Church History
Showing 37–48 of 549 results
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Lent : The Season Of Repentance And Renewal
$20.00Add to cartLent is inescapably about repenting. Every year, the church invites us into a season of repentance and fasting in preparation for Holy Week. It’s an invitation to turn away from our sins and toward the mercy and grace of Christ.
Often, though, we experience the Lenten fast as either a mindless ritual or self-improvement program. In this short volume, priest and scholar Esau McCaulley introduces the season of Lent, showing us how its prayers and rituals point us not just to our own sinfulness but also beyond it to our merciful Savior.
Each volume in the Fullness of Time series invites readers to engage with the riches of the church year, exploring the traditions, prayers, Scriptures, and rituals of the seasons of the church calendar.
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Turning Points : Decisive Moments In The History Of Christianity
$29.99Add to cartNow in its fourth edition, this bestselling textbook (over 125,000 copies sold) isolates key events that provide a framework for understanding the history of Christianity. The book presents Christianity as a worldwide phenomenon rather than just a Western experience.
This popular textbook is organized around 14 key moments in church history, providing contemporary Christians with a fuller understanding of God as he has revealed his purpose through the centuries. The new edition includes a new preface, updates throughout the book, revised “further readings” for each chapter, new sidebar content, and study questions. It also more thoroughly highlights the importance of women in Christian history and the impact of world Christianity.
Turning Points is well suited to introductory courses on the history of Christianity as well as study groups in churches. Additional resources for instructors are available through Textbook eSources.
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Fount Of Heaven
$24.99Add to cartYou are the fountain of life, light, and all grace and truth
The hearts of the first Christians beat with praise for Christ. The strength of their devotion is remarkable, considering the times of uncertainty and persecution in which they lived. Despite all of this, the early church flourished, sustained by the God to whom they prayed.
Christians today have a lot to learn from the devotional life of the early church. In Fount of Heaven, a collection of carefully selected prayers from the first six centuries of the church, we can pray with our spiritual forefathers. Prayers from luminaries such as Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, and Augustine are arranged by theme to reveal the right prayer for the moment. The prayers have been slightly updated to read more easily, but they retain their joy and mystery. As we turn to the prayers of the first Christians, we can return to the foundations of our own faith.
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Reorganized Religion : The Reshaping Of The American Church And Why It Matt
$27.00Add to cartUncover the ways the Christian church has changed in recent years–from the decline of the mainline denominations to the mega-churchification of American culture to the rise of the Nones and Exvaneglicals–and a hopeful reimagining of what the church might look like going forward.
The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented spiritual, technological, demographic, political and social transformation– moving from an older, mostly white, mostly Protestant, religion-friendly society to a younger diverse, multiethnic, pluralistic culture, where no one faith group will have the advantage. At the same time, millions of Americans are abandoning organized religion altogether in favor of disorganized disbelief.
Reorganized Religion is an in-depth and critical look at why people are leaving American churches and what we lose as a society as it continues. But it also accepts the dismantling of what has come before and try to help readers reinvent the path forward. This book looks at the future of organized religion in America and outline the options facing churches and other faith groups. Will they retreat? Will they become irrelevant? Or will they find a new path forward?
Written by veteran religion reporter Bob Smietana, Reorganized Religion is a journalistic look at the state of the American church and its future. It draws on polling data, interviews with experts, and reporting on how faith communities old and new are coping with the changing religious landscape, along with personal stories about how faith is lived in everyday life. It also profiles faith communities and leaders who are finding interesting ways to reimagine what church might look like in the future and discuss various ways we can reinvent this organization so it survives and thrives. The book also reflects the hope that perhaps people of faith can learn to become, if not friends with the larger culture, then at least better neighbors.
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Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength (Expanded)
$22.00Add to cartSome publishers tell you what to believe. Other publishers tell you what you already believe. But InterVarsity Press helps you believe.
J. I. PackerThe history of evangelicalism cannot be understood apart from the authors and books that shaped it. Over the past century, leading figures such as pastor-scholar John Stott, apologist James W. Sire, evangelist Rebecca Manley Pippert and spiritual formation writer Eugene Peterson helped generations of readers to think more biblically and engage the world around them. For many who take their Christianity seriously, books that equip them for a life of faith have frequently come from one influential publisher: InterVarsity Press.
Andy Le Peau and Linda Doll provide a narrative history of InterVarsity Press, from its origins as the literature division of a campus ministry to its place as a prominent Christian publishing house. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the stories, people, and events that made IVP what it is today. Recording good times and bad, celebrations and challenges, they place IVP in its historical context and demonstrate its contribution to the academy, church and world.
In honor of IVP’s seventy-fifth anniversary, senior editor Al Hsu has updated this edition with new content, bringing the story up to 2022 and including stories about contemporary authors such as Esau McCaulley and Tish Harrison Warren. As IVP continues to adapt to changes in publishing and the global context, the mission of publishing thoughtful Christian books has not changed. IVP stands as a model of integrative Christianity for the whole person–heart, soul, mind and strength.
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What Kind Of Christianity
$30.00Add to cartLike most Americans, Presbyterians in the United States know woefully little about the history of slavery and the rise of anti-Black racism in our country. Most think of slavery as a tragedy that “just happened” without considering how it happened and who was involved. In What Kind of Christianity William Yoo paints an accurate picture of the complicity of the majority of Presbyterians in promoting, supporting, or willfully ignoring the enslavement of other human beings. Most Presbyterians knew of the widespread physical and sexual violence that enslavers visited on the enslaved, and either approved of it or did nothing to prevent it. Most Presbyterians in the nineteenth century-whether in the South or the North–held racist attitudes toward African Americans and put those attitudes into daily application. In short, during that period when the Presbyterian church was establishing itself as a central part of American life most of its members were promoting slavery and anti-Black racism. In this important book William Yoo demonstrates that to understand how Presbyterian Christians can promote racial justice today, they must first understand and acknowledge how deeply racial injustice is embedded in their history and identity as a denomination.
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Suffering Not Power
$26.99Add to cartOverturning a popular view of the atonement
Was Christ’s death a victory over death or a substitution for sin? Many today follow Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor view, which portrays Christ’s death as primarily a ransom paid to the powers of evil and which, according to Aulen, reflected the beliefs of the early church. Aulen held that this ransom theory view dominated until Anselm reframed atonement as satisfaction and the Reformers reframed it as penal substitution.
In Suffering, Not Power, Benjamin Wheaton challenges this common narrative that Christ’s work of atonement was reframed by Anselm, showing that sacrificial and substitutionary language was common well before Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. Wheaton displays this through a careful analysis of three medieval theologians whose writings on the atonement are commonly overlooked: Caesarius of Arles, Haimo of Auxerre, and Dante Alighieri. These figures come from different times and contexts and wrote in different genres, but each spoke of Christ’s death as a sacrifice of expiation and propitiation made by God to God.
Let history speak for itself, read the evidence, and reconsider the church’s belief in Christ’s substitutionary death for sinners.
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Shape Of Christian History
$22.00Add to cartWhile understanding history has always been an essential task for God’s people, rapid changes within the past two generations of Christianity have challenged many of our assumptions and methods for studying the past. How should thoughtful Christians–and especially historians and missiologists–make sense of global Christianity as an unfolding historical movement?
Scott Sunquist invites readers to join him for a capstone course in historical thinking from a master teacher. Highlighting both the continuity and the diversity within the Christian movement over the centuries, he identifies three key concepts for framing church history: time, cross, and glory. These themes shed light to help us discern how the Jesus movement developed from the first century to the present, through an explosion of contextual expressions. Tracing these concepts through the centuries, we learn from the stories of Christians reflecting the glories of God’s kingdom–and from their failures.
Filled with historical case studies and stories from Sunquist’s teaching around the world, The Shape of Christian History offers a framework for how to read and write church history. Even more, it demonstrates how the study of history illuminates God’s mission in the world and sharpens our understanding of how to participate in that mission faithfully.
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Klaas Schilder Reader
$49.99Add to cartRecovering a forgotten theologian.
Klaas Schilder (1890-1952) was a prominent Dutch Reformed theologian in the early twentieth century, first as a pastor and then as a professor. While his fame spread to North America in the 1940s, he is mostly forgotten today. In Schilder Reader: The Essential Theological Writings, readers will rediscover this important Dutch theologian.
Working in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, Schilder applies Dutch Neo–Calvinism to the twentieth century. This includes secularism, the rise and influence of Karl Barth, opposition to Nazism, and the relation between the church and society. Schilder Reader contextualizes his work and furthers the neo–Calvinist tradition.
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How The Church Fathers Read The Bible
$24.99Add to cartRead the Scriptures with the insight of our forebears
Christians live in the house built by the church fathers. The fathers’ reading of the Scriptures shaped key doctrines that are essential to Christianity. But appreciating how the fathers read the Bible is not just for the historically curious, as if it were only a matter of literary archaeology. Nor should it be intimidating. Rather, the fathers gleaned insights from Scripture that continue to be relevant to all Christians.
How the Church Fathers Read the Bible is an accessible introduction to help you read Scripture with the early church. With a clear and simple style, Gerald Bray explains the distinctives of early Christian interpretation and shows how the fathers interpreted key Bible passages from Genesis to Revelation. Their unique perspective is summed up in seven principles that can inspire our Bible reading today. With Bray as your guide, you can reclaim the rich insights of the fathers with reverence and discernment.
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Charles Fox Parham
$16.99Add to cartCharles Fox Parham is an absorbing and perhaps controversial biography of the founder of modern Pentecostalism. Parham was a deeply flawed individual who nevertheless was used by God to initiate and establish one of the greatest spiritual movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, helping to restore the power of Pentecost to the church and being a catalyst for numerous healings and conversions. Author Dr. Larry Martin is a lifelong Pentecostal with decades of ministry as a pastor, educator, and evangelist. He researched the life of this complicated and contradictory figure for over twenty-five years before writing this book-with a certain degree of hesitancy. By disclosing the whole truth about Parham’s life-which has never fully been done before-would it give excessive ammunition to the critics of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements? Martin uncompromisingly exposes Parham’s weaknesses, faulty thinking, and transgressions while disassociating his behavior from the movement as a whole, writing with an inside understanding of Pentecostalism and a thoughtful analysis of Parham’s life that goes beyond the acknowledgment of human frailty to reveal the work of a sovereign God. If we don’t confront the faults of our spiritual fathers, Martin says, we will fail to address the truth in the way the Bible lays bare the faults of some of our greatest biblical heroes of the faith. We must recognize and learn from the weaknesses of others, as well as their achievements. The author of several books on the Asuza Street Revival, the history of early Pentecostals, and the Pentecostal Church of God, Martin presents a much-needed exploration of the life of one of the most influential religious figures of the twentieth century, whose impact is still widely felt today. Includes photos of Parham’s life and ministry.
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Historical Foundations Of Worship
$29.99Add to cartThis volume brings together an ecumenical team of scholars to offer a historical overview of how worship developed. The book first orients readers to the common core elements the global church shares in the history and development of worship theology and historical practice. It then introduces the major streams of worship practice: Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, including Reformation traditions, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism. The book includes introductions by John Witvliet and Nicholas Wolterstorff. A previous volume addressed the theological foundations of worship.