How many times have you poured your heart and soul into something for your youth ministry—only to have it fall flat, leaving not much more than a fond memory in the minds of students, let alone amazing life-change in their hearts? You’re not alone. Far too often, we build plans and programs and then stop to ask God to bless them. We all want a transformational student ministry, but we need to remember that God has to be the one doing the transformations in the lives of our students. Based on the principles found in the book of Acts, Moving Forward by Looking Back will help you look back at how God transformed lives through the early church, and look forward at how those principles can be applied to your youth ministry today. As you reflect on the book of Acts, you’ll explore how your youth ministry can implement the principles of: • Adoration—engaging students with God • Community—engaging students with God’s people • Truth—engaging students with God’s Word • Service—engaging students with God’s world With practical ideas that are easy to apply in any ministry context, whether you’re a rookie or a veteran, a professional or a volunteer youth worker, this book is an invaluable resource for any youth ministry that wants to see its students transformed by God.

These creative works and brief essays by accomplished immigrant writers offer fresh perspectives, images, and insights that richly enhance our cultural imagination. Short creative works in a variety of genres-poetry, fiction, drama, and screenplay-address issues of truth, secrecy, love, loss, connections, and community. The contributors to this volume come from Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Syria, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Ethiopia, Germany, China, Mexico, Philippines, and Nepal.

This book, the first full critical overview of the film avant-garde, ushers in a new approach—and in the process creates its own subject. While many books have studied particular aspects of the European film avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, Moving Forward, Looking Back provides a much-needed summary of the theory and practice of the movement, while also emphasizing aspects of the period that have been overlooked. Arguing that a European perspective is the only way to understand the transnational movement, the book also pioneers a new approach to the alternative cinema network that sustained the avant-garde, paying particular attention to the emergence of film culture as visible in screening clubs, film festivals, and archives. It will be essential to anyone interested in the influential movement and the film culture it created.

How do Ghanaian Pentecostals resolve the contradictions of their own faith while remaining faithful to their religious identity? Bringing together the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of ethics, Girish Daswani’s Looking Back, Moving Forward investigates the compromises with the past that members of Ghana’s Church of Pentecost make in order to remain committed Christians. Even as church members embrace the break with the past that comes from being “born-again,” many are less concerned with the boundaries of Christian practice than with interpersonal questions – the continuity of suffering after conversion, the causes of unhealthy relationships, the changes brought about by migration – and how to deal with them. By paying ethnographic attention to the embodied practices, interpersonal relationships, and moments of self-reflection in the lives of members of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana and amongst the Ghanaian diaspora in London, Looking Back, Moving Forward explores ethical practice as it emerges out of the questions that church members and other Ghanaian Pentecostals ask themselves.

Eight contributions written by professors of political science, government, and politics as well as researchers and program directors for environmental change, energy, and security projects provide insight into the process of environmental peacemaking, based on their experiences in a variety of international regions. An initial chapter makes a case for the process; successive chapters address the Baltic, South Asia, the Aral Sea basin, southern Africa, the Caspian Sea, and the US-Mexican border. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Chapter after chapter, verse after verse, the Bible shows a loving heavenly Father lavishing His grace on us through His son. In her book, The Grace Impact, author Nancy Kay Grace gives us a closer glimpse of God's character. In all things at all times, His grace covers every detail of life, not just the good things, but the difficult, sad and complicated things. That knowledge can give us the ability to walk confidently through life knowing God is with us every step of the way.