Take your rightful place on the holistic health care team, with the goal of restoring vitality of body, mind, and spirit to people suffering from emotional illness! This book is designed to bring essential knowledge and skills to the religious professional who seeks to provide special ministry to the emotionally troubled. It provides a basic understanding of psychiatric illnesses, theory, and treatment modalities that is certain to enlarge the perspective of the pastoral worker. In addition to an essential overview of psychiatry in general, Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment: A Guide for Pastoral Counselors will help you to better serve people suffering from depression, anxiety disorders, chemical dependency, reality impairment, or personality disorders. The book's format is designed specifically to help pastors grasp the principles of intervention in each of these disorders. Each of its five concise clinical chapters follows a four-part format that covers the duties and responsibilities of the clergyman as part of the holistic health care team, consisting of: recognizing the disorder assessing its severity intervening in a crisis counseling in the recovery phase In their experience, the authors have observed that severe emotional or psychiatric illnesses often involve spiritual sickness as well. Spiritual sickness is a complex concept that may take many forms depending on the type of emotional illness it accompanies. Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment: A Guide for Pastoral Counselors shows you what spiritual symptoms to look for when assessing someone in your care. For example, did you know that: severe depressive illness could include the loss of faith, abandonment of hope, loss of a right relationship with God, or even self-hatred, guilt, despair, and self-annihilation a psychotic reaction marked by loss of contact with reality might involve abnormal self-importance, grandiosity, fear, or stubbornly mistaken perceptions of reality a problem with alcoholism might involve immoral behavior, irresponsible conduct, denial of the loss of control over liquor consumption, or abject guilt, shame, and self-hatred personality disorders may bring on profound disturbances in social relationships, self-centered anger, impulsiveness, dishonesty, impurity, or distrust of others people with anxiety disorders can lose their trust in God, develop obsessive fears and tensions, and become unable to turn things over to God's divine care In Mental Illness and Psychiatric Treatment: A Guide for Pastoral Counselors, you'll find the information you need to make effective judgments and assessments about the people seeking your help. The book provides you with fascinating case studies that highlight symptoms and illness patterns as well as treatment options and techniques for coordinating pastoral counseling with the mental health team. You'll learn to recognize the spiritual symptoms of diseasenegative, inappropriate, of self-defeating attitudes or behaviorsand to deal specifically with these manifestations of illness through pastoral intervention and counseling.

The shift from adolescence to adulthood, a recently identified stage of life called "emerging adulthood," covers an increasing span of years in today's culture (roughly ages 18-30) due to later marriages and extended education. During this prolonged stage of exploration and self-definition, many young adults drift away from the church.
Here two authors--both veteran teachers who are experienced in young adult and campus ministry--address this new and urgent field of study, offering a Christian perspective on what it means to be spiritually formed into adulthood. They provide a "practical theology" for emerging adult ministry and offer insight into the key developmental issues of this stage of life, including identity, intimacy and sexuality, morality, church involvement, spiritual formation, vocation, and mentoring. The book bridges the gap between academic and popular literature on emerging adulthood and offers concrete ways to facilitate spiritual formation among emerging adults.

John Stott's definitive and passionate plea to the church to listen both to God's Word and to his world (double listening)

An enlightening guide to bringing spirituality into the helping professions! This unique handbook will help you make the journey that will turn spirituality into the touchstone of your practice. For too long, spirituality has been a skeleton in the closet of many practitioners, but now there is a growing movement to integrate the vital beliefs of clients into the healing process. Spirituality in Pastoral Counseling and the Community Helping Professions addresses the core values of the movement, providing you with a step-by-step process you can follow to increase empathy and healing while building on the foundation of spirituality. Each chapter includes penetrating reflection questions to help you better understand your own spiritual perspective and a list of suggested resources to help you learn more. Spirituality in Pastoral Counseling and the Community Helping Professions investigates: the best tools for spiritual assessment how ethnic background influences spirituality the language of the sacred in daily life how people can develop greater empathy integrating spirituality into community the importance of ritual As author Dr. Charles J. Topper says: Spirituality is the integrating core element of human experience. Reading this book, both clients and care providers will learn to explore their own vibrant spirituality, a powerful innate source of strength and healing. Spirituality in Pastoral Counseling and the Community Helping Professions aims to make spirituality more accessible to everyone. Spirituality in Pastoral Counseling and the Community Helping Professions shows how you can take an active approach to integrating spirituality into your profession, helping the people around you see not just their problems but the connections between every facet of their lives. Complete with figures, assessment scales and surveys, and a thoughtful bibliography that points the way to further reading, this book is an important resource for professional growth and spiritual renewal.

Most Christians know they should be trying to tell their friends and family about Jesus. But in a post-Christendom world, personal evangelism is viewed negatively--it's offensive, inappropriate, and insensitive. Recent studies confirm that the majority of Christians rarely evangelize, worried they might offend their family or lose their friends. In How to Talk About Jesus (Without Being That Guy), author Sam Chan equips everyday Christians who are reluctant and nervous to tell their friends about Jesus with practical, tested ways of sharing their faith in the least awkward ways possible. Drawing from over two decades of experience as an evangelist, teacher, and pastor, Chan explains why personal evangelism feels so awkward today. And utilizing recent insights from communication theory, cross-cultural ministry, and apologetics, he helps you build confidence in sharing your faith, and teaches you how to evangelize your friends and family in socially appropriate ways.

Will You Be Complicit, Complacent, or Courageous? In a culture with an ever-narrowing definition of tolerance, Christians can no longer stay silent about the divide between the Bible's truth and the world's lies. From bestselling author Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer, No Reason to Hide examines the toxic roots behind the alarming symptoms of a nation in spiritual freefall-and why your faith must empower you to engage rather than hide. As you read, you'll be equipped to defend your biblical beliefs with confidence and compassion. You'll also identify how you can respond to the battleground issues of today, including identity-driven social justice ideologies that seek to divide rather than unite cultural attacks on the definitions of sex and gender that turn language into a war progressive pushes within the church that ultimately desecrate the Bible's teachings A call for believers to standing firm in today's oppressive world, No Reason to Hide is a rallying reminder that will ready Christians everywhere to have the courage to proclaim Scripture's truth to a culture in desperate need of what only God can offer.

Understand the roles of these three unique professions and how collaboration can make each more effective This is the first book to clarify the roles and interprofessional dynamics of these three professions and describe how they can best work together. Here you'll find theological perspectives on each profession, practice models of collaborative programs, and new resources to aid your professional growth. In addition, this book gives you a thorough historical overview of parish nursing and an introduction to health care chaplaincy as well as insightful analyses of the relationships of clergy and congregation to health care institutions. Parish Nurses, Health Care Chaplains, and Community Clergy: Navigating the Maze of Professional Relationships is a vital addition to your reference shelf. This unique book, written by experts in all three fields, provides: the necessary background to be an effective parish nurse, including information on spiritual formation, clinical pastoral education, and more instruction on starting a parish health ministry effective ways that the disciplines can work together in congregational health ministries to provide the best possible spiritual care successful practice models that your ministry can emulate an examination of the health care institution's role in forming the spiritual care team resources to use to increase your ministry's effectiveness Parish Nurses, Health Care Chaplains, and Community Clergy is a must for practitioners, educators, and students who will be entering these vital professions

When assessing the legacy of black intellectuals in the 20th century there has been a general tendency to overlook the impact of black religious leaders. In Black Religious Intellectuals, Professor Clarence Taylor sheds some much-needed light on the rich intellectual and political tradition that lies in the black religious community.
Taylor shows how black leaders were able to carve out a space for religion as part of a progressive political agenda. Examining leaders from diverse religious and political backgrounds, he reveals the complex and innovative ways that black religious notions were continually reworked and reconstructed to accommodate the communities they served.

Lesslie Newbigin, one of the twentieth century's most important church leaders, offered insights on the church in a pluralistic world that are arguably more relevant now than when first written. This volume presents his ecclesiology to a new generation. Michael Goheen clearly articulates Newbigin's missionary understanding of the church and places it in the context of Newbigin's core theological convictions. Suitable for students as well as church leaders, this book offers readers a better understanding of the mission of the church in the world today. Foreword by N. T. Wright.

Christianity Today 2020 Book Award (Award of Merit, Theology/Ethics) Outreach 2020 Recommended Resource of the Year (Theology and Biblical Studies) The question of what makes life worth living is more vital now than ever. In today's pluralistic, postsecular world, universal values are dismissed as mere matters of private opinion, and the question of what constitutes flourishing life--for ourselves, our neighbors, and the planet as a whole--is neglected in our universities, our churches, and our culture at large. Although we increasingly have technology to do almost anything, we have little sense of what is truly worth accomplishing. In this provocative new contribution to public theology, world-renowned theologian Miroslav Volf (named "America's New Public Intellectual" by Scot McKnight on his Jesus Creed blog) and Matthew Croasmun explain that the intellectual tools needed to rescue us from our present malaise and meet our new cultural challenge are the tools of theology. A renewal of theology is crucial to help us articulate compelling visions of the good life, find our way through the maze of contested questions of value, and answer the fundamental question of what makes life worth living.

This is a groundbreaking study of the relationship between Christianity and collective violence in late nineteenth century China. Using American Baptist and English Presbyterian examples in the Guangdong province, the book examines the scale of Chinese conversions, the creation of Christian villages and the power relations between Christians, non-Christians and between different Christian denominations.
The spread of Christianity needs to be understood in the context of intense violence within and between villages and lineages, and patterns of conversion often following the lines of existing communal divisions.
This book is based on a very comprehensive foundation of data and the Protestant missionary and Chinese archival materials are supplemented with fieldwork data that were collected in several Christian villages.

The Holy Mountain of Athos is a self governing monastic republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece. Standing on the shores of the Aegean Sea is one of the twenty ruling monasteries that comprise the republic, that of St Panteleimon, known in Greek as the Rossikon. It's building, fully restored in recent years, can accommodate up to 5,000 men, reflecting the scale of the settlement at its apogee in the nineteenth century and prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it has experienced a strong revival and is now one of the most numerous of the twenty. But the vast buildings that can be seen today are really only a reflection of the history of the past two centuries. Much less well known is the fact that the history of a Russian presence on Athos goes back more than one thousand years. This is the first comprehensive account of this in the English language. The author has been able to draw from previously inaccessible archival materials in gathering the wealth of information he shares in this work. The history of the community is not described in geographical isolation but shown as interacting with the much wider worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and the modern nation state of Greece, together with that of the Russian homeland whose political character is constantly evolving. There are shown to be three distinct phases in this history: From the tenth to the twelfth centuries when Russian Athonites inhabited the ancient Russian Lavra of the Mother of God, also known as Xylourgou. Then the six hundred years from the mid-twelth to the mid-eighteenth century when the ancient Monastery of St Panteleimon was the Russian house on Athos, more commonly referred to as Nagorny or Stary Rusik. Finally the most recent 250 years, that are naturally covered in greater depth thanks to the wider availability of sources. Amongst the themes explored in the book are ethnic relations, the Pan-Orthodox ideal, the role of money and political pressure, sanctity and heroism in adversity, and the importance of historical memory and precedent. The author seeks to arbitrate fairly between often strongly opposing ethnic viewpoints. It examines in detail the fluctuating fortunes of the monastic community of St Panteleimon during the past 250 years when its ethnic identity was frequently questioned. It is a history that has been blighted by Greek-Russian quarrels, mass deportation of dissenting brethren, troubles in the Caucasus, and even tangential implication in the present-day dispute between the Ecumenical and Moscow Patriarchates over Ukraine. This text will be invaluable to both academic historians and the general educated reader who does not possess specialist knowledge. It is complimented by a timeline, glossary, comprehensive bibliography, index, full colour illustrations and photographs.

Storytelling is a vital skill for everyone in ministry of any kind. Everything we are and everything we do revolves around the big story of God's love for us and how we respond to it. Tell It Together combines stories that have been written to read well aloud with tools for groups to share them effectively. The stories can be used on their own, to enhance a theme or Bible passage, or alongside other activities as the basis for clubs or creative worship gatherings and festivals.

Contemplative Youth Ministry is rooted in Mark Yaconelli's experience of co-directing the acclaimed Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project. Through this project, churches and youth ministers have explored contemplative prayer, discernment, spiritual direction, covenant community, spiritual practice and Sabbath-living as a way of resourcing ministries with youth. The results have been transformative, and this engaging book, richly illustrated with personal stories, provides refreshment and new ways of thinking for anyone who has grown weary or disillusioned with the vital tasks of working with and caring for young people.

'Shh, new vicar might be listening . . .' As the newly appointed Vicar of Helmsley, David was looking forward to working in this picturesque market town, set in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside. Admittedly the vicarage, which dated back to the twelfth century, was extremely cold and damp. And not all of his parishioners were impressed by his new-fangled ways. But with the help of the irrepressible Father Bert, a retired cleric and one-time Tail End Charlie, David set about winning over the townsfolk. There was Lord Feversham, the local landowner who at times bore an unnerving resemblance to Henry VIII; fiery Ted, a retired chef who had fought with the Polish Free Army; Frank the singing shepherd, still working as he approached eighty, and redoubtable countrywoman Eva. All had stories of hardship and sacrifice, friendship and love. Charming and moving, Shepherd of Another Flock is a must-read for fans of authors like Gervase Phinn, James Herriot and Amanda Owen.

In Suid-Afrika ken meer as 60% van kinders nie ’n pa nie. Hierdie gebrek aan ’n pa lei dikwels tot ’n gemis aan ’n gevoel van behoort.

Julian Jansen, joernalis van Rapport en oud-onderwyser, ondersoek hierdie fenomeen en hoe die probleem aangespreek kan word. Hy bespreek dit vanuit ’n praktiese én geestelike perspektief en betrek onlangse navorsing en geestelike en ander gemeenskapslede.

Julian verweef ook sy eie storie tussenin, en vra dan: hoekom het hy en sy broers nie skollies geword nie?

In this fresh look at finding balance between work and sabbath rest, Justin McRoberts leads readers on their journey from false self to true self, discovering that growth and maturity take root in the knowledge of their belovedness in Christ. In his two decades working as a full-time artist and spiritual guide, Justin McRoberts has experienced first-hand the tension between "The Hustle" and "Self Care." In recent years, that conversation has turned to argument as people have suggested that one is more important than the other. But Justin disagrees entirely with such a one-sided approach. Justin says, "My natural posture is not work, nor is my natural posture rest. My natural posture is belovedness, and both work and rest spring from my belovedness, and return me to it." In this book, he uses humorous and poignant stories to help readers discover the deep truths about us being laborers for/with Christ, empowered by the Spirit, as well as worshipers of God the Father. Readers will learn how Sabbath is a gift and a practice that frees us from the anxiety of proving ourselves They are loved and valued by God for who and whose they are—not for what they do Rest is not the absence of work; it is what gives work meaning We can love our world and the people in it through what we do We are not tools in God's tool belt, valued only for our gifts and talents. Nor are we ascetics called to abandon "daily life" to find God in the desert and just sit there. We are beloved by the One who holds all things together . . . including our need to work and our need to rest.