Showing titles in Social Issues

Matthew Goodman is tired, and his one wish is for something he can't have. Instead he focuses on the demands of his work as pastor of Chicagoland's Calvary Community, including bringing a new administrative assistant onboard. New hire twenty-five-year-old Trish Card watches him with somber, lake-clear eyes. What he doesn't know about Trish and her real reason for appearing will dismantle his world.

In an era when people watch more TikTok videos than sermons and doom scroll more than read their Bibles, false teachings and questions about God and the Bible abound. For more than two decades, S. Michael Houdmann and GotQuestions.org have cut through the confusion, answering even the hardest of questions with clarity, grace, and love. GotQuestions.org receives more than 16 million visitors each month and is the most trusted biblically grounded resource online.

Today, over three billion people, a third of humanity, have yet to hear the good news of Jesus. They have no opportunity to believe in him as their Savior and find peace with God through him. Of all the injustices in the world—and there are many that are quite distressing—this is the worst, because of the eternal consequences. A third of anything is significant—especially this third.

An Indian American immigrant who grew up in white Southern culture, Prasanta Verma names and sheds light on the realities of ethnic loneliness. She unpacks the exhausting effects of cultural isolation, the dynamics of marginalization, and the weight of being other. In the midst of disconnection and erasure, she points to the longing to belong, the need to share our stories, and the hope of finding safe friendships and community. Our places of exile can become places where we find belonging—to ourselves, to others, and to God.

John Pavlovitz has inspired millions to keep boldly loving both neighbors and strangers throughout the years of Trump's hate-mongering campaign and presidency and continues to be a voice of sanity and urgency when so much is still at stake.

How the gospel equips Christians to live confidently for Christ in an increasingly secular society, facing the challenges of the future with confidence. We are living in a time of rapid cultural change, when Christian views are often seen as outdated and even dangerous. This can leave us feeling...

Bloomsbury presents Unforgivable? by Stephen Cherry, read by Mark Elstob. Forgiveness is a lovely idea, wrote C. S. Lewis, and in recent decades it has been seen and admired in situations ranging from therapy to politics, and proposed as a constructive pathway in the aftermath of abuse and...

Pastor and author Martin Thielen has compiled a list of ten things people need to believe, and ten things they don't, in order to be a Christian. This lively and engaging book will be a help to seekers as well as a comfort to believers who may find themselves questioning some of the assumptions they grew up with.

Many books have dealt with sexual abuse scandals in the church and the role of pastoral care for survivors. Others have provided liberatory readings of biblical texts to support survivors of sexual violence. Surviving God takes a new approach, centering the voices of sexual abuse survivors while rethinking key Christian beliefs. Starting from experiences of oppression, beliefs that contribute to oppression are challenged, and new, hopeful, and healing beliefs take their place.

In our increasingly secular world, many claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic. Christians are accused of standing on the wrong side of history, failing to accept human dignity, freedom, and progress. Are these accusations valid? Is Christianity actually causing more harm than good in the world? In this concise booklet, author Sharon James shows that through history and across the globe, true followers of Christ have challenged injustice and abuse, and provided care for the needy.

A thoughtful exploration of the intersection of faith and politics, Exiles asks: What if we considered ourselves “exiles in Babylon” and turned to Scripture, not political parties, to shape our most passionate values? Politics are dividing our churches like never before. New York...

Since the beginning of humanity, people have recognized the distinct creation of the male and female gender in God's design. But with today's gender revolution, people are increasingly questioning who they are designed to be. In our society, gender identity has been divorced from biology and rerooted in psychology. Do the core teachings of the Bible uphold these modern ideas?

A local church should be a place of true community and connection—where people belong to God and one another. But in our individualistic culture, many Christians end up struggling with social isolation and loneliness. Lacking a sense of authentic belonging within the church, some eventually stop attending or question their faith altogether. How can believers overcome these negative cultural effects and restore the biblical vision of belonging in their churches today?

The goal of the church should be simple—share the gospel to the ends of the earth. But in our highly politicized age, Christians can tend to place earthly political and social agendas over God's spiritual mission of the church. In Empowered Witness, author Alan D. Strange examines the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, making a clear distinction between the functions of the church and other institutions.

Using her sixteen-year political career as a backdrop, Bunni Pounds gives listeners practical tools for discipling a nation one heart at a time and living the Christian life extravagantly, even in a hostile environment. In Jesus and Politics, Pounds lays out the importance of Christians engaging in politics, government, and other spheres of influence to impact systems and individuals.

Following the way of Jesus should lead us into authentic and life-giving relationships. The Jesus Way calls us into community with others to form a new kind of family—a forged family. In an era when our relationships with our families of origin are more complicated than ever, pastor T. C. Moore shows us how following the way of Jesus can lead us to forged families that are authentic and life-giving. 

If you love Jesus but are unhappy, disappointed, frustrated, disillusioned, or just plain burned-out with church or religion, I have good news for you. There is a problem with church, but it’s neither your fault nor God’s fault and you’re not required to “try harder” to fix it. Furthermore, you’re not alone. More and more evangelical Christians sense that church and religion are somehow at odds with a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. God has already given us the “way of escape.” His answer has always been hiding in plain sight in the New Testament.

How many survivors will it take for us to see the life behind the abortion? Today’s culture would have us believe that abortion is simply a choice, a right, a controversial argument, and a religious and political issue of pro-life vs. pro-choice. It has become easy to think of the unborn as...

Emerging generations in the West are more diverse than ever—ethnically, socioeconomically, educationally, and politically. And as church attendance among younger generations declines rapidly, research shows that one of their primary sticking points is the lack of diversity in most churches. In Church for Everyone, pastors Dan Kreiss and Efrem Smith address this phenomenon head-on. In this research-based and theologically informed book, they explore the younger generations' expectations and disappointments with church and hold out a vision for true diversity taken from the pages of Scripture.

As a Black autistic pastor and disability scholar, Lamar Hardwick lives at the intersection of disability, race, and religion. Tied to this reality, he heeded the call to write How Ableism Fuels Racism to help Christian communities engage in critical conversations about race by addressing issues of ableism. Hardwick believes that ableism—the idea that certain bodies are better than others—and the disability discrimination fueled by this perspective are the root causes of racial bias and injustice in American culture and in the church.