In this compelling audiobook, Scot McKnight shares his personal experience in the church as well as his study of the Apostle Paul to answer this significant question: What is the church supposed to be?For most of us the church is a place we go to on Sunday to hear a sermon or to participate in worship or to partake in communion or fellowship with other Christians. Church is all contained within one or two hours on Sunday morning.The church the Apostle Paul talks about is designed by God to be a fellowship of difference—how people differ socially—and differents—how people differ culturally. God did not design the church to be a two-hour experience on Sunday but a mixture of people from all across the map and spectrum: men and women, rich and poor, Caucasians or African Americans, and Mexican Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, and Indian Americans, and a mixture of people with varying personalities and tastes. The church McKnight grew up in was a fellowship of sames and likes. There was almost no variety in his church. White folks, same beliefs about everything, same tastes in music and worship and sermons and lifestyle. Because of his experience, he writes incisively and compellingly.The church is God’s world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God’s show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a family.

Product Description: In this extraordinary conversation with Paolo Rodari, Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández, the theologian closest to Pope Francis, addresses in every detail the crucial aspects of this pontificate: the relationship between divine mercy and the emphasis on ethical requirements, the necessity of a church outside and in a permanent state of mission, the ecclesiastical resistance in relation to the originality of Francis s proposal, the very strong sense of the people inherent in the mentality of this South American pope...read more

Product Description: Leaving Christendom for Good argues that the solution to some of the most troubling tensions in the life of the Catholic Church since Vatican II can be found in the council’s document Gaudium et spes. This text’s view of the church’s mission and social relationships as dialogical has the capacity to liberate...read more

Product Description: Our possessions can create unbearable weight and affect our ability to serve and thrive. How do we defy gravity and find freedom? In this 4-week small group study and stewardship campaign, pastor and author Tom Berlin explores what is required to sustain a vibrant life, what we need versus what we want, and what we can do to avoid being pulled into the orbit of materialism...read more

Product Description: This study is a journey into practicing discipleship, inviting individuals and group-fellowships to move their church ministries outward, into their surrounding communities--the natural motion God intended and designed for his body...read more

Product Description: This book reveals the ecclesiological values of charisms in the context of the growing values of personalism in the Church. Yves Congar understands charisms in the light of pneumatological christology. The study discovers that Congar’s concept of charisms mirrors the values of the arrangement of the first three chapters in Lumen Gentium...read more

Product Description: The church is political. Theologians have been debating this claim for years. Liberationists, Anabaptists, Augustinians, neo-Calvinists, Radical Orthodox and others continue to discuss the matter. What do we mean by politics and the political? What are the limits of the church's political reach? What is the nature of the church as an institution? How do we establish these claims theologically? Jonathan Leeman sets out to address these questions in this significant work...read more

Product Description: Critiquing a paradigm of growth within the church, this book contends that the church’s growth ethic should be replaced by one based on virtue. Drawing on the work of Sennett, Fromm, and Hauerwas, John Fitzmaurice argues that an approach taking growth to be the overriding task of the church is found to be shallow and risks infantilising the faith it purports to proclaim...read more

Product Description: Younger Christians are leaving the church in droves, frustrated and disillusioned by the track record of American Christianity. Older Christians, who still lead most churches, are concerned about this trend. But the generations don't see eye to eye on many things...read more

Product Description: When church and culture look the same...For the many Christians eager to prove we can be both holy and cool, cultural pressures are too much. We either compartmentalize our faith or drift from it altogether—into a world that’s so alluring...read more

Product Description: Most Christians resist the idea that we are to pursue happiness. We are more comfortable with the idea of finding joy or being blessed. But seeking happiness seems too superficial or too flighty for people of faith. In Happy Church, Tim McConnell offers a radical call for Christians to reclaim happiness...read more

Product Description: Over the past fifty years, Orthodox theologies of ecclesiology have been revoling around competing schools of ecclesiology one universal, the other eucharistic. Father Loudovikos, in this masterful interconnected series of studies, moves beyond this dialectic by exploring the very mode of the Church s existence...read more

Product Description: This volume examines the ways in which migrants and the phenomenon of migration expose longstanding gaps and failings within Christian communities but also open up fresh possibilities for churches to grow and diversify.