Discover new ways of connecting with God by understanding how he uniquely created you to worship him. The Sacred Pathways video study will help you learn: How you naturally express yourself in your relationship with God How to develop new ways of drawing near to him Key biblical figures who share your spiritual temperament How to understand others who connect with the Creator differently As believers in Christ, many of us today fall into the trap of thinking we have to approach God in a certain way. But our Creator made us all unique, and he designed us to connect with him in our own ways. For some, this might look like quiet contemplation. Others express praise through caregiving or theological discussions. It's important to discover the particular pathway that will best help you to experience God's presence. Bestselling author and speaker Gary Thomas reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments to give you insight into how you naturally worship and how your personal walk with God might look different from those around you. Unlike the Enneagram and other personality assessment tools, Sacred Pathways gives you tools to investigate how you naturally relate to God. You will discover the strengths and impulses in your devotional approach so that you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into scripted methods of worship and praise. There is one thing that each of us as Christians can do that nobody else can--give our personal love and affection to God. This Study Guide includes: Discussion questions, reflection questions, and a personal assessment test to discover your pathway Personal Bible study for between sessions A guide with best practices for leading groups Sessions include: The Journey of the Soul - Introduction to the Pathways Pathways of Wonder - the Naturalist, Sensate, and Traditionalist Pathways of Contemplation - the Intellectual, Ascetic, and Contemplative Pathways of Action - the Caregiver, Activist, and Enthusiast Tending the Garden of the Soul - How the Pathways Apply to Your Life Designed for use with the Sacred Pathways Video Study available on DVD or streaming video, sold separately.

Jesus Calling® for Christmas is a heartwarming compilation of devotions from Sarah Young's bestselling brand. With 50 seasonally themed selections as well as high design and exquisite imagery that evokes the season, Jesus Calling® for Christmas makes a stunning addition to the Jesus Calling family of books.

Readers will enjoy devotions with select Scriptures as well as the Christmas story, Old Testament prophecies about the birth of Jesus, and lovely images with overlaid script. Whether a self-purchase to enhance readers' observation of Advent and the birth of the Christ child or a natural gift for friends and loved ones in the biggest shopping season of the year, Jesus Calling® for Christmas will be a holiday favorite for years to come.

This is the second 'book of bits' for worship produced by the Wild Goose Worship Group. Its predecessor, Cloth For the Cradle, was received with great enthusiasm by clergy and laity alike. This book traces Jesus' road to the cross through Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Its prime purpose is to resource worship that enables people to sense the hope, apprehension and joy of Easter as felt by Jesus' friends. The range and diversity offers a unique source of elements for lay and clergy worship planners and enablers. All of the material has been used in celebrations and services of public worship, but little has been previously published.

Ask almost any priest what his or her biggest headache is and the answer is likely to be 'coming up with ideas for including children in worship'. Here is the answer to those prayers - a whole year's worth of activities and ideas complete with artwork and visual aids. These sixty outlines have been developed and used in an Anglican parish church over the last eight years by a professional educationalist, artist and experienced children's church leader. The worship outlines include simple children's liturgies and a complete lesson or story plan that harmonizes with what the adults are doing in church on the same day. Through fun ideas, children encounter a real aspect of the Christian faith focused on a theme to be found in the Gospel of the day. Each outline includes a variety of options which make them workable with small and large groups of children or single groups of mixed ages.Illustrated throughout, the text and artwork appears on the accompanying CD Rom in full colour for downloading and printing or copying.

This sequel to "Baptism, the New Testament and the Church" (JSNT Supplements 171) brings together work by J. Ramsey Michaels, Joel Green, Howard Marshall, Bruce Chilton, Craig Evans and the editors, as well as several others, and deals with aspects of baptism from the New Testament and beyond The first section covers baptism in the New Testament, including the meaning of the word 'baptize', the baptism of John, Paul's own baptism and his theology of it, and baptisms in John 13, Acts and Hebrews. The second section deals with baptism in the Early Church, including essays on Jesus's blessing of th children, and baptism in the Epistle of Barnabas and in Gregory of Nyssa. The third section addresses baptism in contemporary theology, embracing ecumenical perspectives, baptism as a trinitarian event, and baptism as memorial, as m1iracle and as falling into and out of power.Nyssa . The third section addresses baptism in contemporary theology, embracing ecumenical perspectives, baptism as a trinitarian event, and baptism as memorial, as miracle and as falling into and out of power.

This is the third edition of this popular guide book to the biblical sites in both Israel and Jordan. It has been revised and rewritten, with new pictures, illustrations, maps, and plans. The Pilgrim Books team has conducted or accompanied more than forty pilgrimage groups to the Holy Land and have produced a book that is concise and informative. It contains a mine of practical information on both countries and is profusely illustrated, so that it becomes a colorful souvenir, the stimulant to a host of happy memories for years after your return.

When over 900 followers of the People's Temple religious movement committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired People's Temple members. ""Hearing the Voices of Jonestown"" restores the individual voices that have been erased, so that we can better understand what was created - and destroyed - at Jonestown, and why. Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Mary McCormick Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. She provides evidence that shows many of these women voiced their discontent with the actions of the People's Temple in the months right before the mass suicide. The book puts human faces on the events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions as Maaga attempts to reconcile how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends.

Outreach Resource of the Year The Gospel Coalition Book Award What does it mean to be an analog church in a digital age? In recent decades the digital world has taken over our society at nearly every level, and the church has increasingly followed suit-often in ways we're not fully aware of. But as even the culture at large begins to reckon with the limits of a digital world, it's time for the church to take stock. Are online churches, video venues, and brighter lights truly the future? What about the digital age's effect on discipleship, community, and the Bible? As a pastor in Silicon Valley, Jay Kim has experienced the digital church in all its splendor. In Analog Church, he grapples with the ramifications of a digital church, from our worship and experience of Christian community to the way we engage Scripture and sacrament. Could it be that in our efforts to stay relevant in our digital age, we've begun to give away the very thing that our age most desperately needs: transcendence? Could it be that the best way to reach new generations is in fact found in a more timeless path? Could it be that at its heart, the church has really been analog all along?

Walking the Stations of the Cross, the Christian faithful re-create the Passion, following the sorrowful path of Jesus Christ from condemnation to crucifixion. While this devotion, now so popular in the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations, first emerged in Jerusalem and began spreading through Western Europe in the fourteenth century, it did not assume its current form, and earn the Church's formal recognition, until almost three centuries later. It was at this time, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, that a Franciscan friar in colonial Mexico translated a devotional guide to the Stations of the Cross into the native Nahuatl. This little handbook, Fray Agustin de Vetancurt's Via crucis en mexicano, proved immensely popular, going through two editions, but survives today only in a copy made by a native scribe from Central Mexico. Reproduced here in Nahuatl and English, Vetancurt's handbook offers unique insight into the history, the practice, and the meaning of the Stations of the Cross in the New World and the Old. With the Via crucis en mexicano as a starting point, John F. Schwaller explores the history of the development and spread of the Stations of the Cross, placing the devotion in the context of the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque, the two trends that exalted this type of religious expression. He describes how the devotion, exported to New Spain in the sixteenth century, was embraced by Spanish and natives alike. For the native Americans, Schwaller suggests, the Via crucis resonated because of its performative aspects, reminiscent of rituals and observances from before the arrival of the Spanish. And for missionaries, the devotion offered a means of deepening the faith of the newly converted. In Schwaller's deft analysis-which extends from the origins of the devotion, to the processions and public rituals of the Mexica (Aztecs), to the text and illustrations of the Vetancurt manuscript-the Via crucis en mexicano opens a window on the practice and significance of the Stations of the Cross-and of private devotions generally-in Mexico, Hispanic America, and around the world.

An updated and revised version of a book that has impacted thousands of churches: Are you tired of how consumerism has stolen the soul of Christmas? This year, take a stand! Join the groundswell of Christ-followers who are choosing to make Christmas what it should be-a joyous celebration of Jesus' birth that enriches our hearts and the world around us, not a retail circus that depletes our pocketbooks and defeats our spirits. Advent Conspiracy shows you how to substitute consumption with compassion by practicing four simple but powerful, countercultural concepts: Worship Fully-because Christmas begins and ends with Jesus. Spend Less-and free your resources for things that truly matter. Give More-of your presence: your hands, your words, your time, your heart. Love All-the poor, the forgotten, the marginalized, and the sick in ways that make a difference. Find out how to have a Christmas worth remembering, not dreading. Christmas can still change the world when you, like Jesus, give what matters most-your presence. This updated and revised version, with some all-new content, will share stories of the impact this movement has made around the globe as well as giving individuals and churches even better, more practical help in planning the kind of Christmas that truly can change the world. New introduction, new chapter and changes throughout.

When Christine Morgan got Richard Coles, Kate Bottley and Giles Fraser together in a studio, all she had to do was plug them in and let them go. The dynamic between the three meant there were moments of real connection and poignancy alongside the laughter: 'I'm exaggerating for comic effect,' Kate announced after one particularly outrageous anecdote, 'It's one of the reasons we're here.' Each realized in the course of conversation that they favoured one of the three rites of passage: Giles: Baptism because you enter into the body of Christ Richard: Funerals because they take you into the mystery of God Kate: Weddings because you get to wear nice shoes Engagingly introduced by Christine Morgan, the book ends with the profoundly moving episode (recorded remotely in the three vicars' homes) that was broadcast on Easter Sunday 2020, to a world in crisis.

What was Jesus of Nazareth really like? What effect did he have on those he met and befriended? How did he impart his teachings and perform his miracles? These are the questions that James Harpur explores through Joseph of Arimathea, one of the most enigmatic characters of the gospel. After the crucifixion, Joseph embarks on a quest to find out who Jesus really was, seeking out those who knew him personally. These witnesses, all mentioned in the gospels, tell their stories, each contributing a unique insight into the Nazarene.