“We thank you for the inspiration and strength

That you have given to Madiba,

Enabling him, over so many years, to draw out the best in others,

rousing us always, by word and example,

to seek the highest good for every child of this nation.”

So prayed Archbishop Thabo Makgoba with Nelson Mandela in his home in 2009 at the request of Graca Machel. This marked the start of an unusual relationship between southern Africa’s Anglican leader and Mandela in his quietening years. Join Makgoba in his journey towards faith, from his boyhood in Alex as the son of a ZCC pastor to Bishopscourt and praying with Mandela. He shares his feelings about his pastoral approach to the world icon, and how they influenced his thinking on ministering to church and nation in the current era. What did praying with those nearest and dearest to Mandela mean? What was his spirituality? In trying to answer these questions, Makgoba opens a window on South Africa’s spiritual make-up and life.

Many Jesus followers are sleepwalking through their Christian lives. They wear a smile, attend church gatherings, and try their best to make it through, but they don’t really expect answered prayers, breakthroughs, or a miraculous change in their situations. Why? Disappointment and disillusionment. The Bible calls this “hope deferred.” What we hoped for did not happen, and we are left with hopes and dreams that are dead.

But remember: we serve the God of resurrection life and revival!

Robert Henderson is the bestselling author of the Courts of Heaven series, and in this latest book he challenges you to pray for miracle reversals in every situation that seems hopeless. Resurrection thunders as a verdict from the Courts of Heaven, for it is God alone who gives life to the dead.

This powerful new book will show you how to:

• Discover the Seven Secrets to seeing dead things revived in your life
• Identify the spirit of sabotage in your life - and cancel its influence
• Make Lazarus Decrees over those situations that Jesus wants to resurrect and revive
• Dismantle the spirit of death—and stop it from impacting every area of your life
• Receive stirring biblical examples of resurrection power released into impossible situations
• Break off the pain of disappointment and position yourself for answered prayer

Resurrection is not a one-time event; it should be the default setting of the Christian life. We are filled with Jesus’ resurrection life and power! We have been commissioned by the resurrected Jesus to see His supernatural miracle power reverse any plan of the enemy that has sought to steal, kill, and destroy.

In Oktober 2015 het die Algemene Sinode van die NG Kerk ’n merkwaardige besluit oor selfdegeslagverhoudings geneem. Die besluit het erkenning gegee aan sulke verhoudings en dit vir predikante moontlik gemaak om gay en lesbiese persone in die eg te verbind. Ook die selibaatsvereiste wat tot op daardie stadium vir gay predikante gegeld het, is opgehef. Met hierdie besluit het die NG Kerk die eerste hoofstroomkerk in Suid-Afrika en Afrika geword wat totale gelykwaardige menswaardige behandeling van alle mense, ongeag seksuele oriëntasie, erken – en is gedoen wat slegs in ’n handjievol kerke wêreldwyd uitgevoer is. Die besluit het egter gelei tot groot konsternasie. Verskeie appèlle en beswaargeskrifte is ingedien, distriksinodes het hulle van die besluit distansieer, en in die media was daar volgehoue kritiek en debat.

Because, it's said, history is written by the victors, we know plenty about the Patriots' cause in the American Revolution. But what about the perhaps one-third of the population who opposed independence? They too were Americans who loved the land they lived in, but their position is largely missing from our understanding of Revolution-era American political thought. With God against the Revolution, the first comprehensive account of the political thought of the American Loyalists, Gregg L. Frazer seeks to close this gap. Because the Loyalists' position was most clearly expressed by clergymen, God against the Revolution investigates the biblical, philosophical, and legal arguments articulated in Loyalist ministers' writings, pamphlets, and sermons. The Loyalist ministers Frazer consults were not blind apologists for Great Britain; they criticized British excesses. But they challenged the Patriots claiming rights as Englishmen to be subject to English law. This is one of the many instances identified by Frazer in which the Loyalist arguments mirrored or inverted those of the Patriots, who demanded natural and English rights while denying freedom of religion, expression, and assembly, and due process of law to those with opposing views. Similarly the Loyalist ministers' biblical arguments against revolution and in favor of subjection to authority resonate oddly with still familiar notions of Bible-invoking patriotism. For a revolution built on demands for liberty, equality, and fairness of representation, God against Revolution raises sobering questions-about whether the Patriots were rational, legitimate representatives of the people, working in the best interests of Americans. A critical amendment to the history of American political thought, the book also serves as a cautionary tale in the heated political atmosphere of our time.

The Community of True Inspiration, or Inspirationists, was one of the most successful religious communities in the United States. This collection offers a broad variety of Inspirationist texts, almost all of them translated from German and published here for the first time.

When many Christians think about the second coming of Jesus, they imagine apocalyptic disaster, fear and terror, and world-collapse.

But what if the second coming was more like a wedding than a catastrophe? If Jesus is returning as the Bridegroom, shouldn’t His Bride—the Church—focus more on deepening their commitment to Him than on comparing global events to last-days timelines?

Burning with passion and zeal for Jesus, and driven by a vision to see the church revived, prophet and bestselling author, Jeremiah Johnson, offers a prophetic plea to the people of God: “Come to the altar! Purify yourselves for the coming Bridegroom!”

In this timely prophetic message, The Altar shows you how to:

• Join the bridal revival that will sweep through the nations
• Cultivate a lovesickness for Jesus Christ and a longing for His return
• Become a burning and shining lamp in this generation
• Tear down the altar of Baal in your city and region

The Bridegroom is coming! Are you ready for the wedding day?

James E. Tull's study and critique of the history and teachings of Landmarkism has established itself as a classic treatment of this important movement. This present version of that study is the revised, condensed, and updated edition of Tull's 1960 original. Tull did not finish the revision before he died in 1989, but Morris Ashcraft has now completed that task according to Tull's directions and notes. Ashcraft has also added a helpful preface. With this new edition of Tull's invaluable work on Landmarkism, a new generation of historians, students, and all seeking to understand Baptists have at hand a most helpful teacher: Tull on Landmarkism.

Weaving social, political, and religious history together with church music and architecture, A People's Church is a clear-eyed look at Anglican history through the ages. This history is as tumultuous as it is long. The transformative 1534-1660 period shaped not only the Church of England but the country itself, encompassing the Reformation, the return to Catholicism under Mary, and the Civil War. This was closely followed by the Restoration of the monarchy in 1688, the expulsion of the Dissenters, and the 1689 Bill of Rights. By the time of John Henry Newman and the Industrial Revolution, the church was fragile. How, then, has it endured? And what of its future?

This study examines the rise of the holiness movement in Georgia following the Civil War. Employing a blend of social and intellectual historical methods, the study pays particular attention to the shifting cultural conditions occurring in Georgia and the rest of the Southeast around the turn of the century and shows how these changes influenced the movement.

The study offers two major theses regarding the Wesleyan-Holiness movement in the United States. First the Holiness movement which emerged in the North after 1830 emphasizing the speedy attainment of human perfectibility failed to attract receptive audiences in the South due primarily to the cultural conditions of the region. Southern Christians were deeply affected by the culture of honor and the frequent violence it spawned. Moreover, Southerners were reluctant to subscribe to the Northern formula of Phoebe Palmer's "quick and easy" means to achieve perfect love when they recognized the ambiguities of the slave system -- a system most Southerners understood as a necessary evil.

Second, during the Reconstruction period, at a time when most Southerners were searching for new beginnings, the Wesleyan doctrine of immediately acquired "perfect love" began attracting widespread support in the Southeast. The study examines the Holiness movement's emergence in Georgia, and demonstrates that contrary to the views of several historians, a significant number of Wesleyan Holiness advocates in the New South were not drawn from the ranks of the dispossessed, but were in fact members of the region's burgeoning middle class.

Following the hapless Hampton Court Conference, little groups of English Christians (Separatists) began to break away from the established church. As early as 1606, one group, led by John Smyth, migrated to Holland. Prominent among them was Thomas Helwys. In 1611/1612, Helwys and others returned home where they founded at Spitalfield the first General Baptist congregation in England. Helwys had with him a manuscript entitled A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity in which he proposed the notion of liberty of conscience, freedom of religion. This may have been the first such declaration in English. Helwys published the manuscript in 1612. That publication probably cost him his freedom, perhaps even his life. By the beginning of the twentieth century, only four known copies of the book survived. Now, thanks to the careful work of Richard Groves, Helwys's The Mystery of Iniquity is available in a reader-friendly edition. Groves's introduction sets the document in context, not only as an important and influential historical event but as shedding yet more light on whence we have come. Students, historians, Christians, Protestants, Baptists - all for whom freedom of conscience is important will welcome this reissue in modern dress of a religious liberty classic.

Against Returning to Egypt is study of a doctrinal statement recently adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention: "The Report of the Presidential Theological Study Committee." Using criteria developed from the SBC's historic distinction between confessions of faith and creeds, Professor Jeff Pool takes the measure of this doctrinal statement and finds it wanting. He argues that the "Report" represents the greatest theological threat to the denomination in the history of the SBC. This threat consists primarily in that the "Report" intentionally erases the historic Baptist distinction between "confessions of faith" and "creeds, " and, in addition, in that it presents - and in fact is based upon - a radically Calvinistic revision of the SBC's historic perspectives on several central Christian doctrines. This investigative study has significance for other traditions and histories during these tumultuous times, rightly characterized as times of "fundamentalist resurgence." The principles, motives, and aspirations examined here appear not only in other denominational histories but in other political, social, and cultural realms as well.

Why the title "Quakers and Nazis, " not "Quakers against Nazis"? Was not hostility part of the interaction between the two groups? On the contrary, Hans A. Schmitt's compelling story describes American, British, and German Quakers' attempts to mitigate the suffering among not only victims of Nazism but Nazi sympathizers in Austria and Lithuania as well.

With numerous poignant illustrations of the pressure and social cost involved in being a Quaker from 1933 to 1945, "Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness" reveals a facet of Nazi Germany that is entirely unknown to most people. The book focuses on the heroic acts foreign and German Quakers performed under the Nazi regime, offering fully documented and original information regarding the Quakers' commitment to nonviolence and the relief of the victims.

Schmitt's narrative reveals the stress and tension of the situation. How should a Quaker behave in a meeting for worship with a policeman present? Spies did not stop Friends in worship services from openly criticizing Hitler and Goring, but Nazis did inflict torment on Friends. Yet Friends did not, could not, respond in like manner. Olga Halle was one Friend who worked to get people, mostly Jews, out of Germany until America entered the war. When emigration was outlawed, twenty-eight were stranded. Years later her distress was still so deep that even on her deathbed she recited their names.

Schmitt reminds us that virtually all the Berlin Quakers secreted Jews throughout the war. He shows how these brave Quakers opposed the Nazis even after they lost their jobs and had been harassed by the Gestapo. Risking their lives, the Friends persisted in their efforts to alleviate suffering.

At a time when the scholarly world is divided as to whether all Germans knew and approved of the Final Solution, this book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion. Quakers--despite their small numbers--played, and continue to play, an important role in twentieth-century humanitarian relief. "Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness, " a study of how Friends performed under the extreme pressure of a totalitarian regime, will add significantly to our general understanding of Quaker and German history.