Four years ago, I started writing stories for Collin Hansen at The Gospel Coalition. My job was to find places where God was at work in the world through his people and to write them up, journalism-style.

We found dozens—among them a sales manager pulling hundreds of women from the sex industry in Louisville, Southern Baptists training more disaster relief volunteers than the Red Cross, and two healthy churches—one black and one white—uniting under a kingdom vision in Iowa.

As we went along, we noticed our good-news stories stood out more and more in a culture that was less and less Christian. We also noticed that the things our sources were doing—loving their enemies, caring for the weak, suffering with joy—were exactly how Paul instructed early Christians to live in a hostile Rome.

At The Gospel Coalition, we want to tell the increasingly marginalized American church: We already have a playbook for being here. Read the Bible. Suffer with joy. Set another seat at the table. Wait confidently for a future you can’t yet see.

And also: Be encouraged—you’re in good company. Look, so many others are doing this already.

We try to do that every day on the website. But Collin and I also laid out this message in our new book, Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age.

We hope the practical, biblical instruction and the stories—which are just as real as the negative news headlines you read every day—will give you courage and peace as we wait for our glorious future.