The Inspiration for Good News for Our Time

 

In August 2014, ISIS swept across northern Iraq. Entire Yazidi villages were overrun. Thousands of men and older boys were executed. Women and young girls were kidnapped, sold into slavery, and repeatedly abused. Children were torn from their families. Hundreds of thousands fled into the mountains or crowded into refugee camps, carrying little more than the clothes they wore.

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Years later, we sat with some of those survivors.

 

The men gathered before us were fathers whose wives had been taken, husbands who did not know whether they would ever see their families again, and sons whose fathers and brothers had been murdered. Everything that had once given shape to their lives—their homes, livelihoods, security, families, and community—had been stripped away.

 

One man quietly summarized what had happened.

 

"The ummah is broken."

 

He was not speaking only of buildings or villages. He was grieving the collapse of an entire community. The neighbors they had trusted for generations had betrayed them to ISIS. Relationships that had held villages together had been shattered. Trust had disappeared. Their world no longer made sense.

 

Yet in that place of unimaginable loss, another story was unfolding.

 

An Arab Christian pastor, serving a Kurdish congregation, had opened his church and his life to these Yazidi families. Historical memory would have expected distance. Arabs, Kurds, and Yazidis had long carried the weight of conflict, suspicion, and division. Yet here they were, serving one another because of Christ.

 

The pastor shared one of Jesus' best-known stories—the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

 

He did not begin with politics or revenge. He spoke about the Father who runs toward broken sons and welcomes them home. He spoke about forgiveness, dignity, and the possibility that God could restore what violence had destroyed.

 

At nearly the same time, another Arab pastor—this one in Beirut—was ministering to a very different group of people: the wives and children of suspected ISIS fighters. They too had lost everything. Their husbands were dead, imprisoned, or missing. Their communities rejected them. They carried guilt that was not necessarily their own and bore the consequences of decisions they had never made.

 

On the surface, these two ministries appeared to stand on opposite sides of history.

 

One cared for the victims of ISIS.

 

The other cared for the families left behind by the ISIS perpetrators.

 

Yet both revealed the same Kingdom.

 

The Kingdom of God was quietly crossing boundaries that history, ethnicity, religion, and violence insisted could never be crossed. Grace was creating a community where the world expected only perpetual hostility. Invisible to most observers, the reign of God was already at work.

 

Only later did I realize that these encounters gave language to something I had been observing for decades.

 

The Yazidi families had lost far more than possessions. They had lost the ability to direct their own lives. Violence had stolen their freedom, fractured their relationships, destroyed their community, and stripped away their future. Even the families of ISIS fighters, though in profoundly different ways, had also lost agency, belonging, and hope. The entire region bore the marks of a community that had become deeply broken.

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I began to see this as the loss of dominion.

 

Not dominion over other people, but the loss of the God-given capacity to live as human beings were created to live—bearing God's image, exercising responsible stewardship, living in trusting relationships, and participating in healthy community. Wherever fear, violence, oppression, disease, injustice, or sin destroys that calling, humanity loses something God intended from the beginning.

 

Years later, as I reflected on these experiences with my friends Jim and David, we found ourselves returning again and again to the Gospels. We noticed that wherever Jesus went, He encountered people who had lost dominion over their lives. The poor, the sick, the excluded, the possessed, the guilty, the fearful, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger—all had been diminished by forces contrary to God's purposes. Everywhere Jesus went, He restored what had been taken.

 

Those conversations eventually became the foundation for a book: How Jesus Changes the World.

 

The more we reflected, the more we realized that this was not a new insight. God had been teaching our family this lesson for generations.

 

Long before we met Yazidi families in northern Iraq, Connie's parents, Grady and Evelyn Mangham, had lived through another humanitarian catastrophe. After years of missionary service in Vietnam, they watched the war end with the collapse of South Vietnam and the desperate flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Their love for Jesus and people drew them into action. They became part of the early efforts to welcome and resettle Vietnamese refugee families who arrived in North America with little more than the hope of beginning again.

 

Few people experience the loss of dominion more completely than refugees. War strips away home, country, language, possessions, livelihood, identity, and often family itself. Refugees do not simply lose a place to live; they lose the ability to shape the course of their own lives. Yet through the patient work of welcome, friendship, discipleship, and community, God begins restoring what violence has stolen.

 

The same pattern continued throughout our years of missionary service in Indonesia and later through humanitarian work with World Relief. Whether responding to earthquakes, floods, famine, conflict, or forced displacement, the immediate needs were obvious: food, water, shelter, medicine, and safety.

 

But another need was just as urgent. Disaster devastates the human spirit. It leaves fear where there was once confidence, isolation where there was once community, despair where there was once hope. The work of relief is never complete until people recover not only the necessities of life but also the dignity, hope, purpose, relationships, and faith that enable them to live as God's image bearers once again.

 

Over time, we came to recognize that this pattern extends beyond humanitarian crises. Humanity itself lives under the greatest disaster of all. Sin has distorted our hearts, our minds, our relationships, and our stewardship of creation. Death stands before every one of us, making loss seem like the final word. In that sense, the human story is one long narrative of lost dominion.

 

The Gospel announces that death does not have the final word.

 

In Jesus Christ, God entered our broken world, bore its sin, defeated its death, and opened the way to restored life. Those who follow Him to the cross, embrace His Spirit, and walk in His way begin to experience even now the restoration of what was lost. Though the fullness of God's Kingdom still awaits its consummation, its restoring power is already at work—in individuals, families, churches, and communities. Wherever Christ reigns, dominion begins to be restored.

 

Only then did we realize that what we had witnessed in northern Iraq, in Beirut, in refugee resettlement, in Indonesia, and in humanitarian ministry around the world was not a series of disconnected experiences. They were all expressions of the same Kingdom. They were all glimpses of the same redeeming work of God.

 

The theology of Restored Dominion did not begin as an abstract idea. It emerged from listening to people, sharing their struggles, serving alongside churches and communities around the world, and then returning to Scripture with fresh questions. Again and again, the biblical story revealed the same truth: God's redemptive work is always about restoring His people so they may once again reflect His character and participate in His purposes for the world.

 

The pages that follow are an invitation to read Scripture through that lens. From Genesis to Revelation, the story of God is the story of His determination to restore what sin, violence, fear, injustice, and death have taken away. The Kingdom of God is God's great work of restored dominion, and Jesus Christ is its King.

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That conviction lies behind every page of the books that follow.