Author: Mark Sayers
Publisher: Moody Publishers
ISBN: 0802493467
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
When church and culture look the same... For the many Christians eager to prove we can be both holy and cool, cultural pressures are too much. We either compartmentalize our faith or drift from it altogether—into a world that’s so alluring. Have you wondered lately: Why does the Western church look so much like the world? Why are so many of my friends leaving the faith? How can we get back to our roots? Disappearing Church will help you sort through concerns like these, guiding you in a thoughtful, faithful, and hopeful response. Weaving together art, history, and theology, pastor and cultural observer Mark Sayers reminds us that real growth happens when the church embraces its countercultural witness, not when it blends in. It’s like Jesus said long ago, “If the salt loses its saltiness, it is no longer good for anything…”
Author: Janine di Giovanni
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541756681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Vanishing reveals the plight and possible extinction of Christian communities across Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine after 2,000 years in their historical homeland. Some of the countries that first nurtured and characterized Christianity - along the North African Coast, on the Euphrates and across the Middle East and Arabia - are the ones in which it is likely to first go extinct. Christians are already vanishing. We are past the tipping point, now tilted toward the end of Christianity in its historical homeland. Christians have fled the lands where their prophets wandered, where Jesus Christ preached, where the great Doctors and hierarchs of the early church established the doctrinal norms that would last millennia. From Syria to Egypt, the cities of northern Iraq to the Gaza Strip, ancient communities, the birthplaces of prophets and saints, are losing any living connection to the religion that once was such a characteristic feature of their social and cultural lives. In The Vanishing, Janine di Giovanni has combined astonishing journalistic work to discover the last traces of small, hardy communities that have become wisely fearful of outsiders and where ancient rituals are quietly preserved amid 360 degree threats. Di Giovanni's riveting personal stories and her conception of faith and hope are intertwined throughout the chapters. The book is a unique act of pre-archeology: the last chance to visit the living religion before all that will be left are the stones of the past.
Author: Dean R. Hoge
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 9780664254926
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Get Book Here
Book Description
This in-depth survey provides a vivid overview of the religious world of the Baby Boomers. The authors examine their religious faith and explores the reasons they give for leaving or staying in the church. Their findings provide some unexpected results.
Author: Erwin W. Lutzer
Publisher: Moody Pub
ISBN: 9780802409447
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Get Book Here
Book Description
Traces the resurrection of Christ, detailing its impact on his disciples as well as those around him, and revealing that death is not the end but the beginning of an eternity with God.
Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1782395040
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 179
Get Book Here
Book Description
For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. Here, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.
Author: Philip Yancey
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310871778
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 111
Get Book Here
Book Description
Insights from Philip Yancey's personal pilgrimage away from and back to the church—what made him walk away, and what drew him back. Why are there so many more professing Christians than churchgoing Christians? Is it because something is wrong with the church? In his candid, thought-provoking manner, award-winning author Philip Yancey reveals the reasons behind his own journey back from skepticism to wholehearted participation in the church. This book: Weighs the church's human failings against its compelling worth as the body of Christ. Looks into what God may have in mind for His church. Discusses how the church can reach beyond its walls and into the communities and lives around it to be more than just “Sunday worship.” Yancey does not whitewash the church's faults. He sets them against the overwhelming balance of its strengths: its heart for God, its care for the hurting, its outreach to the lost, and its value as family and community. This book is for anyone who’s ever wondered: Why bother with church?
Author: Jason Byassee
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725264455
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book Here
Book Description
You may have heard that churches in Europe are vanishing. Yet church growth in London has been steady for decades, fueled by such innovations as Alpha and Fresh Expressions. What about outside the capital? Some, both inside and outside the church, say churches “cannot grow.” But here they are—growing churches—in the north of England of all places. This is not only a story about England. It is about growing churches wherever you’ve heard they “can’t” grow. God is always up to something precisely where (we think) God shouldn’t be.
Author: Frank Viola
Publisher: David C Cook
ISBN: 1434703312
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Get Book Here
Book Description
Every person follows a script for living, a life guide that directs our behavior and shapes our choices. As believers, we find the original script for living woven throughout the Bible. Yet while the Christian message is simple, it can become complicated by our environment, our culture, and our religious ideas and traditions. For this reason, we are all in constant need of revising the scripts by which we live. Author Frank Viola believes we need to revisit and revise what it means to live the Christian life. Drawing from his rich background in ministry, Viola examines ten key areas that impact every believer and explores fresh ways to revise them. Conversational, insightful, and practical, Revise Us Again encourages us to examine those religious habits that we unconsciously pick up from others and rescript them with new habits that line up with our new nature in Christ.
Author: Leslie Parry
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062367579
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 223
Get Book Here
Book Description
A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all. New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her. A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both. As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.
Author: Arthur W. Hunt
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1625642652
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
Is image everything? For many people in our culture, image and images are everything. Americans spend hours watching television but rarely finish a good book. Words are quickly losing their appeal. Arthur Hunt sees this trend as a direct assault on Christianity. He warns that by exalting imagery we risk becoming mindless pagans. Our thirst for images has dulled our minds so that we lack the biblical and mental defenses we need to resist pagan influences. What about paganism? Hunt contends that it never died in modern Western culture; image-based media just brought it to the surface again. Sex, violence, and celebrity worship abound in our culture, driving a mass media frenzy reminiscent of pagan idolatry. This book is a clear warning that the church is being cut off from its word-based heritage, and that we are open to abuse by those who exploit the image but neglect the Word. Thoughtful readers will find this a challenging call to be critical about the images bombarding our sense and to affirm that the Word is everything.
