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The Early Church and Today is a collection of scholarly articles by an acclaimed specialist in early Christianity written for a broad audience. The topics taken from the New Testament and other early Christian literature are relevant for the church today. The articles are grouped in the following categories: Volume 1, church and ministry; Volume 2, Christian living, biblical interpretation, the restoration motif, religious liberty, and the book of Acts of the Apostles. Sections include: - "Ministry of the Word in the First Two Centuries"- "The Authority and Tenure of Elders"- "Women in the Post-Apostolic Church"- "Baptismal Motifs in the Ancient Church"- "Baptism in the Patristic Period"- "When You Come Together: Epi to auto in Early Christian Literature"- "Congregational Singing in the Early Church"- "Jewish Religious Music in the First Century - Temple, Synagogue, House, and Sect"- "Christian Living in a Pagan Society"- "The Meaning and Significance of the Restitution Motif"

The Early Church and Today is a collection of scholarly articles by an acclaimed specialist in early Christianity written for a broad audience. The topics taken from the New Testament and other early Christian literature are relevant for the church today. The articles are grouped in the following categories: Volume 1, church and ministry; Volume 2, Christian living, biblical interpretation, the restoration motif, religious liberty, and the book of Acts of the Apostles. Sections include: - "Ministry of the Word in the First Two Centuries"- "The Authority and Tenure of Elders"- "Women in the Post-Apostolic Church"- "Baptismal Motifs in the Ancient Church"- "Baptism in the Patristic Period"- "When You Come Together: Epi to auto in Early Christian Literature"- "Congregational Singing in the Early Church"- "Jewish Religious Music in the First Century - Temple, Synagogue, House, and Sect"- "Christian Living in a Pagan Society"- "The Meaning and Significance of the Restitution Motif"

In this final installment from the long-running and celebrated Conference on Preaching book series, an energetic group of scholars join together across ethnic and theological divides to consider one lasting question: "What is a life well-lived in the world that Wisdom fashions?" For over a decade, the Conference on Preaching has generated conversation among evangelicals, postliberals, and mainline Protestants by bringing together well-known biblical scholars and homileticians across the theological spectrum. In Preaching Character, editors Dave Bland and David Fleer turn to the papers from the October 2009 conference on preaching and wisdom. Wisdom is fundamentally about the formation and transformation of character, they write. When God created the world, God breathed wisdom into its essence; the world operates by wisdom. Thus wisdom is essential to living responsibly in this world. It is by wisdom that God empowers humans to negotiate the complexities of life. And it is by wisdom that we deepen our relationship with God and with others. Believing that the task of preaching biblical wisdom is about shaping the character of the faith community and its individual members, the contributors to this book seek to echo wisdom's call to embark on a fascinating and often unpredictable adventure. Intrigue, disappointment, joy, suffering, conflict, dialogue, and satisfaction fill the journey. Wisdom offers no guarantees along the way regarding rewards or financial security or physical well-being. But the journey with wisdom does guarantee the kind of character that enables individuals to live responsibly in community, reflecting the very nature of the God they serve. With Preaching Character, Dave Bland and David Fleer complete a collection of books exploring different focuses in preaching.

Exploring Worldviews in Literature is a collection of essays demonstrating the practice of literary criticism from a Christian perspective. In each essay, author Laura Barge compares and contrasts the philosophical assumptions of various literary works with those of a Christian worldview. This critical strategy, Barge believes, has an important place in both faith-based and secular schools. She embraces Jaroslav Pelikan's claim that the university remains the "custodian" of the "common memory" of any culture and thus cannot escape the obligation to preserve the moral and spiritual history of that culture. She thus presumes that the basic contours of a Christian worldview are an indispensable component of the Western cultural heritage. The literature analyzed here comes from a wide spectrum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature, with one chapter devoted to Russian literature of the same era. Throughout the volume, Barge explores numinous spaces, scapegoats, disclosures of the sacred in nature, and the mythos of an absent God, all in an effort to enlighten by unfolding worldviews. "Because the study of literature is [so] closely connected with the experiences of life itself," Barge writes, "it is also [particularly] in need of the enlightenment of Christian truth." In each of these essays, Barge draws on her years of study and her honest convictions to offer readers models of how to better understand the relationship between texts and Christian life.

A history of the churches of Christ in America with emphasis on who they are and why. Fourteen chapters with pictures of Restoration leaders from both the 19th and 20th centuries.

Few people have made a larger contribution to the ongoing life and health of Churches of Christ around the world than Charles Siburt. During his twenty-four years at Abilene Christian University, Siburt oversaw some fifty DMin theses- a capstone experience designed to recount best practices in congregational life. Rooted in Dr. Siburt's conviction that good theology makes a difference in the lives of people, The Effective Practice of Ministry is a collection of thirteen of those research projects, covering the most critical topics facing churches today: spiritual formation, leadership development, catechesis, preaching, and missional initiatives in the larger community. In honor of Dr. Siburt, this anthology is meant to inspire and encourage effective, embodied praxis in the ministry of the church.

Imago Dei brings together a collection of poets who merge faith, literature, and art as a form of worship and inspiration. An anthology of the best poems published in the journal Christianity and Literature over the past sixty years, Imago Dei brings together in one volume poetry which exemplifies the richness and variety of the art. These poems find beauty in the concrete and particular, but they also ask the big questions: Why do we exist? Who is God? Where do we find God? What does the Incarnation mean? When does God speak to us, and why is God silent? These poets all have in common an awareness of human experience as part of a grand narrative, of the imago dei embedded in human nature, and of the sense of connection to something much larger than themselves. These are poems written from within a theological tradition, though they are not necessarily traditional in form or expression. They upset the usual in their originality; they are worded words, connected to our earthly life but pointed toward the Kingdom of God; they are redemptive words made flesh. Included in the over one hundred poets represented here are Wendell Berry, Mark Jarmon, Jeanne Murray Walker, Dana Gioa, Martha Serpas, Luci Shaw, and Robert Siegel. All of the poets in this collection grapple with what Imago Dei means for them as readers, writers, artists, teachers, and students.

The Rochester College Sermon Seminar and the series of books it has inspired have been built on the conviction that Christian preaching today needs revision. Such reforming begins with a close and faithful reading of Scripture, an engagement so serious that the world of Scripture ultimately sets agendas and invents expectations for meaningful life...In this present volume, too, we wish to grant the book of Hebrews the opportunity to pull all of us into the world it envisions, allowing it the power to judge, convict, and form us into a community God desires. This is not an easy task for several reasons, most notably the fact that the world of Hebrews is quite alien from our own...Like previous volumes in the Rochester Lectures on Preaching, the current work is divided into two parts. The first is a collection of four related essays meant to orient the reader to the world clearly conceived in Hebrews. The second half appropriates this orientation with sermons for particular Christian congregations. - Excerpts from David Fleer's Introduction

The context for this book is rooted in the life of the local church. We desire to integrate biblical scholarship and homiletical theory with the task of preaching Luke/Acts. Our prayer is that the responsible integration of these resources will increase the ability of the Holy Spirit to empower preachers for faithful proclamation of God's word. To that end we give God the glory. - From the editor's Introduction.

This is a follow-up to volume one. What did the second century Christian leaders say about The Early Christian Doctrine of Scripture, The Canon of the New Testament, The Muratorian Canon, Spiritual Gifts, Demons and Exorcism, Angels, Freedom of Religion, Great Women of the Ancient Church, plus many other chapters.

These studies in early church history cover various aspects of the church life of early Christians. They focus on the second century. What did the second century Christian leaders say about faith, baptism, infant baptism, worship services, the Lord's Supper, prayer, singing, church organization, mercy and the role of women? New Testament texts bearing on the topic are listed at the beginning of each chapter. We are talking about the same community of people, the same church, as existed in the New Testament. Such writings have an important bearing on the interpretation of the Scriptures.