Stressful. Overwhelming. Too much. If these words describe the tone of your everyday life, it's time for a change. In the midst of a fast-paced world we need strong friends and family relationships more than ever. The digital devices used to connect us often inhibit even the best efforts to communicate effectively, pulling us into more remote exchanges that isolate us rather than bring us together. This book addresses these challenges head-on. With stories from Scripture and real life, the author helps readers find help and inspiration for love and friendship that flourish rather than simply survive.
This book helps leaders discover, develop, and deliver their leadership lifestories. Through examples of Jesus's 12 disciples, readers will understand more about the relationship between storytelling and leadership from first-century followers of Jesus. In a world that seems to separate people, Leadership Lifestories bring people back together by pointing to the peace found in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. Each chapter includes simple steps so that individuals can uncover their unique strengths and discover how they can better serve their families, their organizations, and their communities.
This collection of 52 devotionals (one per week for a full year) is designed for college or university professors, so all entries are connected to some aspect of faculty life: the classroom experience, research, or participation in the academic community (either intra- or extramural). Readers will be challenged to think of new ways to live out their God-given calling in their teaching, research, and leadership lives. They will be invited to meditate on reflections from some of the most thoughtful and spiritually sensitive members of their profession, both youthful and seasoned. Also, readers will understand ways to become godly mentors...
The American evangelical church today faces profound political and cultural challenges. It is vitally important for the church to understand these challenges more fully and to think about them more theologically. It is also important for the church to repent of how we have failed to be the edifying and countercultural influence we ought to be, and craft an approach to public and political life that bears authentic and life-giving witness to who our God is and what he is like. In this book, the author shows how Justin Martyr, a prominent second-century church leader, provides a useful and powerful...
Words that Shape Us explores evangelicalism's influence on the nation's cultural and political discourse through the lens of its main independent news publications. Waters delves into the pages of evangelical periodicals that reveal a movement at a crossroads. This book offers an unprecedented look at the internal debates and divergent paths that could redefine the future of American politics and religion. Waters uncovers the widening gap between evangelical elites and those claiming the faith through meticulous analysis of four key independent evangelical publications. From the 2016, 2020, and 2024 Presidential elections to pressing social issues like immigration, racism, and healthcare,...
Reuben V. "Uncle Bud" Robinson, born a moonshiner's son in Tennessee and converted under the preaching of a traveling circuit rider while working as a Texas ranch hand, persevered to become the Mark Twain of the early twentieth-century holiness movement. And, at the height of his ministry, he was dubbed the "the most popular man in America." This book explains how a man who originally came from nothing eventually came to personify an entire subset of American Christianity and what it means for Christianity and evangelicalism today. The author examines how "Uncle Bud's" preaching brought together people from all walks...
Opposites Attract introduces readers to the genre of philosophical dialogue and to dialectic, which the author defines as "a back-and-forth that gets us somewhere we couldn't have gotten without the back-and-forth." In an easy-to-follow (and sometimes humorous) way, the book analyzes classical and modern examples to argue that direct, monologic communication is not always the most persuasive form of argumentation. By presenting ideas that seem to contradict one another, or by presenting one's case as a dialogue between opposing parties, others can engage your thought processes in a dynamic way. Dialectic, at its best, makes readers active participants in the...
In October of 1938, two evangelists/faith healers, Burroughs Walters and Kathryn Kuhlman, elope to Iowa to be married. The bride fainted at the civil ceremony. The play covers the first one hundred minutes of their wedding night, the bride seriously second-guessing her decision to marry, feeling compelled to return to her flock in Denver. The bridegroom, frustrated on his wedding night, compels her to stay. Lifting the Veil is a play depicting the battle of two scripture-filled minds and wills. This play is a "what-if" tale, loosely based upon the obscure marriage of Kathryn Kuhlman and Burroughs Waltrip. Burroughs became...
Since the publication of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) and George Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997), Christian educators have worked to challenge anti-intellectualism within American evangelicalism and to demonstrate how religious and theological commitments can deepen our understanding of the world. Yet questions remain about the lasting impact of these efforts: How much progress has been made? To what extent does anti-intellectualism still hinder evangelical thought? And what new challenges and opportunities face faith-informed scholars today? From the Outrageous to the Scandalous explores these questions through a rich and wide-ranging collection of essays....
Sermons preached before a congregation are only one way people hear messages of faith. Whether the listener is seated in a pew or listening to a podcast or a book about faith, most of the faith-talk people hear is shaped by a speaker's faith sensibility. And those faith sensibilities can generally be distinguished as four distinctly different "voices" of preaching. Understanding what these voices are, how they differ in purpose as well as design, and how excellence in each voice can make for greater authenticity in communicating faith is what this book is about. The author canvases the tradition of...
In the summer of 1864, an entrepreneur built an observation tower just outside the walls of the federal prison at Elmira, New York. He charged 15 cents for citizens to climb the tower and observe the Confederate prisoners below. Ginger cakes and drinks were sold. The venture paid for itself in a matter of weeks. Then winter came. Shortly afterward another observation tower was constructed by another business interest, and competition being what it is, the cost for admission was driven to 10 cents. Business was booming. A generation ago, television entertainment ventured into shock modes regarding outlandish relational turmoil...
Unwrapping the Gift of Communication provides readers with theoretically sound principles and guidelines for relational communication. God created human beings with the gift of language which allows us to communicate and build relationships. Unfortunately, this "gift" can often cause problems and strain relationships. Fortunately, God was aware of the challenges communication could create and we have been given Scripture to help us figure out how to unwrap the gift and use it in a positive way. This book takes several contemporary communication concepts and uses Scripture to illustrate what that theory means and how to apply it to your everyday...
A university professor and two young middle school English teachers weave recent educational research on humor with examples from C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles to make a compelling case for teaching teachers how to relax and enjoy the wild things in the classroom. Using Lewis's foundational ideas on the four sources of laughter--Joy, Fun/Play, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy--they illustrate how children begin to lose their gentle and affiliative laughter through the middle school years, often becoming mean, cruel, and cynical, and then suggest ways to counter the downward trajectory and revive the joy and fun of learning. What makes the...
The author brings a career of academic and professional directing experience to inform readers how to select, prepare, and mount a production for the stage. At the same time, he expresses the disciplines, joys, and rigors of the faith-based walk as a framework for this creative journey. The aesthetic requisites for stage directing are combined with an exploration of what it means to be a practicing artist under God's creative mandate. The author demonstrates how one's worldview as a Christian finds reflection in a world of visual and aural metaphors within a stage production.
In this updated and expanded version of Dr. Spencer's classic offering, we are treated to new insights and expressions of wisdom. Big, colorful virtues like courage and decisiveness in crisis easily get our attention. But sometimes it's those everyday values that shape us much more profoundly. Lost in our noisy, flashy, gaudy world are the quiet virtues that work behind the scenes--molding our character, guiding our actions, enriching our lives. Greg Spencer unfolds the beauty and nature of each, showing us how to take notice of discernment, innocence, generosity, authenticity and more. In this book you'll discover how far from...