Download or read book The Empty Church written by Thomas Reeves and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998-01-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when Americans are searching for spiritual and moral renewal, millions of parishioners are abandoning the churches that once embodied the very values they seek. "The Empty Church" offers the first cogent explanation of why his has occurred--and tells what can be done about it.

Download or read book Empty the Pews written by Chrissy Stroop and published by . This book was released on 2019-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Empty Church written by Shannon Nichole Craigo-Snell and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why go to church? What happens in church and why does it matter? The Empty Church presents fresh answers to these questions by creating an interdisciplinary conversation between theater directors and Christian theologians. This original study expands church beyond the sanctuary and into life. Shannon Craigo-Snell emphasizes the importance of liturgical worship in forming Christians as characters crafted by the texts of the Bible. This formation includes shaping how Christians know, in ways that involve the intellect, emotions, body, and will. Each chapter brings a theater director into dialogue with a theologian, teasing out the ways performance enriches hermeneutics, anthropology, and epistemology. Thinkers like Karl Barth, Peter Brook, Delores Williams, and Bertolt Brecht are examined for their insights into theology, worship, and theater. The result is a compelling depiction of church as performance of relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by Scripture, in hope of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical worship, at its best, forms Christians in patterns of affections. This includes the cultivation of emotion memories influenced by biblical narratives, as well as a repertoire of physical actions that evoke particular affections. Liturgy also encourages Christians to step into various roles, enabling them to make intellectual and volitional choices about what roles to take up in society. Through liturgical worship, the author argues, Christians can be formed as people who hope, and therefore as people who live in expectation of the presence and grace of God. This entails a discipline of emptiness that awaits and appreciates the Holy Spirit. Church performance must therefore be provisional, ongoing, and open to further inspiration.

Download or read book The Empty Church written by Mark Bohaichuk and published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Empty Church is a street-level discussion that explores the modern-day Christian Church attendance and why it seems to be dwindling. Mark Bohaichuk walks the reader through logical and clear ways of thinking about Christianity and the decline in church attendance. Is it a coincidence that as people leave the Christian faith for materialism that our world is slowly being submerged in chaos and an out-of-control politically correct movement? Is the waning of the world's moral barometer related to the weakening of our faith? The Empty Church begins an informal discussion on why we may be seeing these declines. The author takes us on an explorative journey to the forces that continue to relentlessly pressure and push people out of the Christian Church. A society of materialism and fast-food-like gratifications lure the gentle sheep of the church out into a world of ravenous wolves. The Empty Church is a great place to start a dialogue with your friends and fellow believers about the condition and health of our modern society and how it may tie in with the decline in our church attendance. Has our faith in God been lost in the stampede of atheistic pleasures of our fast and furious society? Can we reclaim the faith and refill the churches with followers of the truth and the life and once again become the change agents that our society so desperately needs? The Empty Church looks at possible reasons there exists a decline in our faith and looks at the ways we can once again become the salt and the light to the nations.

Download or read book The Empty Church Revisited written by Robin Gill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003. When did churches start to appear more empty than full - and why? The very physicality of largely empty churches and chapels in Britain plays a powerful role in popular perceptions of 'religion'. Empty churches are frequently cited in the media as evidence of large scale religious decline. The Empty Church Revisited presents a systematic account of British churchgoing patterns over the last two hundred years, uncovering the factors and the statistics behind the considerable process of decline in church attendence. Dispelling as myth the commonly held views that the process of secularization in British culture has led to the decline in churchgoing and resulted in the predominantly empty churches of today, Gill points to physical factors, economics and issues of social space to shed new light on the origins of empty churches. This thoroughly updated edition of Robin Gill's earlier work, The Myth of the Empty Church, presents new data throughout to explore afresh the paradox of church building activity in a context of decline, the patterns of urbanisation followed by sub-urbanisation affecting churches, changes in patterns of worship, and changes within the sociology of religion in the last decade.

Download or read book The Myth of the Empty Church written by Robin Gill and published by . This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Death of the Church written by Mike Regele and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 1995 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our culture is changing at a dizzying rate. But the church seems to be left behind, caught in subcultural backwaters that have little or no impact on mainstream society. Based on the quantitative research of his group, Percept, Regele analyzes the forces in our culture and discusses how the church can fulfill its mission in the face of them.

Download or read book Myth of the Empty Church written by Robin Gill and published by Society for Promoting Christian. This book was released on 1993-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Empty Church written by Shannon Craigo-Snell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why go to church? What happens in church and why does it matter? The Empty Church presents fresh answers to these questions by creating an interdisciplinary conversation between theater directors and Christian theologians. This original study expands church beyond the sanctuary and into life. Shannon Craigo-Snell emphasizes the importance of liturgical worship in forming Christians as characters crafted by the texts of the Bible. This formation includes shaping how Christians know, in ways that involve the intellect, emotions, body, and will. Each chapter brings a theater director into dialogue with a theologian, teasing out the ways performance enriches hermeneutics, anthropology, and epistemology. Thinkers like Karl Barth, Peter Brook, Delores Williams, and Bertolt Brecht are examined for their insights into theology, worship, and theater. The result is a compelling depiction of church as performance of relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by Scripture, in hope of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical worship, at its best, forms Christians in patterns of affections. This includes the cultivation of emotion memories influenced by biblical narratives, as well as a repertoire of physical actions that evoke particular affections. Liturgy also encourages Christians to step into various roles, enabling them to make intellectual and volitional choices about what roles to take up in society. Through liturgical worship, the author argues, Christians can be formed as people who hope, and therefore as people who live in expectation of the presence and grace of God. This entails a discipline of emptiness that awaits and appreciates the Holy Spirit. Church performance must therefore be provisional, ongoing, and open to further inspiration.

Download or read book Our Church written by Roger Scruton and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. Here, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.

Download or read book The Man Who Went into the West written by Byron Rogers and published by Quarto Publishing Group USA. This book was released on 2007-07-20 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning life story of Wales national poet and vicar R.S. Thomas is “a biography touched by genius.” (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday) R.S. Thomas is widely considered as one of the twentieth-century’s greatest English language poets. His bitter yet beautiful collections on Wales, its landscape, people and identity, reflect a life of political and spiritual asceticism. Indeed, Thomas is a man who banned vacuum cleaners from his house on grounds of noise, whose first act on moving into an ancient cottage was to rip out the central heating, and whose attempts to seek out more authentically Welsh parishes only brought him more into contact with loud English holidaymakers. To Thomas’s many admirers this will be a surprising, sometimes shocking, but at last humanising portrait of someone who wrote truly metaphysical poetry. “A masterpiece.” —Daily Express “A striking, vivid and tender reading of the man . . . Excellent.” —Observer “Riotiously funny.” —Rowan Williams, Sunday Times “It is precisely Byron Rogers’ darkly comic sense of the ridiculous that melts the frost from the head of R.S. Thomas and humanizes a remote and bleakly beautiful writer.” —The Times “A chatty, disorderly but extremely good [biography] . . . A wonderfully comprehensive picture of the man.” —Daily Telegraph “As revealing an account of a severely private person that anyone could hope to achieve.” —Alan Brownjohn, Times Literary Supplement “Engagingly high-spirited and daring.” —Andrew Motion, Guardian Book of the Week “Charming and deftly written. . . . A very funny book.” —Literary Review “As readable and rounded a life of the man as could be written.” —Tablet Winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography

Download or read book Barefoot Church written by Brandon Hatmaker and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There's got to be more to church than this. People around the world are seeking a community that focuses more on others than on themselves. Yet most don't know where to start. Drawing from his own journey, Brandon Hatmaker reminds us that serving the least is not a trendy act of benevolence but a lifestyle of authentic community and spiritual transformation. In Barefoot Church, he explains: Practical ideas for creating service-based, missional communities How the organizational structure of a church can be created or restructured for mission in any context How any church can truly be a catalyst for individual, collective, and social renewal Whether you are a leader or a layperson, this book is meant to renew your passion for the church and inspire you to take your affections off yourself, place them on people who have nothing to offer you, and lead others to do the same.

Download or read book A New Testament Church in the 21st Century written by Young G. Chai and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book If the Tomb Is Empty written by Joby Martin and published by FaithWords. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beloved pastor and a New York Times bestselling author examine scripture and share inspiring personal stories to help reveal the important role that Jesus’ resurrection plays in our everyday lives. The Son of God was crucified, died and buried, and He lay in the tomb for three days—until He walked out shining like the sun. In a culture in which history is erased or rewritten at will, the existence of an empty tomb matters. Why? Because if the tomb is empty—then anything is possible. In his first book, Joby Martin, Lead Pastor of The Church of Eleven22, dives deep into scripture and traces the story of salvation by highlighting the seven mountains throughout scripture where God manifests himself. As he describes each encounter with God, Martin shows us how the interaction on each mountain laid the groundwork for the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, and shows what God revealed about Himself in the process. He illuminates seven familiar passages, unveiling how God's plan for Christ's sacrifice is threaded throughout scripture, and shows why Christ's resurrection—impossible, unbelievable—means that nothing is too hard for our God. Ultimately, he asks readers, Do you live every day of your life as if the tomb is empty—or as though Jesus is still hanging on that cross? Written with New York Times bestselling author Charles Martin, If the Tomb is Empty is an insightful and spiritually rich examination of what the miracle of Christ's resurrection means for all of us.

Download or read book Deep Church written by Jim Belcher and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-09-25 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you feel caught between the traditional church and the emerging church, read Jim Belcher. He paints a picture of an alternate, "deep" church--a missional church committed to both tradition and contemporary culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also adhering to creeds and confessions.

Download or read book Simple Church written by Thom S. Rainer and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2011-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, this multi-awarded national best seller shares a clear message from case studies of 400 North American congregations: church is done best when it's kept simple.

Download or read book Organic Church written by Neil Cole and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2007-06-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Churches have tried all kinds of ways to attract new and younger members - revised vision statements, hipper worship, contemporary music, livelier sermons, bigger and better auditoriums. But there are still so many people who aren't being reached, who don't want to come to church. And the truth is that attendance at church on Sundays does not necessarily transform lives; God's presence in our hearts is what changes us. Leaders and laypeople everywhere are realizing that they need new and more powerful ways to help them spread God's Word. According to international church starter and pastor Neil Cole, if we want to connect with young people and those who are not coming to church, we must go where people congregate. Cole shows readers how to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God in the places where life happens and where culture is formed - restaurants, bars, coffeehouses, parks, locker rooms,and neighborhoods. Organic Church offers a hands-on guide for demystifying this new model of church and shows the practical aspects of implementing it.