Growing One Another

Discipleship was one of the central themes of Jesus' teaching, yet it is not a major emphasis today for many churches. This short study guide explores the Bible's teaching on discipleship, and covers such topics as the need for discipleship, the demands of discipleship, and the enemy of discipleship. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter, groups will work through guided discussions together as they learn about the centrality of discipleship in the Christian life. A series of ten 6–7 week studies covering the nine distinctives of a healthy church as originally laid out in Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever. This series explores the biblical foundations of key aspects of the church, helping Christians to live out those realities as members of a local body. Conveniently packaged and accessibly written, the format of this series is guided, inductive discussion of Scripture passages and is ideal for use in Sunday school, church-wide studies, or small group contexts.

Women in all seasons of life can feel alone, longing for encouragement, guidance, and wisdom from someone who has been there before. They would value the wealth of knowledge and wisdom from older women's experiences, but often these women don't feel equipped to offer help. This book is a starting place, meant to be a springboard for mentoring discussions between older and younger women, setting the biblical basis for mentoring from Titus 2 before outlining 11 lessons that guide their time together. Each lesson focuses on a topic such as God's word, prayer, contentment, temptation, and church, with activities for before, during, and after the mentoring session. Younger and older women will grow together as they use these lessons to walk through life together. Published in partnership with the Gospel Coalition.

From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. “Growing up”, then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring—voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle—are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize–winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies’ rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn—often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance—from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children—an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.

Guides both pastors and members to recognize key characteristics of a healthy church and then challenge each person to do his or her part in developing those characteristics in the local church body.

Growing Up takes the guesswork out of growing closer to the Lord and equipping others to do the same. - http://www.growingupseries.com/book-1.

"Nobody reaches out to me when I go to church." "This church really isn't much of a family." Have you heard these kinds of comments? How sad if they are true, especially as God's Word has so much to say about how believers should interact with one another! An array of interpersonal problems between spouses, children, parents, siblings, friends, coworkers can easily develop, but if you are a Christian, you can put the Bible's message into practice and see how radically it transforms your relationships with others. By carefully examining the "one another" commands in Scripture, the authors provide a Word-based understanding of what God intends for Christian relationshipsƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚€ƒƒ‚‚ƒ‚‚"showing not only what they look like, but also how to develop them. Enjoy reading and sharing this book; it's very well suited for individuals, couples, and small groups.

It's no secret that the evangelism methods of yesterday are not yielding the kinds of results they did in the 1970s and 1980s. So how are new Christians hearing the Gospel today? How are they finding churches? And what makes them stay at a church? The answers to these questions have the power to dramatically alter the way we do outreach. And Dr. McIntosh has them. Based on ten years of scientific research, Growing God's Church shows pastors and church leaders how people are actually coming to faith in the 21st century. It covers factors such as our motive for ministry, the priorities churches set for themselves, the reality of churchless Christians, generational and gender-based differences in evangelism effectiveness, the name of your church, the influence of pastors, and much more. The appendix includes a copy of the survey that provides the basis for McIntosh's arguments and an overview of the study is provided in the first chapter.