Perhaps no questions cause more confusion than the ones that arise when you are pulled out of a thriving life of work that benefits the world, only to spend your hours, days, and weeks languishing in bed. It just doesn’t make sense. Why, God? Why would you take away my thriving career when it took me years to get to this point? Why would you take away my ability to serve and help and contribute? In this first book in the Chronic Pain and the Christian Life series, explore what it looks like to live a life of work, service, and rest, even when the pain doesn’t go away.

    D. Greear (Gospel, Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart) believes the postmortems are premature. Jesus promised to build his church. He said that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. The church is not going away.   Along with this promise, Jesus gave clear instructions for how the church would prevail. He promised to build it on the rock of the gospel.   The most pressing need for Christianity today is not a new strategy. It is not an updated message. It is a return to keeping the gospel above all.

    But Robert Morris reveals why it is so important not to stop—to never give up. This book provides hope and evidence for readers that God does hear their prayers, cares about them personally, and intervenes in their lives in ways beyond their imaginations. Bestselling author Robert Morris brings encouragement and compelling biblical teaching on the topic of prayer. Reverend Morris is the senior pastor at Gateway Church, which has a congregation of more than 36,000 people.

    Using evidence from the latest national polls and from her own cutting-edge research, Bass, the visionary author of A People’s History of Christianity, continues the conversation began in books like Brian D. McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, examining the connections—and the divisions—between theology, practice, and community that Christians experience today. Bass’s clearly worded, powerful, and probing Christianity After Religion is required reading for anyone invested in the future of Christianity.

    Wherever there is an attack on the organization of society, there is an attack on its religion. The basic faith of a society means growth in terms of that faith, but any tampering with its basic structure is revolutionary activity. The life of a society is its creed; a dying creed faces desertion or subversion readily. Every creed, however healthy, is also under continual attack; the culture which neglects to defend and further its creedal base is exposing its heart to the enemy's knife. Because of its indifference to its creedal basis in Biblical Christianity, western civilization is today facing death and is in a life and death struggle with humanism.Today humanism is the creedal basis of the various democratic and socialistic movements. The clearer the humanism, the more direct its use of power, because it operates in terms of a consistency of principle. The conservatives attempt to retain the political forms of the Christian West with no belief in Biblical Christianity. Apart from vague affirmations of liberty, they cannot defend their position philosophically. They therefore become fact finders: they try to oppose the humanists by documenting their cruelty, corruption, and abuse of office. If the facts carry any conviction to the people, they lead them only to exchange one set of radical humanists for reforming radical humanists. It is never their faith in the system which is shaken, but only in a form or representative of that system. The success of the subversives rests on their attack on the creed of the establishment, and its replacement by a new creed.Then the foundations are provided, the general form of the building is determined. When the creed is accepted, the social order is determined. There can therefore be no reconstruction of the Christian civilization of the west except on Christian creedal foundations.

    In this book, Shawn Bolz reveals a fascinating message from Heaven that will pentrate the deep places of your heart. His stories and wisdom will guide you to a more noble place.

    AND helps Christian leaders recognize the best in different church models and see how to incorporate these values into a cohesive church movement.By the numbers, the American church enjoys the resources to profoundly impact the Kingdom. But despite the rapid growth of these evangelical movements, the church in the West is in decline. A growing schism has emerged between the movement with a strong emphasis on attracting people and the more missional communities that focus on releasing people into ministry.Church resource specialists Hugh Halter and Matt Smay have been observing these different church models, and they challenge the idea that churches have to choose between them—between the attractional and missional approaches to ministry.With professional insight and practical advice, Halter and Smay dial in on how to bring together the very best of the attractional AND missional models for church ministry by exploring:The balance between gathering a community together AND scattering them into the world.The harmony between centralization AND decentralization in church structure.The mindset necessary to invest in both the traditional AND the innovative.The drive to maintain both a vision for the future AND a depth of community for the present.As churches begin to develop these ANDs, they will be better positioned to influence the world according to the design of God instead of the whims of the people or the pride associated with production.

    "When someone tells me yet another horror story about the church, I respond, 'Oh, it's even worse than that. Let me tell you my story.'I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church."Yancey acknowledges that many spiritual seekers find few answers and little solace in the institutional church. "I have met many people, and heard from many more, who have gone through a similar process of mining truth from their religious past: Roman Catholics who flinch whenever they see a nun or priest, former Seventh Day Adventists who cannot drink a cup of coffee without a stab of guilt, Mennonites who worry whether wedding rings give evidence of worldliness."How did Yancey manage to survive spiritually despite early encounters with a racist, legalistic church that he now views as almost cultic? In this, his most soul-searching book yet, he probes that very question. He tells the story of his own struggle to reclaim belief, interwoven with inspiring portraits of notable people from all walks of life, whom he calls his spiritual directors. Soul Survivor is his tribute to thirteen remarkable individuals, mentors who transformed his life and work.Besides recalling their effect on him, Yancey also provides fresh glimpses of the lives and faith journeys of each one. From the scatterbrained journalist G. K. Chesterton to the tortured novelists Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to contemporaries such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Annie Dillard, and Robert Coles, Yancey gives inspiring portraits of those who modeled for him a life-enhancing rather than a life-constricting faith."I became a writer, I now believe, to sort out and reclaim words used and misused by the Christians of my youth," Yancey says. "These are the people who ushered me into the Kingdom. In many ways they are why I remain a Christian today, and I want to introduce them to other spiritual seekers."Soul Survivor offers illuminating insights that will enrich the lives of veteran believers and cautious seekers alike. Yancey's own story, unveiled here as never before, is a beacon for those who seek to rejuvenate their faith, and for those who are still longing for something to have faith in.

    But the further he studied the Bible, the more he found himself confronted by questions that could neither be answered within the rigid framework of his religious instruction or accepted among the conservative evangelical community.Rejecting the increasingly complicated intellectual games used by conservative Christians to “protect” the Bible, Enns was conflicted. Is this what God really requires? How could God’s plan for divine inspiration mean ignoring what is really written in the Bible? These questions eventually cost Enns his job—but they also opened a new spiritual path for him to follow.The Bible Tells Me So chronicles Enns’s spiritual odyssey, how he came to see beyond restrictive doctrine and learned to embrace God’s Word as it is actually written. As he explores questions progressive evangelical readers of Scripture commonly face yet fear voicing, Enns reveals that they are the very questions that God wants us to consider—the essence of our spiritual study.