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Ministry is challenging, complex, and costly. Too many pastors and church leaders are getting spread thin, burned out, and walking away! In an ever-changing church culture that includes social media, blurred denominational lines, and an increased demand for relational ministry, many pastors are feeling overwhelmed, becoming discouraged, and dropping out of leadership roles.
You may be one of them–but you are not ready to give up. The Resilient Pastor will help you to focus on character development and spiritual formation as a Christian leader, engaging the challenges of ministry with passion and perseverance. You will explore ten principles for developing pastoral resilience and consider biblical examples as well as testimonies from contemporary leaders as you lay the foundation for becoming a resilient leader. This journey through The Resilient Pastor will be worth your time as an individual leader or in a small group context with other pastors.

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Catholic sacramental doctrine has lost much of its credibility. Baptized people leave the church, adolescents stop attending shortly after they are confirmed, supposedly indissoluble marriages regularly dissolve, few go to confession, and many do not believe in transubstantiation.
Drawing upon his decades-long study of the sacraments, Martos reveals how teachings that seemed rooted in the scriptures and Catholic life have become unmoored from the contexts in which they arose, and why seemingly eternal truths are actually historically relative.
After carefully constructing Catholic teaching from the church's own documents, he deconstructs it by demonstrating how biblical passages were misconstrued by patristic authors and how patristic writings were misunderstood by medieval scholastics. The long process of misinterpretation culminated in the dogmatic pronouncements of the Council of Trent, which continues to dominate Catholic thinking about the church's religious ceremonies. If the sacraments are released from their dogmatic baggage, Martos believes that the spiritual realities they symbolize can be celebrated in any human culture without being tied to their traditional rites.

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The Trinity can be understood as a social community with members speaking and listening to one another in love, or, as Luther understood the Trinity, as conversation, then God's mission essentially involves in mission-in-dialogue. Byungohk Lee contends the church has to embrace the dialogical dimension in missional terms because the triune God is the subject of mission. The missional church conversation has taken it for granted that local churches should speak and listen to their neighbors. In contrast, for many churches in Asia, including Korea, mission has generally tended to be practiced in a monological, rather than dialogical, manner. The neighbor has not been regarded as a conversational partner of the church, but only as the object for its mission. In Listening to the Neighbor Lee shows that some local churches have participated in God's mission by listening to their neighbors. He argues that listening is not a technique, but a multifaceted learning process in missional terms. The church must nurture its hearts, eyes, and ears in order to listen to the sigh of its neighbors.

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Leaders of congregations want to foster change but how is rarely obvious. Some pursue top-down approaches while others think bottom-up. Either approach assumes some control by the leader, but effective leadership of change needs more than control; it requires influencing the ongoing change that is naturally occurring. In the organizational literature this matter is understood in terms of systems and more specifically complex adaptive systems or self-organizing systems. This literature has important insights for church leaders when viewed in tandem with biblical principles.
These concepts are presented here within the story of a mid-career pastor who is frustrated by his complacent congregation and is seeking a new way forward. Information on complex adaptive systems is presented in the context of the story of his interactions with a church consultant, a seminary professor, some published materials and an ongoing seminar conducted by the consultant. The pastor's engaging issue is whether change in a church is best pursued top-down or bottom-up. Within this context, self-organizing change becomes the central focus of the book and eventually is distinguished from both top-down and bottom-up initiatives. The focus is understanding the connection between such change and biblical principles.

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This work employs multiple methodologies to analyze the story of the man born blind (John 9) in order to discern how this episode serves the greater purpose of the Gospel, stated in 20:31: «so that you may trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through trusting you may have life.» The analysis of linguistic patterns; narrative structure; cultural anthropology; and an analysis of irony, humor, and wit are each employed. These are all synthesized in the final chapter, which makes an attempt to discern how an ancient performance of John 9 might look, and how such a performance might sway an ancient audience toward trust in Jesus as Messiah.

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How do evangelism and social concern relate to one another in the mission of the church? How should the Old Testament's emphasis on social justice inform the praxis of modern believers? Does the Bible emphasize individual salvation, or does it teach a broader, more inclusive concept? Theologians, missiologists, pastors, and educators have wrestled with these questions for centuries. But especially since the early part of the twentieth century, this debate has increasingly become a point of contention among evangelical Christians, with few indications that a consensus may soon be forthcoming. Yet few have offered so thorough an answer to these questions as has Carl F. H. Henry. Henry's regenerational model of evangelism and social concern stands on the shoulders of Augustine and many others, and offers what may be the best way forward. This book explores Henry's thoughts on this subject and sets him in dialogue with numerous others who have written on these topics. Thus it will prove a valuable resource for all interested in this topic.

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In the words of Saint Augustine, the Bible is long, complicated, and difficult to read. Orange Proverbs & Purple Parables is a book about reading the Bible. How does one become a more spiritually discerning and critically appreciative reader of the Holy Scriptures? What does it take to become a better interpreter of biblical texts? This book explores wide-ranging approaches and considerations germane to the enterprise of reading. The catch phrase used throughout the book is that of reading the Holy Scriptures as scripture. What goes into reading the Bible as scripture? What are some of the major elements inherent in this endeavor that should be of concern to the one who aspires to become a deep, thoughtful reader and an effective interpreter? This book weaves through a labyrinth of characters and disciplines as it explores this enterprise of reading the Holy Scriptures. The likes of Chomsky, Augustine, neuroscience, Barth, linguistics, theological interpretation, Origen, metaphor theory, devotional reading, and Jerome, along with many more people and fields of inquiry, are all garnered to encourage the reader in an exploration of the enterprise of reading the Holy Scriptures.

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Every night of revival–1945 to 1956–the Evangelist and his family carried the mostly Appalachian folks to whom they ministered on up to a higher place. Worn down bodies in from the heat and dust of a sharecropper's cotton fields or unventilated rooms of the mill barely made it over to the local Pentecostal church house, to the shelter of a raised-up tent or bush arbor. But by the time they sang, shouted, and prayed in response to the Skondeen family's music and preaching, something shifted.
In Hidden Biscuits, Audrey Skondeen Ward's memories come alive by way of her writing, as words, songs, and voices long silent are connected through a Deep South landscape.

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While the conflict in the Middle East continues to fester, many Christians advance a theology that perceives these events to be the hand of God. Has God truly brought the Jewish people back to the land in fulfillment of biblical prophecies? Must we truly bless Israel in order to be blessed by God?
Lost in the midst of the turmoil over the Holy Land reside Christian communities. Has the church–in an effort to see prophecy fulfilled–failed to care for the least of «these brothers of mine»?
This book steps into this controversial topic with several aims. First, Dalrymple answers two key questions: Are the Jews still God's chosen people? And does the Holy Land belong to them? Dalrymple contends that just as Jesus is the fulfillment of God's purpose for the Temple, so also Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham that he would receive the Holy Land and an uncountable number of descendants.
Dalrymple also responds to some of the common assertions set forth by Christian Zionists: «Many might still ask: 'Why should I care about what happens in Israel and Palestine?' The fact is that we must care. And we must alert the Church that we must care. Too much is at stake. We have Christian brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East in general and in the Holy Land in particular who have been directly impacted by our theological opinions. As a result, the Church cannot be silent. It must not be silent.»

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Did Jesus speak Greek? An affirmative answer to the question will no doubt challenge traditional presuppositions. The question relates directly to the historical preservation of Jesus's words and theology. Traditionally, the authenticity of Jesus's teaching has been linked to the recovery of the original Aramaic that presumably underlies the Gospels. The Aramaic Hypothesis infers that the Gospels represent theological expansions, religious propaganda, or blatant distortions of Jesus's teachings. Consequently, uncovering the original Aramaic of Jesus's teachings will separate the historical Jesus from the mythical personality. G. Scott Gleaves, in Did Jesus Speak Greek?, contends that the Aramaic Hypothesis is inadequate as an exclusive criterion of historical Jesus studies and does not aptly take into consideration the multilingual culture of first-century Palestine. Evidence from archaeological, literary, and biblical data demonstrates Greek linguistic dominance in Roman Palestine during the first century CE. Such preponderance of evidence leads not only to the conclusion that Jesus and his disciples spoke Greek but also to the recognition that the Greek New Testament generally and the Gospel of Matthew in particular were original compositions and not translations of underlying Aramaic sources.

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