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Pastor, preacher, and New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet Timothy Keller shares his wisdom on communicating the Christian faith from the pulpit as well as from the coffee shop. Most Christians—including pastors—struggle to talk about their faith in a way that applies the power of the Christian gospel to change people’s lives. Timothy Keller is known for his insightful, down-to-earth sermons and talks that help people understand themselves, encounter Jesus, and apply the Bible to their lives. In this accessible guide for pastors and laypeople alike, Keller helps readers learn to present the Christian message of grace in a more engaging, passionate, and compassionate way.
We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.
In this masterful analysis of the religious and political dilemmas at the end of the modern age, world-renowned theologian J rgen Moltmann assays the vaulting dreams and colossal failures of our time. He asks how we came to this point, and he argues strenuously for Christian discipleship and public theology that take sides. In both critical and creative ways he advances the specific relevance of Christian messianic hope to today's thorniest political, economic, and ecological questions-including human rights, environmental rights, globalization, market capitalism, fundamentalisms, and Jewish-Christian relations-and the deeper values contested therein.In a world reeling between utopia and disaster, Moltmann here passionately and provacatively shows how Christian discipleship, through engagement and solidarity, can blaze a redemptive path.
Winner of the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award (1995) “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” So begins this award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement by one of evangelicalism’s most respected historians. Unsparing in his indictment, Mark Noll asks why the largest single group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship. While nourishing believers in the simple truths of the gospel, why have so many evangelicals failed to sustain a serious intellectual life and abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture? Over twenty-five years since its original publication, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind has turned out to be prescient and perennially relevant. In a new preface, Noll lays out his ongoing personal frustrations with this situation, and in a new afterword he assesses the state of the scandal—showing how white evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism, their deepening distrust of science, and their frequent forays into conspiratorial thinking have coexisted with surprisingly robust scholarship from many with strong evangelical connections.
At the heart of our current moment lies a universal yearning, writes David Zahl, not to be happy or respected so much as enough--what religions call "righteous." To fill the void left by religion, we look to all sorts of everyday activities--from eating and parenting to dating and voting--for the identity, purpose, and meaning once provided on Sunday morning. In our striving, we are chasing a sense of enoughness. But it remains ever out of reach, and the effort and anxiety are burning us out. Seculosity takes a thoughtful yet entertaining tour of American "performancism" and its cousins, highlighting both their ingenuity and mercilessness, all while challenging the conventional narrative of religious decline. Zahl unmasks the competing pieties around which so much of our lives revolve, and he does so in a way that's at points playful, personal, and incisive. Ultimately he brings us to a fresh appreciation for the grace of God in all its countercultural wonder.
The Sacred Secular examines cultural spaces where people are experiencing something sacred. These places are not in the church. They’re in yoga studios, neighborhood potlucks, and TED Talks. Dottie Escobedo-Frank and Rob Rynders see lessons for the church in these spaces. They see new ways we can convey to people that the church is uniquely sacred and significant and that Jesus is for them. These glimpses into the sacred-secular will inspire creative church leaders to set aside their assumptions about what church looks like. The Sacred Secular nurtures empowerment, creativity, spiritual movement, and the courage to embody the sacredness and substance of our faith. “Many of us in the church (including clergy) feel we have more in common with the ‘spiritual but not religious’ than we have with lots of church folks these days. We are just as spiritually hungry and thirsty as ever, but we’re open to finding God in surprising places and spaces . . . including ‘secular’ ones. This beautifully written book is all about that phenomenon. I think you’re going to love it.” —Brian D. McLaren, author/speaker, brianmclaren.net “Be prepared to hear contemporary stories akin to the Apostle Peter discovering God in an ‘outsider’—Cornelius—in twenty-first–century urban America. This book is a jewel from two missional church practitioners in The United Methodist Church. It offers wisdom, vision, creativity, and humility that will mark the gospel-bearing church of the future. I highly recommend The Sacred Secular to pastors, church planters, and laity who want their congregations to know how to develop culturally connected faith communities in our rapidly changing world.” —Elaine A. Heath, Dean, Duke Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC
The sacred-secular divide permeates our churches, our seminaries, and our lives. By perpetuating the false belief that there are some areas of life that are not important to God, some callings that are second-class, and some spheres of society that are not worth engaging, the sacred-secular divide diminishes our understanding of God, discipleship, missiology, and the gospel itself. Seeking to liberate the global church from the power of this dichotomy, Whole-Life Mission for the Whole Church provides theological educators with the tools they need to combat the sacred-secular divide in the very realm where it is so often generated: the classroom. Filled with contributions from practitioners around the world, this book contains a wealth of insight into both the nature of the problem and the possibilities for its solution. The approaches suggested here are biblically rooted, contextually appropriate, and experientially tested, offering an excellent resource for educators desiring to transform their institutional cultures, curriculums, and classrooms into environments that envision, empower, and liberate the whole church for its role in the mission of God.
"The Church is irrelevant to my day-to-day life! It's just a dead, empty tradition of the past." This is the overwhelming consensus among young people today, and it has resulted in an ever-widening cultural divide between the secular youth culture and the Church. Much of what was formerly regarded as the Christian world is leaving its roots behind and is dominated by secularism and relativism. The Bible is no longer considered the moral compass, but rather everyone is free to decide for themselves what is right and wrong. As followers of Jesus, it's clear that we need to respond to this - but how? Jesus in the Secular World combines vivid illustrations from over a decade of front-line ministry with practical principles that will encourage and equip any follower of Jesus to relevantly reach those who would not come to the Church for answers.