Download or read book Churchless Christianity written by Herbert E. Hoefer and published by William Carey Library. This book was released on 2001 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to describe a fact and reflect upon it theologically. The fact is, there are thousands of people who believe solely in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior but who have no plans to be baptized or to join the local church. Churchless Christianity is based on research from the early 1980s among non-baptized believers in Christ in Tamil Nadu, India. This revised edition includes all the original text plus five additional chapters and a new foreword.

Download or read book Churchless written by George Barna and published by Tyndale House. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Churchless people are all around us: among our closest loved ones, at our workplaces, in our neighborhoods. And more and more, they are becoming the norm: The number of churchless adults in the US has grown by nearly one-third in the past decade. Yet the startling truth is that many of these people claim they are looking for a genuine, powerful encounter with God—but they just don’t find it in church. What are they (or we) missing? How can we better reach out to them? What can we say or do that would inspire them to want to join a community of faith? Containing groundbreaking new research from the Barna Group, and edited by bestselling authors George Barna (Revolution) and David Kinnaman (You Lost Me), Churchless reveals the results of a five-year study based on interviews with thousands of churchless men and women. Looking past the surface of church attendance to deeper spiritual realities, Churchless will help us understand those who choose not to be part of a church, build trust-based relationships with them, and be empowered to successfully invite them to engage.

Download or read book Churchless Christianity Revised Edition written by Herbert E. Hoefer and published by William Carey Publishing. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to describe a fact and reflect upon it theologically. The fact is, there are thousands of people who believe solely in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior but who have no plans to be baptized or to join the local church. Churchless Christianity is based on research from the early 1980s among non-baptized believers in Christ in Tamil Nadu, India. This revised edition includes all the original text plus five additional chapters and a new foreword.

Download or read book The Invisible Church written by Steve Aisthorpe and published by Saint Andrew Press. This book was released on 2016-04-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For anyone who is concerned about Church decline, the contents of this book offer an essential blueprint for building God’s whole community in the coming years. This unique set of resources offers practical help and insight for all who want to grow, enrich and develop their congregational life. The Church of Scotland has drawn on the findings of extensive new research that it has commissioned in order to put together this set of carefully crafted and informed resources aimed at helping every congregation to understand why people leave the Church, how to avoid unnecessary departures and, above all, to develop an enriching, vital Christian fellowship with the large numbers of Churchless Christians in every community across the country. This ground-breaking book, illustrated by Dave Walker, offers information, hope, insight, prayerful reflection and practical ideas for bringing together in fellowship all Christians, whether they are members of an institutional Church or not.

Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Download or read book Godless written by Pete Hautman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why mess around with Catholicism when you can have your own customized religion?" Fed up with his parents' boring old religion, agnostic-going-on-atheist Jason Bock invents a new god -- the town's water tower. He recruits an unlikely group of worshippers: his snail-farming best friend, Shin, cute-as-a-button (whatever that means) Magda Price, and the violent and unpredictable Henry Stagg. As their religion grows, it takes on a life of its own. While Jason struggles to keep the faith pure, Shin obsesses over writing their bible, and the explosive Henry schemes to make the new faith even more exciting -- and dangerous. When the Chutengodians hold their first ceremony high atop the dome of the water tower, things quickly go from merely dangerous to terrifying and deadly. Jason soon realizes that inventing a religion is a lot easier than controlling it, but control it he must, before his creation destroys both his friends and himself.

Download or read book A Churchless Faith written by Alan Jamieson and published by Society for Promoting Christian. This book was released on 2002 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is based on research with those who have left churches but are nethertheless pursuing a journey of faith. Most of the church leavers interviewed for this text had been in their churches for over 15 years; most had held key leadership positions, and 40 per cent had been in full time theological study of church work. The text outlines how churches can help leavers and suggests a conversion between post-church groups and churches.

Download or read book God Laughs Plays written by David James Duncan and published by Triad Institute, Inc.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Duncan offers a collection of "churchless sermons," stories, memoir, and conversations with the affirmation that the way of life preached and embodied by Jesus is apolitical.

Download or read book Christless Christianity written by Michael Horton and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible that we have left Christ out of Christianity? Is the faith and practice of American Christians today more American than Christian? These are the provocative questions Michael Horton addresses in this thoughtful, insightful book. He argues that while we invoke the name of Christ, too often Christ and the Christ-centered gospel are pushed aside. The result is a message and a faith that are, in Horton's words, "trivial, sentimental, affirming, and irrelevant." This alternative "gospel" is a message of moralism, personal comfort, self-help, self-improvement, and individualistic religion. It trivializes God, making him a means to our selfish ends. Horton skillfully diagnoses the problem and points to the solution: a return to the unadulterated gospel of salvation.

Download or read book Counterfeit Gospels written by Trevin Wax and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the biggest danger to the church of Jesus Christ is not blatant heresy, the moral failures of church leaders, persecution, the rise of Islam or the loss of our rights? What if the biggest threat is counterfeit gospels within the church, ways of thinking and speaking about the good news that lead to a gradual drift from the truth of Scripture? The gospel is like a three-legged stool. There’s the Gospel Story – the grand narrative of Scripture (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration). Within that overarching framework, we make the Gospel Announcement about Jesus Christ (His perfect life, substitutionary death, resurrection, exaltation). The gospel announcement then births the Gospel Community: God’s church – the embodiment of the gospel, the manifestation of God’s kingdom. A counterfeit gospel is like a colony of termites, eating away at one of the legs of this stool until the whole thing topples over. This book exposes six common counterfeits (Therapeutic, Judgmentless, Moralist, Quietist, Activist, and Churchless) that would get us off track. The goal of Counterfeit Gospels is to so deepen our love for the unchanging gospel of Jesus Christ that we would easily see through the many counterfeits that leave us impoverished. So come, love the gospel, recognize and overcome the counterfeits, and be empowered for ministry!

Download or read book Believing Without Belonging written by Vinod John and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines an indigenous phenomenon of the Hindu devotees of Jesus Christ and their response to the gospel through an empirical case study conducted in Varanasi, India. It analyzes their religious beliefs and social belonging and addresses the ensuing questions from a historical, theological, and missiological perspective. The data reveals that the respondents profess faith in Jesus Christ; however, most remain unbaptized and insist on their Hindu identity. Hence, a heuristic model for a contextualized baptism as Guru-diksha is proposed. The emergent church among Hindu devotees should be considered, from the perspective of world Christianity, as a disparate form of belonging while remaining within one's community of birth. The insistence on a visible church and a distinct community of Christ's followers is contested because the devotees should construct their contextual ecclesiology, since it is an indigenous discovery of the Christian faith. Thus, the "Christian" label for the adherents is dispensable while retaining their socio-ethnic Hindu identity. Christian mission should discontinue extraction and assimilation; instead, missional praxis should be within the given sociocultural structures, recognizing their idiosyncrasies as legitimate in God's eyes and in need of transformation, like any human culture.

Download or read book Uncomfortable written by Brett McCracken and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does your church make you uncomfortable? It’s easy to dream about the “perfect” church—a church that sings just the right songs set to just the right music before the pastor preaches just the right sermon to a room filled with just the right mix of people who happen to agree with you on just about everything. Chances are your church doesn’t quite look like that. But what if instead of searching for a church that makes us comfortable, we learned to love our church, even when it’s challenging? What if some of the discomfort that we often experience is actually good for us? This book is a call to embrace the uncomfortable aspects of Christian community, whether that means believing difficult truths, pursuing difficult holiness, or loving difficult people—all for the sake of the gospel, God’s glory, and our joy.

Download or read book Jesus Outside the Lines written by Scott Sauls and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether the issue of the day on Twitter, Facebook, or cable news is our sexuality, political divides, or the perceived conflict between faith and science, today’s media pushes each one of us into a frustrating clash between two opposing sides. Polarizing, us-against-them discussions divide us and distract us from thinking clearly and communicating lovingly with others. Scott Sauls, like many of us, is weary of the bickering and is seeking a way of truth and beauty through the conflicts. Jesus Outside the Lines presents Jesus as this way. Scott shows us how the words and actions of Jesus reveal a response that does not perpetuate the destructive fray. Jesus offers us a way forward—away from harshness, caricatures, and stereotypes. In Jesus Outside the Lines, you will experience a fresh perspective of Jesus, who will not (and should not) fit into the sides.

Download or read book Why We Love the Church written by Kevin L. DeYoung and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2009-06-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the case for loving the local church. It paints a picture of the local church in all its biblical and real life guts, gaffes, and glory in an effort to edify local congregations and entice the disaffected back to the fold. It also provides a solid biblical mandate to love and be part of the body of Christ and counteract the "leave church" books that trumpet rebellion and individual felt needs. Why We Love the Church is written for four kinds of people - the Committed, the Disgruntled, the Waffling & the Disconnected.

Download or read book Essays in Contextual Theology written by Steve Bevans and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on the nature of contextual theology, criteria for orthodoxy, prophetic dialogue, conversion, culture and other relevant topics as Christian faith and particular contexts encounter one another.

Download or read book What the Gentiles Have Done to Christianity written by Lloyd David Elcock and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2004-12 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians do not love Jesus enough! Indeed on a scale of 1 to 10, the average Christian's love for Him scores no more that 10. This is the startling message of Lloyd David Elcock's first volume of a series of scriptural expositions that he proposes to publish under the rubric: What the Gentiles Have done to Christianity. The foundation upon which he has built this series includes the following three cornerstones: "Biblical Christianity" can accurately and justifiably also be called "Jewish Christianity". After the control and direction of Biblical/Jewish Christianity was passed from Jewish to Gentile hands at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Gentiles comprehensively deformed it, and 1200 years later, partially reformed it. The salvage and recovery of Biblical/Jewish Christianity, begun five hundred years ago by Luther, Calvin and the other Gentile Protestant Reformers, is only fifty percent completed; in particular, a number of the most fundamental doctrines of Biblical/Jewish Christianity are yet to be recovered, and their absence from today's Evangelical Church is the sole and single reason for the widespread carnality, and stunted spiritual growth that characterizes the lifestyle of the overwhelmingly vast majority of born again Christians everywhere in the western world. In this first volume, the author puts forward the view that one of those as yet unretrieved fundamental doctrines is the major key to the Spirit filled life of love, faith and power that is the ultimate goal of both Biblical Christianity and Gentile Evangelical Christianity. That key, he says, is hidden (in plain view, out in the open) in the pages of the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to the apostle John.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer written by John W. de Gruchy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-05-13 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion serves as a guide for readers wanting to explore the thought and legacy of the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45). The book shows why Bonhoeffer remains such an attractive figure to so many people of diverse backgrounds. Its chapters, written by authors from differing national, theological and church contexts, provide a helpful introduction to, and commentary on, Bonhoeffer's life, work and writing and so guide the reader along the complex paths of his thought. Experts set out comprehensively Bonhoeffer's political, social and cultural contexts, and offer biographical information which is indispensable for the understanding of his theology. Major themes arising from the theology, and different interpretations to it, lead the reader into a dialogue with this most influential of thinkers who remains both fascinating and challenging. There is a chronology, a glossary and an index.