Showing titles in Church & Church Leadership

Theology shapes who we are and how we organize to transform the world. Especially written for required United Methodist classes, this accessible book uses a Wesleyan theological frame—connection—to help listeners understand United Methodism's polity and organization as the interrelationship of our beliefs, mission, and practice. The book is organized into four parts—United Methodist beliefs, mission, practice, and organization. Polity and organization are primary embodiments of The United Methodist Church.

Taking his trademark intellectual approach to understanding Christianity, Timothy Keller uncovers the essential message of Jesus, locked inside his most familiar parable. Within that parable Jesus reveals God's prodigal grace toward both the irreligious and the moralistic. This book will challenge both the devout and skeptics to see Christianity in a whole new way.

Second in a new series of expository guides to the Bible, Timothy Keller's Judges for You walks you through the book of Judges, showing how the flawless God is at work in the most flawed situations and the most failing people.

Combining a close attention to the detail of the text with Timothy Keller's trademark gift for clear explanation and compelling insights, this resource will both engage your mind and stir your heart.

Turning the other cheek does not mean standing by while the enemies of God dismantle Christian civilization and brainwash our children. Decrying the cowardice that masquerades as meekness, Eric Metaxas summons the Church to battle. An attenuated and unbiblical “faith” based on what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” has sapped the spiritual vitality of millions of Americans. Paying lip service to an insipid “evangelism,” they shrink from combating the evils of our time. Metaxas refutes the pernicious lie that fighting evil politicizes Christianity.

Waiting to be rediscovered in the British Library is an ancient manuscript of the early Church, copied by an anonymous monk. The manuscript is at least 1,450 years old, possibly dating to the first century, Jesus' lifetime. And now, The Lost Gospel provides the first-ever translation from Syriac into English of this unique document that tells the inside story of Jesus' social, family, and political life. The Lost Gospel takes listeners on an unparalleled historical adventure through a paradigm-shifting manuscript.

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male.

These thirty brief meditations for leaders are based upon The Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In this short, accessible account of the Eastern Orthodox Church, John McGuckin begins by tackling the question "What is the Church?" His answer is a clear, historically and theologically rooted portrait of what the Church is for Orthodox Christianity and how it differs from Western Christians' expectations.

Theological Education demonstrates how churches and seminaries can cooperate through a competency-based learning approach to ministry preparation-that is, competency-based theological education (CBTE). CBTE focuses on the mutual mission of the church and theological education: developing followers of Christ who flourish in their vocations.

The latest book from the author of Evangelism: For the Care of Souls.

10 Women Who Changed the World is seminary president Daniel L. Akin’s powerful tribute to the transformational work done by some truly inspiring female Christian missionaries. With each profile, he journeys into the heart of that gospel servant’s mission-minded story and makes a compelling connection to a similar account from the Bible. By listening to each missionary story, and how each woman embodies a certain passage of Scripture, prepare to be challenged and inspired to follow in their footsteps—because intentionally living on mission isn’t something reserved for heroes of the past.

In this powerful audiobook, pastor, professor, and leading cultural apologist Voddie Baucham explains the sinister worldview behind the social justice movement and how it has quietly spread like a fault system, not only through our culture, but throughout the evangelical church in America. He also details the devastation it is already wreaking - and what we can do to get back on solid ground before it’s too late.

Who are you when the teeth come out? For every true act of leadership, there is an equal and monstrous act of sabotage. Our leaders have been entirely routed by the agitated and the anxious. These emotional tyrannies manifest themselves in local libraries, HR cubicles, elder meetings, and at your Thanksgiving dinners.

Best-selling author Paul David Tripp suggests that lurking behind the failure of a pastor is a weak leadership community. Turning to the Scripture for guidance, Tripp presents listeners with 12 leadership-community principles necessary for a gospel-centered leadership model, making this an essential tool for anyone in church leadership. Here is a book with a message for the young and hopeful, as well as the experienced and weary — God’s abiding presence is your hope in ministry leadership.

Beginning with the life of Jesus, Robert Louis Wilken narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the Roman world after the conversion of Constantine, he sheds new light on the subsequent stories of Christianity in the Latin West, the Byzantine and Slavic East, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

In This Book You Will Learn 8 principles that will lead to Guaranteed Growth, How to create an atmosphere for growth in your church and organization. Help you identify who you are called to reach. Your growth zone!

A thought-provoking work on one of the least understood - but most powerful - disciplines of Christianity. Most believers know about fasting, but few of us really understand the wonderful benefits that come when we fast with purpose and direction. Written in Dr. Elmer Towns' dynamic, descriptive style, this title gives the why of fasting, rather than just the how. Towns' avoids a glut of techniques and schedules; instead he provides a probing look at Isaiah 58, often called "the fasting passage."

Transforming Presence talks you through 10 vital practices that will help you have a new experience of the Holy Spirit. You’ll learn how our relationship with the Holy Spirit changed from the Old Testament to the New Testament, what common misconceptions of the Holy Spirit are, and how to think and speak (and sing) rightly about him. It can be hard to discern what’s right and wrong in a world of gray scales, differing preferences, and emotional highs, but when we start with the Bible, all the secondary things fall into place.

Biblical womanhood - the belief that God designed women to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers - pervades North American Christianity. From choices about careers to roles in local churches to relationship dynamics, this belief shapes the everyday lives of evangelical women. Yet biblical womanhood isn't biblical, says Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr. It was born in a series of clearly definable historical moments.

The standard translation of R. H. Charles is combined in the MSV with the timeless work of Richard Laurence, George H. Schodde, and August Dillmann to make the Book of Enoch easier to understand. All four translations and their extensive notes were compared diligently when updating the text in this complete edition.