Author: Merwyn S. Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781733514200
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book addresses the current turmoil in American Christianity and culture. The Church is at a crossroads, often trapped by its own message. Only Jesus Christ can provide bedrock for such a time as this. American Christianity has boxed itself in at two crucial points. (1) The message of salvation, including the afterlife, typically focuses on Jesus dwelling in our hearts to make us good, make society good, and through us make others good. This message raises tough questions from within. If we do not feel Jesus in our hearts, is God still there? Are we still saved? Is it finally up to us to make ourselves good? Where, then, does God fit in? (2) Many American Christians set up a distinction between the Church as the place where God dwells and the World as a secular place without God. Does our World now confidently embrace secularism? If so, how do Christians--and the Church--fit into such a World? On both fronts, the Church now faces a crisis of authenticity, relevance, and community. The true Christian bedrock, Jesus Christ, offers new directions for moving forward. When the message shifts from claiming that Christ is in us to affirming that we are in Christ, the emphasis changes from embodying God in ourselves to participating in what God is doing all around us. The mantra, where the Church is, there is Christ, gives way to where Christ is, there is the Church. God's gracious presence brings out joy in every moment, and in Christ we experience a vigorous fellowship with God and others in all of life. Bedrock draws on the Bible and Christian theology to reflect on Jesus Christ as bedrock for a Church on the move.
Author: Esther Seaton-Dummer
Publisher: WestBow Press
ISBN: 1449762476
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 506
Get Book Here
Book Description
Potent Probing Powerful Up Close and Personal! A Wake-up Call to All The author is an amazing and most timely gift of God to His Church. My heart is more than stirred. My spiritual motor is revved up and I am grabbing another gear to pursue His presence and power for the new season of my life and ministry. Thanks Esther, for providing the high octane in Bedrock Faith. Ormel Chapin, founder of Pastors Power-Up Connection, Bend, Oregon Bedrock Faith caused my heart to race from beginning to the end. God spoke off the pages and required an answer. This book is personal! Bedrock Faith breaks the fallow ground and challenges the hearts of believers to say, Yes, Lord, I am there! Lucinda Waddell, pastor, New Harvest Fellowship, Amity, Oregon
Author: Justin Bass
Publisher: Lexham Press
ISBN: 1683593618
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Get Book Here
Book Description
Can we all agree on some things about Jesus, regardless of our belief--or unbelief? Perhaps surprisingly, there is a lot upon which all scholars can agree. When surveying historical scholarship, there are certain truths about Jesus that Christians, agnostics, and skeptics must affirm. In The Bedrock of Christianity, Justin Bass shows how--regardless of one's feelings about Christianity--there lies a bedrock of truths about Jesus's life and ministry that are held by virtually all scholars of religion. Through an examination of each of these key facts, readers will encounter the unalterable truths upon which everyone can agree. Useful for both Christians and non-Christians alike, this study demonstrates what we can really know about the historical truth of Jesus' death and resurrection.
Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984880330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Get Book Here
Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
Author: Bill Hull
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 1441201033
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
Christ commanded the church to make disciples, to produce people who love and obey God, bear fruit, and live with joy. The crisis at the heart of the church is that we often pay lip service to making disciples, but we seldom put much effort behind doing it. For the pastor who is ready to put words into action, The Disciple-Making Pastor offers the inspiration and practical know-how to do so. Bill Hull shows pastors the obstacles they will face, what disciples really look like, the pastor's role in producing them, and the practices that lead to positive change. He also offers a six-step coaching process to help new disciples grow in commitment and obedience and practical ideas to integrate disciple making into the fabric of the church.
Author: Alvin Reid
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
ISBN: 0805445420
Category : Evangelistic work
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Get Book Here
Book Description
A thoroughly updated overview of how evangelism should happen, detailing the work of the Great Commission in four key categories: biblical, spiritual, intentional, missional.
Author: Tennent
Publisher: Messianic Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 9780989765602
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
A gold 2014 IPPY award-winner, The Messianic Feast proves the Last Supper wasn't the Passover, how the bread and wine parables relate to the Showbread, and how God wants spiritual communion, not a ritual.
Author: John S. Compton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780620696050
Category : Human beings
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Allan Hugh Cole Jr.
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630873578
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
As a global religion with growing numbers of expressions, Christianity calls for deepening relationships across traditions while also formulating collaborative visions. A thriving church will require Christians from various traditions and on varying trajectories to become familiar with one another, appreciate one another, and work in common service to God in Jesus Christ. In this book, a group of thirteen distinguished scholars from around the world and representing a range of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives demonstrate how theological reflection and broad-based ecumenical conversations may serve the church. Reflecting on numerous salient matters facing the global church, these scholars model what may be accomplished in ecumenical conversations that recognize the gifts that come with unity across diversity among those who seek to be faithful to Jesus Christ.
Author: Deborah Brunt
Publisher: WestBow Press
ISBN: 1449731783
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Get Book Here
Book Description
How could a church culture that lifted high the name of Jesus make covenant with the Confederacy? How did the Southern Baptist Convention lead the way? How do divided hearts and unholy covenants still hinder awakening in the conservative US church culture? What dramatic changes will a spirit of grace and supplication bring? We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church uncovers the answers, historically and biblically. God is revealing what we haven't wanted to see, so we can become who we truly are. He promises to cleanse us from bloodguilt not yet cleansed, as we say what we haven't dared say. As we confess, healing, life, oneness, witness and true worship flow. As we confess, our Lord is honored and his kingdom furthered. So why don't we, who most tend to gravitate to the word "celebrate" when talking of the Civil War, instead throw all caution to the wind--and confess? Honest, compelling, courageous, redemptive, this remarkable look at the conservative church culture rooted in the Deep South explores such topics as king cotton and mighty oaks; the fast God has chosen; spiritual bulimia; spiritual schizophrenia; blood covenant; cleansing from bloodgui“/li> an undivided heart.
