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When the Church was a Family
A study of the early Christian church in the Mediterranean region and its emphasis on collective good over individual desire clarifies much about what is wrong with the American church today.
Embracing Shared Ministry
Joseph Hellerman (PhD, UCLA) is Professor of New Testament at Biola University. He also currently serves as Team Pastor at Oceanside Christian Fellowship Church. Hellerman's other publications include The Ancient Church as Family, Reconstructing Honor in Roman Philippi, When the Church Was Family, and Jesus and the People of God.
When the Church Was a Family
Spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community. But as the modern cultural norm of what social scientists call “radical American individualism” extends itself, many Christians grow lax in their relational accountability to the church. Faith threatens to become an “I” not “us,” a “my God” not “our God” concern. When the Church Was a Family calls believers back to the wisdom of the first century, examining the early Christian church from a sociohistorical perspective and applying the findings to the evangelical church in America today. With confidence, author Joseph Hellerman writes intentionally to traditional church leaders and emerging church visionaries alike, believing what is detailed here about Jesus’ original vision for authentic Christian community will deeply satisfy the relational longings of both audiences.
Reconstructing Honor in Roman Philippi
This book examines Paul's letter to the Philippians against the social background of the colony at Philippi. After an extensive survey of Roman social values, Professor Hellerman argues that the cursus honorum, the formalized sequence of public offices that marked out the prescribed social pilgrimage for aspiring senatorial aristocrats in Rome (and which was replicated in miniature in municipalities and in voluntary associations), forms the background against which Paul has framed his picture of Jesus in the great Christ hymn in Philippians 2. In marked contrast to the values of the dominant culture, Paul portrays Jesus descending what the author describes as a cursus pudorum ('course of ignominies'). The passage has thus been intentionally framed to subvert Roman cursus ideology and, by extension, to redefine the manner in which honour and power were to be utilized among the Christians at Philippi.
Jesus and the People of God
How did the Jesus movement-a messianic sectarian version of Palestinian Judaism-transcend its Judaean origins and ultimately establish itself in the Roman East as the multi-ethnic socio-religious experiment we know as early Christianity? In this major work, Hellerman, drawing upon his background as a social historian, proposes that a clue to the success of the Christian movement lay in Jesus' own conception of the people of God, and in how he reconfigured its identity from that of ethnos to that of family. Pointing first to Jesus' critique of sabbath-keeping, the Jerusalem temple, and Jewish dietary laws-practices central to the preservation of Judaean social identity-he argues that Jesus' i...
Philippians
Each volume of the Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (EGGNT) series provides paragraph-by-paragraph exegesis of the Greek text and includes homiletical helps, suggestions for further study, and a comprehensive exegetical outline of the New Testament book.
Why We Need the Church to Become More Like Jesus
Many of us long to experience the fullness of God and his purpose for our lives. Not a whole lot of us ever do. The reason is that we have departed in some significant ways from the biblical view of Christian life and growth. The New Testament highlights the communal, missional, and eschatological aspects of our walk with God. We grow in our faith as individual Christians to the degree that we are (a) deeply rooted relationally in a local church community that is (b) passionately playing its part in God's grand story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration, and (c) intently anticipating the summing of all things in Christ when Jesus returns. In recent decades, American evangelicals have traded away community, outreach, and the Bible's teaching about eternity future for the pursuit of individual religious experience in the here-and-now. Why We Need the Church to Become More Like Jesus traces this departure from biblical Christianity through recent decades of popular evangelical trends and reminds us that faith centered on community, mission, and the story line of Scripture remains the key to the spiritual formation of the individual Christian.
The Ancient Church as Family
The author explores the literature of the first three centuries of the church in terms of group identity and formation as surrogate kinship. Why did this become the organizing model in the earliest churches? How did historical developments intervene to shift the paradigm? How do ancient Mediterranean kinship structures correlate with church formation? Hellerman traces the fascinating story of these developments over three centuries and what brought them about. His focus is the New Testament documents (especially Paul's letters), second-century authors, and concluding with Cyprian in the third century. Kinship terminology in these writings, behaviors of group solidarity, and the symbolic power of kinship language in these groups are examined.
They Like Jesus but Not the Church
Many people today, especially among emerging generations, don’t resonate with the church and organized Christianity. Some are leaving the church and others were never part of the church in the first place. Sometimes it’s because of misperceptions about the church. Yet often they are still spiritually open and fascinated with Jesus. This is a ministry resource book exploring six of the most common objects and misunderstandings emerging generations have about the church and Christianity. The objections come from conversations and interviews the church has had with unchurched twenty and thirty-somethings at coffee houses. Each chapter raises the objection using a conversational approach, provides the biblical answers to that objection, gives examples of how churches are addressing this objection, and concludes with follow-through projection suggestions, discussion questions, and resource listings.
Offside
Soccer is the world's favorite pastime, a passion for billions around the globe. In the United States, however, the sport is a distant also-ran behind football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Why is America an exception? And why, despite America's leading role in popular culture, does most of the world ignore American sports in return? Offside is the first book to explain these peculiarities, taking us on a thoughtful and engaging tour of America's sports culture and connecting it with other fundamental American exceptionalisms. In so doing, it offers a comparative analysis of sports cultures in the industrial societies of North America and Europe. The authors argue that when sports cultu...
