Download or read book How to Be a Christian without Going to Church written by Kelly Bean and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As many--young people especially--leave the traditional church in droves, they often still long for a genuine Christian community in which to practice their faith and share their spiritual journeys with others. They want to be faithful but struggle to find a place where they flourish. Whether they've already left the church behind or are merely considering it, readers will find here both heartfelt encouragement and practical steps for finding or creating a community of faith that honors God and offers rest, love, and communion with other believers. Author Kelly Bean broadens our definition of church to include many alternative forms of Christian community. With true stories of those who have given up on church and what they're doing now, this book is also helpful for pastors and churchgoers to help them understand why people leave the church--and what might be done to help them stay.

Download or read book At Your Best written by Carey Nieuwhof and published by WaterBrook. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A perceptive and practical book about why our calendars so rarely reflect our priorities and what we can do to regain control.”—ADAM GRANT “Carey’s book will help you reorganize your life. And then you can share a copy with someone you care about.”—SETH GODIN You deserve to stop living at an unsustainable pace. An influential podcaster and thought leader shows you how. Overwhelmed. Overcommitted. Overworked. That’s the false script an inordinate number of people adopt to be successful. Does this sound familiar: ● Slammed is normal. ● Distractions are everywhere. ● Life gets reduced to going through the motions. Tired of living that way? At Your Best gives you the strategies you need to win at work and at home by living in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. Influential podcast host and thought leader Carey Nieuwhof understands the challenges of constant pressure. After a season of burnout almost took him out, he discovered how to get time, energy, and priorities working in his favor. This approach freed up more than one thousand productive hours a year for him and can do the same for you. At Your Best will help you ● replace chronic exhaustion with deep productivity ● break the pattern of overpromising and never accomplishing enough ● clarify what matters most by restructuring your day ● master the art of saying no, without losing friends or influence ● discover why vacations and sabbaticals don’t really solve your problems ● develop a personalized plan to recapture each day so you can break free from the trap of endless to-dos Start thriving at work and at home as you discover how to be at your best.

Download or read book Holy Envy written by Barbara Brown Taylor and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2019-03-30 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned Christian preacher and New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching world religions to undergraduates in Baptist-saturated rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations. Christians are taught that God is everywhere--a tenet that is central to Barbara Brown Taylor's life and faith. In Holy Envy, she continues her spiritual journey, contemplating the myriad ways she encountered God while exploring other faiths with her students in the classroom, and on field trips to diverse places of worship. Both she and her students ponder how the knowledge and insights they have gained raise important questions about belief, and explore how different practices relate to their own faith. Inspired by this intellectual and spiritual quest, Barbara turns once again to the Bible for guidance, to see what secrets lay buried there. Throughout Holy Envy, Barbara weaves together stories from her classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been challenged and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions--and by meeting God in them. At the heart of her odyssey is her trust that it is God who pushes her beyond her comfortable boundaries and calls us to "disown" our privatised versions of the divine--a change that ultimately deepens her relationship with both the world and with God, and ours.

Download or read book Hipster Christianity written by Brett McCracken and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insider twentysomething Christian journalist Brett McCracken has grown up in the evangelical Christian subculture and observed the recent shift away from the "stained glass and steeples" old guard of traditional Christianity to a more unorthodox, stylized 21st-century church. This change raises a big issue for the church in our postmodern world: the question of cool. The question is whether or not Christianity can be, should be, or is, in fact, cool. This probing book is about an emerging category of Christians McCracken calls "Christian hipsters"--the unlikely fusion of the American obsessions with worldly "cool" and otherworldly religion--an analysis of what they're about, why they exist, and what it all means for Christianity and the church's relevancy and hipness in today's youth-oriented culture.

Download or read book They Like Jesus But Not the Church written by Dan Kimball and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2007 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kimball provides an overview of the six most common objections emerging generations have with church and Christianity along with the biblical answers to these objections and examples of how churches are facing this challenge.

Download or read book Comeback Churches written by Ed Stetzer and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2007 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Church growth experts Stetzer and Dodson explain why most congregations plateau and then eventually decline, and they reveal how to revive a body of believers. Readers can learn the importance of lighting a spiritual fire, intentional evangelism, making disciples, forming small groups, and then watch pews fill up again. (Church Life)

Download or read book Beyond Christianity written by Darnise C. Martin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Christianity draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances. This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion.

Download or read book Leaving the Church to Find God written by John Fenn and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2007-03 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motivated by a deep hunger for more of God, millions of Christians are leaving the traditional church to look for more freedom and fulfillment than the routine of five songs, announcements, a plea for money and a forty five minute sermon allow. They are looking for open ended, deep worship that flows with the Holy Spirit, relatable Bible study and discussion in which they may participate, and strong bonds of fellowship outside the four walls of organized church. Instead of leaving the church to fall away from God, they are leaving the church to find God. Leaving the Church to Find God offers scriptural, safe, and balanced answers tempered by real life experiences, on how to move from a traditional church structure into meetings that allow the Lord to set the agenda and where needs are met. John Fenn - I was a Christian who felt disconnected from church though I'd been actively involved nearly all my life. I was looking for answers to my desire and hunger for God to move freely, and came to realize I wasn't alone. From all walks of life and across the church spectrum people are searching for something deeper, but they don't quite know what. This is the story of how I found God moving outside the church structure that I had known, loved, and been a part of my whole Christian life. John and his wife Barbara were born in Kokomo, Indiana and began dating as teenagers when they met the Lord, and began ministering to their teenage friends. They've been in the ministry now for over thirty years, serving in various capacities including Campus Pastor, Associate Pastor, Senior Pastor, and advisor to churches and Bible schools all over the world. John also worked with Peter Wagner teaching at the Wagner Leadership Institute, serving as Canadian National Director and Education Advisor. He remains an adjunct instructor of Wagner Leadership Institute of Colorado Springs. In early 2002 John and his wife Barb, founded The Church Without Walls International of Tulsa, a house church network, emphasizing Relationship Based Christianity. He travels and teaches in all different streams of Christianity, helping churches and individuals find significance and fulfillment through Godly relationships and the discipleship process.

Download or read book Salvation Outside the Church written by Francis A. Sullivan and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2002-09-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When in 1949 Fr. Leonard Feeney, SJ accused the Archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing, of heresy for holding that Jews and Protestants could be saved, he backed up his charge by producing passages from the writings of fathers of the church such as St. Augustine, of eminent theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, and from the decrees of popes and councils, to prove that it was a dogma of faith that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. He did seem to have the weight of evidence on his side, and it was not easy to see how the modern idea that non-Catholics can be saved could be reconciled with the church's traditional doctrine that excluded them from salvation. Many in the Catholic Church have felt that while Feeney must surely have been wrong, the questions he raised were never satisfactorily answered. Is it really a dogma of Catholic faith that there is no salvation outside the church? Can the optimism of Vatican II about the universal possibility of salvation be defended as an example of homogeneous development of doctrine? Or would it be more honest to say that the Catholic Church has recognized that its previous teaching was mistaken? The author is convinced that the only way to answer such questions is by a thorough study of the history of Christian thought about the salvation of those Òoutside the church.Ó Rev. Sullivan makes this historical study a lively reading experience while drawing conclusions that will impact ecumenical thinking for years to come.

Download or read book Cold Case Christianity written by J. Warner Wallace and published by David C Cook. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.

Download or read book Faitheist written by Chris Stedman and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a former Evangelical Christian turned openly gay atheist who now works to bridge the divide between atheists and the religious The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement—whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens—speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully. Becoming aware of injustice, and craving community, Stedman became a “born-again” Christian in late childhood. The idea of a community bound by God’s love—a love that was undeserved, unending, and guaranteed—captivated him. It was, he writes, a place to belong and a framework for making sense of suffering. But Stedman’s religious community did not embody this idea of God’s love: they were staunchly homophobic at a time when he was slowly coming to realize that he was gay. The great suffering this caused him might have turned Stedman into a life-long New Atheist. But over time he came to know more open-minded Christians, and his interest in service work brought him into contact with people from a wide variety of religious backgrounds. His own religious beliefs might have fallen away, but his desire to change the world for the better remained. Disdain and hostility toward religion was holding him back from engaging in meaningful work with people of faith. And it was keeping him from full relationships with them—the kinds of relationships that break down intolerance and improve the world. In Faitheist, Stedman draws on his work organizing interfaith and secular communities, his academic study of religion, and his own experiences to argue for the necessity of bridging the growing chasm between atheists and the religious. As someone who has stood on both sides of the divide, Stedman is uniquely positioned to present a way for atheists and the religious to find common ground and work together to make this world—the one world we can all agree on—a better place.

Download or read book Ask a Franciscan written by Patrick McCloskey and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editor of "St. Anthony Messenger" magazine for many years, Fr. McCloskey has answered many questions in his "Ask a Franciscan" column. He mines that wealth of material to find the most helpful questions and answers for readers to help them see the connection between their faith and their spiritual growth as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Download or read book Onward written by Russell D. Moore and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2015-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity Today "Beautiful Orthodoxy" Book of the Year in 2016. Keep Christianity Strange. As the culture changes all around us, it is no longer possible to pretend that we are a Moral Majority. That may be bad news for America, but it can be good news for the church. What's needed now, in shifting times, is neither a doubling-down on the status quo nor a pullback into isolation. Instead, we need a church that speaks to social and political issues with a bigger vision in mind: that of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As Christianity seems increasingly strange, and even subversive, to our culture, we have the opportunity to reclaim the freakishness of the gospel, which is what gives it its power in the first place. We seek the kingdom of God, before everything else. We connect that kingdom agenda to the culture around us, both by speaking it to the world and by showing it in our churches. As we do so, we remember our mission to oppose demons, not to demonize opponents. As we advocate for human dignity, for religious liberty, for family stability, let's do so as those with a prophetic word that turns everything upside down. The signs of the times tell us we are in for days our parents and grandparents never knew. But that's no call for panic or surrender or outrage. Jesus is alive. Let's act like it. Let's follow him, onward to the future.

Download or read book A Bigger Table written by John Pavlovitz and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one likes to eat alone; to approach a table filled with people, only to be told that despite the open chairs there isn't room for you. The rejection stings. It leaves a mark. Yet this is exactly what the church has been saying to far too many people for far too long: “You're not welcome here. Find someplace else to sit.†How can we extend unconditional welcome and acceptance in a world increasingly marked by bigotry, fear, and exclusion? Pastor John Pavlovitz invites readers to join him on the journey to findâ€"or buildâ€"a church that is big enough for everyone. He speaks clearly into the heart of the issues the Christian community has been earnestly wrestling with: LGBT inclusion, gender equality, racial tensions, and global concerns. A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, Hopeful Spiritual Community asks if organized Christianity can find a new way of faithfully continuing the work Jesus began two thousand years ago, where everyone gets a seat. Pavlovitz shares moving personal stories and his careful observations as a pastor to set the table for a new, more loving conversation on these and other important matters of faith. He invites us to build the bigger table Jesus imagined, practicing radical hospitality, total authenticity, messy diversity, and agenda-free community.

Download or read book A History of the Christian Church written by Williston Walker and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Salvation Outside the Church written by Francis A. Sullivan SJ and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2002-09-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When in 1949 Fr. Leonard Feeney, SJ accused the Archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing, of heresy for holding that Jews and Protestants could be saved, he backed up his charge by producing passages from the writings of fathers of the church such as St. Augustine, of eminent theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, and from the decrees of popes and councils, to prove that it was a dogma of faith that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. He did seem to have the weight of evidence on his side, and it was not easy to see how the modern idea that non-Catholics can be saved could be reconciled with the church's traditional doctrine that excluded them from salvation. Many in the Catholic Church have felt that while Feeney must surely have been wrong, the questions he raised were never satisfactorily answered. Is it really a dogma of Catholic faith that there is no salvation outside the church? Can the optimism of Vatican II about the universal possibility of salvation be defended as an example of homogeneous development of doctrine? Or would it be more honest to say that the Catholic Church has recognized that its previous teaching was mistaken? The author is convinced that the only way to answer such questions is by a thorough study of the history of Christian thought about the salvation of those "outside the church." Rev. Sullivan makes this historical study a lively reading experience while drawing conclusions that will impact ecumenical thinking for years to come.

Download or read book Revelation written by and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.