Somewhere this Sunday there is a chance that the congregation the Smiths have attended for years will be closed, it has ceased to exist. A For Sale sign is posted around the property. This is not a rare exception. Back in 2019 more churches closed than opened: 4,000 closed and 3,000 opened. It has been estimated back in a 2020 report that the average size of a congregation in the USA is down to 65 from 137. Churches go through a cycle: planting, birth, growth, stability, maturity, status quo, decline, sickness, death, and burial. This happened to the 32 churches mentioned in one form or another in the New Testament. Remember the 7 churches of Asia? Why do churches die? There are many reasons but a major one is what this book is about--sowing discord, creating disunity, divisions, and splitting. This book contains 26 chapters related to the issue of discord and how Satan works continually to create division and destroy congregations. It spells out why God hates those who cause division (Proverbs 6:16-19). This material is a fresh wake-up call for every Christian. What stage is your congregation in on the road to death and burial?

Knowable Word offers a foundation on why and how to study the Bible. Through a running study Genesis 1, this new edition illustrates how to Observe, Interpret, and Apply the Scripture-and gives the vision behind each step.

This book explores the tensions surrounding national turmoil in family life and new divides in political life. Christensen warns that continued reliance on government to compensate for family failure will make matters worse in the long run.

How can we create more meaningful and intimate connections with our loved ones? By using moments of discord to strengthen our relationships, explains this original, deeply researched book. You might think that perfect harmony is the defining characteristic of healthy relationships, but the truth is that human interactions are messy, complicated, and confusing. And according to renowned psychologist Ed Tronick and paediatrician Claudia Gold, that is not only okay, but crucial to our social and emotional development. In The Power of Discord they show how working through the inevitable dissonance of human connection is the path to better relationships with romantic partners, family, friends, and colleagues. Dr. Tronick was one of the first researchers to show, via ‘The Still-Face Experiment’, that babies are profoundly affected by their parents’ emotions and behaviour. His work, which brought about a foundational shift in our understanding of human development, shows that our highly evolved sense of self makes us separate, yet our survival depends on connection. Working through the volley of mismatch and repair in everyday life helps us form deep, lasting, trusting relationships, resilience in times of stress and trauma, and a solid sense of self in the world. Drawing on Dr Tronick’s research and Dr Gold’s clinical experience, The Power of Discord is a refreshing and original look at our ability to relate to others and to ourselves.

A deeply textured dual biography and fascinating intellectual history that examines two of the greatest minds of European history—Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther—whose heated rivalry gave rise to two enduring, fundamental, and often colliding traditions of philosophical and religious thought. Erasmus of Rotterdam was the leading figure of the Northern Renaissance. At a time when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were revolutionizing Western art and culture, Erasmus was helping to transform Europe’s intellectual and religious life, developing a new design for living for a continent rebelling against the hierarchical constraints of the Roman Church. When in 1516 he came out with a revised edition of the New Testament based on the original Greek, he was hailed as the prophet of a new enlightened age. Today, however, Erasmus is largely forgotten, and the reason can be summed up in two words: Martin Luther. As a young friar in remote Wittenberg, Luther was initially a great admirer of Erasmus and his critique of the Catholic Church, but while Erasmus sought to reform that institution from within, Luther wanted a more radical transformation. Eventually, the differences between them flared into a bitter rivalry, with each trying to win over Europe to his vision. In Fatal Discord, Michael Massing seeks to restore Erasmus to his proper place in the Western tradition. The conflict between him and Luther, he argues, forms a fault line in Western thinking—the moment when two enduring schools of thought, Christian humanism and evangelical Christianity, took shape. A seasoned journalist who has reported from many countries, Massing here travels back to the early sixteenth century to recover a long-neglected chapter of Western intellectual life, in which the introduction of new ways of reading the Bible set loose social and cultural forces that helped shatter the millennial unity of Christendom and whose echoes can still be heard today. Massing concludes that Europe has adopted a form of Erasmian humanism while America has been shaped by Luther-inspired individualism.