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Hobgood examines new pressures on clergy that are emerging in the "post-Christendom era:" financial stresses; the effects of a conflicted and confrontational culture; the needs of an increasing number of people living broken or dependent lives; dysfunctional behavior on the part of pastors and parishioners; questions regarding clergy respect and job satisfaction. How is ministry being affected by these changes? What skills will clergy need as they enter the new century? An invaluable resource thoroughly grounded in research and full of practical observations for clergy, judicatory executives, seminary professors, and long-range planners.
Advent, says Fleming Rutledge, is not for the faint of heart. As the midnight of the Christian year, the season of Advent is rife with dark, gritty realities. In this book, with her trademark wit and wisdom, Rutledge explores Advent as a time of rich paradoxes, a season celebrating at once Christ’s incarnation and his second coming, and she masterfully unfolds the ethical and future-oriented significance of Advent for the church.
Mead presents five key challenges facing today’s churches-and how they represent opportunities for the evolutionary, transformative changes he believes must take place in congregations if the church is to remain a viable institution into the twenty-first century. Readers of Mead's Once and Future Church and Transforming Congregations for the Future will want to continue the journey begun with those books. A must for congregational leaders at all levels.
In 1991 The Once and Future Church by Alban Institute founder and former director Loren B. Mead created an instant sensation in congregational circles with its prophetic insights into the life of the church in a post-Christendom era. Still often-quoted and in demand, the book stands as Alban's all-time best seller. Two subsequent titles, Transforming Congregations for the Future and Five Challenges for the Once and Future Church, extended Mead's original vision with similar success. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Once and Future Church, Alban released all three of these books as a single, special edition hardcover. In addition to these classic texts in beautiful, newly designed formats, this collection features an interview with Loren Mead discussing how his views have changed since the books' first publications and his current thoughts on directions for the church in the twenty-first century. This hardcover volume is the perfect gift for graduating seminary students, new congregational leaders, or for pastors whose original editions of these three books may be dog-eared or missing--and a wonderful addition to every church library. All who love the church and pray for the future of our congregations will value this opportunity to have Loren Mead's seminal works in a single, long-lived edition.
Few other books have caused as much stir in the Church of England in recent decades as has For the Parish. Twelve years on from its publication, in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the ‘Save the Parish’ movement much has changed, but much has stayed the same. In this follow up to this influential and controversial book, new and already familiar themes are newly inflected in the debates of the present time: principally minster hubs, the ‘Emerging Church’ programme and the Strategic Development Fund. Alison Milbank challenges the ecclesiology, models of theological anthropology and the analysis of secularism that are present (explicitly or implicitly) in these movements, and offer a striking and encouraging vision of what the parish model could offer to our anxious world.
Mead takes a broad look at past and present changes in the church, and postulates a future to which those changes are calling us. Denominations, once structured to deliver resources to far-off lands of foreign mission, now encounter the mission field in the layperson's workplace and the community surrounding the local congregation. Thus, the church is called to reinvention for this new mission frontier
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green
This remarkable book shatters just about every myth surrounding American government, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, and offers the clearest warning about the alarming rise of one-man rule in the age of Obama. Most Americans believe that this country uniquely protects liberty, that it does so because of its Constitution, and that for this our thanks must go to the Founders, at their Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. F. H. Buckley’s book debunks all these myths. America isn’t the freest country around, according to the think tanks that study these things. And it’s not the Constitution that made it free, since parliamentary regimes are generally freer than presidential ones. Finally, what we think of as the Constitution, with its separation of powers, was not what the Founders had in mind. What they expected was a country in which Congress would dominate the government, and in which the president would play a much smaller role. Sadly, that’s not the government we have today. What we have instead is what Buckley calls Crown government: the rule of an all-powerful president. The country began in a revolt against one king, and today we see the dawn of a new kind of monarchy. What we have is what Founder George Mason called an “elective monarchy,” which he thought would be worse than the real thing. Much of this is irreversible. Constitutional amendments to redress the balance of power are extremely unlikely, and most Americans seem to have accepted, and even welcomed, Crown government. The way back lies through Congress, and Buckley suggests feasible reforms that it might adopt, to regain the authority and respect it has squandered.
Past and present collide in this page-turner investigation into Salem's irrepressible question: How could this have happened? In 1692, Martha Allen Carrier was hanged in the Salem witch trials as the "Queen of Hell." Three hundred years later, her nine-times-great-granddaughter, Alice Markham-Cantor, set out to discover why Martha had died. As she chased her ancestor through the archives, graveyards, and haunted places of New England, grappling with what we owe the past, Alice discovered a shocking truth: witch hunts didn't end in Salem. Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, The Once & Future Witch Hunt does not treat Salem as a cautionary tale. It treats Salem as an instruction manual—not on how to perform witch hunts, but how to stop them. Foreword by Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author. Afterword by Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch.
This book offers a way to engage with the Bible as a set of sacred texts that can serve as a song sheet for believers in exile-those people Bishop John Shelby Spong calls the "church alumni association." This includes those internally displaced persons of faith who have not yet become spiritual refugees but who feel the pressure to conform to traditional expressions of faith that no longer serve as springs of living water for the journey of life. These ancient texts come from another world and another time, but they can serve as maps for the journey of life. They can best do this when the sacred wisdom of the Bible is accepted as permission to voice the new questions we face today in the confidence that authentic faith has always required such boldness. Religious progressives are people who live the questions, not dodge them. Our task is not to guard a set of traditional answers, but to live life boldly, taking risks for God's sake and our own. One of the hallmarks of this book is that the problems posed by the Bible are acknowledged. In particular, the contributions of recent critical scholarship are embraced, rather than being ignored or neutralized by pious ambivalence. The intended reader of this book is not a traditional believer, secure in her assumptions about God and salvation, but someone struggling to live with integrity in a time when traditional religion seems increasingly irrelevant. The goal is not to persuade the reader that the Bible is credible but-more modestly-to offer an account of the Bible that may encourage religious progressives to reclaim the Bible as a valued part of our spiritual baggage.