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While research identifies a disturbing exodus from church life by all age groups and young people in particular, many churches continue to maintain the status quo. Can we do no better? Are we too afraid to confront the realities of living in today’s world? Have we failed? This book will help readers create a church worth getting up for. In the book, Chuck Gutenson presents the thoughts of eight successful church leaders, including Deb Hirsch, Al Hirsch, Mike Slaughter, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Chris Seay, Greg Boyd, Olu Brown, and Doug Pagitt. Learn what characteristics they have in common. We all want to be a part of something meaningful—something or someone who will change our lives for the better. The Church has to find new ways to encourage, nurture, guide, inspire, and motivate people to find their true source in Jesus Christ. 'Jesus is worth getting up for." Help people find in your church a means to experience the source of their deepest desires.
The Lord is the Spirit (2 Cor 3:17) . . . and yet one might be excused for thinking otherwise when reading studies on God's attributes - omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, immutability, impassibility, and the like. Although Christians throughout theages have defended the deity of the Holy Spirit, theologians have not adequately taken the doctrine of the Holy Spirit into account when formulating a theology of the divine attributes. The resulting understandings of God fall short of being fully Trinitarian. Gabriel builds on contemporary Trinitarian theology by advocating for the integration of insights from pneumatology into the doctrine of God's attributes. Three case studies are presented: impassibility, immutability, and omnipotence. Gabriel writes from an evangelical and Pentecostal vantage point as he engages in ecumenical dialogue with a wide spectrum of historical and contemporary theological voices.
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Many of us long for a faith like the first Christians. We speak ideally of the earliest followers of Jesus and use them authoritatively for current church doctrine and practice. But do we know what that means? What happens if we actually learn what early church leaders wrote? What might they be able to teach us? A variety of contemporary, hot-button issues have surprising context to the early church. In the modern era, church leaders can learn from early church thinking on key ethical issues such as poverty and wealth, war, creation care, social issues and more. Take a peek into a lost era and discover surprisingly relevant insights into contemporary issues. Includes a downloadable study guide.
Paying particular attention to the issue of God's sovereignty, Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell critique biblical and theological weaknesses of Calvinist thought.
In this project, Gutenson examines Pannenberg's theology with an eye particularly to his doctrine of God as laid out in his various theological writings.
Rescue your church from the infiltration of partisan politics. Especially in this election season, the political discourse within our country grows more rancorous and increasingly uncivil. During the last several decades there has been a growing tendency to conflate one's theological commitments with one's political ideology. As a consequence, partisan politics has infiltrated our churches and political commitments are creating unnecessary divisions. Perhaps of most concern, these trends generally tend to obscure the properly holistic nature of the Gospel of Christ and turn people off to Christianity altogether. Too often, it often seems politics has more influence than theology. Sadly, this leads to division, where decisions on church direction, and even the content of teaching, gets determined more based on partisan politics than on sound biblical and theological factors. Hijacked explores this phenomenon, offers analysis, and proposes a way forward.
David Trementozzi contends that conservative-traditional Christianity has uncritically adopted an intellectualist (i.e., rationally-driven) view of faith in its understanding and practice of salvation. Throughout, he maintains that an intellectualist soteriology should be rejected because it prioritizes the rational over other behavioral and affective aspects of faith. An intellectualist rendering of salvation is incomplete because human experience is neither abstract nor gnostic—it is embodied and experientially relevant. An intellectualist soteriology simply cannot account for the dynamic and transforming possibilities of saving grace. Salvation in the Flesh offers an innovative perspect...
If there were a perfect, unending existence awaiting us after death, what would it be like? What would we do there? Would you want to go there at all? Today, philosophers of religion are increasingly interested in questions of this kind. This book uses the approach of analytic philosophy to examine a conception of heaven that is rooted in Christian tradition but rarely considered by modern philosophers and theologians: heaven as atemporal, that is, a state in which no time passes. It argues that such a view is not only coherent but offers answers to some key problems facing the concept of heaven. Along the way, it considers topics such as the nature of time, the possibility of atemporal persons, the relationship between earthly and heavenly selves, the beatific vision and the role of the body, and how the blessed in heaven could be said to be divine.
Rosario Picardo was a recently divorced and slightly jaded ex-Marine when I heeded God's call to plant "a church for broken people." This book chronicles the struggles and triumphs of Embrace Church, from its beginnings in his basement as a rare urban church plant to a multi-campus congregation that reaches hundreds of folks broken by poverty, burned by Christians, and in need of healing grave. By telling his story, Picardo hopes to inform, inspire, and encourage seminary students, future church planters, and any Christian committed to expanding the body of Christ among marginalized people in urban areas. Alongside relevant data and theological insights, Picardo shares the practical lessons he learned, as well as personal journal entries about his internal struggles, in order to offer a comprehensive glimpse into not only the need for new church plants, but the difficulties and opportunities that exist in this sort of ministry. Book jacket.