ukrainian refugees, the gathered community sings a Polish hymn with violin accompaniment after hearing two different pastors—one from Ukraine, the other from Poland—preach the Word of God.
These snapshots of Christians worshiping God around the globe offer a taste of the rich feast we encounter in a new book, From the Rising of the Sun: A Journey of Worship Around the World. The authors, Tim Challies and Tim Keesee, take us on a whirlwind journey, starting just west of the international dateline in the Pacific Ocean, where a new day begins, and concluding on the Alaskan coastline, just east of where the day ends. (Their title draws from Psalm 113:3, which says, “From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, the name of the Lord is to be praised.”)
Along the way, the book introduces us to gathered communities of worship in 11 different settings. Taken together, these churches lift up Christ across the 24 hours that make up any given Sunday. Challies and Keesee target countries in roughly every second time zone. Unfortunately, however, no church in South Asia appears on the itinerary, presumably due to last-minute visa restrictions the authors encountered.
What is the purpose of this global tour? Mainly, to narrate how local expressions of music, preaching, and sacrament demonstrate both our rich differences and our defining unity as Christ’s church across the world. For the most part, Challies and Keesee succeed in that specific task. The book is primarily descriptive rather than reflective. It’s concerned more with showing certain commonalities and differences than with explaining why they exist. (If you’re looking for a deeper analysis of what unifies and divides the global Christian church, this may not be the place to start.)
The book’s structure is straightforward, making it easy to follow. In the prologue and introduction, Challies and Keesee each give a personal account of how the project took form and what led them to choose which churches to visit. We learn that once the plan was hatched, its implementation hit a series of walls, including a cancer diagnosis and therapy, the devastating loss of a child, and a global pandemic that shut down travel. Nevertheless, the authors’ dream persevered and ultimately led to this book (and an accompanying film series).
The main chapters also follow a straightforward pattern. Each consists primarily of a travelogue based on Keesee’s journal entries from the three or four days the pair spent in a given location. Chapters begin with a general reflection, often from the history of Christian missions in that place. Keesee then typically tells faith narratives of believers or church leaders the authors encountered.
Keesee is a gifted storyteller, and these testimonies constitute some of the richest and most inspiring material in the book. For example, while in Poland, the authors met a Ukrainian woman named Svetlana and her four children. Originally from Mariupol, a city devasted by three months of Russian bombing, Svetlana paid smugglers to extract her family from their homeland. With little access to food and water, they made the dangerous journey through Crimea, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania and finally reached Poland.
Hearing of a church in Rybnik, Poland, that cared for refugees, Svetlana pleaded with the pastor to let her family stay. Although the facilities were already overcrowded, the pastor extended hospitality to this desperate family, and they had lived and worshiped at the church for four months by the time of the authors’ visit.
Finally, each chapter ends with a description of the Sunday worship the writers experienced. I found their narrative of a house church gathering in a member’s living room in Morocco particularly compelling. As they describe it, the small Christian community encircles a table of mint tea and Arabic sweets. The service begins with praying and singing to guitar accompaniment, including original Arabic hymns and songs translated from English. The song “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” is familiar, but this community adds an Arabic verse: “If I’m put in chains, or go to prison, no turning back, no turning back.”
The sermon, taken from 1 Corinthians 1:26–31, talks about how God chose the weak, the low, and the despised in the world so that no one might put hope in themselves. The preaching is interactive, with the leader asking questions and congregants seeking clarification. Later, the group sings the Lord’s Prayer and shares the bread and cup for Communion. Keesee comments, “In that room were old and young along with professionals and the barely literate. Some have good jobs and bright prospects, while others are outcasts, poor, and maybe a little odd. There’s no reason for us to be together here except for one everlasting reason: Christ!”
The scene they describe evokes my own memories of worshiping in house church settings in Asian countries, where even assembling to lift up Christ is a risky business. Although I went to teach classes on the Bible, their joyful worship instructed me in how to more faithfully read New Testament passages about suffering for Christ.
After each chapter, Challies offers a brief reflection on one aspect of Christian worship in a global setting, covering such topics as a visitor’s heart posture, music, preaching, and worshiping in different languages. These sections spotlight common elements as well as differences. Some I found valuable, such as Challies’s reflection on diversity in how different churches practice the Lord’s Supper. Others are quite brief and almost self-evident, like his thoughts “On Being a Good Traveler”: Essentially, try to avoid offending people! In each case, helpful discussion questions enable readers to reflect further and make applications in their own context.
There is much I appreciate in this book. After living outside North America for nearly 25 years and ministering on several continents, I resonate profoundly with the writers’ desire to show how Christians of various languages and cultures exalt our one Lord. These snapshots offer a foretaste of Revelation’s vision of a multitude from every tribe and tongue worshiping before the throne of God and the Lamb (7:9–11). Although we don’t always recognize or embody it, this diversity of cultures, languages, and worship expressions is baked into who we are as God’s people. It will continue into the new creation.
What is more, the book is beautifully written, narrative in style, and engaging to read—perfect for a broad Christian audience. The authors seamlessly weave Scripture and hymns into their travelogue, and photos of their encounters with people and places enrich their descriptions. I also appreciate their efforts to provide relevant historical context, from the voyages of British explorer and captain James Cook to the eruptions of a Chilean volcano to the marginalized posture of the early church in North Africa.
Yet despite the book’s positive features, it left me with several concerns. First, for a book claiming to celebrate the diversity of Christian worship around the world, it offers only one relatively narrow slice of the Christian pie.
Challies and Keesee set boundaries for the types of churches they visited, some acknowledged, some not. The common thread that ties these congregations together is “a deep commitment to Scripture and sound doctrine.” Fair enough. But in practice, these parameters translate into conservative, evangelical churches, primarily from a broadly Reformed theological background. Further, nearly all these churches prioritize doctrine-centered expository preaching.
Given the Reformed backgrounds of Challies (a pastor) and Keesee (a missions organization leader), these limits are perhaps not surprising. But I wonder what would have happened if the authors had expanded their journey and moved out of their comfortable lane. What if they had included churches from a Wesleyan Methodist or Pentecostal background? Given that Pentecostals are the largest single group of evangelical Christians worshiping on any given Sunday, that tradition might have been worth considering.
Or for that matter, what about Roman Catholic or Orthodox Christians? (Surely some will appear among the diverse multitude described in Revelation 7:9.) Or churches that use more drama, ritual, storytelling, media, or other preaching styles, like the kind of call-and-response pattern so familiar to African American worship? Or congregations that emphasize Christlike living as much as or more than sound doctrine?
And what about women? In the book, pastors and pastoral team members are always men, with females fulfilling roles like composing music and singing. But in my time as a missionary and professor serving in different global contexts, I have witnessed God consistently using called and Spirit-gifted women in many ministry roles, including pastoral leadership and preaching. What if the authors had grafted a church with more female leadership into their itinerary, even if this took them outside their comfort zone?
Filling these gaps would have yielded a different book. But perhaps the resulting product would better reflect Revelation’s vision of worshipers from every nation, tribe, people, and culture.
Second, I wish the authors had shown a deeper understanding of issues related to the mission of the church. Challies and Keesee tend to glimpse the global church through a traditional Western filter. For example, when describing missionaries, past and present, they paint a somewhat-romanticized portrait. Missionaries, in this view, are heroes, primarily Western men, who endured great hardship (and sometimes martyrdom) to plant the gospel.
I readily acknowledge the enormous debt we owe to pioneer missionaries who risked everything to fulfill Christ’s commission to make disciples of all nations. As someone who spent most of his adult life in global missions, I’m the last one to throw all missionaries under the bus.
But the book could have demonstrated more sensitivity toward other aspects of the Western missionary legacy, like the colonial attitudes and cultural assumptions that still influence worship around the globe. For example, in the South Pacific, I’ve observed that many pastors wear dress shirts, ties, and sometimes jackets in a tropical climate. The reason, I’ve been told, is that missionaries had prescribed this as proper preaching attire. And the churches the authors describe throughout the book rely heavily, though not exclusively, on translations of Western hymns.
What’s more, missions as described in From the Rising of the Sun advances in one direction, from “us” to “them,” from the West to the rest. But missions today is globalized and multidirectional—“from everywhere to everyone,” as South American theologian Samuel Escobar puts it. That includes missionaries from around the globe coming to minister in North America. I realize this book isn’t a missions textbook. But at times it risks reinforcing stereotypes that still shape the mindsets of North American evangelical congregations.
Finally, Challies and Keesee could have strengthened the book with more in-depth reflection on the various worship settings they observed. They affirm virtually all the examples of worship and preaching they encountered, with little attempt at evaluation or critique. I had hoped that, at the end of the book, they might reflect on some strengths and weaknesses of different practices and traditions or perhaps grapple with their theological significance. But that didn’t happen.
It’s noteworthy that in the final worship reflection, the authors describe feeling “at home” in different churches where familiar elements were present. On the one hand, I share their delight in what unites Christians across various traditions and international venues. On the other hand, a littleless familiarity and a bit more discomfort with the differences might have produced a richer portrait of the magnificent diversity of Christ’s body throughout the earth.
Despite these concerns, this is a book worth reading, especially for Christians who assume, consciously or otherwise, “The way we do worship is right!” or “Everybody does it like us.” With infectious enthusiasm and elegant prose, Challies and Keesee turn a travelogue into an opportunity to celebrate the vibrant variety that characterizes the one global church of Jesus Christ.
Dean Flemming is professor emeritus of New Testament and mission at MidAmerica Nazarene University. His books include Recovering the Full Mission of God: A Biblical Perspective on Being, Doing and Telling.
