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For Rob Peabody, the young pastor of a mega-church in southern USA, the realization that his faith had little real connection with the world around him meant that something had to change. He redirected his church towards the poor on their doorstep and then took the larger step of moving to the UK to establish the missional fellowship 'Awaken'. In Citizen, he outlines the Kingdom-centered identity that is given to followers of Jesus. It a wake-up call to the church in the West. Jesus' death and resurrection initiates and invites people into a life of so much more than the status quo. God is re-building, re-newing, and re-creating that which is broken and marred by sin, and he is doing this, setting things right in the world, through Jesus. As citizens of the Kingdom, we have been saved and set apart for this work. We have a new allegiance, a changed identity, and a new mission as we seek to establish the rule of God on earth as it is in Heaven.
Drawing on the author’s years spent working in and around Westminster, this essay collection provides a personal perspective on the themes of faith, politics, and belonging. To understand identity and place we need faith. Faith should lead to engagement in the wider world, and engagement in the wider world should deepen our faith and sense of purpose. In three sections, each drawing on his experience, Ian Geary reflects on the cognate themes of faith, politics, and belonging. Each section concludes with some questions for discussion and some suggestions for further reading. Written from personal experience via immersion in British political life and informed by his understanding of theology, the author seeks to animate a generous debate about the key themes, not to secure readers’ attachment to a cause or political ideology. These essays are written in the hope that Christians engaged in politics will find them helpful and that they will also reach a wider audience to show how viewing politics through the lens of faith might yield a fresh perspective. Ian Geary would venture to suggest that politics—despite its critics—is a necessary and good thing.
If prophets are called to unveil and expose the illegitimacy of those principalities masquerading as "the right" and purportedly using their powers for "the good," then Will D. Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day, Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming and smashing the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude. Despite an action-packed life, Campbell is no activist seeking to control events and guarantee history's right outcomes. Rather, Campbell has committed his life to the proposition that Christ has already set things right. Irrespective of who one is, or what one has done, each human being is reconciled to God and one another, now and forever. History's most scandalous message is, therefore, "Be reconciled!" because once that imperative is taken seriously, social constructs like race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality are at best irrelevant and at worst idolatrous. Proclaiming that far too many disciples miss the genius of Christianity's good news (the kerygma) of reconciliation, this Ivy League-educated preacher boldly and joyfully affirms society's so-called least one, cultivating community with everyone from civil rights leaders and Ku Klux Klan militants, to the American literati and exiled convicts. Except for maybe the self-righteous, none is excluded from the beloved community. For the first time in nearly fifty years, Campbell's provocative Race and Renewal of the Church is here made available. Gayraud Wilmore called Campbell's foundational work "an unsettling reading experience," but one that articulates an unwavering "confidence in the victory which God can bring out of the weakness of the church."
What is God like? Is he the lofty Almighty of conservative religion, with power to stop heartbreaking human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, but who inexplicably declines to do so? Is he the callous Judge, offering the faithful a place in his heaven while summarily casting the faithless into everlasting hell? Is he the vain King on his throne, requiring us to stroke his ego by praising him—unceasingly—for his “awesome power”? If this is the God we have been taught, it is no wonder that many people have come to realize that they do not like, let alone trust him. The simple certainties of their childhood no longer make sense. But the equally assured assertions of today’s atheists also leave them cold. They want a personal connection with God —an honest faith that grows out of their own felt truth and touches them at the deepest levels of their being. This book points the way. It dismantles the “angry, punitive God” of traditional Protestantism and beckons us toward a kinder, more welcoming God. This God does not ask us to grit our teeth and try our best to believe. Instead, this God meets us in our humanity, inviting our hearts to respond in genuine trust and love.
The eschatological heart of Paul’s gospel in his world and its implications for today Drawing upon thirty years of intense study and reflection on Paul, Douglas Campbell offers a distinctive overview of the apostle’s thinking that builds on Albert Schweitzer’s classic emphasis on the importance for Paul of the resurrection. But Campbell—learning here from Karl Barth—traces through the implications of Christ for Paul’s thinking about every other theological topic, from revelation and the resurrection through the nature of the church and mission. As he does so, the conversation broadens to include Stanley Hauerwas in relation to Christian formation, and thinkers like Willie Jennings to engage post-colonial concerns. But the result of this extensive conversation is a work that, in addition to providing a description of Paul’s theology, also equips readers with what amounts to a Pauline manual for church planting. Good Pauline theology is good practical theology, ecclesiology, and missiology, which is to say, Paul’s theology belongs to the church and, properly understood, causes the church to flourish. In these conversations Campbell pushes through interdisciplinary boundaries to explicate different aspects of Pauline community with notions like network theory and restorative justice. The book concludes by moving to applications of Paul in the modern period to painful questions concerning gender, sexual activity, and Jewish inclusion, offering Pauline navigations that are orthodox, inclusive, and highly constructive. Beginning with the God revealed in Jesus, and in a sense with ourselves, Campbell progresses through Pauline ethics and eschatology, concluding that the challenge for the church is not only to learn about Paul but to follow Jesus as he did.
A recent phenomenon of charismatic renewal took place in Toronto in the mid-1990s. Commonly known as the "Toronto Blessing" and operated by the former Vineyard Church leaders John and Carol Arnott, the renewal was defined by reports of uncontrollable laughter, weeping, speaking in tongues, animal noises, and falling on the floor during worship. Sympathetic Christians embraced these practices while others who believed that this form of worship boarded on spectacle rejected them. By the end of the 1990s most people thought that the renewal was over. Yet, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the authors—a sociologist and a theologian—heard rumors that the Toronto church, now known as "Catch the Fire," was still holding mass meetings with upwards of 2,000 people in attendance. They also learned of an emerging practice of "soaking prayer," an adaption of Pentecostal-charismatic prayer that, participants and leaders claim, facilitates and expands the reception of divine love in order to give it away in acts of forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion, and benevolence. Soaking, the authors reveal, is a metaphor for practices like resting in the Spirit, prayer for spiritual gifts, healing, prophecy, impartation, and supports overall charismatic spirituality. Attending "Catch the Fire" conferences, churches, and house meetings in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, Wilkinson and Althouse observed first-hand how people soak, what it means to soak, and why soaking is considered an important practice among charismatics.
A compelling view of two competing religious visions---one of "creation" and the other of "empire"---that run throughout the Bible. "A remarkable offering for those who care about the interface of power and faith with all the threats and seductions that go with it. . . As I read, I felt overwhelmed, both by the mass of data and by the cunning of interpretation. I could not put it down, and expect to continue to be instructed by it.---Walter Brueggemann "Howard-Brook undertakes what few dare anymore: an introductory primer for the whole Bible...This book invites disciples to `connect the dots', in order to recover our ancient, anti-imperial identity, and to embrace a radical faith and practice that are personal and politica."---Ched Myers "Howard-Brook illuminates how ancient empires exercised control and manipulation of people not simply by political and military means, but also through the religion of empire. Throughout he makes clear that the core message of the God of creation is to call people out of empire, to refuse to cooperate with the forces of destruction and domination today."---Richard Horsley "Will become a classic for communities that seek first to receive the gracious gift of God's alternative future to Empire."---Jarrod McKenna "If we who sojourn in America are to be a community that can both name and resist the lure of Empire, we need a story more powerful than the story called America. Wes Howard-Brook knows than the Bible tells such a story. May its story be ours as we're set free from our imperial imaginations to dream with our Creator of a new world here and now."---Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Beyond an occasional sports-inspired sermon illustration, sports are generally regarded as having little relevance to the Christian faith. More often, they are viewed as a welcome and safe reprieve from politics and religion. Quietly, however, as they avoid the discerning eye of the church, sports are slowly overtaking families and overwhelming parents. Under the labels "elite," "select," and "travel," a new experience of sports has taken root in American culture demanding financial burdens, time commitments, and heightened pressures never before seen. Community leaders from various public sectors have criticized many recent trends in youth sports, but, alas, where has the church been? This new "elite" expression of youth sports is quickly building an intimidating front against the church. As church attendance declines, "elite" youth sports participation is on the rise. This book ventures into the challenging, controversial, and powerful world of youth sports. Young people participate in sports more than just about any other activity, and the church has neglected its role in providing a voice of discernment for what participating in sports should look like. Christians are desperately in need of a manifesto for helping them wrestle with the complex, exciting, and often exhausting world of youth sports.
Godly Love: Impediments and Possibilities examines the theory of “Godly Love,” understood as including a vertical axis denoting the love of God and a horizontal axis involving the love of others, is at the core of a new field of research that studies how divine love influences the love of others and vice-versa. It is a multi-disciplinary research program into the benevolent expressions of the Great Commandment of the Christian tradition involving the theological and social sciences. Theological and social scientific essays ask why there is not more Godly Love in this world and what might be done to change the situation. This book focuses on the problems confronting, challenging, prohibiting, and perhaps even resisting the concrete expression of Godly Love in the world, utilizing a range of theological and especially social scientific methodologies.