Churchless Christianity PDF Download

Author: Herbert E. Hoefer
Publisher: William Carey Library
ISBN: 9780878084449
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to describe a fact and reflect upon it theologically. The fact is, there are thousands of people who believe solely in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior but who have no plans to be baptized or to join the local church. Churchless Christianity is based on research from the early 1980s among non-baptized believers in Christ in Tamil Nadu, India. This revised edition includes all the original text plus five additional chapters and a new foreword.

Author: George Barna
Publisher: Tyndale House
ISBN: 1414395981
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Churchless people are all around us: among our closest loved ones, at our workplaces, in our neighborhoods. And more and more, they are becoming the norm: The number of churchless adults in the US has grown by nearly one-third in the past decade. Yet the startling truth is that many of these people claim they are looking for a genuine, powerful encounter with God—but they just don’t find it in church. What are they (or we) missing? How can we better reach out to them? What can we say or do that would inspire them to want to join a community of faith? Containing groundbreaking new research from the Barna Group, and edited by bestselling authors George Barna (Revolution) and David Kinnaman (You Lost Me), Churchless reveals the results of a five-year study based on interviews with thousands of churchless men and women. Looking past the surface of church attendance to deeper spiritual realities, Churchless will help us understand those who choose not to be part of a church, build trust-based relationships with them, and be empowered to successfully invite them to engage.

Author: Brett McCracken
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433554283
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Does your church make you uncomfortable? It’s easy to dream about the “perfect” church—a church that sings just the right songs set to just the right music before the pastor preaches just the right sermon to a room filled with just the right mix of people who happen to agree with you on just about everything. Chances are your church doesn’t quite look like that. But what if instead of searching for a church that makes us comfortable, we learned to love our church, even when it’s challenging? What if some of the discomfort that we often experience is actually good for us? This book is a call to embrace the uncomfortable aspects of Christian community, whether that means believing difficult truths, pursuing difficult holiness, or loving difficult people—all for the sake of the gospel, God’s glory, and our joy.

Author: Steve Aisthorpe
Publisher: Saint Andrew Press
ISBN: 0861539168
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
For anyone who is concerned about Church decline, the contents of this book offer an essential blueprint for building God’s whole community in the coming years. This unique set of resources offers practical help and insight for all who want to grow, enrich and develop their congregational life. The Church of Scotland has drawn on the findings of extensive new research that it has commissioned in order to put together this set of carefully crafted and informed resources aimed at helping every congregation to understand why people leave the Church, how to avoid unnecessary departures and, above all, to develop an enriching, vital Christian fellowship with the large numbers of Churchless Christians in every community across the country. This ground-breaking book, illustrated by Dave Walker, offers information, hope, insight, prayerful reflection and practical ideas for bringing together in fellowship all Christians, whether they are members of an institutional Church or not.

Author: Vinod John
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532697244
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This study examines an indigenous phenomenon of the Hindu devotees of Jesus Christ and their response to the gospel through an empirical case study conducted in Varanasi, India. It analyzes their religious beliefs and social belonging and addresses the ensuing questions from a historical, theological, and missiological perspective. The data reveals that the respondents profess faith in Jesus Christ; however, most remain unbaptized and insist on their Hindu identity. Hence, a heuristic model for a contextualized baptism as Guru-diksha is proposed. The emergent church among Hindu devotees should be considered, from the perspective of world Christianity, as a disparate form of belonging while remaining within one's community of birth. The insistence on a visible church and a distinct community of Christ's followers is contested because the devotees should construct their contextual ecclesiology, since it is an indigenous discovery of the Christian faith. Thus, the "Christian" label for the adherents is dispensable while retaining their socio-ethnic Hindu identity. Christian mission should discontinue extraction and assimilation; instead, missional praxis should be within the given sociocultural structures, recognizing their idiosyncrasies as legitimate in God's eyes and in need of transformation, like any human culture.

Author: Lalsangkima Pachuau
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506493475
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"This book provides a panoramic view of Christians in India today. It deals with Christianity's history, major theological themes and approaches, and missiological issues in India within the framework of World Christianity"--

Author: David James Duncan
Publisher: Triad Institute, Inc.
ISBN: 9780977717019
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Duncan offers a collection of "churchless sermons," stories, memoir, and conversations with the affirmation that the way of life preached and embodied by Jesus is apolitical.

Author: Wendy Elgersma Helleman
Publisher: Langham Publishing
ISBN: 1783685697
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Designed as an undergraduate textbook, and shaped by needs of both Muslim and Christian students across Africa, this resource provides a thorough introduction to the history, theology and teaching of early Christianity. Professors Helleman and Gaiya follow Christianity from its inception in Jerusalem through to the decline of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and the development of Orthodox churches in the East and in Africa before the arrival of Islam. The book provides an overview of critical historical events, controversies, teaching, and important individuals and movements providing foundational understanding of early developments in Christianity and the general history of antiquity. Students and lecturers will also appreciate the attention given to the role of North African leaders in early Christianity and the impact of major issues on the North African church, such as Gnosticism, Donatism and Arianism. Additional Features: • Introduction to online tools & resources •Survey of the study of early Christianity • Introduction to key historians • Evaluation of recent literature & early Christianity

Author: Lloyd David Elcock
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595332412
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Christians do not love Jesus enough! Indeed on a scale of 1 to 10, the average Christian's love for Him scores no more that 10. This is the startling message of Lloyd David Elcock's first volume of a series of scriptural expositions that he proposes to publish under the rubric: What the Gentiles Have done to Christianity. The foundation upon which he has built this series includes the following three cornerstones: "Biblical Christianity" can accurately and justifiably also be called "Jewish Christianity". After the control and direction of Biblical/Jewish Christianity was passed from Jewish to Gentile hands at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Gentiles comprehensively deformed it, and 1200 years later, partially reformed it. The salvage and recovery of Biblical/Jewish Christianity, begun five hundred years ago by Luther, Calvin and the other Gentile Protestant Reformers, is only fifty percent completed; in particular, a number of the most fundamental doctrines of Biblical/Jewish Christianity are yet to be recovered, and their absence from today's Evangelical Church is the sole and single reason for the widespread carnality, and stunted spiritual growth that characterizes the lifestyle of the overwhelmingly vast majority of born again Christians everywhere in the western world. In this first volume, the author puts forward the view that one of those as yet unretrieved fundamental doctrines is the major key to the Spirit filled life of love, faith and power that is the ultimate goal of both Biblical Christianity and Gentile Evangelical Christianity. That key, he says, is hidden (in plain view, out in the open) in the pages of the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel according to the apostle John.

Author: Steve Bevans
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004363084
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Essays in Contextual Theology is a collection of essays that reflect on the doing of contextual theology from several perspectives. After a general introductory essay, subsequent essays reflect on topics such as contextual theology and prophetic dialogue, criteria for orthodoxy, the nature of tradition, the role of culture, the dynamics of conversion, and the way theology is being done in World Christianity. The collection closes with an autobiographical essay tracing the author’s journey to becoming a “global theologian.”