Through a series of remarkable events, Sarah de Carvalho left her glittering career in film promotion and TV production to join a missionary organization in Brazil. There she met children from the age of seven living on the streets, taking drugs, stealing to survive, and vulnerable to prostitution and gang warfare. This is the remarkable true story of a life transformed. It tells of the incredible work that Sarah founded in the Happy Child Mission. It is a story of immense faith, suffering, and love. The children whose stories are revealed in this exceptional book will change the heart of every reader. This new fully updated edition of "The Street Children of Brazil" brings the story up to date. 12 years on, Sarah celebrates the anniversary of the founding of Happy Child, revisits some of the first children she worked with, and reflects on all that God has done.

Small new Christian communities created by pioneer ministers, both lay and ordained, are popping up everywhere - on housing estates, in community centres, schools, cafes, among different age groups and in numerous other contexts beyond the local church. This practical book is for all who are engaged in this form of ministry and it begins by identifying some basic principles from a wide variety of creative examples of pioneer ministry. Illustrated with actual examples throughout, it explores * how to 'listen' to the physical, social and spiritual environment of a local context * how to discern a community's needs and the appropriate missional response * how to build a creative team * the art of the start - how to begin well * how to build relationships and create community by acts of authentic love * how to become and stay Jesus-centred * how to live and tell the gospel in meaningful ways * how to grow disciples * how to stay fresh (and avoid rotas!)

A Modern Manual for Sharing a Relevant, Vibrant, Enduring Faith

In the face of mounting obstacles, parents and educators find themselves increasingly challenged by the task of leading people toward lives of faith. Now Thomas Groome, a world-renowned authority on religious education, has created a contemporary, holistic approach to teaching Christian beliefs and values that offers real, effective solutions for today's parents and teachers. His guide to religious education--which aims to "bring life to Faith and Faith to life"--is a hopeful road map for reenergizing the faith community and family from the bottom up.

The current religious climate poses unique challenges to those engaged in mission. Thus the authors of this book propose a new, yet very biblical, model for interacting with people of other faiths. They term this model giftive mission, as it is based on the metaphor of free gift. We bear the greatest gift possible--the gospel message. Adopting this perspective not only has the potential for greater missionary success but also enables us to more closely imitate God's gracious activity in the world. The core of the book explores eleven practices that characterize giftive mission. Each practice is illustrated through the story of a figure from mission history who embodied that practice. Further discussion shows how to incorporate these practices in specific mission settings.

2020 Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year ("Also Recommended," Cross-Cultural and Missional) In our globalized world, ideas are constantly being exchanged between people of different cultural backgrounds. But educators often struggle to adapt to the contexts of diverse learners. Some focus so much on content delivery that they overlook crosscultural barriers to effective teaching. Educator and missiologist James Plueddemann offers field-tested insights for teaching across cultural differences. He unpacks how different cultural dynamics may inhibit learning and offers a framework for integrating conceptual ideas into practical experience. He provides a model of teaching as pilgrimage, where the aim is not merely the mastery of information but the use of knowledge to foster the development of the pilgrim learner. Plueddemann's crosscultural experience shows how teachers can make connections between content and context, bridging truth and life. Those who teach in educational institutions, mission organizations, churches, and other ministries will find insights here for transformational crosscultural learning.

The Gallup Poll reports that 1 in 25 people has had a near-death experience. Their heart stopped beating, their brain waves ceased, yet they claim they were more alive than ever. With improved medical resuscitation, more and more verifiable evidence indicates that life doesn't end with our last breath--it's just beginning. Drawing out the similarities found by studying over 1,000 accounts of near-death experiences around the globe, John Burke unfolds a compelling and comforting vision of a world where - we are free from pain - we feel fully known and accepted - we are greeted by loved ones - we encounter indescribable beauty - we discover a God of unconditional love If you've lost a loved one, if you've received a frightening diagnosis, or if you're just curious about what happens after death, this concise look at the life to come will bring you hope and reassurance. Content derived from the New York Times bestseller Imagine Heaven.

Picturing Pity is the first full length monograph on missionary photography. Empirically, it is based on an in-depth analysis of the published photographs taken by Norwegian evangelical missionaries in Northern Cameroon from the early nineteen twenties, at the beginning of their activities in this region, and until today. Being part of a large international movement, Norway sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country in Europe. Marianne Gullestad's main contention is that the need to continuously justify their activities to donors in Europe has led to the creation and maintenance of specific ways of portraying Africans. The missionary visual rhetoric is both based on earlier visualizations and has over time established its own conventions which can now also be traced within secular fields of activity such as international development agencies, foreign policy, human relief organizations and the mass media. Picturing Pity takes part in the present "pictorial turn" in academic teaching and research, constituting visual images as an exciting site of conversation across disciplinary lines.

Sent to Heal traces the development of medical missions, one of the most intriguing, complex, and controversial phenomena in the history of the encounter of Western and Non-Western cultures promoted by Christianity. This groundbreaking study surveys the missions from their earliest beginnings in the fifteenth century until the turn of the twentieth century. Sent to Heal is a defining reference work on the philosophical, theological, missiological, and scientific aspects of medical missions. An extensive bibliography is included.

This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America-that of the Jesuit missions to the Guarani Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. The book demonstrates conclusively that the Guarani were as instrumental in determining their destinies as were the Catholic Church and Spanish bureaucrats. They were neither passive victims of Spanish colonialism nor innocent "children" of the jungle, but important actors who shaped fundamentally the history of the Rio de la Plata region. The Guarani responded to European contact according to the dynamics of their own culture, their individual interests and experiences, and the changing political, economic, and social realities of the late Bourbon period.

This new addition to a highly acclaimed series portrays the sweep of missions history, revealing how God has fulfilled his promise to bless all the nations. Two leading missionary scholars and experienced professors help readers understand how missions began, how missions developed, and where missions is going. The authors cover all of missions history and provide practical application of history's lessons. Maps, tables, box inserts, sidebars, and discussion questions add to the book's usefulness in the classroom.

Why doesn't God answer my prayers? If God is so powerful, why does evil exist? And if He is so good, why do we suffer?

Nonbelievers, and even Christians, are often troubled by questions about suffering, doubt, failure, and unanswered prayer. Yet careful, compassionate answers are hard to find, in part because evangelicals have not taken the life of the mind seriously enough. The intellectual currents of our day are just too strong for simplistic responses.

In Hard Questions, Real Answers, William Lane Craig doesn't offer trite phrases or pat answers-he offers honest insights gained from a life of study and ministry. Readers in the midst of doubt and confusion will find real answers to these perplexing questions and learn to stand on the only sure foundation for hope-God Himself. This expanded new edition includes chapters on abortion and homosexuality to help readers know how to think about these volatile social issues.

Years ago, the author had a startling realization. Theologians and pastors have long taught on the glory of God and its central importance in the Bible. However, because he was living in East Asia, it also dawned on the author that this sort of talk about God's glory, praising Him, and magnifying His name was simply another way of talking about honor and shame. When the author looked at most theology and ministry-related books, he found that honor and shame seemed to be treated differently. Anthropologists talked about honor-shame, but theologians largely focused more on legal metaphors. The author could see both themes in Scripture but couldn't find help as to how to bring them together. This study was developed in order to address this gap and bring those themes together. Sign up for the WCIU Press newsletter to be notified about new books from this author and more http: //eepurl.com/rB15L