LITMIR.BIZ

Incorporating children in worship is a powerful and overlooked mark of God's kingdom. This book argues that children's full participation in worship signifies not only a vibrant, faithful communion but also offers a critical window into the Spirit's work of linking the church to Christ. Children have a vocation in worship. They embody the theological virtues in distinct ways that enrich the worship of the whole church. Moreover, incorporating children reflects the difference in unity that is God's triune life. Receiving children in their difference moves the worshipping body toward the telos of worship–glorification of God and sanctification of humanity–and habituates the worshipping body to incorporate other, often more threatening, kinds of difference.

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From their theological and devotional writings to their social and ecclesial practices, the fathers and mothers of Pietism boldly declared the ethical spirit of the Christian faith. This seventeenth-century renewal movement inspired a simple Christian ethic by connecting Christian character with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. They sought to cultivate these virtues by reading Scripture together, empowering the common priesthood of believers, and engaging in social and ecclesial reform toward the end of spreading the gospel. Pietism brought together faith and life, Word and deed, and piety and social reform in effort to get back to the basic belief in the power of God's Word to engender faith and to transform human life. This book celebrates Pietism's contribution by telling the stories of three early figures–Philipp Jakob Spener, Johanna Eleonora Petersen, and August Hermann Francke–as they attended to issues of class, gender, poverty, and education through the lens of scripture. In addition to clarifying what historians call «one of the least understood movements in the history of Christianity,» this book challenges a religious culture that juxtaposes faith and social action, and it rehabilitates the Pietist heritage and its central role in the birth of Evangelicalism.

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