Book picks similar to
God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships by Matthew Vines
theology
non-fiction
lgbtq
religion
Strength to Love
Martin Luther King Jr. - 1963
A collection of sermons by this martyred Black American leader which explains his convictions in terms of the conditions and problems of contemporary society.
Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Sara Miles - 2007
Take This Bread is the story of her journey to faith and how she took Jesus' call to feed others by establishing food pantries that feed thousands of people.
Conscience: What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ
Andrew David Naselli - 2016
Yet there is hardly a more neglected topic among Christians. In this much-needed book, a New Testament scholar and a cross-cultural missionary explore all thirty passages in the New Testament that deal with the conscience, showing how your conscience impacts virtually every aspect of life, ministry, and missions. As you come to see your conscience as a gift from God and learn how to calibrate it under the lordship of Jesus Christ, you will not only experience the freedom of a clear conscience but also discover how to lovingly interact with those who hold different convictions.
The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended
Sheila Wray Gregoire - 2021
Generations of women have grown up with messages about sex that make them feel dirty, used, or invisible, while men have been sold such a cheapened version of sex, they don't know what they're missing. The Great Sex Rescue hopes to turn all of that around, developing a truly biblical view of sex where mutuality, intimacy, and passion reign.The Great Sex Rescue pulls back the curtain on what is happening in Christian bedrooms and exposes the problematic teachings that wreck sex for so many couples--and the good teachings that leave others breathless. In the #metoo and #churchtoo era, not only is this book a long overdue corrective to church culture, it is poised to free thousands of couples from repressive and dissatisfying sex lives so that they can experience the kind of intimacy and wholeness God intended.
Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose
Aimee Byrd - 2020
Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a resource to help church leaders improve the culture of their church and disciple men and women in their flock to read, understand, and apply Scripture to our lives in the church. Until both men and women grow in their understanding of their relationship to Scripture, there will continue to be tension between the sexes in the church. Church leaders need to be engaged in thoughtful critique of the biblical manhood and womanhood movement and the effects it has on their congregation.Do men and women benefit equally from God's word? Are they equally responsible in sharpening one another in the faith and passing it down to the next generation? While radical feminists claim that the Bible is a hopelessly patriarchal construction by powerful men that oppresses women, evangelical churches simply reinforce this teaching when we constantly separate men and women, customizing women's resources and studies according to a culturally based understanding of roles. Do we need men's Bibles and women's Bibles, or can the one, holy Bible guide us all? Is the Bible, God's word, so male-centered and authored that women need to create their own resources to relate to it? No! And in it, we also learn from women. Women play an active role as witnesses to the faith, passing it on to the new generations.This book explores the feminine voice in Scripture as synergistic with the dominant male voice. Through the women, we often get the story behind the story--take Ruth for example, or the birth of Christ through the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke. Aimee fortifies churches in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God's household and the necessity of learning from one another in studying God's word.The troubling teaching under the rubric of "biblical manhood and womanhood" has thrived with the help of popular Biblicist interpretive methods. And Biblicist interpretive methods ironically flourish in our individualistic culture that works against the "traditional values" of family and community that the biblical manhood and womanhood movement is trying to uphold. This book helps to correct Biblicist trends in the church today, affirming that we do not read God's word alone, we read it within our interpretive covenant communities--our churches. Our relationship with God's word affects our relationship with God's people, and vice versa. The church is the school of Christ, commissioned to discipleship. The responsibility of every believer, men and women together, is being active and equal participants in and witnesses to the faith--the tradents of faith.
Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality
Hanne Blank - 2012
The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. With an eclectic scope and fascinating detail, Straight tells the eye-opening story of a complex and often contradictory man-made creation that turns out to be anything but straight or narrow.
No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity
Nabeel Qureshi - 2016
In the years that followed, he realized that the world’s two largest religions are far more different than they initially appeared.No God but One: Allah or Jesus? addresses the most important questions at the interface of Islam and Christianity: How do the two religions differ? Are the differences significant? Can we be confident that either Christianity or Islam is true? And most important, is it worth sacrificing everything for the truth?Nabeel shares stories from his life and ministry, casts new light on current events, and explores pivotal incidents in the histories of both religions, providing a resource that is gripping and thought-provoking, respectful and challenging.Both Islam and Christianity teach that there is No God but One, but who deserves to be worshiped, Allah or Jesus?
Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say
Preston M. Sprinkle - 2021
This book fills the great need for Christians to speak into the confusing and emotionally charged questions surrounding the transgender conversation. With careful research and an engaging style, Embodied explores:What it means to be transgender, nonbinary, and gender-queer, and how these identities relate to being male or femaleWhy most stereotypes about what it means to be a man and woman come from the culture and not the BibleWhat the Bible says about humans created in God’s image as male and female, and how this relates to transgender experiencesMoral questions surrounding medical interventions such as sex reassignment surgeryWhich pronouns to use and how to navigate the bathroom debateWhy more and more teens are questioning their gender
Jesus, Justice, and Gender Roles: A Case for Gender Roles in Ministry
Kathy Keller - 2012
At the same time, she encourages women to teach and lead in the church in ways that may startle some complementarians. Readers on both sides of this hot-button topic will be challenged by her ministry-tested and thoroughly Scriptural perspective.
Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity
Elizabeth M. Edman - 2016
After deep reflection on her tradition, Edman is struck by the realization that her queer identity has taught her more about how to be a good Christian than the church.In Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and Why Christians Should Care, Edman posits that Christianity, at its scriptural core, incessantly challenges its adherents to rupture false binaries, to “queer” lines that pit people against one another. Thus, Edman asserts that Christianity, far from being hostile to queer people, is itself inherently queer. Arguing from the heart of scripture, she reveals how queering Christianity—that is, disrupting simplistic ways of thinking about self and other—can illuminate contemporary Christian faith. Pushing well past the notion that “Christian love = tolerance,” Edman offers a bold alternative: the recognition that queer people can help Christians better understand their fundamental calling, and the creation of sacred space where LGBTQ Christians are seen as gifts to the church.By bringing queer ethics and Christian theology into conversation, Edman also shows how the realities of queer life demand a lived response of high moral caliber—one that resonates with the ethical path laid down by Christianity. Lively and impassioned, Edman proposes that queer experience be celebrated as inherently valuable, ethically virtuous, and as illuminating the sacred.A rich and nuanced exploration, Queer Virtue mines the depths of Christianity’s history, mission, and core theological premises to call all Christians to a more authentic and robust understanding of their faith.
Sex, Jesus, and the Conversations the Church Forgot
Mo Isom - 2018
In a world overwhelmingly obsessed with it, why is the church so silent about it? While our secular culture twists, perverts, cheapens, and idolizes sex, there are gaping holes in the church's guidance of young people. The result is generations of sexually illiterate people drowning in the repercussions of overwhelming sin struggles.Enough is enough, says Mo Isom. With raw vulnerability and a bold spirit, she shares her own sexual testimony, opening up the conversation about misguided rule-following, virginity, temptation, porn, promiscuity, false sex-pectations, sex in marriage, and more and calling readers back to God's original design for sex--a way to worship and glorify him. This book is for the young person tangled up in an addiction to pornography, for the girlfriend feeling pressured to go further, for the "good girl" who followed the rules and saved herself for marriage and then was confused and disappointed, for the married couple who use sex as a bargaining tool, for every person who casually watches sex play out in TV and movies and wonders why they're dissatisfied with the real thing, and for every confused or hurting person in-between. Sex was God's idea. It's time we invited him back into the bedroom.
Knowing God
J.I. Packer - 1973
I. Packer's classic has been an important tool to help Christians around the world discover the wonder, the glory and the joy of knowing God. In 2006, Christianity Today voted this title one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals. This edition is updated with Americanized language and spelling and a new preface by the author. Stemming from Packer's profound theological knowledge, Knowing God brings together two important facets of the Christian faith: 1. Knowing about God and 2. Knowing God through the context of a close relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. Written in an engaging and practical tone, this thought-provoking work seeks to transform and enrich the Christian understanding of God. Explaining both who God is and how we can relate to him, Packer divides his book into three sections: The first directs our attention to how and why we know God, the second to the attributes of God and the third to the benefits enjoyed by a those who know him intimately. This guide leads readers into a greater understanding of God while providing advice to gaining a closer relationship with him as a result.
Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
Esau McCaulley - 2020
A key element in the fight for hope, he discovered, has long been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation that comes out of traditional Black churches. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded or viewed with suspicion by much of the wider church and academy, but it has something vital to say. Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery. Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.
The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living As If He Doesn't Exist
Craig Groeschel - 2010
After over a decade of successful ministry, he had to make a painful self admission: although he believed in God, he was leading his church like God didn’t exist.To Christians and non-Christians alike, to the churched and the unchurched, the journey leading up to Groeschel’s admission and the journey that follows—from his family and his upbringing to the lackluster and even diametrically opposed expressions of faith he encountered—will look and sound like the story of their own lives.Now the founding and senior pastor of the multicampus, pace-setting LifeChurch.tv, Groeschel's personal journey toward a more authentic God-honoring life is more relevant than ever.Christians and Christian Atheists everywhere will be nodding their heads as they are challenged to take their own honest moment and ask the question: am I putting my whole faith in God but still living as if everything was up to me?
Loveology: God. Love. Marriage. Sex. And the never-ending story of male and female.
John Mark Comer - 2014
Then he made Eve. And ever since we've been picking up the pieces. Loveology is just that—a theology of love. With an autobiographical thread that turns a book into a story, pastor and speaker John Mark Comer shares about what is right in male/female relationships—what God intended in the Garden. And about what is wrong—the fallout in a post-Eden world. Loveology starts with marriage and works backward. Comer deals with sexuality, romance, singleness, and what it means to be male and female; ending with a raw, uncut, anything goes Q and A dealing with the most asked questions about sexuality and relationships. This is an audiobook for singles, engaged couples, and the newly married—both inside and outside the church—who want to learn what the Scriptures have to say about sexuality and relationships. For those who are tired of Hollywood's propaganda, and the church's silence. And for people who want to ask the why questions and get intelligent, nuanced, grace-and-truth answers, rooted in the Scriptures.