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This text highlights the importance of friendship for human community. Beginning with stories of friendship in biblical accounts and the teachings of the early leaders of the church, Brother John describes friendship as the basis for community throughout the world and at Taizé.
"This book, for both seekers and practicing Christians, highlights the importance of friendship for human community. Beginning with stories of friendship in biblical accounts and the teachings of the early leaders of the church, Brother John describes friendship as the basis for community throughout the world and at Taizé, an international ecumenical community that draws thousands of young people from around the globe together in worship and prayer."--Back cover.
Making Friends for Christ is a guide for learning how to be a real friend. It offers practical, everyday ideas for touching the people God has already put into your life. You will learn how to be a good listener, overcome common barriers, and invest in relationships. You can turn your home into a place of ministry and effectively tell how Christ has changed your life. You can learn to pray in faith for your friends and family and join with other believers for support and encouragement.
Pastor, it’s time to turn down the noise and focus on what matters. Today’s pastoral world is packed with books, conferences, and seminars teaching you different techniques for being an all-star pastor, growing your church quickly, and changing the world. But the key to true success is much harder and much simpler. Pastors are called to be faithful, to have exemplary character, and to love Jesus. Without faithfulness, their ministry ends up harming others rather than helping them. Churches need pastors with sound doctrine and a sound life. Character Matters was written to help you slow down, cut through the noise and distractions, and focus on what matters—the fruit of the Spirit. Each chapter is a guided, biblical meditation on one aspect of each piece of the fruit of the Spirit. As you reflect and focus on the simple things that matter, you’ll see your heart change and your ministry follow, slowly, surely, and by the power of the Spirit.
A Study Guide and a Teacher’s Manual Gospel Principles was written both as a personal study guide and as a teacher’s manual. As you study it, seeking the Spirit of the Lord, you can grow in your understanding and testimony of God the Father, Jesus Christand His Atonement, and the Restoration of the gospel. You can find answers to life’s questions, gain an assurance of your purpose and self-worth, and face personal and family challenges with faith.
Drawing on the controversial case of “Ashley X,” a girl with severe developmental disabilities who received interventionist medical treatment to limit her growth and keep her body forever small—a procedure now known as the “Ashley Treatment”—Reconsidering Intellectual Disability explores important questions at the intersection of disability theory, Christian moral theology, and bioethics. What are the biomedical boundaries of acceptable treatment for those not able to give informed consent? Who gets to decide when a patient cannot communicate their desires and needs? Should we accept the dominance of a form of medicine that identifies those with intellectual impairments as pathological objects in need of the normalizing bodily manipulations of technological medicine? In a critical exploration of contemporary disability theory, Jason Reimer Greig contends that L'Arche, a federation of faith communities made up of people with and without intellectual disabilities, provides an alternative response to the predominant bioethical worldview that sees disability as a problem to be solved. Reconsidering Intellectual Disability shows how a focus on Christian theological tradition’s moral thinking and practice of friendship with God offers a way to free not only people with intellectual disabilities but all people from the objectifying gaze of modern medicine. L'Arche draws inspiration from Jesus's solidarity with the "least of these" and a commitment to Christian friendship that sees people with profound cognitive disabilities not as anomalous objects of pity but as fellow friends of God. This vital act of social recognition opens the way to understanding the disabled not as objects to be fixed but as teachers whose lives can transform others and open a new way of being human.
“Above all, Romans is a letter about Spirit-enabled participation and transformation in Christ and his story, and thus in the mission of God in the world.” This commentary engages the letter to the Romans as Christian scripture and highlights the Pauline themes for which Michael Gorman is best known—participation and transformation, cruciformity and new life, peace and justice, community and mission. With extensive introductions both to the apostle Paul and to the letter itself, Gorman offers background information on Paul’s first-century context before proceeding into the rich theological landscape of the biblical text. In line with Paul’s focus on Christian living, Gorman interprets Romans at a consistently practical level, highlighting the letter’s significance for Christian theology, daily life, and pastoral ministry. Questions for reflection and sidebars on important concepts make this especially useful for those preparing to preach or teach from Romans—the “epistle of life,” as Gorman calls it, for its extraordinary promise that, through faith, we might walk in newness of life with Christ.
The history of the intertwined relationships woven by the Taizé Community amongst Christians of Eastern European countries in the second half of the last century has not yet been written. Yet it is a fundamental chapter for understanding the unique international influence of the community. The encounter with the different faces of a Christian youth beyond the Iron Curtain, who in Taizé had their first experience of a unified European space, was to become one of the main directions of the community's effort from the early 1960s. The contributions of this volume intend to throw a first light on this story, relying on a completely unpublished documentation and on the testimony of many protagonists involved in the construction of this unique continental and ecumenical network.
A unique and incisive exploration of the place and nature of friendship in both its personal and civic dimensions In Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship, distinguished theological researcher Anne-Marie Ellithorpe delivers a constructive and insightful exploration of the place and nature of friendship as innate to being human, to the human vocation, and to life within the broader community. Of particular interest to members and leaders of faith communities, this book responds to contemporary concerns regarding relationality and offers a comprehensive theology of friendship. The author provides an inclusive and interdisciplinary study that brings previous traditions and texts into dialogue with contemporary contexts and concerns, including examples from Indigenous and Euro-Western cultures. Readers will reflect on the theology of friendship and the interrelationship between friendship and community, think critically about their own social and theological imagination, and develop an integrative approach to theological reflection that draws on Don Browning’s Fundamental Practical Theology. Integrating philosophical, anthropological, and theological perspectives on the study of friendship, this book presents: A thorough introduction to contemporary questions on friendship and discussions of co-existing friendship worlds Comprehensive explorations of friendship in first and second testament writings, as well as friendship within classical and Christian traditions Practical discussions of theology, friendship, and the social imagination, including explorations of mutuality and spirit-shaped friendships Considerations for outworking friendship ideals within communities of practice, from the perspective of strategic (or fully) practical theology Perfect for graduate and advanced undergraduate students taking courses on friendship or practical theology, Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars of practical theology and community practitioners, including ministers, priests, pastors, spiritual advisors, and counselors.
What you believe about God sets the foundation of the person you will become. In God Has a Name, pastor and New York Times bestselling author John Mark Comer invites you to rethink many of the prevalent myths and misconceptions about God and weigh them against what God actually tells us about himself. After all, what you believe about God will ultimately shape the type of person you become. We all live at the mercy of our ideas, and nowhere is this more true than our ideas about God. The problem is many of our ideas about God are wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong enough to form our souls in detrimental and disheartening ways. God Has a Name is a simple yet profound guide to understanding God in a new light--focusing on what God says about himself in the Bible. This one shift has the potential to radically alter how you relate to God, not as a doctrine, but as a relational being who responds to you in an elastic, back-and-forth way. John Mark Comer takes you line by line through Exodus 34:6-8--Yahweh's self-revelation on Mount Sinai, one of the most quoted passages in the Bible. Along the way, Comer addresses some of the most profound questions he came across as he studied these noted lines in Exodus, including: Why do we feel this gap between us and God? Could it be that a lot of what we think about God is wrong? Not all wrong, but wrong enough to mess up how we relate to him? What if our "God" is really a projection of our own identity, ideas, and desires? What if the real God is different, but far better than we could ever imagine? No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, God Has a Name invites you to step into a fresh and biblically rooted vision of who God is that has the potential to alter your life with God and shape who you become.