Bøker utgitt av Abingdon Press

In The Undivided Soul: Helping Congregations Connect Body and Spirit, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan offers a worship, study, and sermon planning resource containing meditations, responsive readings, poems, and prayers for use by pastors, educators, and small-group leaders. This volume is designed as a teaching/learning guide. Each chapter explores various aspects of faith, health, and spirituality. The book can be used as a worship resource for Sunday worship, retreats, or other gatherings; it can be used as a devotional resource for small groups; it can be a study guide for group study or retreats. This resource is designed to help persons and groups explore the relationship between the faith journey, physical bodies, and spiritual discipline. Key Features: - Explores various aspects of faith, health, and spirituality as well as how the three are connected - Provides ready-made worship and study materials - Includes ideas for one-day seminars - Ideal for both pastors and small-group leaders Key Benefits: - Helps readers understand the relationship between faith journey, physical body, and spiritual discipline - Provides pastors, worship leaders, Bible study leaders, and small-group leaders with ready-to-use resources (such as responsive readings, meditations, prayers, and vows of commitment) - Provides group leaders with resources for seminars, short-term study, or occasional devotion or discussion topics - Provides retreat leaders with abundant resources for spirituality retreats

Written without theological jargon, this book explains the historical development of abstract concepts and presents an outline of the races, the particular contexts, and the doctrinal understandings of Christian topics. Ideal for beginners and advanced students alike.

Pastors, seminary professors, and university teachers will find original ideas in this book to help enhance their teachings of the Old Testament. The book's analysis helps congregations more fully understand and enjoy the biblical text.

This book enables pastors to use the tools available to them more effectively to create sermons. Readers will find Jimenez's style easy to manage as he examines the different styles of preaching.

The Web of Women's Leadership calls for women in the church leadership to recognize the potential of female styles of authority and ministry and lay claim to them as a way to move beyond the hierarchical models that have dominated our understanding of how the church practices its mission and organizes its life.

This leader's guide gives for each lesson: a purpose statement, Bible background, and sections on beginning the lesson, developing the lesson, concluding the lesson and a prayer. In the developing the lesson section you will help class members look at how the scriptures were heard in Bible times, how we hear them today and how members can apply them to their life. Sessions: Genesis 2:4b-3:24 Adam and Eve Genesis 6-9 The Flood Genesis 28:10-22 Jacob's Ladder Genesis 37-45; 50:15-21 Joseph Exodus 12:1-39 The First Passover Numbers 6:22-27 The Benediction 2 Samuel 7 The Unconditional Covenant Job 19:25-27 My Redeemer Lives Psalm 121 My Help Comes From the Lord Psalm 139 Where Can I Go From Your Spirit Isaiah 40:1-11 A Voice in the Wilderness Isaiah 40:12-31 Wings Like Eagles Micah 6:6-8 What Does the Lord Require? Matthew 1:18-2:12 When Jesus Was Born Matthew 6:1-15 The Lord's Prayer Mark 2:1-12 Forgiveness of Sins Mark 14:12-25 The Last Supper Luke 4:16-30 Jesus Fulfills the Prophecy Luke 10:25-37 The Good Samaritan Luke 15:11-32 The Waiting Father John 1:1-18 The Coming of the Word John 10:1-18 The Good Shepherd Acts 2:1-36 The Day of Pentecost Philippians 2:1-11 The Mind of Christ Hebrews 11:1-3; 12:1-3 Faith and Witnesses Revelation 7:9-17 The Church Triumphant in Heaven Each session contains: Words for Bible Times (how the scriptures were heard) Words for Our Time (how we hear them today) Words for My Life (how we apply them to our life) separate Student Book #9780687071791 26 sessions / 45-60 minut

This book is a companion to Webber's "Journey to Jesus" seminars, held in over 100 American cities from 2000-2003. The "seeker" model of worship presupposes a split between what goes on during the worship service and how the church evangelizes its members into full discipleship in Jesus Christ. The basic idea is to draw the unchurched in through lively, uplifting services, and then move them into small group ministries that will lead them to a deeper understanding of the Christian life. While this model works well in some, mostly "start-up" congregations, it has been a dismal failure in traditional, established churches, many of which have had to abandon their seeker services. Robert Webber here proposes an alternative: a model of worship that emphasizes the fact that those who come to worship are at very different points in their spiritual lives. Rather than ignore these differences or gear all of worship to those already established in the faith, he argues that churches should openly recognize the stages of faith through which their members are passing, and structure their worship and ministry to celebrate those stages, openly encouraging Christians to move from spiritual infancy to maturity in Christ.

Churches stagnate, decline, and die for a number of reasons, but principally because they have forgotten that we worship, not to feel comfortable and safe, but to come into the presence of a God who leads us out into the world. They have forgotten the "cloud of witnesses" who have gone before them in the Christian faith, providing models for how they can proclaim the message of the gospel in ways that new generations can hear it. Paul Nixon calls this failure of memory "spiritual amnesia." Concerned with institutional survival and personal comfort, congregations have forgotten what previous generations of Christians have learned time and again: that the church's great challenge is to make the gospel available in new and compelling ways to those who need to hear it. In a series of sweeping insights into congregational life and contemporary culture, Nixon maps a course that will help churches remember who they are and for whom they exist.

Coyner and Anderson believe that to assimilate newcomers into the life and ministry of the congregation, the whole church system must be involved. They show how to identify and respond to visitors in a nonthreatening, yet interested way; how to share information about them with leaders of ministries and programs that would interest them most; how to help them in their decision to become church members; and how to help them understand and fulfill their own call to ministry in the congregation.

Written by well-known preachers, these sermons explore the intimate connection between body and spirit.

Why do we pray? What is God's role in prayer? What is the human role? "Prayer: Living in God's Power and Presence explores definitions of prayer, Scriptures that show Jesus' teachings and practices related to prayer, methods of and aids to prayer, the varieties of individual words, needs and emotions that form the content of prayers, ways people interpret answered or unanswered prayer, and the unity between prayer and human action.

According to The Book of Discipline, Wesley believed that the "living core of the Christian faith" is revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, "vivified" by personal experience, and confirmed by reason. The thesis of Wesley and the Quadrilateral is that the Church needs serious conversation about reappropriating the Quadrilateral in a manner that is consistent with historical Methodist identity (beginning with Wesley), a conversation that takes the church's past identity with the utmost seriousness while recognizing present and future cultural trends.

Everyone understands human pain. But many Christians have difficulty comprehending God's pain, especially God's pain in the death of Christ. Is it atonement or child abuse? To speak of God in pain, says Barbara Brown Taylor, is not only to address the biblical stories of Christ's suffering and death, but also to proclaim the God who is present in our pain. This volume of teaching sermons on suffering presents different approaches to the problem of God in pain. In each sermon, Taylor speaks with sensitivity and profound insight as she addresses pain and both its human and divine impact. TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: Pain of Life: The Gift of Disillusionment; A Cure for Despair; Learning to Hate Your Family; Divine Anger; Feeding the Enemy; The Betrayer in Our Midst; Buried by Baptism; The Suffering Cup; Pick Up Your Cross; Unless a Grain Falls; The Dress Rehearsal; Surviving Crucifixion; Portents and Signs; and The Delivery Room. Part II: Pain of Death: Believing What We Cannot Understand; Someone to Blame; The Triumphant Victim; The Myth of Redemptive Violence; The Silence of God; The Will of God; The Suffering of God; May He Not Rest in Peace. BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR, an Episcopal priest in the diocese of Atlanta, holds the Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. She is widely sought after as a preacher and guest lecturer, and is the author of five books, including Preaching Life and Bread of Angels.She was named by Baylor University as one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English language.

This second collection of approximately 100 piggyback songs for preschool children differs from the first collection by using new texts never published before. While the texts are based on Scripture and themes such as God's love, friends, and so forth, the tunes are familiar children's songs such as "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" or "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." The words are written around a story, character, or theme, and are created to fit a popular tune. Piggyback songs are popular to use with preschool children's choirs, vacation Bible school, and children's Sunday school settings, and with teachers who are not overly musically inclined. For ages 3-7. Key Benefits: * Allows teachers to be comfortable with music because of the use of familiar tunes * Fun for children because they already know the tune of the new song * Songs included for all parts of the Bible