Ordered to Love: Recovering the Order of Affections from the Home to the Ends of the Earth

Modern Christians face a crisis of love. Shaped by globalism and liberal individualism, contemporary culture has stripped love of its proper order and detached it from the concrete relationships that give it meaning. What once was a society formed by loyalty, obligation, and location has been replaced by an ethic of openness without roots. In response, many evangelicals have embraced a vision of world mission that is sincere yet placeless—zealous for the nations but inattentive to the families, churches, and communities through which God ordinarily works.

At the same time, renewed concern for nation, peoplehood, and belonging has reemerged, particularly in the West. Yet when severed from biblical theology, these affections can become disordered, collapsing either into idolatry or into a narrow self-interest that neglects Christ’s command to disciple the nations. The question, then, is not whether Christians should love their own, but how that love is rightly ordered so that it overflows rather than competes with obedience to the Great Commission.

In Ordered to Love, Alex Kocman argues that Scripture provides a clear hierarchy of affections: love for God first, then the church, followed by neighbor, nation, and finally the nations beyond. When love follows this order, Christians are preserved from both rootless cosmopolitanism and solely inward-looking nationalism. Drawing from Scripture and the Christian tradition, this book presents a theological vision in which grace restores nature—reforming households, strengthening the church, ordering national life, and advancing the gospel to the ends of the earth.

For pastors, thinkers, and believers longing for coherence between love of home and love for the world, Ordered to Love calls for a recovery of rightly ordered affections—from the home to the nations, for the glory of God.