Church Life
Showing 673–684 of 746 resultsSorted by latest
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Truly The Community A Print On Demand Title
$31.99Originally published in 1992 as The Hilarity of Community, this edition includes a new title, preface, and entirely new cover design. Truly the Community continues to be one of the best sources for understanding what it means to live together as the church of Christ.
Many writers, both secular and religious, have decried the lack of intimacy and community in our contemporary culture. Few of them, however, offer practical suggestions for counteracting the isolation and alienation felt by so many people today. But Marva Dawn does this–and more–in Truly the Community. Through an intensive study of Romans 12, Dawn offers specific guidance for building vital Christian community life.
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Deeply Woven Roots
$41.66Improving the quality of life in your community. Gunderson takes the eight major strengths of congregations and shows how they can be used to fill the gap between what a health care system will pay for and what it won’t in caring for their members. Help your church become a more imaginative, courageous, and effective enabler of healing and well-being in personal and societal life.
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Starting Small Groups
$23.99In Starting Small Groups: Building Communities That Matter, Jeffrey Arnold discusses small groups and details step-by-step the method for designing a small-group ministry to fit a congregation’s unique situations. Adapted from a workbook format that allows each congregation to identify its own particular needs and character, this resource includes ways to plan, envision, and strategize for the formation of small groups.
The author looks at significant issues related to designing or revamping a small-group ministry, including group types; group structure; leadership training and support; marketing; recruiting people into groups; answering the why, when, how, and what of groups; and evaluating so that positive changes can be continually made. Ending each chapter is a series of workbook-style questions. The answers to these questions form the structure and content of each church’s unique ministry design. While individuals, committees, and churches work their way through the questions, they may consult the sample strategy contained in an appendix at the end of the book.
The writing style employed in this resource is simple, graphic, and easy to read. It is written so that both laypersons and pastors will be comfortable using it. Stories abound so that a process that may seem difficult comes to life in these pages.
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Who Comes In The Name Of The Lord
$26.99In Who Comes in the Name of the Lord?, Harold J. Recinos advances the thesis that God has already prepared a future for mainline churches in Christ at the margins of society. That margin is the barrio — a contemporary Nazareth — judged by society as inferior, worthless, and productive of nothing good.
Drawing on the biblical witness, Recinos develops a perspective that shows that God identifies with those who are poor, marginal, weak, and lowly in society. God’s option for the lowly, he asserts, takes the form of incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. God-in-Jesus is enfleshed in the history of an unimportant place known as Nazareth of Galilee. Nazareth, an inferior and worthless place, supports God on its barrio streets. Far from the Temple, on the town roads and with fisher-folk, Jesus first reveals in a fresh way the God of the poor and lowly.
The cultural role of mainline Christians, argues Recinos, is not to be guardians of society; rather, mainline Christians and their churches are to shape and amend their culture in response to the work of God in human history. That work is imaged by feasting with the uninvited people who are kept isolated from mainstream society, yet presuppose the reality of God. Thus, Recinos argues for a missional ecclesiology suggesting that local congregations are instruments of a sacred love that renews the world of uninvited guests and forgotten people. The true church, he says, does not meet the anguished cry of people at the margins of life with silence but with dikaioma (“a just action”) which assures shalom. The author then suggests several ways the local church can announce the reign of God and peace with justice, beginning in the barrio.
“Once again, Harold Recinos opens up the gospel for us from the perspective of the barrio, and in particular of those recent immigrants who have arrived at the barrio as refugees from situations of unspeakable violence and dehumanization. This is a hard-hitting book about a hard-hitting Jesus. Not recommended for those who are looking for a soft, other-worldly word of inspiration. But certainly required reading for any who wish to be faithful to Jesus in our contemporary society!” –Justo L. Gonzalez
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End Of Christian Psychology
$14.11Eastgate Publishers Title
What can be wrong with “Christian psychology”? When it is comprised of the same confusion of contradictory theories and techniques as secular psychology. “Christian” psychologists have simply borrowed their theories and techniques from this world’s wisdom. Packed with biblical and scientific evidence, this book thoroughly demonstrates that professional psychotherapy with its underlying psychologies is questionable at best, detrimental at worst, and a spiritual counterfeit in any event.
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After Our Likeness
$37.99In this first volume in the Sacra Doctrina series, Miroslav Volf explores the relationship between persons and community in Christian theology. The focus is the community of grace, the Christian church. The point of departure is the thought of the first Baptist, John Smyth, and the notion of church as “gathered community” that he shared with Radical Reformers. Volf seeks to counter the tendencies toward individualism in Protestant ecclesiology and to suggest viable understanding of the church in which both person and community are given their proper due.
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2 Cities Of God A Print On Demand Title
$21.99The chapters of this book offer informed perspectives on a “theology of the world,” exploring the question How does/should the church relate to the secular world? The standard dogma of the 1960s was Let the world set the agenda! Such a perspective has often caused the American church merely to reflect, rather than to inform and lead, the society in which it lives. Surely, say the authors of this volume, it must be the other way around.
Using the biblical image of the earthly city and the heavenly city, Robert Benne, Carl E. Braaten, Robert W. Jenson, Gilbert Meilaender, Christopher R. Seitz, Anthony Ugolnik, George Weigel, and Robert L. Wilken discuss such subjects as natural law, politics, the academy, economics, and marriage. Each essay boldly asserts that the church’s most faithful service in the world begins and ends with her life in the communion of the triune God. The first task of the church is to be true to her own self as the Body of Christ in the world. As such the church is a sign and agent of the heavenly city within and for the earthly city.
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Another Days Journey
$31.66An analytical portrayal of the internal life of black churches and their many effective forms of social ministry. The author provides the reader with an excellent set of practical guidelines that churches will find useful as they strive to increase their resources for worthy projects.
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Crisis In The Church
$29.95Drawing on his wealth of experience as both a seminary professor and minister, John Leith identifies and confronts the contemporary crisis in theological education. He argues that the crisis in the seminaries is interwoven with the crisis in the church, and that the secularization of educational institutions has led seminaries to move away from their primary responsibility – preparing pastors for ministry.
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Contemporary Worship : A Sourcebook For Spirited Traditional Praise And See
$32.99This handbook contains everything a congregation needs in order to plan, launch, and stabilize contemporary worship services. Three formats for contemporary worship are shown: spirited-traditional, contemporary praise, and contemporary seeker (or outreach-oriented) services. The resources include sample formats, sample messages that are appropriate for the format, sample skits, interviews, or dramas, and a database of worship choruses that are appropriate to each of the three contemporary formats.
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