Many congregations today are beset by fears, whether over loss of members and money, or of irrelevancy in an increasingly pluralistic society. To counter this, many congregations focus on strategy and purposewhat churches "do"but Cheryl Peterson submits that mainline churches need to focus instead on "what" or "who" they areto reclaim a theological, rather than sociological, understanding of themselves. To do this, she places the questions of the church's identity and mission into a conversation with the primary ecclesiological paradigms of the past century: the neo-Reformation concept of the church as a "word event" and the ecumenical paradigms of the church as "communion." She argues that these two paradigms assume a context of cultural Christendom that no longer existsfocused on the church that is gatheredrather than the missional church that is sent out. Peterson suggests instead that we understand the church as a people created by the Spirit to be a community, and that we must claim a narrative method to explore the church's identityspecifically, the story of the church's origin in the Acts of the Apostles. Finally, here is a way of thinking of church that reconciles the best of competing models of church for the future of mainline Protestant theology.

Constantine the Great is one of those rare historical figures who is nearly as controversial today as he was in his own time. Lauded, both then and now, as a military hero who ended the brutal persecutions of Christians and as the first Roman emperor to himself embrace Christianity, Constantine is just as often vilified as a destructive innovator, a coddler of heretics, and a tyrannical hypocrite with the blood of his own family on his hands. The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine was penned shortly after the emperor's death in AD 337 by the great Church historian Eusebius Pamphilus, bishop of C]sarea. Though criticized as mere panegyric lionizing Constantine's virtues while ignoring his flaws, Eusebius's Life is nonetheless the most substantial and detailed biography of the first Christian emperor to come down to us from antiquity. The work is also the sole source for several key episodes in Constantine's life--including the emperor's famous vision of a cross in the sky accompanied by the words, "Conquer by this."

Sophronius was one of the most influential figures spanning the ecclesiastical troubles in East and West during the sixth to the seventh centuries. Poet, hagiographer, dogmatician, homilist, and liturgist, he was a widely-travelled monastic who had close ties with the see of Rome and an unrivalled knowledge of the workings of the anti-Chalcedonian churches, revealed in his Synodical Letter. Sophronius despatched this epistle to other church leaders when at an advanced age he became patriarch of Jerusalem in AD 634. The letter was read out at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680-1, and provided the only sustained rebuttal of the monoenergist doctrine which was used by eastern emperors and church leaders alike as a political strategy to unite Christians in the early Byzantine empire.
Pauline Allen provides the first complete annotated translation of the Synodical Letter into a modern language. A comprehensive introduction situates the work in the context of the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451). It is accompanied by a dossier of translated documents by other writers of the time which illustrate the progress of the debate and its political and ecclesiastical repercussions in the first half of the seventh century.