Mike McNichols has created a marvelous fable about evangelism, spiritual formation, faith community, and ministry leadership in The Bartender. This is a study guide to that book. It was written by one who has led several discussion groups on The Bartender and who discovered that readers found it deeply fascinating. The issues it raises are so relevant to many contemporary conversations about how those who believe intersect and interact with thos ...
The Three Pillars: How Family Politics Shaped the Earliest Church and the Gospel of Mark, examines how family relationships played a key role in the earliest Christian church. By disentangling the two disparate genealogies of Jesus, the author reconstructs the families of Joseph and Mary. Presented here for the first time is the full ancestry of Jesus' mother, Mary, who was descended from the anti-Hasmonean high priest Alcimus. The author s ...
U.S. audiences know Latin American liberation theologies largely through translations of Latin American Catholics from the 1970s and beyond. Most of the few known Protestant authors were students of Richard Shaull, whose critical thinking on social change, prophetic Christianity, and dialogue with Marxism and Christian use of Marxist analysis precedes the emergence of the formal schools of liberation theology by two decades. His own education at ...
Charlie's Christmas Letter is a little document in the form of a letter to my grandson, which seeks to answer the questions that a bright teenager ought to be asking: Why were the shepherds in the fields in winter? Who were the three wise men? Why do we bring holly into the house? Of all the ways of entering a house why does Santa choose the chimney? What is the Messiah about? Why did Tchaikovsky drink unboiled water during a cholera epidem ...
At each turn in life we are bombarded with the idea of normal. Normal finds a job he hates so it can pay for things he doesn't need while he wishes he was doing something else. Normal believes that creativity, imagination, innovation, and dreaming should cease after the fifth grade. Normal goes to church for an hour on Sundays but doesn't get carried away or allow her faith to truly intersect her life any other time of the week. Each ...
The book you hold in your hands says that our churches and our nation are in desperate need of biblical awakening and revival. It begins with the churches. In stark opposition to the quest to give our utmost for God's glory, as a whole, the modern evangelical movement has settled for a compromised form of Christianity. The book exposes the roots of this compromise, analyzes keys areas of church life where we have abandoned the biblical reco ...
Designed for daily use as well as for retreats, Digging for God is an invitation to linger in the gardens of the Bible and the gardens of the heart. Using the passages concerning five biblical gardens, and then her own experiences distilled into poetry, Higgins provides meditative ideas and questions as springboards to prayer. For all who have labored and loved their backyard gardens, Higgins' poems will nudge memories. For all who are, as ...
Are you intrigued by the idea of faith? Are you searching for answers to questions about God as you try to make sense of the circumstances of your life? Have you ever wondered what it means to experience religious conversion? In Out of the Fog, Into the Sun, Jo Kinnard shares her personal story of life transformation. She talks freely about what it means to be brought into faith through Christ as an older adult, after being born and rai ...
Climbing Up the Downward Spiral takes a holistic approach in looking at practical, neurological, and spiritual issues, as it walks readers through the shadows of some of the most difficult problems of our time: financial loss; drug and alcohol abuse and addiction; mental illness; and suicide. The authors also share from their considerable personal experience with these problems. Bringing together some twenty years of work with people in program ...
