You have a passionate desire to take the church outside its four walls and make the love of Jesus practical, visible, and lived out in daily life. But how? How do you put into action what is stirring in your heart? Indispensable Church provides you and your church real-world, hands-on steps to create a revolution of service to your local community in the name of Christ. By exploring the life of Jesus and the strategic ways he modeled serving the people around him, pastor Chris Sonksen shows you how to put love into action in your neighborhood and your city. The step-by-step instructions, biblical challenges, and teaching resources will help you take love to the streets and make an impact right where you live.

Meticulously faithful to Bosch's great work, Stan Nussbaum offers readers a companion to bring into relief the major themes of this great classic in missionary history and theology. The book is a chapter-by-chapter introduction, complete with page references to Transforming Mission for every theme developed. It contains 25 figures and diagrams to help the reader see patterns and is written to make it easier to penetrate and grapple with the questions that define Christian mission in our age

In this warm and personal book the author looks at what Muslims believe and how this affects--and often doesn't affect--their behavior. Phil Parshall compares and contrasts Muslim and Christian views on the nature of God, sacred scriptures, worship, sin, and holiness.

This volume of essays contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the Jesuits employed emotions to "change hearts"-that is, convert or reform-both in Europe and in the overseas missions. The early modern Society of Jesus excited and channeled emotion through sacred oratory, Latin poetry, plays, operas, art, and architecture; it inflamed young men with holy desire to die for their faith in foreign lands; its missionaries initiated dialogue with and 'accommodated' to non-European cultural and emotional regimes. The early modern Jesuits conducted, in all senses of the word, much of the emotional energy of their times. As such, they provide a compelling focus for research into the links between rhetoric and emotion, performance and devotion, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

This book concerns the missionary philanthropic movement which burst onto the social scene in early nineteenth century in England, becoming a popular provincial movement which sought no less than national and global reformation. It central concerns are: the significance of the civilizing mission for the English middle class, from the domestic lives of individual families, through local and regional networks, to high political campaigns; the relationships between missionary men and women, and the importance of "domestic reform" within the movement; and the relationship between missions at home and overseas and their significance for changing understandings of class and cultural difference.

The root of the word 'mission' means 'sending'. All Christian mission has its fountainhead in the God revealed in Scripture, who sent his Son for us, sends his Spirit to us, and summons all people to himself. The privilege and responsibility of his church, sent into all the world, is to testify by his words and deeds to Jesus Christ, God's unique son, crucified, risen and ascended. The East-West partnership in missiological exploration expounds a variety of Old and New Testament texts, and examines a wide range of issues. The authors' desire is that Jesus Christ might be glorified more and more in the church and in the world; their eager expectation is that one day the whole creation will find its consummation in him, and God will be all and in all.

In the sixteenth century Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries attempted to convert the native populations of central Mexico. The native peoples generally viewed the new religion in terms very different from that of the missionaries. As conflict broke out after 1550 as Spaniards invaded the Chichimeca frontier (the frontier between sedentary and nomadic natives), the missionaries faced new challenges on both sides of the frontier. Some sedentary natives resisted evangelization, and the missionaries saw themselves in a war against Satan and his minions. The Augustinians assumed a pivotal role in the evangelization campaign on both sides of the Chichimeca frontier, and employed different methods in the effort to convince the natives to embrace the new faith and to defeat Satan's designs. They used graphic visual aids and the threat of an eternity of suffering in hell to bring recalcitrant natives, such as the Otomi of the Mezquital Valley, into the fold.

While atheists and religious liberals purport themselves to be enlightened intellectuals, what we find, upon deeper exploration, is that their "intellectualism" is simply a facade. Conversely, many believers are unable to defend their faith and shrink back when confronted with tough questions, particularly those concerning Jesus being the only way to Heaven. Whether out of fear, lack of knowledge, or a spirit of compromise, the ability to express the idea of one true Holy Book, and one way true way to Heaven, seems to escape far too many Christians. Common Sense Apologetics will inspire Christians to drop this spirit of timidity, while gaining confidence and loving boldness when sharing the faith. Foundational, is the fact that God has not called Christians to believe what is not believable nor defend what is indefensible. The evidence for God's existence and the truth of His Word is abundant and accessible. Christians have Biblical directives to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and lovingly contend for the faith when it is perverted from within and attacked from without. This book is uniquely constructed to present a practical approach to learning why the Christian faith is true, and a better method for defending that truth.

What is the value of medical research? With contributions from anthropologists, sociologists and activists, this approach brings into focus the forms of value - social, epistemic, and economic - that are involved in medical research practices and how these values intersect with everyday living. Though their work covers wide empirical ground -from HIV trials in Kenya and drug donation programs in Tanzania to industry-academic collaborations in the British National Health Service - the authors share a commitment to understanding the practices of medical research as embedded in both local social worlds and global markets. Their collective concern is to rethink the conventional ethical demarcations betwweenpaid and unpaid research services in light of the social and material organisation of medical research practices. . Rather than warn against economic incursions into medical knowledge and health practice, or, alternatively, the reduction of local experience to the standards of bioethics, we hope to illuminate the array of practices, knowledges, and techniques through which the value of medical research is brought into being. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Cultural Economy.

Thierry Meynard and Dawei Pan offer a highly detailed annotated translation of one of the major works of Giulio Aleni (1582 Brescia-1649 Yanping), a Jesuit missionary in China. Referred to by his followers as "Confucius from the West", Aleni made his presence felt in the early modern encounter between China and Europe. The two translators outline the complexity of the intellectual challenges that Aleni faced and the extensive conceptual resources on which he built up a fine-grained framework with the aim of bridging the Chinese and Christian spiritual traditions.

There is nothing traditional about the typical family of the twenty-first century, and so it follows that ministering to today's families presents an assortment of new challenges. Rainey believes that the resources needed by the church to confront and combat family problems do exist, and "Ministering to Twenty-First Century Families" is a user-friendly guide to combating the destruction of the family unit. Offering practical solutions and encouraging action, Rainey calls for a "roll-up-your-sleeves" approach to healing weary families.

Missa Est! is a constructive work in ecclesiology, and particularly the relationship between liturgy and mission in the churchs life. It advances a notion of the church in which liturgy and mission are both given their due without opposing them to each other, subordinating one to the other, or collapsing them into each other. Mission and liturgy are intrinsically related to each other, for the churchs liturgical rites disclose and enact the churchs identity as a missionary community.