From generation-to-generation there has been an anguished cry from preachers about preaching – there is no imagination! The Scriptures present the wondrous hope and vision of “Kingdom Come” and yet contemporary preaching can often be mute and blind by comparison. This book explores what is possible when the Scripture to be preached is prayed through the agency of two ancient prayer disciplines: lectio divina and Ignatian Gospel Contemplation. Through the experiences of eight vocational pastor-preachers this study tracks the difficulties, discoveries and delights as they commit to utilizing these prayer disciplines as part of their regular sermon preparation.
Nothing is more important than hearing, understanding and obeying God’s Word. Our lives and local churches depend on this for their life, health and growth. John Stott is well known worldwide for the commitment he had to the Bible, both in his preaching and in his living. In this persuasive book, Stott concisely demonstrates the power, authority and relevance of the Bible for every Christian – in every culture and generation. What is the purpose of God’s Word? How does it point us to Christ? What is its relationship to the Holy Spirit? How does it shape the church? And what does it mean for Christian discipleship?
The Seed and the Soil explores the power of the Bible that brings about God’s transforming and liberating purposes, as well as its power as an often oppressively misused text. Characterised by a wide variety of storytelling, this book is accessible to all that read it.
This volume is a meticulously researched text on pneumatology which puts the major pneumatologically issues together without confine to the traditional way of dealing with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Although pneumatology has been a neglected field in theological discussions of the past, there is a renewal of interest among theologians on pneumatology today. This renewal of interest has led to the formation of this work on the role of the Holy Spirit in the Protestant Systematic Theology.
Those who long to walk close to God are often keenly aware of their shortcomings. This was as true for the apostles as it is for today’s Christian leaders and Christian students. In this book, the author sets out to answer the following questions: What lies behind these inner conflicts? What are the implications of such conflicts for Christians? How does one successfully handle these conflicts? How useful is a rational mind to the Holy Spirit? This book offers deep spiritual insights interlaced with down-to-earth illustrations that make it easily accessible and relevant.
Misconceptions about what the Bible actually says can breed confusion and false ideas about God and the Christian life. Therefore, it is critically important that you know how to interpret Scripture carefully. Dr. Michael Kyomya explains what interpretation is, why it is important, how to do it, and the pitfalls to avoid. Dr. Kyomya makes it clear that interpretation is not just something for scholars, but also is useful when preparing a sermon or a Sunday school lesson, as well as in your own personal study of the Bible.
Within the pages of this book, an international group of Methodist scholars are united in the belief that another church and another world are not only necessary but possible. Holiness traditions, even though at times addressing matters too narrowly and at other times to triumphantly, are in agreement that the status quo in both church and world can be improved upon significantly. The question is not whether but how does this happen and how far does it go.
Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges is a pioneering attempt to contest the politics of conquest, commodification, and homogenization in mainstream Ecotheology, informed by the voices of Indigenous and subaltern communities from around the world. The book marshals a robust polyphony of reportage, wonder, analysis, and acumen seeking to open the door to a different prospect for a planet under grave duress and a different self-assessment for our own species in the mix.
Several of the ways and cultures that the Bible privileges or denounces slip by unnoticed. When those–the privileged and the denounced–are not examined, they fade into and hide in the blind spots of the Bible. This collection of essays engages some of the subjects who face dispersion (physical displacement that sparks ideological bias) and othering (ideologies that manifest in social distancing and political displacement). These include, among others, the builders of Babel, Samaritans, Melchizedek, Jezebel, Judith, Gomer, Ruth, slaves, and mothers.
Despite the fact that 99 percent of us work for a living and although work shapes us to the core, class and labor are topics that are underrepresented in the work of scholars of religion, theology, and the Bible. With this volume, an international group of scholars and activists from nine different countries is bringing issues of religion, class, and labor back into conversation.
What does believing mean in the face of empire and militarization? These essays articulate the critical and liberating consciousness shared by oppressed peoples across the world, arising from a faith in the God of the oppressed, expressed in radically diverse ways, and resisting the imperialist deities of materialism (read: economic growth), racism, and militarization that falsely appear as the saviors of humanity.
Responses to the recent pandemic have been driven by fear, with social distancing and locking down of communities and borders as the most effective tactics. Out of fear and strategies that separate and isolate, emerges what has been described as the “new normal” (which seems to mutate daily). Truly global in scope, with contributors from across the world, this collection revisits four old responses to crises – assure, protest, trick, amend – to explore if/how those might still be relevant and effective and/or how they might be mutated during and after a global pandemic.
Church and Human Sexuality by Joshua Arvind Theodore is the fourth book of the series “Re-imagining Church as Event: Perspectives from the Margins”. Who defines desire, pleasure and love? Must sex and sexuality be defined by negations? How can the privileged audit themselves in order to practice respect, mutuality and just love? What role must the church play in eliminating sexual injustice? These questions not only shape this book but demand our attention.
This book invites us to approach disability as a window for the church to revision its mission and ministry differently. In this process, the were not only see the face of the other differently but also experiences its being alternatively, welcoming the disabled without prejudice with an alternative vision. In this rudical vision, we affirm Gods preferential option for the disabled.
In American seminaries today, there is a very limited amount of time available to most students for language study. And yet, a working knowledge of the original language of the New Testament is imperative for informed exegesis of the biblical texts. Written with this difficult situation in mind, Read It in Greek offers a concise, one-semester introduction to the Greek language of the New Testament.
The book discusses in detail the why and the how of our call to transform faith communities into eco-justice communities in the context of climate injustice. The discernment that climate change is the consequence of the prevailing socio-economic and ecological relations challenges us to be in solidarity with the climate refugees and climate victims and to be informed by their knowledge, ethics, politics and spirituality.
This book is a gift to all. consumers looking for a way out of their addiction. Those of us (myself included) who know our excessive consumption is causing ecological and economic disasters should read Professor Moe-Lobedas new book. It is the best one-volume analysis of our moral dilemma I know of and, even better, it suggests principles and practices to help deal with it.
The Ruth narrative opens with a climate crisis – a famine pushed a family to migrate – and addresses some of the critical concerns for refugees: food, security, home, land, inheritance. Around those concerns, Losing Ground: Reading Ruth in the Pacific?? offers a collection of bible studies from the Pacific that interweave the climate pandemic with the interests and wisdoms of Pasifika natives.
The book tries to initiate discussions on the imperial desires and designs deployed in Christian doctrines in the early period of the church to this day. It tries to discuss the need to reshape Christian theologies and doctrines in a postcolonial sensibility.
In this collection the authors focus on contextual, cultural, and postcolonial criticisms. This work seeks to move beyond simply reacting to, rejecting, or recasting biblical interpretations that misunderstand or mischaracterize island space. Instead, it serves as an entry point to thinking biblically through the island.
‘Koyama’s relaxed confidence, extending from the chapter titles to the homely to-ing and fro-ing between the author’s own world and the deepest themes of theology make this is truly stimulating book … One of the rare books of theology one can unreservedly recommend with full sincerity.’ What The Tablet said about Waterbuffalo Theology is even more true of Three Mile an Hour God – which is perhaps a still better book. Its setting is the world of South-East Asia – and beyond.
This short and highly readable text opens up what will be a completely new and inviting way of understanding God and approaching the task of theology from a unique perspective – the deep understanding of and identification with the ocean of the people of the Pacific. Surrounded by the vastness of the ocean which governs every aspect of their lives, it is unsurprising that they have a profound belief in the ocean’s rich symbolism and religious significance.
Beginning Christology not from above or below but from within the Disciple’s confession of Jesus as the Christ, Fuller constructs a powerful Open and Relational Christology. At the heart are three pairings of contemporary thinkers who share a thematic center with distinct trajectories. Fuller weaves each into a vision of God’s self-investment in history and the person of Jesus.
In this revised introduction, an internationally respected scholar explores biblical, historical, and contemporary developments in Christology. The book focuses on the global and contextual diversity of contemporary theology, including views of Christ found in the Global South and North and in the Abrahamic and Asian faith traditions.
This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research – specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as ‘regimes of truth.’ Concepts such as ‘discovery’ and ‘claiming’ are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.
This collection engages the challenges and opportunities for doing theology in the context or age of media. The intersection of media with theology is reciprocating: media boosts theology in its functions to inform, connect and educate; theology humbles the globalizing media with a reminder – media is in mediation but not in domination.
This book celebrates the 50th anniversary of the PTC with historical reflections and personal reminiscences in the Pacific region at the backdrop of theological studies. Stimulating the various island churches and missions to confer regarding questions facing the churches on the neo-colonialism and communities in which each denomination and mission found itself.
This book celebrates without apology the fact that indigenous spirituality lives and breathes in our Pacific person and personhood. In so doing, it celebrates what is core to indigeneity in the Pacific: our names and our naming; our knowing, being and seeing; and our identities and sense of belonging.
Decolonisation begins with our mind. I recall gratefully changing a sentence in my thesis: We live in one of the most isolated land masses in the world, to: We live in the most interconnected land mass in the world. Mahalo Epeli! That changed everything. Thus began my hermeneutic awakening.
This book offers readings by native biblical critics from the South Pacific (Pasifika). An essay from editor Jione Havea introduces the volume by locating these essays within islander criticism and by explaining the flow of the book. Essays offer readings that twist, like a whirlpool, biblical texts around insights of Pasifika novelists, composers, poets, and sages.
This book explores several significant theological positions and religious actions that determine the sociopolitical involvement of the members of the Church of South India. It subsequently offers possible guidelines to construct and promote alternative and more creative approaches in training to address the sociopolitical contexts in South India today.
The effort of the author to bring out this book is highly appreciable since it in not only aimed at the present but for future generations too. The book reveals the ideologies on faith and serves as a guide to involve the readers deeply in socio-political context.
In recent years religion has received a good deal of attention in the discourse on globalization. Christianity in its Pentecostal – charismatic, evangelical and fundamentalist forms seem to have thrived in the globalization climate.
Church history cannot present a final identity; this remains subject to the final revelation. Until this time history explores the sins and struggles of Christians searching for their unfinished identity within their history of God.
We proclaim in church services that “God is good all the time . . . All the time God is good,” but there are often times when we feel that life is just unfair and ask God, “Why?” The uplifting songs and victorious testimonies of our church gatherings are frequently difficult to identify within the midst of the suffering and hardship of people’s daily lives, yet there is all too often no room for our “not-OK” experiences in our Christian communities. This is especially true for pastors and leaders who are required to always be strong and OK all the time.