Download or read book The 5 Masculine Instincts written by Chase Replogle and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don’t trust your instincts—there is a better path to becoming a better man. It’s no secret: today’s men face a dilemma. Our culture tells them that their instincts are either toxic or salvific. Men are left with only two options: deconstruct and forfeit masculine identity or embrace it with wild abandon. They’re left to decide between ignoring their instincts or indulging them. Neither approach helps them actually understand their own masculine experiences nor how those experiences can lead them to become better men of God. The Bible doesn’t shy away from the reality of masculine instincts nor all of the ways those instincts can lead to destruction. Examining the lives of five men of the Bible, The 5 Masculine Instincts shows that these men aren’t masculine role models or heroes but are men who wrestled with their own desires and, by faith, matured them into something better. Through this book you’ll discover your own instincts are neither curse nor virtue. They are the experiences by which you develop a new and better instinct—an instinct of faith. By exploring sarcasm, adventure, ambition, reputation, and apathy, The 5 Masculine Instincts shows you how to better understand yourself and how your own instincts can be matured into something better. This is the path by which we become better men.

Download or read book The Church Impotent written by Leon J. Podles and published by Spence Publishing Company. This book was released on 1999 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current preoccupation with the role of women in the church obscures the more serious problem of the perennial absence of men. This provocative book argues that Western churches have become women's clubs, that the emasculation of Christianity is dangerous for the church and society, and that a masculine presence can and must be restored.After documenting the highly feminized state of Western Christianity, Dr. Podles identifies the masculine traits that once characterized the Christian life but are now commonly considered incompatible with it. He contends that though masculinity has been marginalized within Christianity, it cannot be expunged from human society. If detached from Christianity, it reappears as a substitute religion, with unwholesome and even horrific consequences. The church, too, is diminished by its emasculation. Dr. Podles concludes by considering how Christianity's virility might be restored.In the otherwise stale and overworked field of gender studies, The Church Impotent is the only book to confront the lopsidedly feminine cast of modern Christianity with a profound analysis of its historical and sociological roots.

Download or read book Celebration of Discipline written by Richard J. Foster and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 1988-10-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twenty years since its publication, Celebration of Discipline has helped over a million seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God. For this special twentieth anniversary edition, Richard J. Foster has added an introduction, in which he shares the story of how this beloved and enduring spiritual guidebook came to be. Hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality, Celebration of Discipline explores the "classic Disciplines," or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Along the way, Foster shows that it is only by and through these practices that the true path to spiritual growth can be found. Dividing the Disciplines into three movements of the Spirit, Foster shows how each of these areas contribute to a balanced spiritual life. The inward Disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study, offer avenues of personal examination and change. The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service, help prepare us to make the world a better place. The corporate Disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration, bring us nearer to one another and to God. Foster provides a wealth of examples demonstrating how these Disciplines can become part of our daily activities-and how they can help us shed our superficial habits and "bring the abundance of God into our lives." He offers crucial new insights on simplicity, demonstrating how the biblical view of simplicity, properly understood and applied, brings joy and balance to our inward and outward lives and "sets us free to enjoy the provision of God as a gift that can be shared with others." The discussion of celebration, often the most neglected of the Disciplines, shows its critical importance, for it stands at the heart of the way to Christ. Celebration of Discipline will help motivate Christians everywhere to embark on a journey of prayer and spiritual growth.

Download or read book Streams of Living Water written by Richard J. Foster and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2001-11-27 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the bestselling celebration of discipline explores the great traditions of Christian spirituality and their role in spiritual renewal today. In this landmark work, Foster examines the "streams of living water" –– the six dimensions of faith and practice that define Christian tradition. He lifts up the enduring character of each tradition and shows how a variety of practices, from individual study and retreat to disciplines of service and community, are all essential elements of growth and maturity. Foster examines the unique contributions of each of these traditions and offers as examples the inspiring stories of faithful people whose lives defined each of these "streams."

Download or read book Shepherding Movement written by S. David Moore and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-04-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging history of the Shepherding Movement, an influential and controversial expression of the charismatic renewal in the 1970s and 1980s. This neopentecostal movement, led by popular Bible teachers Ern Baxter, Don Basham, Bob Mumford, Derek Prince and Charles Simpson, became a house church movement in the United States. The Shepherding Movement is a case study of an attempt at renewing church structures. Many critics accused the movement of being authoritarian because of its emphasis on submission to a personal pastor or "shepherd" as they termed it.

Download or read book Church Planting Movements written by V. David Garrison and published by WIGTake Resources. This book was released on 2007 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Garrison, PhD University of Chicago, defines Church Planting Movements as rapidly multiplying indigenous churches planting churches that sweep across a people group or population segment. Garrison's Church Planting Movements: How God Is Redeeming a Lost World signaled a breakthrough in missionary church planting. After the publication of Garrison's book in 2004 it became impossible to talk about missions without referencing Church Planting Movements. Church Planting Movements examines more than two-dozen movements of multiplying churches on five continents. After presenting these case studies, Garrison identifies ten universal elements present in each movement. He then broadens the circle of examination to identify a further ten common characteristics, factors identified in most, but not all, of the movements. He concludes his examination with a list of "Seven Deadly Sins," i.e. harmful practices that stifle or impede Church Planting Movements. Important for evangelical readers, the author returns to his findings to see how they stand up to the light of Scripture. What he discovers is that Church Planting Movements are much more consistent with the New Testament lay-led house-church movements that swept rapidly through the Mediterranean world in the face of hostile opposition than today's more sedentary professional institutionalized Christianity. Learn more about Church Planting Movements from the book's website: www.ChurchPlantingMovements.com.

Download or read book Reaching for the Invisible God written by Philip Yancey and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2002-02-18 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author Philip Yancey asks the question: How does a relationship with God work? And then he answers it with an investigation that turns up surprising and satisfying answers about life and communication with an invisible God.

Download or read book Pure written by Linda Kay Klein and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us “inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can” (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women. In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Pure is “a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society’s larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, “Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom” (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).

Download or read book Wild at Heart written by John Eldredge and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-04-17 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all your boyhood dreams of growing up, did you dream of being a "nice guy"? Eldredge believes that every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. That is how he bears the image of God; that is what God made him to be.

Download or read book A Farewell to Mars written by Brian Zahnd and published by David C Cook. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know Jesus the Savior, but have we met Jesus, Prince of Peace? When did we accept vengeance as an acceptable part of the Christian life? How did violence and power seep into our understanding of faith and grace? For those troubled by this trend toward the sword, perhaps there is a better way. What if the message of Jesus differs radically differs from the drumbeats of war we hear all around us? Using his own journey from war crier to peacemaker and his in-depth study of peace in the scriptures, author and pastor Brian Zahnd reintroduces us to the gospel of Peace.

Download or read book Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation written by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

Download or read book Movements That Change the World written by Steve Addison and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Addison gleans the characteristics of the dynamic missionary movement from biblical, historical and contemporary case studies. Addison shows how these factors recur in every period of Christian expansion, and suggests that Christianity's distinction as a historical movement lies in its power to outlast the centuries.

Download or read book Church Unique written by Will Mancini and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by church consultant Will Mancini expert on a new kind of visioning process to help churches develop a stunningly unique model of ministry that leads to redemptive movement. He guides churches away from an internal focus to emphasize participation in their community and surrounding culture. In this important book, Mancini offers an approach for rethinking what it means to lead with clarity as a visionary. Mancini explains that each church has a culture that reflects its particular values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions and shows how church leaders can unlock their church's individual DNA and unleash their congregation's one-of-a-kind potential.

Download or read book The Power Worshippers written by Katherine Stewart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the documentary God & Country For readers of Democracy in Chains and Dark Money, a revelatory investigation of the Religious Right's rise to political power. For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today's Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America's past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals. The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart's probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.

Download or read book Evaluating the Church Growth Movement written by Zondervan, and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is the Church Growth movement? This timely volume in the Counterpoints series addresses the history of the movement that has become such an enormous shaping force on the Western church today, and it explores--in a roundtable forum of leading voices--five main perspectives on the classic Church Growth movement: Effective Evangelism View - presented by Elmer Towns Gospel in Our Culture View - presented by Craig Van Gelder Centrist View - presented by Charles Van Engen Reformist View - presented by Gailyn Van Rheenan Renewal View - presented by Howard Snyder Each view is first presented by its proponent, then critiqued by the co-contributors. The interactive and fair-minded format allows the reader to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each view and draw informed, personal conclusions. Evaluating the Church Growth Movement concludes with reflections by three seasoned pastors who have grappled with the practical implications of Church Growth. The Counterpoints series presents a comparison and critique of scholarly views on topics important to Christians that are both fair-minded and respectful of the biblical text. Each volume is a one-stop reference that allows readers to evaluate the different positions on a specific issue and form their own, educated opinion.

Download or read book No Man Left Behind written by Patrick Morley and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Murrow's book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, has heightened awareness of an epidemic--Patrick Morley offers the solution. No Man Left Behind is the blueprint for growing a thriving men's ministry that has the power to rebuild the church as we know it, pulling men off the couch and into active involvement as part of the body of Christ.

Download or read book Why Men Hate Going to Church written by David Murrow and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2011-10-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Church is boring.” “It’s irrelevant.” “It’s full of hypocrites.” You’ve heard the excuses—now learn the real reasons men and boys are fleeing churches of every kind, all over the world, and what we can do about it. Women comprise more than 60% of the adults in a typical worship service in America. Some overseas congregations report ten women for every man in attendance. Men are less likely to lead, volunteer, and give in the church. They pray less, share their faith less, and read the Bible less. In Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow identifies the barriers keeping many men from going to church, explains why it’s so hard to motivate the men who do attend, and also takes you inside several fast-growing congregations that are winning the hearts of men and boys. In this completely revised, reorganized, and rewritten edition of the classic book, with more than 70 percent new content, explore topics like: The increase and decrease in male church attendance during the past 500 years Why Christian churches are more feminine even though men are often still the leaders The difference between the type of God men and women like to worship The lack of volunteering and ministry opportunities for men The benefits men get from attending church regularly Men need the church but, more importantly, the church needs men. The presence of enthusiastic men is one of the surest predictors of church health, growth, giving, and expansion. Why Men Hate Going to Church does not call men back to church—it calls the church back to men.