Growing up the daughter of a pastor, Anne Jackson experienced firsthand the conflict, stress, and struggle church leaders often face. She vowed her life in ministry would be different. Yet, years later, as a church leader, she was hospitalized because stress began wreaking havoc on her body. After being released from the hospital, an associate pastor asked her, 'Does working at this church interfere with your communion with Christ?' The question was aramount in turning her life around. Thinking she wasn't alone, Anne developed a website that allowed church leaders to share their struggles. Within a few days, she was flooded with over a thousand responses from people pouring out their stories of burnout. Using anecdotal parallels between Mad Cow Disease and leadership trends in the church, she writes not only to help us realize what church leaders are facing, but also to provide practical and positive treatment plans. Mad Church Disease is a lively, informative, and potentially life-saving resource for anyone in ministry---vocational or volunteer---who would like to understand, prevent, or treat the epidemic of burnout in church culture.

Does serving in the church hurt your relationship with Christ? That question may have saved author Anne Marie Miller's life. She believes it could save yours, too.As the daughter of a pastor, Anne saw firsthand the struggles leaders face and the toll it takes on their families. She vowed her life in ministry would be different.Yet, years later, as a church leader, she was hospitalized because stress began wreaking havoc on her body. She had burned out.Anne developed a website that allowed church leaders to share their struggles. Within a few days, she was flooded with over a thousand responses from people pouring out their stories of pain.Mad Church Disease, born out of that experience, is a lively, informative, and potentially life-saving resource for anyone who has ever stepped foot in a church who would like to understand, prevent, or treat the epidemic of burnout in church culture.

When it comes to understanding and treating madness, distortions of research are not rare, misinterpretation of data is not isolated, and bogus claims of success are not voiced by isolated researchers seeking aggrandizement. This book's detailed analyses of coercion and community treatment, diagnosis, and psychopharmacology reveals that these characteristics of bad science are endemic, institutional, and protected in psychiatry. This is mad science. Mad Science argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are not based on convincing research, but on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science. The authors address multiple paradoxes in American mental health, including the remaking of coercion into scientific psychiatric treatment in the community, the adoption of an unscientific diagnostic system that now controls the distribution of services, and how drug treatments have failed to improve the mental health outcome. This book provides an engaging and readable scientific and social critique of current mental health practices. The authors are scholars, researchers, and clinicians who have written extensively about community care, diagnosis, and psychoactive drugs. Mad Science is a must read for all specialists in the field as well as for the informed public.

This annual bestselling resource for preachers provides a planned preaching program for an entire year, including Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and midweek sermons as well as helps for special occasions such as weddings, funerals, and youth meetings.

Why, when relevance is at the very heart of the gospel, are Christians today so irrelevant? And why do we compromise in the face of modern pressures? The culprit, says Os Guinness, is our starry-eyed pursuit of relevance in a highly modern form. In this short but penetrating book, Guinness uncovers the influence and pressures of the modern clock culture, which we take as natural and self-evident even though it's not. And he outlines strategies for a wise handling of time -- today's ultimate currency. To become "untimely people" -- those who are faithful despite the mesmerizing lure of the present age -- we need fresh and creative thinking coupled with a life of integrity. For our true timeliness lies finally in the untimeliness of rejecting modern timeliness. Then, and only then, will we make sense to the world around us while remaining faithful to God. Book jacket.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Echoing Hosea, Jesus defends his embrace of the unclean in the Gospel of Matthew, seeming to privilege the prophetic call to justice over the Levitical pursuit of purity. And yet, as missional faith communities arewell aware, the tensions and conflicts between holiness and mercy are not so easily resolved. In an unprecedented fusion of psychological science and theological scholarship, Richard Beck describes the pernicious (and largely unnoticed) effects of the psychology of purity upon the life and mission of the church.