Modern Christians face a crisis of love. In an age shaped by globalism and liberal individualism, the very meaning of love has been abstracted and detached from the concrete ties that give it substance. Our culture has replaced what R. R. Reno calls “the love society” with Karl Popper’s “open society,” a world that prizes boundless openness over rooted belonging. In the process, many evangelicals have adopted a theology of world mission that is passionate yet placeless—aspirational but rootless, detached from the real communities and covenants through which love is meant to work.

At the same time, a renewed affection for nation and peoplehood is reemerging, especially in the West. Yet without biblical grounding, this too can curdle into idolatry or neglect the universal scope of God’s purposes. The question before us is how our love for our own—our families, churches, and nation—can overflow in love for the nations as Scripture models.

In Ordered to Love, Alex Kocman argues that the path forward lies in recovering the biblical order of affections: loving first God, then the church, then our neighbors, our nation, and finally the nations who have yet to hear the gospel. When love follows this order, Christians are guarded against both disembodied cosmopolitanism and the sort of self-preservation that fails to obey the Great Commission.

This book offers a theological vision rooted in Scripture and the Christian tradition, showing how grace restores nature by reforming families, renewing the church, strengthening nations, 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.