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If you feel caught between the traditional church and the emerging church, read Jim Belcher. He paints a picture of an alternate, "deep" church--a missional church committed to both tradition and contemporary culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also adhering to creeds and confessions.
2010 Christianity Today Book Award winner! 2010 Golden Canon Leadership Book Award winner! Feeling caught between the traditional church and the emerging church? Discover a third way: deep church. C. S. Lewis used the phrase "deep church" to describe the body of believers committed to mere Christianity. Unfortunately church in our postmodern era has been marked by a certain shallowness. Emerging authors, fed up with contemporary pragmatism, have offered alternative visions for twenty-first-century Christianity. Traditionalist churches have reacted negatively, at times defensively. Jim Belcher knows what it's like to be part of both of these worlds. In the 1990s he was among the pioneers of what was then called Gen X ministry, hanging out with creative innovators like Rob Bell, Mark Oestreicher and Mark Driscoll. But he also has maintained ties to traditionalist circles, planting a church in the Presbyterian Church of America. In Deep Church, Belcher brings the best insights of all sides to forge a third way between emerging and traditional. In a fair and evenhanded way, Belcher explores the proposals of such emerging church leaders as Tony Jones, Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt. He offers measured appreciation and affirmation as well as balanced critique. Moving beyond reaction, Belcher provides constructive models from his own church planting experience and paints a picture of what this alternate, deep church looks like--a missional church committed to both tradition and culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also creeds and confessions. If you've felt stuck between two extremes, you can find a home here. Plumb the depths of Christianity in a way that neither rejects our postmodern context nor capitulates to it. Instead of veering to the left or the right, go between the extremes--and go deep.
The major cultural changes in Western societies since the Reformation have created a serious challenge for the church. Modernity in particular has been inhospitable to Christian orthodoxy and many have been tempted to reject classical versions of the faith. This has led to a division within churches that Walker and Parry name the third schism, a divide between those who believe and practice the central tenets of Christian tradition and those who do not. The authors have adopted and adapted C. S. Lewis' phrase deep church to highlight the necessity of remembering our past in order to recover historic Christian orthodoxy. This book is a call to deep church, to remember our future, to make a half-turn back to premodernity; not in order to repeat or relive the past, but in order to draw on its rich yet often-forgotten resources for the here and now.
Everyone is being discipled. The question is: what is discipling us? The majority of Christians today are being discipled by popular media, flashy events, and folk theology because churches have neglected their responsibility to make disciples. But the church is not a secondary platform in the mission of God; it is the primary platform God uses to grow people into the image of Jesus. Therefore, as church leaders, it is our primary responsibility to establish environments and relationships where people can be trained, grow, and be sent as disciples. There are three indispensable elements of discipleship: Learning to participate in the biblical story (the Bible) Growing in our confession of who God is and who we are (theology) Regularly participating in private and corporate intentional action (spiritual disciplines) Deep Discipleship equips churches to reclaim the responsibility of discipling people at any point on their journey.
The Catholic Church is on the threshold of a bold new era in its two-thousand year history. As the curtain comes down on the Church defined by the 16th-century Counter-Reformation, the curtain is rising on the Evangelical Catholicism of the third millennium: a way of being Catholic that comes from over a century of Catholic reform; a mission-centered renewal honed by the Second Vatican Council and given compelling expression by Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. The Gospel-centered Evangelical Catholicism of the future will send all the people of the Church into mission territory every day -- a territory increasingly defined in the West by spiritual boredom and aggressive secularism. Confronting both these cultural challenges and the shadows cast by recent Catholic history, Evangelical Catholicism unapologetically proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the truth of the world. It also molds disciples who witness to faith, hope, and love by the quality of their lives and the nobility of their aspirations. Thus the Catholicism of the 21st century and beyond will be a culture-forming counterculture, offering all men and women of good will a deeply humane alternative to the soul-stifling self-absorption of postmodernity. Drawing on thirty years of experience throughout the Catholic world, from its humblest parishes to its highest levels of authority, George Weigel proposes a deepening of faith-based and mission-driven Catholic reform that touches every facet of Catholic life -- from the episcopate and the papacy to the priesthood and the consecrated life; from the renewal of the lay vocation in the world to the redefinition of the Church's engagement with public life; from the liturgy to the Church's intellectual life. Lay Catholics and clergy alike should welcome the challenge of this unique moment in the Church's history, Weigel urges. Mediocrity is not an option, and all Catholics, no matter what their station in life, are called to live the evangelical vocation into which they were baptized: without compromise, but with the joy, courage, and confidence that comes from living this side of the Resurrection.
Follow pastor Jim Belcher and his family as they take a pilgrimage through Europe, seeking substance for their faith in Christianity's historic, civilizational home. What they find, in places like Lewis's Oxford and Bonhoeffer's Germany, are glimpses of another kind of faith—one with power to cut through centuries and pierce our hearts today.
Every Sunday people walk onto your church campus and decide if they will return the following week before the preacher even opens his mouth. Many of those people don't know what to make of Jesus. They're hesitant to be in a church. They're not sure they belong. But over and over in the pages of the gospels, we see something extraordinary. People who were nothing like Jesus liked Jesus. Shouldn't that be true of his church as well? In Going Deep & Wide, Andy Stanley lays out a blueprint for becoming that kind of church. Going Deep & Wide offers practical steps to help church leaders create irresistible environments, define ministry goals, and communicate more effectively with unbelievers. Each section includes discussion materials that walk you more deeply into the content of Deep & Wide and invites conversations about how to apply what you've learned.
How the issues of the past affect the future of "Deep Church"--a concept conceived by C. S. Lewis. Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions drink from the well of a common tradition rooted in the early church. Many Evangelicals are now reengaging with the practice of the early church as they seek to live as disciples today. Remembering the past is essential for facing the future. In Remembering Our Future leaders and theologians reflect on a range of issues for which a vibrant contemporary faith requires a careful listening to the past. What is the place of tradition in the church's life? How should we interpret the Bible? How should we worship? What, in other words, might "Deep Church" look like?
Lenny Duncan is the unlikeliest of pastors. Formerly incarcerated, he is now a black preacher in the whitest denomination in the United States: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Shifting demographics and shrinking congregations make all the headlines, but Duncan sees something else at work--drawing a direct line between the church's lack of diversity and the church's lack of vitality. The problems the ELCA faces are theological, not sociological. But so are the answers. Part manifesto, part confession, and all love letter, Dear Church offers a bold new vision for the future of Duncan's denomination and the broader mainline Christian community of faith. Dear Church rejects the narrative of church decline and calls everyone--leaders and laity alike--to the front lines of the churchÂs renewal through racial equality and justice. It is time for the church to rise up, dust itself off, and take on forces of this world that act against God: whiteness, misogyny, nationalism, homophobia, and economic injustice. Duncan gives a blueprint for the way forward and urges us to follow in the revolutionary path of Jesus.
Shares uplifting advice about the virtues of forgiveness, offering strategic and biblically based advice on how to achieve peace and personal fulfillment by letting go of past wrongs.