• A fresh approach to church life and ecclesial health • Addresses the concerns of leadership in challenging times • Includes questions for reflection and study by individuals and groups Patience may be the least understood and least practiced of the Christian virtues—and yet patience may be the most important virtue to today’s church, the virtue that can underpin our most faithful longing. Building on a theological, biblical, and historical foundation, the author lays out a case for patience as a distinctly Christian practice. Patience subverts the cycle of crisis and fear that shapes so much of our culture. Patience understands that urgency and haste are hallmarks of the secular world, not the church. Patience and attending to the Other, whether divine or human, is a modern day cornerstone of justice, holding us together in a timeless bond. The author, a scholar and minister, has long wrestled with the notion that the church has to get out there and sell itself. In this book, he offers patience as an alternative way to address current issues and church growth.

How and why did the early church grow in the first four hundred years despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution? In this unique historical study, veteran scholar Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of study as he tells the amazing story of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the church grew because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. They wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, yet the church grew--not by specific strategies but by patient ferment.

Life Is Never Mainly About Love and Marriage. So Learn to Live and Date for More. Many of you grew up assuming that marriage would meet all of your needs and unlock God's purposes for you. But God has far more planned for you than your future marriage. Not Yet Married is not about waiting quietly in the corner of the world for God to bring you "the one," but about inspiring you to live and date for more now. If you follow Jesus, the search for a spouse is no longer a pursuit of the perfect person, but a pursuit of more of God. He will likely write a love story for you different than the one you would write for yourself, but that's because he loves you and knows how to write a better story. This book was written to help you find real hope, happiness, and purpose in your not-yet-married life.

By mining the rich tradition of virtue ethics, Christopher Vogt uses the virtues of patience, compassion, and hope as a framework for specifying the shape of a good death, and for naming the practices Christians should develop to live well and die well. Bringing together historical, biblical, and contemporary sources in Christian ethics, Vogt provides a long-overdue theological analysis of the ars moriendi or "art of dying" literature of four centuries ago. Through a careful analysis of Luke's passion narrative, Vogt uses Jesus as the primary model for being patient in the face of death and for dying well.

Lasting happiness through patience & humility. Learn how to develop these virtues without which heroism, self-denial, and martyrdom are worthless. Learn why Jesus said that to save your life, you must lose it, and see how happiness can be found in self-surrender.