But as even the culture at large begins to reckon with the limits of a digital world, it's time for the church to take stock. Are online churches, video venues, and brighter lights truly the future? What about the digital age's effect on discipleship, community, and the Bible? As a pastor in Silicon Valley, Jay Kim has experienced the digital church in all its splendor. In Analog Church, he grapples with the ramifications of a digital church, from our worship and experience of Christian community to the way we engage Scripture and sacrament. Could it be that in our efforts to stay relevant in our digital age, we've begun to give away the very thing that our age most desperately needs: transcendence? Could it be that the best way to reach new generations is in fact found in a more timeless path? Could it be that at its heart, the church has really been analog all along?

    This is a vision for turning every church -- new or old - -into a contagious church that is a powerful magnet for attracting and influencing unchurched people.

    Despite the church's place of prominence in American culture and the ubiquity of the church in every American town, misconceptions about the faith of Jesus Christ run rampant today. Christians are known more for exclusivity than for love, more for potlucks than for solving world hunger.It's time for churches to get over the cruise-ship mentality of being a program provider, and reconnect with the true message and mission of Jesus: to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom to the oppressed.Pastor Mike Slaughter challenges church leaders to look at the future of their congregations and make tough but necessary choices. Will you send the church out into the world? Will you focus on building disciples or tallying decisions? Will you multiply your impact or expand your facilities? Will you step out in courage or comply with the status quo? The answers to these and other questions determine how your church will focus its time, its energy, and its budget to work for real change in a hurting world.Download Free Study GuideFor more info, visit www.ChangeTheWorld.Cokesbury.com

    From Christ, we learn that biblical worship involves our: • Volition (heart)• Emotion (soul) • Intellect (mind) • Body (strength) Experiential Worship shows you how to create a place where worshipers come face-to-face with the Father.• Indexed for easy reference• Ideal for churches of all sizes

    Real-Life Discipleship explains what should happen in the life of every Christian and in every small group so that the church becomes an army of believers dedicated to seeing the world saved.With the overriding goal to train disciples who know how to make more disciples, this book offers proven tools and strategies from Real Life Ministries, one of America’s fastest-growing churches.Discover what the Bible says about true and effective discipleship with these strategies and practices.

    Two of the worldOCOs foremost church research experts take an unprecedented qualitative look at how churches can change the culture through the transformative power of the gospel."

    But is this level of physical and spiritual weariness inevitable? Just as a car needs to be regularly refueled, retuned, and repaired in order to keep running, a balanced life can be sustained only when a man takes proper steps to stay on track. In this hopeful book, experienced pastor and counselor David Murray shares stories from his own life and the lives of friends, offering gospel-centered advice for avoiding, assessing, and recovering from burnout. With chapters on rest, relationships, routines, and more, this book lays out a host of practical remedies men can use to reset their lives on a more sustainable course--resulting in renewed energy, joy, and purpose.

    God expects preachers to prepare sermons as much as possible and allow Him to prepare the preachers. Join Dr. Jerry Vines and Dr. Jim Shaddix as they achieve a balanced approach to sermon preparation in Power in the Pulpit. This book combines the essential perspectives of a pastor of forty years with another who devotes daily time to training pastors in the context of theological education. Power in the Pulpit is practical preaching instruction in line with a tradition that sees expository preaching as a paramount and frequent event in the life of the local church. Power in the Pulpit is the combined work of Dr. Vines's two earlier publications on preaching: A Practical Guide to Sermon Preparation (Moody Publishers, 1985) and A Guide to Effective Sermon Delivery (Moody Publishers, 1986). Dr. Shaddix carefully organizes and supplements the material to offer this useful resource, which closes the gap between classroom theory and what a pastor actually experiences in his weekly sermon preparation.

    From this point they learn to respond to their wives in a consistent Christlike manner. A radically transformed and renewed marriage is the result.Drawing from his own story and the stories of husbands whose marriages were dissolving, Ken Nair reveals major problems in life and marriage. After discussing the problems, he reveals relationship altering concepts which not only will revive a marriage, they will radiate throughout couple's lives as well.

    This is a well-recognized crisis, but the cause of this crisis will surprise many. In his new book, A Weed in the Church, Scott Brown identifies the problem — age-segregated youth ministry — and says it is a weed growing in the church that needs to be rooted out. Brown argues that Scripture defines and wholeheartedly encourages ministry to youth, but that the premises of modern youth ministry are at odds with biblical teaching and must be reformed. Discover the problem of youth ministry in its historical context, and find hopeful solutions built on Scriptures’ sure foundation.

    But this renewed interest in poverty alleviation is doomed to fail if it is not rooted in the local church--God's established means of drawing downtrodden people into a transformative relationship with himself. Emphasizing the priority of the gospel, Mez McConnell and Mike McKinley, both pastors with fruitful ministries among the poor, offer biblical guidelines and practical strategies for planting, revitalizing, and growing faithful churches in hard places--in our own communities and around the world.

    It is more than a book about brands, and contains many sound lessons for strategy and the role of leaders.­­Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business SchoolPractical, psychologically astute, and clearly written, this book has much to offer business folk of all stripes.­­Publishers Weekly

    Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors,, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing. Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter's rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.

    But how to get that message to employees without applying the kind of pressure that makes them even less productive? The answer is empowerment. In this motivating book, you will find specific strategies designed to help you encourage responsibility, acknowledgment, and creativity so that employees feel they "own" their jobs. It's all here, in an accessible guide for the successful managers of tomorrow.

    They must learn to discern God at work in their own lives, shaping their hearts to embrace the particular ministries to which they are called. A Work of Heart shows how God prepares leaders today just as he did in biblical times-and how God creates these leaders in order to share his heart with his people.