Struggle well. Fight for progress. Know the One who has fought for you. The writer of Hebrews says that we are to "throw off everything that hinders" and run "the race marked out for us" (Hebrews 12:1). We are called to action and empowered to struggle well. And yet, as we navigate life, we realize there are difficulties without and discouragements within. Not only do we feel ill equipped to thrive . . . we don't even know how to survive. In this six-session study, Ben Stuart will give you practical strategies to help you war against the enemy of your soul and find the rest that God has promised for you. You will discover how to overcome deceptive strategies the enemy aims at you. How to move away from aimless affections and toward things that develop intimacy with God. How to make a place, a time, and a plan for communicating with God each day. And how to keep in step with the Spirit. Life is hard, but there are promises to grip. Strategies and tactics to employ. Progress to be made. Are you ready? This study guide has everything you need for a full Bible study experience, including: The study guide itself-with video notes, personal study and group discussion sections, and a guide to best practices for leading a group. An individual access code to stream all five video sessions online (you don't need to buy a DVD!). Sessions and video run times include: FREED TO FIGHT (20:30) AWAY AND TOWARD (17:30) DOWNSTREAM AND UPSTREAM (21:00) CONSISTENCY AND CREATIVITY (19:30) FOCUS AND UNITY (20:30) KEEP IN STEP (20:30) Watch on any device! Streaming video access code included. Access code subject to expiration after 12/31/2027. Code may be redeemed only by the recipient of this package. Code may not be transferred or sold separately from this package. Internet connection required. Void where prohibited, taxed, or restricted by law. Additional offer details inside.

Why go to church? What happens in church and why does it matter? The Empty Church presents fresh answers to these questions by creating an interdisciplinary conversation between theater directors and Christian theologians. This original study expands church beyond the sanctuary and into life. Shannon Craigo-Snell emphasizes the importance of liturgical worship in forming Christians as characters crafted by the texts of the Bible. This formation includes shaping how Christians know, in ways that involve the intellect, emotions, body, and will. Each chapter brings a theater director into dialogue with a theologian, teasing out the ways performance enriches hermeneutics, anthropology, and epistemology. Thinkers like Karl Barth, Peter Brook, Delores Williams, and Bertolt Brecht are examined for their insights into theology, worship, and theater. The result is a compelling depiction of church as performance of relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by Scripture, in hope of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical worship, at its best, forms Christians in patterns of affections. This includes the cultivation of emotion memories influenced by biblical narratives, as well as a repertoire of physical actions that evoke particular affections. Liturgy also encourages Christians to step into various roles, enabling them to make intellectual and volitional choices about what roles to take up in society. Through liturgical worship, the author argues, Christians can be formed as people who hope, and therefore as people who live in expectation of the presence and grace of God. This entails a discipline of emptiness that awaits and appreciates the Holy Spirit. Church performance must therefore be provisional, ongoing, and open to further inspiration.

"A Pilgrim's Guide to Iona Abbey" gives you the opportunity to walk around the Abbey church and cloisters with suggestions for reflection and prayer. If you have not visited the Abbey it is an excellent tool with which to help visualise the sites of Iona. Included are some stories about the Abbey and life in the community from the perspective of Iona Community members. At each point of your pilgrimage around the Abbey and the Abbey grounds you will find: some background information; a reflection; and a simple prayer. 'Iona is a place where people come looking for answers - to get in touch with their spiritual needs and find a new vision of themselves and their lives, and of our lives together.' From "A Pilgrim's Guide to Iona Abbey": Candles in the Abbey Some candles flickered in a downdraft; some stood still, lighting, in orange flame, the precious dark. Their silence created silence; their dimness in so vast a space soothed the restless soul. Their light was a quiet presence that spoke of the light, the real presence, come to meet us at the appointed place. He was there, though human eyes are not given to see him. Hearts, open to receive him, rested awhile in a circle of peace. David Levison is a member of the Iona Community.

Through his work as a physician, Karl Koenig explored the relationship between the rhythm of the seasons, the Christian festivals, thinking in particular about their effect on human beings and communities. This fascinating collection of Koenig's essays, lectures and notes looks at the cycle of the year and the different aspects of all the Christian festivals, from Easter to the Twelve Holy Days of Christmas. Koenig discusses the idea that human beings can derive inner strength from festival celebrations through an active social life and participation in community, and also that a strong, healthy community life relies on the celebration of festivals.

You can know undeniably that Jesus is real and fully-present, even when your feelings and circumstances scream the opposite.

Best-selling author and journalist Max Davis had his life turned upside down when he experienced a supernatural encounter with a nine-year-old, nonverbal, autistic boy named Josiah Cullen. This special boy, who lived in Minnesota, had prophetic visions and messages from God about Max, who lived in Louisiana, even though the two had never met or had any contact. These messages, which Josiah typed with one finger, were packed with amazing biblical insight and highly detailed specifics about Max's life--details that Josiah could not possibly have known unless they were revealed to him by the Holy Spirit.

As a skeptical journalist who pursues truth, Max gained undeniable evidence that God is real and knows us personally. Even more compelling is that the prophetic messages centered around Max's personal prayer life. Just like in John 1:48 when Jesus let Nathanael know He saw him praying under the fig tree, through Josiah, God was letting Max know that He sees us when we pray too, even though circumstances often scream the opposite. Life can be brutal, and we tend to equate pain and struggle with the absence of God. Yet nothing could be further from the truth! Regardless of how things may appear, Jesus is real, alive, and fully present, and living in that awareness changes everything.

In Jesus, Josiah, and Me, Max Davis shows you that it is possible to encounter the living Jesus in a richer and more tangible way--that you can cultivate an awareness of His reality and know your prayers are affecting outcomes. More than an amazing account of Max's encounter with an autistic boy that sparks faith and hope, it's a story that unveils the mystery of experiencing God's presence and power like never before!

This book will encourage your faith by showing you that you can encounter the living Jesus in a richer and more tangible way. It will unveil the mystery of experiencing God's presence and power like never before.

Selections from her titles Just Enough Light for the Step I'm On, The Power of a Praying® Wife, The Power of a Praying® Woman, and The Power of a Praying® Parent create this bountiful gathering of reflections, guidance, Scriptures, and prayers. More than 120 devotions cover topics relevant to a woman's life, including:

• family and marriage
• priorities for life
• dreams waiting to unfold
• God's will and plan
• gifts of faith

Bryan Spinks is one of the world's leading scholars in the field of liturgy and to have a comprehensive work by him on the Eucharist is a major catch for SCM. Like the author's previous work on Baptism, this will become a standard work about the Eucharist and Eucharistic theology worldwide. The book, a study of the history and theology of the Eucharist, is the fifth volume in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series and will help to establish the series as a place for landmark books of liturgical scholarship. This book will be aimed at undergraduate and graduate theology students, clergy and theologically literate laity. It will assume some technical knowledge (i. e. it is not an introduction to liturgy or introduction to sacraments), but will attempt to outline what the evidence is, and what current scholars think. On occasions it will advance or argue for why one interpretation is preferable to another.

Anne Fedele offers a comprehensive ethnography of alternative pilgrimages to French Catholic shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Drawing on more than three years of extensive fieldwork, she describes how pilgrims from Italy, Spain, Britain, and the United States interpret Catholic figures, symbols, and sites according to spiritual theories and practices derived from the transnational Neopagan movement. Fedele pays particular attention to the life stories of the pilgrims, the crafted rituals they perform, and the spiritual-esoteric literature they draw upon. She examines how they devise their rituals; why this kind of spirituality is increasingly prevalent in the West; and the influence of anthropological literature on the pilgrims. Among these pilgrims, spirituality is lived and negotiated in interaction with each other and with textual sources: Jungian psychology, Goddess mythology, and ''indigenous'' traditions merge into a corpus of theories and practices centered upon the worship of divinities such as the Goddess, Mother Earth, and the sacralization of the reproductive cycle. The pilgrims' rituals present a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and the medical establishment and have critical implications for contemporary discourses on gender. Looking for Mary Magdalene is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in ritual and pilgrimage.

Isho'yabh IV was a schoolmaster of very high repute and later became the Catholicos of the Church of the East. He wrote tracts on liturgical matters in the first two decades of the eleventh in order to restore the traditions of his church. In Nestorian Questions of the Administration of the Eucharist, Willem Cornelis van Unnik gives a comprehensive research of the liturgical writings of Isho'yabh IV in the context of the 'Nestorian' liturgical tradition based on the manuscript tradition. After an analysis of the text, the author gives an annotated English translation of the text and a reproduction of the original Syriac text with a critical apparatus.

The doctor told Wanda that she had a fourth of an ovary and that child bearing was not an option. God had promised her that she would have children. Was God going to lie to her? God fulfills His promises. After years of waiting and trying, Wanda brought five children into this world and was a mother just as was promised. With the miracle came an unwanted price since we have come to believe that Heaven has a price on some of its most cherished of gifts. It wasn't that it was authored by a loving God, but the seeds of cancer were sown as the gift was made real for five times. This young family would watch their mother succumb to a dreadful disease, slowly leaching the life from her. Wanda had a challenge understanding why the children she had been promised wouldn't be hers to raise to adulthood. Christmas would come that year before she finally died in February and the gift she craved was just to understand God's will in granting the blessing and then seemingly ripping it away in a slow death. Miracles happen to create life and miracles happen to explain why life gets cut short.

Christians frequently come into conflict with themselves and others over such matters as music, popular culture, and worship style. Yet they usually lack any theology of art or taste adequate to deal with aesthetic disputes. In this provocative book, Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive, 'ecumenical' approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has 'teeth but no fangs'.

While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in the making of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline? In exploring the complex relation between taste, religious imagination, and faith, Brown offers a new perspective on what it means to be spiritual, religious, and indeed Christian.

During study of the scriptures for his previous book, Alpha and Omega, it became apparent to the author that when the Lord talked to the disciples about His coming for Israel, He also intimated that there is likely to be a period of delay between the signs of His expected coming, and His actual appearance for them as their Messiah. In the light of this the author decided to follow through and find out what this period may involve, and his conclusions are set out in this book. Whilst Israel, the Lord's people, remain special to Him, even more important is that His Word and promises will be kept, and that His Father's will is completed in its perfection. This book is an attempt to interpret how Israel will be expected to play its part, and how in the process it will be proved faithful before the Lords return.

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases, have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence.
This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the change in attitudes to hymns and their growing popularity in the course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style, language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.

This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship.
The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day, the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God.
The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of God.
A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more faithfully in the world.

From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives. Good for the Souls brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.

"A brilliant breakthrough in pilgrimage studies. An exemplary study that shows how to bring together different academic and institutional interests in a common cause - understanding the relationship between pilgrimage and English cathedrals over time. A publication that will, hopefully, inspire similar collaborative studies around the globe." - John Eade, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Roehampton, UK "People who oversee, minister, lead worship, guide, welcome, manage, market, promote and maintain cathedrals will find this book an indispensable treasure. It is aware of the awesome complexity inherent in cathedral life but it doesn't duck the issues: its clear-eyed focus is on the way people experience cathedrals and how these extraordinary holy places can speak and connect with all the diversity represented by the people who come to them. In a spiritually-hungry age, this book shows us how to recognise and meet that hunger. This book will be required reading for all us "insiders" trying to invite and signpost access to holy ground." - The Very Reverend Adrian Dorber, Dean of Lichfield, Chair of the Association of English Cathedrals This book looks at England's cathedrals and their relationship with pilgrimage throughout history and in the present day. The volume brings together historians, social scientists, and cathedral practitioners to provide groundbreaking work, comprising a historical overview of the topic, thematic studies, and individual views from prominent clergy discussing how they see pilgrimage as part of the contemporary cathedral experience.

This book provides twenty-three pages for listing the names of living Orthodox loved ones to pray for and provides twenty-three pages to list Orthodox loved ones who have died. There is one prayer in English for the living and one prayer in English for the dead as well as two half tone icons. In the Russian tradition, this book is handed to the priest with the small prosphora before the beginning of the liturgy. The booklet has a card cover with saddle stitch binding printed in red and black ink.