You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The story of women's ministry is longer and far more varied than most people imagine. This book tells the story of women's ministry in the Free Churches, and looks at its impact on the ways we worship and live out our Christian lives. Women have ministered in garrets and gutters, at home and on the mission field. Today, women are fully engaged in ministry within our multicultural society, bringing a diversity of voices to match the diversity of the world in which we live. Six well-known contributors who are themselves involved in the story of women's ministry explore issues of leadership and authority, preaching and worship, global perspectives, the relation to feminist theology and the ecum...
Contemporary texts are used in this volume to illustrate key themes in the history of Nonconformity in England and Wales. Although the twentieth century was in many ways a century of decline, this book shows that there was still much life in the Nonconformist tradition. It also looks at contemporary issues such as racism and the place of women. Through contemporary writings it provides an insight into the life and thought of the English Free Churches in a century in which they expected to come into their own, only to discover that they faced new challenges and the problems of decline.
A groundbreaking, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary analysis of women’s experiences in World Christianity Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement is the first textbook to focus on women’s experiences in the founding, spread, and continuation of the Christian faith. Integrating historical, theological, and social scientific approaches to World Christianity, this innovative volume centers women’s perspectives to illustrate their key role in Christianity becoming a world religion, including how they sustain the faith in the present and their expanding role in the future. Women in World Christianity features findings from the Women in World Christianity Pr...
Authority lies at the very center of what it means to be called together in an ecclesial community and shapes how the Church understands its purpose and orders its activity. It can manifest itself as something owned and used by those in power, yet it is something fundamental to the entirety of Church life. However, while some polities exude authority in every pronouncement and every action, other ecclesiologies find it more difficult to locate and express authority, often needing a quest to explore and discover the authority that shapes the Church’s life. Focusing on the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom, this book explores the particular shaping and bringing together that is a characteristic of a United and Reformed ecclesiology and examines how this influences ecclesial polity and practice. Matthew Prevett argues that authority in ecclesial life can be understood historically and empirically, drawing deeply from the well of tradition and history yet inspired by the social, political, and technological challenges of the twenty-first century.
What do we need to learn and receive from the other to help us address challenges or wounds in our own tradition? That is the key question asked in what has come to be known as ‘receptive ecumenism’. And nowhere is this question more pressing and pertinent than in women’s experiences within the church. Based on qualitative research from five focus groups, 'For the Good of the Church' expose the difficulties women face when they work in a church – sexism, unfulfilled vocation, and abuse of power and privilege, as well as the wide range of gifts and skills which women bring in light of these. The second part of the book continues to draw on the particular wounds and gifts, which arise in the focus groups. Specific case studies are used to identify gifts of theology, practice, experience, vocation and power. Against negative prognoses of an ‘ecumenical winter’, Gabrielle Thomas reveals how radically different theological and ecclesiological perspectives can be a space for learning and receiving gifts for the well-being of the whole Church.
In Ordained Ministry in Free Church Perspective Jan Martijn Abrahamse presents a constructive theology of ordained ministry by returning to the life and thought of the English Separatist Robert Browne (c. 1550-1633). This study makes a substantial contribution not only by solving one of the most thorny problems in congregational ecclesiology, but also by recovering the legacy of this ecclesial pioneer. Through an in-depth analysis of Browne’s literature, the author provides a covenantal theology of ordained ministry in conversation with present-day authors Stanley Hauerwas and Kevin Vanhoozer. Inspired by the emerging trend of ‘theology of retrieval’ Abrahamse offers a methodologically innovative way of doing systematic theology in a manner in which voices from the past can be made fruitful for today.
The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England -and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organ...
This is the final volume in a four-volume series, using contemporary texts to illustrate key themes in the history of Nonconformity in England and Wales. Although the twentieth century was in many ways a century of decline, this book shows that there was still much life in the nonconformist tradition. It also looks at contemporary issues such as racism and the place of women.
Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907-2005), a convert to Orthodoxy in her early twenties and a central figure of Orthodox theology among Russian émigrés in Paris, first began to reflect on the question of women in the priesthood in 1976. Initially supporting the general consensus that priesthood would be impossible for the Orthodox, she came to retract this view, finding a basis for female ordination in women's distinct spiritual charisms. Behr-Sigel later shifted the foundation of her case to personhood, inspired by the work of fellow Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, and arrived at the conclusion that all the Orthodox arguments against the ordination of women were, in fact, heretical at root. In this volume, Wilson analyzes all of Behr-Sigel's writings about women and the priesthood across the whole sweep of her career, demonstrating the development of her thought on women over the last thirty years of her life. She evaluates her relationship to feminism, Protestantism and movements within Orthodoxy, finally drawing conclusions about this much-contested matter for the ongoing debate in both the East and the West.
The growth of women's ordained ministry is one of the most remarkable and significant developments in the recent history of Christianity. This collection of essays brings together leading contributors from both academic and church contexts to explore Christian experiences of ordaining women in theological, sociological, historical and anthropological perspective. Key questions include: How have national, denominational and ecclesial cultures shaped the different ways in which women's ordination is debated and/or enacted? What differences have women's ordained ministry, and debates on women's ordination, made in various church contexts? What 'unfinished business' remains (in both congregational and wider ministry)? How have Christians variously conceived ordained ministry which includes both women and men? How do ordained women and men work together in practice? What have been the particular implications for female clergy? And for male clergy? What distinctive issues are raised by women's entry into senior ordained/leadership positions? How do episcopal and non-episcopal traditions differ in this?