In this book, Theodore J. Hopkins utilizes the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to navigate the relationship between the church and the world in the emerging post-Christian context. Following Bonhoeffer's Christology, Hopkins situates the church within the story of Jesus to be formed by him for his mission of witness and service in the world.

"The Church, who is she?" asks Bo Giertz in this book, which, he adds, "is first of all for those who have some notion of the life which is present within the church walls and also have some desire to understand that life better and know more about it." If you're among the tens of thousands who've read Giertz's bestselling novel The Hammer of God about ordinary people in their relation to the Church and her message, then you know his ability to engage you in the dramatic events of everyday life. Giertz shows the same engaging ability, when he in Christ's Church takes you on a walk from her biblical roots toward her glorious future.

The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), an African American Pentecostal denomination founded in 1896, has become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States today. In this first major study of the church, Anthea Butler examines the religious and social lives of the women in the COGIC Women's Department from its founding in 1911 through the mid-1960s. She finds that the sanctification, or spiritual purity, that these women sought earned them social power both in the church and in the black community. Offering rich, lively accounts of the activities of the Women's Department founders and other members, Butler shows that the COGIC women of the early decades were able to challenge gender roles and to transcend the limited responsibilities that otherwise would have been assigned to them both by churchmen and by white-dominated society. The Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement brought increased social and political involvement, and the Women's Department worked to make the "sanctified world" of the church interact with the broader American society. More than just a community of church mothers, says Butler, COGIC women utilized their spiritual authority, power, and agency to further their contestation and negotiation of gender roles in the church and beyond.

What is Lutheran ecclesiology? The Lutheran view of the church has been fraught with difficulties since the Reformation. Church as Fullness in All Things reengages the topic from a confessional Lutheran perspective. Lutheran theologians and clergy who are bound to the Holy Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions explore the possibilities and pitfalls of the Lutheran tradition’s view of the church in the face of contemporary challenges. The contributors also take up questions about and challenges to thinking and living as the church in their tradition, while looking to other Christian voices for aid in what is finally a common Christian endeavor. The volume addresses three related types of questions faced in living and thinking as the church, with each standing as a field of tension marked by disharmonized—though perhaps not inherently opposite—poles: the individual and the communal, the personal and the institutional, and the particular and the universal. Asking whether de facto prioritizations of given poles or unexamined assumptions about their legitimacy impinge the church Lutherans seek, the volume closes with Anglican, Reformed, and Roman Catholic contributors stating what their ecclesiological traditions could learn from Lutheranism and vice-versa.

“These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” That was the startled cry, circa 50 AD, from a hastily assembled mob in Thessalonica. These men who have turned the world upside: their description of Paul and Silas. Holy vandals on the loose, anointed marauders running amok, men out ransacking Roman cities with the gospel. You’d think they were heralding the arrival of Barbarian hordes, fierce Berserkers descending on poorly fortified villages, not two hungry men with no more than a fire in their bellies and a wildness in their eyes. These were just two ordinary men. But, as Paul says to the Corinthians, he was a man who preached “with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power,” a man whose weapons were not of the world but had “divine power to demolish strongholds.” Two simple, ordinary men, walking in the power of God. A whole town in uproar because of them. It’s been a while since we’ve seen the likes of this. Your Church Is Too Safe is an ebook based on a simple idea: that God meant his church to be both good news and bad news, an aroma and a stench – a disruptive force to whoever or whatever opposes the Kingdom of God, and a healing and liberating power to those who seek it. That the church has not always lived this mandate is well-documented. That the church needs to recover this mandate is much touted. Your Church Is Too Safe is a plea, a celebration, and a manifesto. It’s an attempt to call the church to be the church. It is a tribute to the many churches that seek to be this. And it is a roadmap to become this. Above all, Your Church Is Too Safe is a biblical reflection and exhortation on why we should be this. Its main narrative is rooted in the story of how the early church, for all her failings and heresies and squabbles, managed to turn the world upside down. And its principal claim is that the modern church, for all her failings and heresies and squabbles, has every advantage they had, and maybe more, and faces no more challenges than they did, and maybe fewer.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

This book is a multi-faceted collection of readings focused on the biblical, historical, cultural, and strategic dimensions of the task of world evangelization. The editors have pooled the contributions of over 70 authors to provide laymen and college students with an introduction to the history and potential of the World Christian Movement, a movement of men and women who have responded with courage and conviction to the challenges of this task. - Back cover.