Church Building Quarterly

Includes the annual reports of the American Congregational Union, and of the society under its later name, the Congregational Church-Building Society.

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Includes the annual reports of the American Congregational Union, and of the society under its later name, the Congregational Church-Building Society.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1878.

As people inside and outside of the church in America become more disillusioned with what they experience or see from the outside looking in, what will be the way forward for Jesus's bride the Church? In this book, I hope you will join me in taking a look into where we have come from and what might be a path forward. If we are not willing to take a look and wrestle with the church in our wandering instead of settling, can we forge that path forward? Join me as my wife and I took a trip around this country in our little camper in part to do some of that wrestling and wandering. Join me as I look back on a twenty-year career in full-time church staff ministry and twenty-plus years in church ministry as a volunteer committed to making church work in a local setting. But also, I sense along with others "a new work" that God is up to. Can a new mindset be instilled that will help us navigate that new way forward in a way that puts ministry back in the hands of all God's people? One that grasps a much more relational approach to bringing restoration to a waiting world. Like an orchestra tuning their instruments, Consumer Christianity is producing chaotic noise about God. Rather than adding to the noise, perhaps it is time for us to finally be silent, be still, and wait in anticipation for God to begin a new work. (The Divine Commodity by Skye Jethani) My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither or your ways my ways...for as high as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than yours and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)