Churches are increasingly exploring the potential of diaconal ministry to help them serve wider society in the contemporary context. Those involved in this ministry seek to forge improved connections between churches and the wider communities in which they are located. However, the role of those ordained to be deacons is diverse, challenging and often controversial, both within and outside the Church.

This book explores how deacons within the Methodist Church in Britain have understood their own ministry and sought to address these challenges. It draws on innovative research undertaken with the Methodist Diaconal Order over two years. Key questions and implications for practice are provided to help those wishing to reflect further on this ministry.

This book makes a significant contribution to the ecumenical debate on diaconal ministry. It offers much that will be of interest to all those seeking to reflect on, understand, engage in or work with those involved in this ministry in their own contexts."

Grieving, Brooding, and Transforming: The Spirit, The Bible, and Gender is a collection of scholarly essays by Pentecostal women. It explores troubling biblical texts, as well as those of contemporary church life, in regards to the portrayal of women. The authors seek to identify the presence and work of the Spirit that is often hidden within the contours of these texts. A Pentecostal feminist hermeneutic desires to move beyond suspicion into the deeper terrain of the Spirit's mission of grieving, brooding, and transforming a broken world. The essays point to the purposes of God toward justice and the healing of creation.

Exploring one of the most controversial figures in recent evangelical theology, this book thoroughly examines core features of Stanley J. Grenz's Trinitarian vision.

The late 19th century was a time of rapid industrialization, mass politicization , and modern philosophy. The resulting political and cultural upheaval confronted the German protestant church with deep questions of identity.On the one side sat an educated academic guild whose explorations of history, philology, and emerging social scientific disciplines gave rise to serious questions about the Christian faith and its meaning for today.On the other sat parish clergy faced with the complexities of daily life and leadership in common communities. For these parish clergy the pressure was great to support and bolster people not only in their life as Christians, but in their life as Germans.Shepherds of the Empire engages timeless questions of identity and faith through the time-bound work of 4 key thinkers who attempted, and ultimately failed, to carve a middle way for the German parish clergy in that environment.

Under the Big Top challenges the utility of the fundamentalist-modernist dichotomy in understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century American Protestantism. Through an examination of the immensely popular big tent revivals, the book develops a new framework to view Protestantism in this transformative period of American history. Contemporary critics of the revivalists often depicted them as anachronistically anxious and outdated religious opponents of a new urban, modern nation. Early historical accounts followed suit by portraying tent revivalists as Victorian hold-outs bent on re-establishing nineteenth-century values and religion in a new modern America. Josh McMullen argues that rather than mere dour opposition, big tent revivalists participated in the shift away from Victorianism and helped in the construction of a new consumer culture in the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s. McMullen also seeks to answer the question of how the United States became the most consumer-driven and yet one of the most religious societies in the western world. Early critics and historians of consumer culture concluded that Americans' increasing search for physical, mental, and emotional well-being came at the expense of religious belief, yet evangelical Christianity grew alongside the expanding consumer culture throughout the twentieth century. A study of big tent revivalism helps resolve this dilemma: revivalists and their audiences combined the Protestant ethic of salvation with the emerging consumer ethos by cautiously unlinking Christianity from Victorianism and linking it with the new, emerging consumer culture. This innovative, revisionist work helps us to understand the continued appeal of both the therapeutic and salvific worldviews to many Americans as well as the ambivalence that accompanies this combination.