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In short, anecdotal chapters, the author explains how to diagnose a crisis (public, congregational, and personal) and offers six homiletical strategies for creating sermons when speaking during a crisis.

Contents: Meet John Wesley; A Tale of Two Villages; A Nursery Epic; Student and Missionary; A Prayer Meeting and What Came of It; The Very Soul That Over England Flamed; How They Sang a New Day into Britain; Men of Mighty Stature; Methodism Crosses the Atlantic; The Birth of a Church; The Afterglow; The End of the Long Trail; Methodism in the New Republic; Methodism's Man on Horseback; Camp-Meeting Days; The Winning of the West; The Missionary Spirit; Methodist Breaks and Fractures; Southern Methodism; Through the Civil War and Beyond; A Spiritual Forty-Niner; The Tale of the Years in Many Lands; Forming a World Parish; High Hours in a Church's History; The Battlefields of Reform; The Unification of American Methodism; and Methodism Since World War I.

Many preachers are aware of the presence of children in Sunday morning worship and wish to include them effectively in worship, but have a hard time figuring out how to do so. Preachers who are unhappy with children's sermons in general and all the books of printed children's sermons in particular are looking for a theologically and educationally sound approach to preaching to congregations that include children. This practical guide offers preachers a variety of ideas and helps for making any sermon one that is suitable for both children and adults. The author includes an introductory chapter on the importance of children's participation in worship during their elementary school years as part of their faith development. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how children "listen" to a sermon and the importance of planning for children in preparing sermons.

Charles Wesley is widely remembered as a significant hymn-writer, especially among Methodists, but he is not often regarded either as a major poet or as an important theologian. He quite often takes second place to his more famous elder brother, John, and frequently disappears in the face of John's role as leader of "the people called Methodists." This volume attempts to rectify these unfortunate misconceptions by demonstrating that Charles Wesley is a figure of primary literary significance in the history of English religious poetry. It also seeks to show that Charles Wesley was a theologian of considerable depth and creativity, and to place his work in the context of a variety of church traditions. The essays in this volume originated in papers presented to the Charles Wesley Publication Colloquium, held at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ, in the fall of 1989.

Autobiographical journals of Thomas Coke, an important figure to both American and Methodist history.In these journals Thomas Coke gives contemporaneous detailed impressions of late-18th century North America from his nine visits and four Caribbean tours. Using the 1816 edition of the journals as a base, Vickers compares it to earlier editions and, where available, to the manuscript journal, noting any variations.

Hell Without Fire has been nominated in the Creative Nonfiction Historical Division category of the 39th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards. Abingdon Press would like to congratulate Henry Whelchel on this honor. Conversion is one of the most significant motifs in American church history. From the First and Second Great Awakenings to early twentieth century Pentecostal revivals and contemporary Evangelical movements, conversion in all its extravagant forms is important to the story of religion in America. L. Henry Whelchel takes up this motif of conversion as it relates particularly to enslaved Africans and Black Americans. He explains the role of conversion in the complex interaction between blacks and whites in America. Beginning with the differences between European and African forms of slavery and the importance of the motif of conversion to white legitimization of the Atlantic slave trade, Whelchel describes the process of slave conversion as one in which slaves were separated from African religion and culture. He counters the myth that Africans had no history and that African religion was entirely effaced in its American context. He demonstrates the contradictory relationship between Afro-American and Euro-American religion: on the one hand whites prohibited demonstrations of African religion and on the other hand they embraced and adopted these demonstrations of religion in transformed modes with their revivalist Christianity. According to Whelchel, "as African religion and culture were exposed to western Christianity," there was forged "a new Afro-American religion." Whelchel's exposure of the contradiction between the propaganda used to defend slavery and the actual, historical circumstances of slaves in America is most compelling in his treatment of the role of education as an adjunct to conversion. He highlights the emergence of laws prohibiting the teaching of slaves and he explores the emergence of the plantation missions--sponsored by mainline southern denominations--to implement an oral method of religious training. He continues with the role of conversion in post-emancipation relations between black and white religion in America, in both the North and South. Finally, Whelchel chronicles the rise of the CME and the distinctions between the AME and CME, concluding with the seating of the first black CME bishops.

How Christian is evangelism? How biblical is it? In Call and Response: Biblical Foundations of a Theology of Evangelism, Walter Klaiber seeks answers to such provocative questions. After reviewing the different understandings of evangelism abroad today (fundamentalist, charismatic, pietist, liberationist), he articulates the conviction that evangelism is a central part of the church's mission. At its most basic level, asserts Klaiber, evangelism is the announcement of the good news of salvation to those both outside and inside the church. This understanding of the nature of evangelism provides the basis for the two major themes of the work. The first is a discussion of evangelism in the New Testament in terms of its original contexts and meanings. Here Klaiber examines the rich variety of New Testament images for the task of evangelism, which range from the announcement of glad tidings to the poor, to the revelation of God's righteousness. The second is the question of the significance of personal decision in evangelism. Here the biblical evidence provides the foundation for the author's discussion of the nature and necessity of conversion.

Black Religious Experience is an examination of the role Christian education has played in the African American community, as seen in the work of one of its greatest interpreters, Grant Shockley. In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois coined the term "double consciousness" to refer to the fact that African Americans always view the world through two lenses. First, they see it from their own perspectives as members of an oppressed community, living out the consequences of a particular history. Second, they perceive life from the point of view of a dominant culture that seeks to impose on African Americans its own false understanding of their status and worth. Christian educators working in the African American community have often drawn on this idea as they seek to apply the gospel to the spiritual formation of members of that community. The heart of the work of Grant Shockley, the preeminent African American religious educator of the twentieth century, was combating the negative attitudes and perspectives that the larger society would dictate to African Americans, while providing positive and powerful images of their self-worth drawn from the Christian story. Charles R. Foster and Fred Smith, friends and colleagues of Shockley, seek in this book to interpret the significance of his work for Christian education, both in the African American community and beyond it, for the twenty-first century. They draw on personal encounters as well as Shockley's written and published materials to indicate how this seminal thinker continues to speak to the need for faith formation in Christian congregations today.

Contributors from diverse backgrounds in the United States and around the globe reflect on radical and liberation traditions in Methodism in their own context. In conversation with contemporary Methodism and the Wesleyan heritage, each chapter focuses on the question how radical and liberation traditions provide new visions for the present and future of the church. Contributors include: Ted Jennings Jr., John J. Vincent, Joerg Richer, Josiah Young Jr., Andrew Sung Park, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Stephen Hatcher, Jose Miguez Bonino, Harold Recinos, Rebecca Chopp, Cedric Mayson, Jong Chun Park, and Jione Havea.

This groundbreaking book has given birth to new congregations, rejuvenated tired leaders, and transformed declining churches. By telling the story of thriving church life through the experience of the institutionally alienated, spiritually yearning public, Bandy provides the big picture of thriving church life in the postmodern world. "Desechando Habitos not only challenges the Hispanic church to rediscover faithfulness today, hut reveals that there is a better way to organize effectively as the body of Christ.

For more than a decade, Howard Clinebell's Understanding and Counseling the Alcoholic has been considered the standard work in the field. This updated edition of Clinebell's earlier book expands his work on counseling to encompass the care of persons with drug addiction, behavioral addictions, multiple addictions, and co-dependency. The volume includes a new annotated bibliography. "This is the most comprehensive summary on understanding and counseling persons with addictions of which I am aware. The book should be part of every counselor's library." --Anderson Spickard, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Vanderbilt Internal Medicine Associates "This invaluably revised work on addiction is inclusive and comprehensive. Building upon seminal research in alcoholism, this expansive explication of the etiology, treatment, and after-care of those afflicted and affected by addictions provides a pragmatic proposal of care for all practitioners. It gleans the best from the past, appropriates the research of the present, and provides a vision of what effective care might be in the future.--Robert H. Albers, Professor of Pastoral Theology at Luther Seminary and Editor of The Journal of Ministry

How is it that we come to know ourselves as Christians? What were the elements of John Wesley's work that contributed to spiritual formation for a Christian life, and how did these elements interrelate? Focusing on matters of formation and transformation in faith, Sondra Matthaei answers such questions in light of early Methodist practices of formation. Through research and dialogue with Wesleyan scholarship and constructive proposals related to the life of the church, this insightful study encourages faithful and imaginative approaches to spiritual formation in churches today. The focus of this book is on matters of formation and transformation in faith. The book answers the question "How do we come to know ourselves as Christian?" and analyzes this question in light of early Methodist practices of formation and an ecology of education within the Methodist movement. The reader will come to understand John Wesley's idea of character formation and moral transformation. The reader will understand how Christian and vocation are shaped through spiritual formation and will understand the role of structures and relationships (family, school, church, etc.) in spiritual formation.