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Norma Jean Duncan found God following a personal revelation of his love. In a life now dedicated to him, she offers her readers an account of her journey that illustrates the difficulties of living in a secular world with a heavenly perspective. Duncan weaves personal reflections into her discussions on the glory of God, prayer, love, forgiveness, obedience, and terminal illness and shows the relevance of scriptural wisdom to the life of every modern believer. There are chapters on eternal scriptural truth, and the factors that corrupt it and lead to the promotion of intolerance and injustice in organized religion. The author examines this difficulty in relation to subjects like creation, sexuality, gender submission, faith and works, the spiritual standing of those who have no knowledge of Christ, and the rise of aggressive atheism. Through discussion of these controversial but important topics, her intention is that the Christian community will lead and not follow the contemporary secular world.

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In Finding Voice, Kincaid employs an often used but somewhat elusive metaphor, «voice,» as a way of speaking of pastoral identity and contends that a lively, imaginative pastoral voice emerges from a thorough grasp of context, theology, pastoral roles, personal journey, and systemic dynamics. Designed as a text for the field education, contextual education, and supervised ministry experiences of seminary students and others preparing for congregational leadership, Finding Voice examines in depth how people are experiencing each of these constituent parts of pastoral voice at their student ministry sites not only to learn about each of the areas, but also to recognize and understand what is being called forth in the students as they engage these five key experiences and begin to visualize their future ministry. The book further explores the opportunities created when the five aspects of pastoral identity are in conflict with one another. In the absence of any one of these or the imbalance of them, pastoral voice gets skewed, and vibrant, effective ministry is undermined. Finding Voice urges students to begin now, with field education, to engage a practice of ministry that is imaginative, courageous, nimble, and faithful.

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A major aspect of the history of Christian missions is the way groups who have jumped the ecclesiastical ship have renewed and recalled their parent bodies back to biblical roots and a biblical vision. This book examines fourteen such vibrant Christian movements which operated outside the box. Each chapter ends with a practical section highlighting those factors that made the particular group successful. They were all missional movements that pursued a Christian vision and developed structures to facilitate it. In contrast, the traditional organizations from which they emerged tended to do mission from an established, given structure. Here are seriously committed movements that offer a dynamic challenge to our contemporary churches.

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Lovescapes introduces the reader to the various meanings and manifestations of love and its many cognates such as compassion, caring, altruism, empathy, and forgiveness. It addresses how love and compassion have been understood in history and the religions of the world. It goes on to explore the ways that our environments and heredity influence our capacity to love and suggests ways to cultivate love and compassion in one's life. The book shows how the values of love and compassion are integral to finding humane solutions to the daunting problems we face as individuals, as a human family, and as an earth community–a world in crisis. Lovescapes has the following features: –Describing how love is the essence of the divine, and therefore the ground of reality –Understanding the meaning of love and its place in our lives –Learning how love and compassion have been understood across history, culture, and tradition –Gaining insight about how to increase our capacity to love and show compassion –Discerning how love and compassion can be applied in all aspects of our lives, in the regions where we live, and in our global setting.

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Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was one of the world's last great polymaths and one of the most important Christian thinkers of his time, engaging the world with a simplicity, sincerity, courage, and passion that few have matched. However, Ellul is an often misunderstood thinker. As more than fifty books and over one thousand articles bear his name, embarking on a study of Ellul's thought can be daunting. This book provides an introduction to Ellul's life and work, analyzing and assessing his thought across the most important themes of his scholarship. Readers will see that his remarkably broad field of vision, clarity of focus, and boldly prophetic voice make his work worth reading and considering, rereading and discussing.

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Living Biblically de-situates biblical wisdom from its formally religious-theological underpinnings and offers it as a guide for fulfilled, happy living. Although over 95 percent of Americans have some sense of a meaning-providing transcendent power, 75 percent of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists lack such belief. Without intelligent, applicable access to biblical wisdom, many unwittingly live out the tragic patterns emerging from classical Greece underlying much of modern life and psychotherapy. People are stuck, even trapped, without hope of redemptive change. They spin their wheels, cycling back and forth. Biblical narratives, in contrast, portray people as growing, developing, and overcoming problematic life situations. This book presents a systematic yet readable delineation of how biblical wisdom can apply to ten issues of daily life: 1) Relating to the Environment, 2) Relating to Another as Yourself, 3) Relating to Authority, 4) Relating to the Opposite Sex, 5) Relating to a Son, 6) Relating to a Daughter, 7) Relating to Siblings, 8) Relating Body to Soul, 9) Relating to a Self-Destructive Person, and 10) Relating to Misfortune. In each chapter, a specific psychological issue is discussed, applicable Greek and biblical narratives are compared, and contemporary illustrations are provided, enabling the reader to live in a more fulfilling and happy manner.

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Rather than pledging allegiance to the military effort as dictated by Prussian law in 1867, many devout Anabaptists deemed it prudent to become pioneers in Kansas. The year was 1876 and odd numbered sections of railroad land were being marketed by the Santa Fe across Kansas. Towns developed around train depots; local shopping became available. Marie Harder Epp was born in America to these relocated Anabaptists. She was a Kansas Mennonite farmer and also the village poet. Her poems, written for oral delivery, tell the story of life in Holland and West Prussia following the Reformation, the relocation to Kansas, and the creation of a church community on the tall grass prairies. A church was organized to focus these hard-working Germans on divine realities as they buried their dead, married their young, and dealt with the harsh prairie winds. Marie's poems also describe the changeover from buggies to cars, from German to English, and from isolation to global outreach. With time, the Anabaptists learned through cultural adaptation that they could be both staunch Mennonites and also patriotic Americans.

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In Evangelism and the Openness of God, Vaughn Baker argues that a dynamic concept of God as articulated in open theism better serves the evangelistic mission of the church than does conventional theology. Open theism affirms an ontology of love as opposed to power, and it focuses on God's kenosis in creation, allowing for the authentic freedom of creation influenced by divine persuasion. God's genuine temporal relationship with creation–one that is open, synergist, and non-coercive–provides a new perspective for evangelistic activity. In this volume the author has made a valuable contribution to the integration of new developments in theology and evangelism.

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A Christian approach to economic analysis requires that humans be thought of not as maximizing their own private economic welfare, but rather as making moral choices with their resources. Professor Tiemstra lays out the methodology of this approach in the first section of this book. He then applies it to real economic problems, including poverty and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and globalization.

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The contemporary trinitarian paradigm in systematic theology has been internationally well-known since the time of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner and, particularly, since the contribution of their famous successors. Many of them, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Robert W. Jenson among others, have intentionally shown in their writings what the general ecumenical relevance of the findings of trinitarianism might be. However, the academic research of ecumenism has not yet fully investigated how ecumenically-oriented trinitarian theology has been factually applied in varying ecumenical relationships and agreements.
Unity in the Triune God focuses on the ecumenism of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America with its full-communion partners–the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ (1997); the Episcopal Church (1999); the Moravian Church in America (1999); and the United Methodist Church (2009). Together all these ecumenically active denominations have shown in their full-communion agreements that the doctrine of the Trinity and the church's common trinitarian confession are not meaningless relics from ancient times, but rather are dynamic and many-sided ecumenical resources that can be used for several functions in full-communion agreements. The goal of this study is to reveal the differing ways in which to utilize this ecumenical potential of the trinitarian faith.

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