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In a time of shifting worldviews and changing expectations of the church, how does a pastor navigate the challenges, joys, and pains of ministry? How does a church support, love, and hold accountable its pastoral leaders? The key lies in the relationship between pastor and congregation – in the duet they are singing, in the rhythms of their life together. In this book, Gary Harder reflects on the difficulties and rewards, the missteps and humour that are part of learning that ministry duet. Here he celebrates the mysterious ways God works through, and sometimes in spite of, the people singing God’s songs together. We reach for harmony. We hear dissonant notes. We catch only a glimpse of God’s beautiful music. And that is enough.
This book is a study of how congregational song developed and has been used in the worship of Western churches in general and specifically churches in the United States. Beginning with the worship of ancient peoples, the Hebrews, and early Christians and continuing to the present, the author examines historically how song has been and is used as an intentional sacred ritual action, like prayer or Scripture reading. Written primarily as an introductory text for college and seminary students, the overall goal is to make a historical journey with the people, events, and ideas from which have evolved the various types of song we have in American worship today. To help readers think more deeply about the material, study questions are given at the end of each chapter.
The "duet" of calls-to follow God and to become a mother-began with Sarah's story in Genesis and continues in God's people today. As more women follow God's call into ministry, many are discovering the power of this duet. These women are gifted for ministry, trained and shaped through excellent educations, and affirmed in their call. They serve as pastors in churches, on campuses, in impoverished areas, prisons, hospitals, hospices, the military, and in academia. And many of them are also called to be mothers: birth mothers, adoptive mothers, mothers to other people's children, mothers to their students. As they continue to follow God, the call story and the birth story combine, and the duet rings true. Each essay in this inspiring collection is as different as the mother-minister who wrote it, from theologians to chaplains, inner-city ministers to rural-poverty ministers, youth pastors to preachers, mothers who have adopted, birthed, and done both.
Different churches grow in different ways. This book will help you figure out your church's orientation and show the way to healthy growth.
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.