Showing titles in Church & Church Leadership

The Apostle Paul was a veteran church planter who "laid a foundation like a wise and master builder", and there is much we can learn from his example. Paul indicated that there were basic skills and experiences required to successfully plant a church. Church Plantology examines the wide variety of church planting methods and ideologies in contemporary pastoral practice and outlines a biblical model based on the New Testament.

Neil Cole's best-selling book Organic Church described the fastest growing segment of contemporary Christianity - the so-called organic church. Now in this next-step book, he answers questions about how to deal with theological and organizational issues that come up. He talks about issues such has what to do with finances, children, heresy, leader training, and rituals and ordinances. Without the top-down structure of a denomination, even people who are proponents of this small, house-church model worry that they are not doing it right.

Probably no book published in the last decade has been so ambitious as Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. He seeks nothing less than to account for the spread of secularism and decline of faith in the last 500 years. Now a remarkable roster of writers - including Carl Trueman, Michael Horton, and Jen Pollock Michel - considers Taylor’s insights for the church’s life and mission, covering everything from healthcare to liturgy to pop culture and politics. Nothing is easy about faith today. But endurance produces character, and character produces hope, even in our secular age.

The sex-abuse scandal, which erupted anew in 2018, poses the greatest challenge that the Catholic Church has faced since the Reformation. In The Smoke of Satan, veteran Catholic journalist Philip Lawler explains why the crisis is even more severe than when it first commanded headlines in 2002, and how the failure of Church leaders goes all the way to the Vatican. In this unflinching look at the crisis threatening the Church and her members, Lawler: shows how the sex-abuse scandal is not a question of pedophilia, but of homosexual activity within the clergy and much more.

Choices unlock divine moments. Pastor and author Erwin Raphael McManus invites listeners to choose a life of blazing urgency. Are you willing to risk failure? Are you ready to get in the game? You may stumble, but you will find yourself falling forward, propelled toward the God-inspired adventure he intends you to live. Using the biblical characters of Saul and Jonathan during Israel’s war with the Philistines (1 Samuel 13 and 14), Chasing Daylight demonstrates the difference between living a life of purpose and adventure and living one of apathy and missed opportunity.

With emerging generations in his sights, Mark Batterson delivers a fresh and eye-opening journey of self-discovery, drawing on theology, psychology, and neurology.

Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God is the revised and expanded edition that helps leaders to promote the classic, best-selling 13-week study and conduct an Experiencing God Weekend or churchwide spiritual growth emphasis. Written by Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King, the Experiencing God Bible Study is based on the Experiencing God book, which has sold millions of copies worldwide. Participants will understand and apply seven realities of experiencing God.

Ask Christians what they expect to happen to them after they die, and most will say they will go to heaven. And they’ll probably say that they will meet Jesus and hope to hear Him say, “Well done good and faithful servant.” But many believers know they are not living up to God’s calling on their lives. In fact, many might even admit their lives don’t honor God at all. Author Ken Harrison masterfully uses his stories as a Los Angeles police officer in one of the deadliest areas of the country to explain and illustrate deep truths from God’s Word.

In this audiobook, you'll learn how to build a business partnership with God, changes you can make in your work habits, and the laws you should follow to reap the benefits of your partnership with God and others.

In Know How We Got Our Bible, scholars Ryan Reeves and Charles Hill trace the history of the Bible from its beginnings to the present day, highlighting key figures and demonstrating overall the reliability of Scripture. Reeves and Hill begin with the writing of the Bible's books (including authorship and dating), move into the formation of the Old and New Testaments (including early transmission and the development of the canon), and conclude with several chapters on Bible translation from the Latin Vulgate to the ongoing work of translation around the world today.

There is a growing movement among young Christians returning to historic, creedal, and liturgical reflections of Christianity. Filled with stories illustrating the joy young adults have found in these ancient expressions of Christianity, Winfield Bevins introduces practices and principles that help the church engage our postmodern world.

In this book Alan Fadling unfolds what it means for leaders to let Jesus set the pace. Through biblical illustrations, personal examples, and on-the-ground leadership wisdom, this book will guide you into a new view of kingdom leadership. Along the way you just might find that the whole of your life has been transformed into a more livable and more fruitful pace.

Heavily tattooed and foul-mouthed, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a former stand-up comic, sure as hell didn't consider herself to be religious-leader material - until the day she ended up leading a friend's funeral in a smoky downtown comedy club. Surrounded by fellow alcoholics, depressives, and cynics, she realized: These were her people. Maybe she was meant to be their pastor. Using life stories, Nadia uses humorous narrative and poignant honesty to portray a woman who is both deeply faithful and deeply flawed, giving hope to the rest of us along the way.

Pastor and leadership development expert Steve Cuss explains how personal anxiety and leadership frustration is the result of not being “self-aware” and provides simple tools listeners can use to do something about it. Listeners will be empowered to take back control of their lives and lead in mature and vibrant ways.

The journey toward deeper faith and spiritual maturity is a lifelong pursuit, with plenty of stops and bumps along the way. Inevitably, there comes a point when Christians - new believers and veterans in the faith alike - find themselves asking, "What do I do next? How do I stay motivated to grow deeper in my relationship with God when I feel complacent, intimidated, or confused?" In Now What?, Chris Hodges reveals the four steps to spiritual maturity: knowing God, finding freedom, discovering purpose, and making a difference.

Why do we feel like we are always performing? Where does this impulse come from? As John Starke shows in The Secret Place of Thunder, our modern world has internalized the idea that the markers of having an admirable and successful life are primarily visible. It leads us to believe that a sense of self-worth and identity are metrics to be displayed. The performance of the self has become more important than the reality.

Most pastors pray for a healthy and vibrant church, but many find themselves frustrated because they lack direction and feel as though they are spinning their wheels. They struggle to correct unhealthy patterns or do not have fresh vision for their ministry. John K. Jenkins can relate. The first church he attended is best described as a shack with a bell and a steeple. When he accepted his first senior pastoral role, he ministered to 35 people on a good Sunday. Today, Pastor Jenkins welcomes more than 11,000 worshipers to Sunday services, and thousands more participate virtually.

Enemy mode is an immensely damaging brain state that occurs in everyday life. In enemy mode, a person sees and experiences others as adversaries. Living in this mode poisons family and community bonds. It contributes to social stress, business failure, divorce, alienation, domestic violence, crime, racism, and international violence. Social media magnifies the impact of enemy mode toward almost all topics or persons imaginable.

Saxum - the Latin word means rock - is a term that St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, sometimes used in letters to Alvaro del Portillo to describe him. Don Alvaro, as he came to be known, was for many years the founder's closest associate as well as his successor and first Prelate of Opus Dei after it became a personal prelature-a foundational rock for this dynamic international Catholic group devoted to promoting sanctity in ordinary life.

In this newly revised and updated edition, best-selling author John Bevere reemphasizes for a new generation the protective boundaries God provides through authority figures. John reveals how the enemy tricks us into believing our true destinies can be found away from divine leadership by distorting our ability to recognize God's inherent authority and his delegated authority. By teaching us how to properly relate to leadership, John shows why living under authority provides a place where there is provision, protection, and hope for the future.