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: Herbert E. Hoefer
Publisher: William Carey Publishing
ISBN: 0878085483
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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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: 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: Alan Jamieson
Publisher: Society for Promoting Christian
ISBN: 9780281054657
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This text is based on research with those who have left churches but are nethertheless pursuing a journey of faith. Most of the church leavers interviewed for this text had been in their churches for over 15 years; most had held key leadership positions, and 40 per cent had been in full time theological study of church work. The text outlines how churches can help leavers and suggests a conversion between post-church groups and churches.

Author: Timothy Keller
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525954155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

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

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Book Description
A collection of essays on the nature of contextual theology, criteria for orthodoxy, prophetic dialogue, conversion, culture and other relevant topics as Christian faith and particular contexts encounter one another.

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: John W. de Gruchy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521587815
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This Companion serves as a guide for readers wanting to explore the thought and legacy of the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45). The book shows why Bonhoeffer remains such an attractive figure to so many people of diverse backgrounds. Its chapters, written by authors from differing national, theological and church contexts, provide a helpful introduction to, and commentary on, Bonhoeffer's life, work and writing and so guide the reader along the complex paths of his thought. Experts set out comprehensively Bonhoeffer's political, social and cultural contexts, and offer biographical information which is indispensable for the understanding of his theology. Major themes arising from the theology, and different interpretations to it, lead the reader into a dialogue with this most influential of thinkers who remains both fascinating and challenging. There is a chronology, a glossary and an index.