Cultivating Christlikeness

Are you ready to reclaim our inheritance as United Methodist Wesleyans? Our communities and the world are crying out for empathy, authenticity, and integrity. This book helps us choose ways of living that are grace-filled and redeeming. Cultivating Christlikeness is about the bold adventure of United Methodists celebrating and living into a grand vision that includes everyone in God’s extravagant embrace. Jesus invites us to partner in the work of transformation, new birth, and resurrection in every aspect of our lives. Together we can step into a future showered by God’s multiplying love. Paul Chilcote mines his decades of study, prayer, and devotion to Christian practices to share his vision for how we partner with God to make the world more loving and just. In Cultivating Christlikeness, he weaves the threads of insight and appreciation with special attention to Wesleyan ways of loving God and neighbor that can change us and change the world. With his gentle direction, we discover with new appreciation how 18th-century John and Charles Wesley illumine our 21st-century quest to befriend Jesus, who frees us to live into and by the grace of God. Chilcote’s book is a practical guide. He guides us with a mentor’s insightful nudge as we explore essential Wesleyan teachings about God and the beloved community. He helps us know how to share these understandings with our families and neighbors, and more importantly, he points us to ways to live out our commitments with purpose, courage, and joy. The framework and flow of Cultivating Christlikeness make it easily adaptable for group discussion and individual use. It includes a plan for a two-day retreat for those eager to join in a more intensive experience of mutual engagement to renew their spirits and discover fresh ways to grow in love and grace. The book is a companion to Chilcote’s, Multiplying Love (Abingdon Press), which casts the theological vision that animates this practical spiritual guide. And it is an updated and expanded revision of an earlier work entitled, Wesley Speaks on Christian Vocation, originally published by Discipleship Ministries, then reissued by Wipf & Stock.

How should Christians live? On the one hand, some very legalistic Christians stress the importance of keeping all the rules—that you must do this and never do that if you want to prove you are really a Christian. On the other hand, there are those who reject the whole idea of rules or traditions in the church and see the point of the Christian faith as setting us free from the institutionalized religious burden. But Paul addresses these two competing views by showing us a far better way—a truly Christian way to live our lives. It is the way of the Spirit of God given to us through Christ: "Walk by the Spirit . . . led by the Spirit . . . live by the Spirit . . . keep in step with the Spirit." That is the heart and soul of Christian living. It is the center and secret of what it means to be a person who belongs to Christ. Pastor and scholar Christopher Wright invites us to live a life in step with the Spirit by cultivating the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These nine chapters, each addressing a different fruit, each conclude with questions for contemplation or discussion. Feed on the Word of God, grow in Christlikeness, and live a fruitful life.

Being is greater than doing. We all come into the world with a certain emptiness in our lives—an emptiness that leads to a search for meaning. And the world tells us that search for meaning can be solved by doing. Unfortunately, an overemphasis on doing has led many people away from cultivating an interior life that allows them to sustain their exterior life. This explains the many failures we continuously see in day-to-day life. When a person’s inner life—who he or she is—is not prepared, that person's character does not have the maturity or the strength to sustain them in the long run. In this book, Miguel Núñez points us to Scripture and experience to show us how being is more important than doing. He teaches us how to cultivate the foundations of our lives, so that we can be what we need to be, in order to do what we need to do.

Are you ready to reclaim our inheritance as United Methodist Wesleyans? Our communities and the world are crying out for empathy, authenticity, and integrity. This book helps us choose ways of living that are grace-filled and redeeming. Cultivating Christlikeness is about the bold adventure of United Methodists celebrating and living into a grand vision that includes everyone in God's extravagant embrace. Jesus invites us to partner in the work of transformation, new birth, and resurrection in every aspect of our lives. Together, we can step into a future showered by God's multiplying love. Paul Chilcote mines his decades of study, prayer, and devotion to Christian practices to share his vision for how we partner with God to make the world more loving and just. In Cultivating Christlikeness, he weaves the threads of insight and appreciation with special attention to Wesleyan ways of loving God and neighbor that can change us and change the world. With his gentle direction, we discover with new appreciation how 18th-century John and Charles Wesley illumine our 21st-century quest to befriend Jesus, who frees us to live into and by the grace of God. Chilcote's book is a practical guide, leading us through selected excerpts from the Wesleys, adding fresh insights and probing questions as we explore essential teachings about God and the beloved community. He helps us know how to share these understandings with our families and neighbors, and more importantly, he points us to ways to live out our commitments with purpose, courage, and joy. The framework and flow of Cultivating Christlikeness make it easily adaptable for group discussion and individual use. It includes a plan for a two-day retreat for those eager to join in a more intensive experience of mutual engagement to renew their spirits and discover fresh ways to grow in love and grace. The book is a companion to Chilcote's Multiplying Love (Abingdon Press, 2023) that casts the theological vision that animates this practical spiritual guide. And it is an updated and expanded revision of an earlier work entitled Wesley Speaks on Christian Vocation, originally published by Discipleship Resources then reissued by Wipf & Stock.

Christians are hungry for a return to their own tradition to cultivate meditation practices that are both psychologically and spiritually fruitful. In recent decades, mindfulness meditation, which originates from the Buddhist tradition, has been embraced in many settings as a method for addressing a plethora of symptoms. What would it look like to turn instead to the Christian faith for resources to more effectively identify and respond to psychological suffering? Over the last decade, Dr. Joshua Knabb has conducted a variety of empirical studies on Christian meditation, focusing on both building theory and testing specific, replicable practices. In this overview and workbook he presents the foundations of a Christian-sensitive approach to meditation in clinical practice. Filled with practical features for immediate use by Christian clients and their therapists, Christian Meditation in Clinical Practice provides an introduction to the rich resources on meditation from eight major streams of the Christian tradition practices from the early desert Christians, Ignatius of Loyola, Celtic Christians, the Puritans, contemporary writers, and many others guidance for targeting transdiagnostic processes—patterns of cognition, affect, behavior, the self, and relationships that may lead to psychological suffering research-based evidence for the benefits of Christian meditation client-friendly tools for practicing meditation, including step-by-step instructions, worksheets, journaling prompts, and links to tailored audio resources Using the approach of Christian psychology, Knabb's model dually builds on a biblical worldview and integrates the latest research in clinical psychology. As clients engage the variety of meditative exercises in this book, they will move toward healthier responses to difficult experiences and a deeper awareness of, and contentment in, God. Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

A collection of ninety daily meditations confront the issue of human suffering and offer the possibility of healing through trust in God.

Daily Assurance in the Face of Life’s Hardest Struggles When life throws challenges at us, our view of God’s presence can become cloudy. If God is good, why is there so much evil and suffering? In times of hardship, it’s easy to lose sight of God’s purpose, goodness, and love. 90 Days of God’s Goodness helps disperse the fog—little by little, discovery by discovery, day by day. Through these thoughtful, inspiring devotional readings, bestselling author Randy Alcorn brings clarity to the question of God’s goodness. For anyone who’s ever suffered, or shared in a loved one’s suffering…or for anyone who’s ever been painfully distressed by the prevalent evil in this world…90 Days of God’s Goodness opens a wide door to healing and the reassurance of a God whose love we can count on and always turn to.

Race complicates our relationships, even when we reject racism and seek to walk a better path together. How can we get our thinking—and our conversations—unstuck from entrenched patterns? In this book, four experts in psychology and social work present a model for how to build and deepen the cross-race relationships we want. The starting place, they testify, must be a biblical understanding of the problem of racial disunity, grounded in the grand narrative of Scripture, followed by practical insights about psychology and social behavior. This book is the culmination of professional—but also deeply personal—conversations the authors have had with each other, wrestling together over current events, their own stories, and their roles in the healing process. They combine biblical teachings with psychological science to help Christians develop the skills to discuss race and ethnicity. In each chapter, you will be guided through essential information, biblical examples, case studies, activities, and journaling exercises to prepare you to practice healing conversations. Using research from psychology, attachment theory, and emotionally focused therapy, this process will build your knowledge, self-awareness, other-awareness, and specific relational skills. Jesus embodied love, challenged injustice, welcomed those rejected by society, and engaged in healing conversations with everyone he encountered. The insights and practices in Healing Conversations on Race will help Christians grow in Christlikeness and follow his example.