While the North American church grapples with an eroding position of privilege in society, there is a liberating vision of church from the margins. This manifesto defines eight marks of liberating churches that were identified through research of antebellum hush harbors. Hush harbors were the covert gatherings of enslaved Africans to worship and organize for change free from the surveillance of plantation Christianity. Liberating Church explores how the marks of antebellum hush harbors are being lived out now in several faith communities. This book offers a guide for anyone who wants to embrace innovative models for building spaces of faith and activism with structural critique and spiritual power.

Every year thousands of God's servants leave the ministry convinced they are failures. Years ago, in the midst of a crisis of faith, Kent Hughes almost became one of them. But instead he and his wife Barbara turned to God's Word, determined to learn what God had to say about success and to evaluate their ministry from a biblical point of view. This book describes their journey and their liberation from the "success syndrome"-the misguided belief that success in ministry means increased numbers. In today's world it is easy to be seduced by the secular thinking that places a number on everything. But the authors teach that true success in ministry lies not in numbers but in several key areas: faithfulness, serving, loving, believing, prayer, holiness, and a Christlike attitude. Their thoughts will encourage readers who grapple with feelings of failure and lead them to a deeper, fuller understanding of success in Christian ministry. This book was originally published by Tyndale in 1987 and includes a new preface.

The Church gets into trouble whenever it thinks it is in the church business rather than the Kingdom business. In the church business, people are concerned with Kingdom activities, all human behavior and everything God has made.... Church people think about how to get people into the church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world.

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Kristina LaCelle-Peterson seeks both to affirm the central place of Scripture in the Christian life and to highlight the liberating nature of the gospel for both men and women. To do this the author considers the biblical ideal for human beings and then proceeds to offer a biblical foundation for each of the topics under discussion--identity, body image, personal relationships, marriage, church life, and language for God. Along the way she examines the cultural nature of gender roles and the ways in which they have become entangled with ecclesial expectations. This book will help women better appreciate themselves as women, gain a better understanding of their value in God's eyes, and recognize their potential for meaningful engagement in a variety of relationships and vocational callings.

Christians often misunderstand one another when they refer to the kingdom of God. They may ask: Is it here on earth? In our hearts? In our churches?" Over the years, best-selling author Howard Snyder has been helping pastors and church leaders understand kingdom terminology. Now he explains in eight models how the kingdom or reign of God has been and may be conceived. Snyder explains with biblical texts and illustrations from church history. If you are a pastor or church leader, you will find guidance for building new kingdom communities in your congregation as well as ways to relate kingdom theology to global crises with the environment and our economy.

Freedom is a fundamental Christian theological category, as much a challenge to construct a new way of seeing oneself and others as it is an announcement of what Christ has already done for us in his death and resurrection. Liberation theology is, most simply, the effort to spell out what such freedom means for Christians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book has as its principle premise the conviction that if we are to construct a North American liberation theology we must begin listening to and understanding Latin American theology not so much as a model to be slavishly followed but as a challenge to our own cultural, political, and even religious assumptions. The focus thus is not so much on the theoretical meaning of Christian freedom but on its practice, and more exactly its praxis, that is to say the dialectic between theory and practice. After focusing on the creation and development of liberating theological methods and sources and, above all, the revitalization and renewal of structures that will contribute to the development of a liberated and liberating church, Fr. Hennelly ends with an analysis of the most recent and the most important vatican document on liberation theology, The Instruction of Christian Freedom and Liberation, which he sees as an acknowledgement by the universal church that the theme of liberation is central to the meaning of Christian theology.