Showing results for "In the World" in Church & Church Leadership

For many Christians, our understanding of the history of the church universal jumps straight from what we read in the New Testament to a basic understanding of the Reformation. We're missing more than a millennium! And it was a busy, fascinating, tumultuous thousand-or-so years during which Christianity spread across three continents. In places as distant and different from each other as China, Sudan, and Britain, the gospel was spreading, the church was growing, and believers were expressing their faith in myriad ways.

Phil Moore tells us how a persecuted group of Iranian Christians radically 'rediscovered' Luke 10 as the 'forgotten manifesto' of Jesus.

In a world that often feels inhospitable to life, the original recipients of Hebrews found themselves struggling to maintain their faith against the pressures of doubt and despair. Likewise, modern believers face similar trials as they seek to live out their faith in a broken world.

In this stirring follow-up to his memoir, Steve Pemberton gives practical encouragement for how you can be a "human lighthouse" for others and through these inspiring stories will renew your hope for humanity. Our polarized, divisive culture seems to be without heroes and role models. We are...

In Preaching in a Post-Truth World, Mike Glenn, a pastor of one of the largest churches in America, with more than 30 years of pastoral experience, offers wisdom, guidance, and insight for the pastors that seek to recenter the pulpit and preach the truth of God’s Word.

When it comes to the ethnic divisions in our world, we speak often of seeking racial reconciliation. But at no point have all ethnicities on Earth been reconciled. Animosity, distrust, and hostility among people from various ethnicities have always existed in American history. Even in the church, we have often built walls to divide God’s people from each other. In Intensional, pastor D. A. Horton steps into the tension to offer vision and practical guidance for Christians longing to embrace our Kingdom ethnicity, combating the hatred with the hope of Jesus Christ.

The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war.

The rates of decline in church attendance and the ticking demographic timebomb show that business as usual will lead to extinction. But out of these ashes there are countless reasons to hope. Signs and stories emerging from worshipping communities the world over can give us renewed confidence that, as always, God is doing a ‘new-old’ thing. The Church that is emerging amid times of uncertainty is growing, alive and demonstrating the qualities of the early church recorded in the New Testament, one that is more diverse, more spirit-filled, more confident in the Gospel.

Despite its many crises, especially in Western Europe, there are still 1.2 billion Catholics in the world and the Church remains a powerful, controversial and defiantly archaic institution. After the French Revolution and the democratic rebellions of 1848, the Church retreated, especially under Pius IX, into a fortress of unreason, denouncing almost every aspect of modern life, including liberalism and socialism. In Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World, Dr. Ambrogio A. Caiani narrates the epic, fascinating, entertaining and horrifying history of the Roman Catholic Church.

Today there are too many examples of those claiming to follow Christ being caustic, divisive, and irrational, contributing to dismissals of the Christian faith as hypocritical, self-interested, and politically co-opted. What has happened in our society? One short outrageous video, whether it is true or not, can trigger an avalanche of comments on social media. Welcome to the new age of outrage. In this groundbreaking book featuring new survey research of evangelicals and their relationship to the age of outrage, Ed Stetzer offers a constructive way forward.

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the twenty-first century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive answers to these questions.

Is it possible for church leaders to use biblical and secular leadership concepts in a way that keeps Christ - not the marketplace - at the center of their mission? Drawing on biblical material and business wisdom, In Pursuit of Great AND Godly Leadership explores the critical leadership decisions and practices that shape the success of Christian organizations. These decisions are illustrated in compelling interviews with over 40 leaders of churches, universities, denominational bodies, and international ministries.

How is that hope both expressed and experienced in contemporary worship? In this volume in the Dynamics of Christian Worship series, pastor, theologian, and songwriter Glenn Packiam explores what Christians sing about when they sing about hope and what kind of hope they experience when they worship together. Through his analysis and reflection, we find that Christian worship is crucial to both the proclamation and the formation of Christian hope.

Fresh Expressions is a canary in the coal mine, alerting congregations to reevaluate what the Church is, where and when it can happen, and who can lead it. Church as we know it is inaccessible to most people. A fundamental premise of the movement is that Church can become accessible again by emerging in every nook and cranny where life already happens. Fresh Expressions is based in simplification, returning to basic scriptural principles, and a recovery of a "priesthood of all believers" - in the three places where people live and relate to others.

The world is a very different place from what it was just a few years ago. Today’s post-everything world is arguably more divisive, political, indifferent, and impatient than ever. While many believe that the best course of action is to find a way back to how things used to be, is that actually the best way forward? Given the many ways that our world has changed, it’s time for Christian leadership strategies to change, and for churches to approach making disciples, evangelism, and preaching differently than yesterday.

In this popular introduction to church history, now in its third edition, Mark Noll 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. Students in academic settings and church adult education contexts will benefit from this one-semester survey of Christian history.