This book is a comprehensive guide and a one-volume handbook on Spirit-led ministry in the twenty-first century. Written for ministry students, seasoned pastors, and anyone dealing with a sense of calling, this is an inspiring read on Spirit-empowered ministry that expresses itself in word and deed through preaching, teaching, healing, and leadership. In these pages, a pastor, chaplain, and seminary professor who has trained people for ministry in multiple nations addresses the most important aspects of effective Christian ministry. Read this book to encounter biblically sound and theologically balanced information and transformational instruction. Discern, discover, or reaffirm a call to ministry, seek the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and develop excellence in contemporary ministry.

This book is a comprehensive guide to competent Spirit-led ministry in the 21st century. Written from a Pentecostal/Charismatic perspective, it focuses on four important aspects of effective ministry - preaching, teaching, healing, and leading. Beginning with biblical definitions of ministry, the book describes the challenges presented by the 21st century in light of the long history of Christian ministry, and it offers biblically sound advice to address these challenges. The role of the Holy Spirit in ministry is examined in detail. The bulk of the book is devoted to the theory (theology) and practice of competent, Spirit-led ministry. This book is a call to excellence in ministry as well sa a guide to empowered preaching, teaching, healing, and leading.

Our Life is Love describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who turned to the Light of Christ within and allowed it to be their guide. Many Friends today use different language, but are still called to make the same journey. In our time people seeking deeper access to the profound teachings of Christianity want more than just beliefs, they want direct experience. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life that affects this world. Quakers in the seventeenth century and today provide examples of people and communities living in the midst of the world whose radical understanding of Christ's teachings led them to become powerful agents of social change. The book offers a simple, clear explanation of the spiritual journey that is suitable not only for Quakers, but for all Christians, and for seekers wanting to better understand our spiritual experience and the fullness of God's call to us. The book would make an excellent focus for study groups. Marcelle Martin has led workshops at retreat centers and Quaker meetings across the United States. She served for four years as the resident Quaker Studies teacher at Pendle Hill and was a core teacher in the School of the Spirit program, The Way of Ministry. She is the author of the Pendle Hill pamphlets Invitation to a Deeper Communion and Holding One Another in the Light. In 2013 she was the Mullen Writing Fellow at Earlham School of Religion while working on this book.

Focusing on pastoral leadership within local churches or groups of churches, Derek Tidball provides a comprehensive survey of the variety of ministry models and patterns found in the New Testament with applications for today's ministry.

Spirit-Empowered Christianity in the 21st Century is an authoritative compilation of the presentations from thirty leaders in the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement given at the Empowered 21 Conference in Tulsa, OK, in April 2010. These chapters share emerging insights on how the next generation will handle the profound issues facing Christians within the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement in the 21st century.

Who decides what your church (local or denominational) will look like twenty-five or thirty years from now? How can you ensure that your church will continue to fulfill its God-given purpose in the next generation? What can be done now to reverse negative trends in ministry such as pastoral burnout? Much of the answer to these questions about pastors and other local church leaders is tied to the training they receive. Training Spirit-Filled Local Church Leaders for the Twenty-First Century encourages all stakeholders in ministry training—educators, pastors and other local church leaders, church members, and those who sense God is calling them to ministry—to prayerfully consider the foundational issues that determine the effectiveness and relevance of a ministry training program. These foundational issues are: •What is the local church, really? •What is spiritual leadership? •What is ministry training? •What is the role of the Holy Spirit in all this? •What did effective training look like in the past, and what might it look like in the twenty-first century?

Many congregations today are beset by fears, whether over loss of members and money, or of irrelevancy in an increasingly pluralistic society. To counter this, many congregations focus on strategy and purpose-what churches "do"-but Cheryl Peterson submits that mainline churches need to focus instead on "what" or "who" they are-to reclaim a theological, rather than sociological, understanding of themselves. To do this, she places the questions of the church's identity and mission into a conversation with the primary ecclesiological paradigms of the past century: the neo-Reformation concept of the church as a "word event" and the ecumenical paradigms of the church as "communion." She argues that these two paradigms assume a context of cultural Christendom that no longer exists-focused on the church that is gathered-rather than the missional church that is sent out.