16th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year Is your church wrestling with LGBT questions from membership to marriage? Travis Collins has been there. A pastor who has walked congregations through the complex issues surrounding gay Christians, he knows firsthand the confusion and hurt that often follow. He has also seen churches have these conversations with grace and understanding. In this practical resource, readers will gain insight into relevant biblical passages and, while the author is working from a traditional perspective, he offers insights from interpreters on both sides of the debate. They will consider the implications of their convictions for ministry practice, relationships, church policy, and more. They will hear testimonies from gay friends and family members about their experiences in the church. Collins calls readers to both grace and truth, with humility. What Does It Mean to Be Welcoming? considers how we might welcome everyone into the church while calling for all to be transformed.

We can see the injustice and inequality in our lives and in the world. We are ready to rise up. But how, exactly, do we do this? How does one reconcile? What we need is a clear sense of direction. Based on her extensive consulting experience with churches, colleges and organizations, Rev. Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil has created a roadmap to show us the way. She guides us through the common topics of discussion and past the bumpy social terrain and political boundaries that will arise. In this revised and expanded edition, McNeil has updated her signature roadmap to incorporate insights from her more recent work. Roadmap to Reconciliation 2.0 includes a new preface and a new chapter on restoration, which address the high costs for people of color who work in reconciliation and their need for continual renewal. With reflection questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, this book is ideal to read together with your church or organization. If you are ready to take the next step into unity, wholeness and justice, then this is the book for you.

Academy of Parish Clergy Top Ten List Immigration is one of the most complicated issues of our time. Voices on all sides argue strongly for action and change. Christians find themselves torn between the desire to uphold laws and the call to minister to the vulnerable. In this book World Relief immigration experts Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang move beyond the rhetoric to offer a Christian response to immigration. They put a human face on the issue and tell stories of immigrants' experiences in and out of the system. With careful historical understanding and thoughtful policy analysis, they debunk myths and misconceptions about immigration and show the limitations of the current immigration system. Ultimately they point toward immigration reform that is compassionate, sensible, and just as they offer concrete ways for you and your church to welcome and minister to your immigrant neighbors. This revised edition includes new material on refugees and updates in light of changes in political realities.

God's purpose in calling us to lives of faithful stewardship and generosity isn't merely to sustain the church. Rather, the continued existence of the church is essential to sustain the powerful, transformative message of our faith. Lovett H. Weems Jr. and Ann A. Michel present the Bible's redeeming and transforming message of generosity, stewardship, and abundance in this comprehensive guide to Christian financial responsibility. The book provides practical advice to pastors and church leaders tasked with funding ministry and inspiring others toward responsible stewardship and greater generosity. It addresses church fundraising, stewardship campaigns, budgets, financing capital needs, endowments, and innovative approaches to economic sustainability. The book integrates the theological and practical dimensions of finance to empower congregational leaders to think critically about stewardship from a Christian perspective, help them use their personal and congregational possessions in the light of faith.

IVP Readers' Choice Award Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year The United States has more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. Mass incarceration has become a lucrative industry, and the criminal justice system is plagued with bias and unjust practices. And the church has unwittingly contributed to the problem. Dominique Gilliard explores the history and foundation of mass incarceration, examining Christianity's role in its evolution and expansion. He then shows how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles, offering creative solutions and highlighting innovative interventions. The church has the power to help transform our criminal justice system. Discover how you can participate in the restorative justice needed to bring authentic rehabilitation, lasting transformation, and healthy reintegration to this broken system.

"Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans" examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws, statutes that created a racial caste system in the American South. The book fills a gap in the scholarship on religion and race in the crucial decades between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records, Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century.

Churches remained a source of hope and a means of resistance against segregation, rather than a retreat from racial oppression. Especially in the decade after Reconstruction, churches offered the possibility of creating a common identity that privileged religious over racial status, a pattern that black church members hoped would transfer to a national American identity transcending racial differences. Religion thus becomes a lens to reconsider patterns for racial interaction throughout Southern society. By tracing the contours of that hopeful yet ultimately tragic journey, this book reveals the complex and mutually influential relationship between church and society in the American South, placing churches at the center of the nation's racial struggles.

F. D. Maurice was a leading nineteenth-century theologian famous for founding the movement called Christian Socialism. In the first major reassessment of Maurice's work for many years, Jeremy Morris argues that his importance above all lay in his thinking about the Christian Church, and about its social role. At a time when many people feared the collapse of Christianity and of social order, Maurice tried to show that Christians, despite their many differences, had a responsibility to the whole of society. By appreciating the source and strength of each other's convictions, they could learn to work together to restore the authority of the Christian faith. It was the Church of England's task in particular to bring its message of hope to the poor as well as the rich.

In the last four decades, desegregation has revolutionized almost every aspect of life in the United States: schools, businesses, government offices, even entertainment. But there is one area that remains largely untouched, and that is the church. Now comes a major new call for multiracial congregations in every possible setting--a call that is surprisingly controversial, even in the twenty-first century.
In United By Faith, a multiracial team of sociologists and a minister of the Church of God argue that multiracial Christian congregations offer a key to opening the still-locked door between the races in the United States. They note, however, that a belief persists--even in African-American and Latino churches--that racial segregation is an acceptable, even useful practice. The authors examine this question from biblical, historical, and theological perspectives to make their case. They explore the long history of interracialism in the church, with specific examples of multiracial congregations in the United States. They cite examples ranging from the abolitionist movement to an astonishing 1897 camp meeting in Alabama that brought together hundreds of whites and blacks literally into the same tent. Here, too, is a critical account of the theological arguments in favor of racial separation, as voiced in the African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native-American, and white contexts. The authors respond in detail, closing with a foundation for a theology suited to sustaining multiracial congregations over time.
Faith can be the basis for healing, but too often Christian faith has been a field for injury and division. In this important new book, readers will glimpse a way forward, a path toward once again making the church the basis for racial reconciliation in our still-splintered nation.

Ghillean Prance, Director of Kew Gardens, applies his knowledge as botanist and scientist and his deeply held Christian beliefs to the basic questions that surround our destruction of the earth and what we can do to change course.

A practical guidebook that helps readers align with God's desire to cross cultures and reach all nations.

Many Christians experience a stirring in their souls after short mission trips or global conferences, or as they interact with the increasingly diverse sets of people moving into their neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. But most don't know how to build intentional relationships with people from different backgrounds.

Across the Street and Around the World offers an answer to those Christians wondering, Is it possible to engage with people of other cultures right now, in my everyday world-or even beyond? Step by step, it helps them see how to prepare their souls, reshape their worldviews, and redesign their patterns of life to become the sort of people who can represent Jesus across cultural lines and take part in God's plans for their neighborhoods, their cities, and the world.

Popular calls to transform our current welfare system and supplant it with effective and inexpensive faith-based providers are gaining political support and engendering heated debate about the separation of church and state. Yet we lack concrete information from which to anticipate how such initiatives might actually work if adopted.

Despite the assumption that congregations can help many needy people in our society, it remains to be seen how extensive they wish their involvement to be, or if they have the necessary tools to become significant providers in the social service arena. Moreover, how will such practices, which will move faith-based organizations towards professionalization, ultimately affect the spirit of volunteerism now prevalent in America's religious institutions?

We lack sufficient knowledge about congregational life and its ability to play a key role in social service provision. The Invisible Caring Hand attempts to fill that void. Based on in-depth interviews with clergy and lay leaders in 251 congregations nationwide, it reveals the many ways in which congregations are already working, beneath the radar, to care for people in need. This ground-breaking volume will provide much-sought empirical data to social scientists, religious studies scholars, and those involved in the debates over the role of faith-based organizations in faith-based services, as well as to clergy and congregation members themselves.

In the contemporary United States, there are hundreds of thousands of Protestant churches whose members habitually carry their Bibles with them. These churches - often referred to as evangelical or fundamentalist - play a crucial role in shaping American society. In this book, David Watt draws on years of fieldwork to present an elegant reinterpretation of the way that conservative Protestants influence American politics and culture. At the heart of the book is a sympathetic, but far from uncritical, analysis of those forms of social power that are assumed to be natural among Bible-carrying Christians. While outsiders often presuppose that evangelical Christians take for granted the authority of certain institutions (among them the American state, corporations, ministers, men, and heterosexuals), Watt argues that the reality is far more complex. This is a concise and lively book that sheds new light on the way that Bible-carrying Christians influence the way that people in America think - and avoid thinking - about social power.

This collection of all new essays offers a close look at the connections between American Protestants and money in the Antebellum period. During the first decades of the new American nation, money was everywhere on the minds of the church leaders and many of their followers. Economic questions were important for religious self-definition, they figured regularly in preaching and pamphleteering, and they contributed greatly to perceptions of morality both public and private. In fact, money was always a religious question. For this reason, argue the authors of these essays, it is impossible to understand broader cultural developments of the period - including political developments - without considering religion and economics together. Taken together, the essays provide essential background to an issue that continues to loom large and generate controversy in the Protestant community today.

Anthropology and Christian Theology have traditionally interpreted religion in quite different ways and have often been thought of as hostile to one another. In fact, a fundamental concern for human experience lies at the heart of both disciplines. This innovative book takes a new look at key anthropological and theological themes, and explores the intricacies of their interplay throughout history and in the present. Sacrifice, embodiment, ritual, incarnation, symbolism, gift and power are all related in ways that shed new light on religious behaviour and belief. Detailed analysis of fundamental Christian rites shows how they help generate emotional meaning and inspire philosophical ideas, and demonstrates how the body serves as a vehicle for religious beliefs.
Through an examination of these issues and much more, Davies reveals how religious rituals help people to become secure in their sense of identity. This accessible foray into new territory is essential reading for anthropologists, theologians, or anyone interested in religion who is seeking new interpretations of familiar themes.

Anthropology and Christian Theology have traditionally interpreted religion in quite different ways and have often been thought of as hostile to one another. In fact, a fundamental concern for human experience lies at the heart of both disciplines. This innovative book takes a new look at key anthropological and theological themes, and explores the intricacies of their interplay throughout history and in the present. Sacrifice, embodiment, ritual, incarnation, symbolism, gift and power are all related in ways that shed new light on religious behaviour and belief. Detailed analysis of fundamental Christian rites shows how they help generate emotional meaning and inspire philosophical ideas, and demonstrates how the body serves as a vehicle for religious beliefs.
Through an examination of these issues and much more, Davies reveals how religious rituals help people to become secure in their sense of identity. This accessible foray into new territory is essential reading for anthropologists, theologians, or anyone interested in religion who is seeking new interpretations of familiar themes.

A personal journey of a priest's understanding of his Whiteness widens into an invitation to wrestle with larger cultural issues of race and belonging With humor, and a sharp, easily-readable style, Peter Jarrett-Schell delves deeply into how Whiteness has shaped his life. By telling his story, he challenges readers to personally consider the role of race in their own lives. In recent years, white institutions, congregations, and individuals have all begun to wrestle with their racial legacy. But these reflections often get lost abstracting ideas of "white privilege," "white fragility," "structural racism," and the like, until they become nothing more than jargon. This book challenges its readers to look closely at how these concepts show up in their everyday lives. By examining how Whiteness has distorted his own perceptions, relationships, and sense of self, Jarrett-Schell argues for the personal stakes that white people have in dismantling racism, and offers the creative possibilities that emerge when we begin to do the work.

Addiction to pornography has exploded to epidemic proportions, infiltrating churches and holding our pastors, friends, and family members prisoner. But no one not even the church is talking about this dangerous and destructive addiction. The Dirty Little Secret follows Pastor Craig Gross as he breaks the silence and begins his ministry XXXchurch.com, a website devoted to fighting pornography. As he meets people in the industry and those addicted to porn, Craig exposes the very real, human face of pornography and the destructive physical, emotional, and spiritual toll it takes. The Dirty Little Secret plainly reveals the addictive lure of pornography, explores the pain and brokenness it causes, and challenges us as individuals and as the church to talk about and openly fight pornography. Don t be tempted to keep this secret any longer. If this book won't make you roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, then you need to check your pulse. Skip Mathews, president, Integrity Online"

This is not your typical birds-and-the bees discussion. Inside this book is an exploration of the real questions you have about sex and your sexuality-all the ones you're too afraid to ask out loud (especially to your parents. Shudder.). Drawn from actual questions and with totally honest answers about what is and isn't okay to look at, think about, and do, this book breaks down what God really has to say about keeping your clothes on. Let's face it, the sex talk you got and the messages you hear at church aren't always that helpful when it comes to what is really going through your mind (or bothering you elsewhere) in real life. And asking those questions is not exactly easy when you want a real answer instead of, "You'll go blind." But in these pages, no topic is off-limits, and the answers you'll see are a real discussion of what you want to know (and exactly what the Bible does and does not say on the topic), or even what it means if you've already experimented. From pre-marital sex to masturbation to the temptations of porn and what it means to be a technical virgin-and questions about homosexuality-Questions You Can't Ask Your Mama About Sex is a go-to handbook for the things you need to know but don't want to ask out loud. Questions You Can't Ask Your Mama About Sex: comes from authors with decades of experience on the topics of relationships and sex, who have been featured on The TODAY Show, Good Morning America, The Daily Show, Anderson Cooper 360, as well as in The New York Times and Buzzfeed uses a straight-forward approach to answer over 50 questions teens have asked goes beyond "how far is too far?" to look at the nuances and real things you wonder about and face-done though straight-forward and honest discussion

Answers to real-life, nitty-gritty private questions Christians are asking about sex Louis and Melissa McBurney offer frank, humorous, sensitive, and biblically grounded answers to the thousands of sex questions readers have sent to the editors of Marriage Partnership, a publication of Christianity Today International. The authors deal with sensitive issues that need to be talked about, but within a solid spiritual, psychological, and therapeutic context. This book is perfect for newlyweds, newlyweds of 25 years, or for parents to give their engaged son or daughter who is soon to be married. The McBurney s give frank, honest answers to real, honest questions that many Christians have always wanted to ask, but were too embarrassed or afraid. The author s authentic, unblushing, yet thoroughly Christian perspective is presented in a two-column format. Their humor, husband-wife dialogue, and to-the-point answers provide an ideal reference for all the stages of married sex."

Andre Trocme of Le Chambon is famous for his role in saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis during World War II. But his bold deeds did not spring from a void. They were rooted in his understanding of Jesus' way of nonviolence - an understanding that gave him the remarkable insights contained in this long out-of-print classic. In this book, you'll encounter a Jesus you may have never met before - a Jesus who not only calls for spiritual transformation, but for practical changes that answer the most perplexing political, economic, and social problems of our time.

During the late second and early third centuries C.E. the resurrection became a central question for intellectual commentary, with increasingly tense divisions between those who interpreted the resurrection as a bodily experience and those who did not. The relationship between the resurrected person and their mortal flesh was also a key point of discussion, especially in regards to sexual desires, body parts, and practices. Early Christians struggled to articulate how and why these bodily features related to the imagined resurrected self. The problems posed by the resurrection thus provoked theological analysis of the mortal body, sexual desire and gender. Resurrecting Parts is the first study to examine the place of gender and sexuality in early Christian debates on the nature of resurrection, investigating how the resurrected body has been interpreted by writers of this period in order to address the nature of sexuality and sexual difference. In particular, Petrey considers the instability of early Christian attempts to separate maleness and femaleness. Bodily parts commonly signified sexual difference, yet it was widely thought that future resurrected bodies would not experience desire or reproduction. In the absence of sexuality, this insistence on difference became difficult to maintain. To achieve a common, shared identity and status for the resurrected body that nevertheless preserved sexual difference, treatises on the resurrection found it necessary to explain how and in what way these parts would be transformed in the resurrection, shedding all associations with sexual desires, acts, and reproduction. Exploring a range of early Christian sources, from the Greek and Latin fathers to the authors of the Nag Hammadi writings, Resurrecting Parts is a fascinating resource for scholars interested in gender and sexuality in classical antiquity, early Christianity, asceticism, and, of course, the resurrection and t

In the debate about homosexuality one thing that seems clear - on an issue renowned for lack of clarity and controversy - is that two fundamentally incompatible positions continue to hold tenaciously. One asserts that homosexual acts are legitimate, the other that they are not. Concentration on the legitimacy of sexual expression rather than on underlying needs has made the debate about homosexuality incapable of resolution. Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic presents a psychoanalytic interpretation that has shifted the focus of the debate from symptoms to root causes. The crux of Elizabeth Moberly's argument is that 'the homosexual condition involves legitimate developmental needs, the fulfilment of which has been blocked by an underlying ambivalence to members of the same sex'. But while the argument is certainly controversial, it involves a much-needed restatement of the traditional Christian distinction between the homosexual condition and its expression in homosexual activity. Formerly published as a James Clarke and Co Ltd title.