The Wine of the Kingdom

This book explores the implications of some of Jesus's teaching about the nature of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is penetrational, in contrast to congregational. The kingdom is inner and spiritual, in contrast to external and physical. The kingdom is relational, in contrast to impersonal. The kingdom manifests itself in humility, weakness, and obscurity in contrast to domination, position, and visibility. The kingdom begins small without recognition but achieves great influence. The kingdom is entered by a second birth, but one's first birth is a valuable indicator of and contributor to one's calling within it. The kingdom is now. The kingdom is future. Kingdom teaching has been largely ignored and contradicted throughout church history by the various institutions of Christendom, but children of the kingdom have been present both within and without those institutions. This book is a call to focus on the centrality of Jesus's teaching, to embrace kingdom values, and to proceed accordingly.

Steve Slater, a native of Southwest Virginia, was founder of Vektor Communications in Long Beach, California. In 1985 he began representing a Long Beach aerospace firm and a Dutch trading company in Russia. He formed the joint venture Divek in Moscow and later opened an affiliate of Vektor in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk—the Siberian city of scientists, an academic center and home to numerous scientific institutes.

He is a graduate of Carson-Newman University in mathematics and physics. He was a licensed minister in the Southern Baptist Convention and later commissioned by the Grace Brethren Churches. He has served on the international staff of The Navigators for the last 36 years.

He met his wife Kit in Brighton, England, where they were married. Three years later they moved from there to the Soviet Union with their one-year old daughter Julie. They resided in Moscow and Siberia for 12 years.