[1] Cracknell has written many articles and books on interfaith dialogue and other subjects, including Towards a New Relationship (1985), Justice Courtesy and Love (1994), An Introduction to World Methodism (2005), and In Good and Generous Faith (2005).
A festschrift, A Great Commission (2000) edited by Martin Forward, Stephen Plant and Susan White, includes scholarly articles by numerous friends and colleagues on the occasion of Cracknell's 65th birthday.
His Justice, Courtesy and Love examines the contributions of Christian scholars including missionaries whose encounter with the religious Other deepened their own understanding of the nature of God's concern for the restoration of human and planetary health.
His career included pioneering the interfaith relations work of the British Council of Churches, teaching at University of Cambridge and at Brite Divinity School, Texas from where he retired in 2007 as Distinguished Professor of Theology and Global Studies.
Marcus Braybrooke, historian of interreligious relations, refers to Cracknell as "the influential Methodist thinker" in his contribution to Islam and Global Dialogue (2005) (edited by Roger Boase).
Cracknell founded the Association for Ministerial Training in a Multifaith Society, which held annual conferences attended by upwards of 200 clergy over several years, exploring how theological education ought to respond to the reality and challenges of multiculturalism.
Cracknell's 1985 book, Towards A New Relationship written while serving at the BCC explored many of the Biblical passages, such as John 14: 6 and Acts 4: 2 that Christian cite to defend an exclusive view of salvation as found only through an explicit, with the lips confession of Jesus as Lord and Savior.
Travelling widely throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland, in Europe and beyond promoting interfaith dialogue and visiting situations where Christian found themselves compelled to think about their relations with the religious Other, Cracknell was concerned to learn from their experiences but to also challenge a narrow perception of the meaning of faith, which is always God's gift and never a human work.
In much of his writing, Cracknell drew on the scholarship of Wilfred Cantwell Smith whose approach allows Others to define themselves, resisting the temptation to impose preconceived assumptions such as that any claim to experience God outside of Christ must be false.