How The Church Fails Businesspeople And What Can Be Done About It

Why do so many Christians struggle to relate their faith to their daily work? In this book John C. Knapp argues that the church's ambiguous teachings about vocation, money, and business have long contributed to Christians' uncertainty about discipleship in the workplace. Drawing on his own expertise in business ethics and numerous interviews with Christians in diverse occupations, Knapp offers a new theological framework for Christian life in the world of business.

Two of the most influential forces in American history are business and religion. Merchants and Ministers weaves the two together in a history of the relationship between businesspeople and Christian clergy. From fur traders and missionaries who explored the interior of the continent to Gilded-Age corporate titans and their clerical confidants to black businessmen and their ministerial collaborators in the Civil Rights movement, Merchants and Ministers tells stories of interactions between businesspeople and clergy from the colonial period to the present. It presents a complex picture of this relationship, highlighting both conflict and cooperation between the two groups. By placing anecdotal detail in the context of general developments in commerce and Christianity, Merchants and Ministers traces the contours of American history and illuminates those contours with the personal stories of businesspeople and clergy.

The divide between the sacred and the secular life has dogged Christians for centuries. Even today, many Christians and church leaders still assume that the workplace is inferior to pastoring, Bible study, mission trips, and the like. This volume provides a different approach: it surveys the persistence of the sacred-secular divide in Christian history to develop a more robust theology of vocation while engaging with both the Old and New Testament. Charles offers a vision for numerous ways Christians are called to live faithfully in the so-called secular world.

This book is an arresting interdisciplinary publication on Christian education, comprising works by leading scholars, professionals and practitioners from around the globe. It focuses on the integrated approaches to Christian education that are both theoretically sound and practically beneficial, and identifies innovative pedagogical methods and tools that have been field-tested and practice-approved. It discusses topics such as exploring programmes and courses through different lenses; learning challenges and opportunities within organisational management; theology of business; Christian models of teaching in different contexts; job preparedness; developing different interpretive or meaning-making frameworks for working with social justice, people with disability, non-profit community organisations and in developing country contexts. It offers graduate students, teachers, school administrators, organisational leaders, theologians, researchers and education practitioners a fresh and inspiring reimagining of Christian education perspectives and practices and the ramifications of their application to life-long learning.

We live in an age of enormous and rapid change, but how do people, organisations, even whole cultures and societies change? And where is God in such transformations? For more than a hundred years, anthropology has taught us that entering a chaotic, awesome and fraught 'threshold' - or liminal space - is fundamental to our renewal as human beings. Yet none of us goes willingly into such places. We need to be 'held' in liminal movement so that it is safe enough to change. Crossing Thresholds is the first inter-disciplinary theological treatment of the universal phenomenon of liminality. Developing practical wisdom from foundations in the work of Victor Turner, Donald Winnicott and Bruce Reed, the authors explore the place of liminality in the worship, mission and hermeneutics of the Church and reflect on its usefulness to a wide range of Christian practice. For all those who strive to think theologically about the great transitions of life, this comprehensive work offers unique insight into what it is to safely cross the threshold of chaos and embrace the future with courage.

Introduction / Klyne Snodgrass A Christian View of Wealth and Possessions: An Old Testament Perspective / Hugh G. M. Williamson Response to Williamson / James K. Bruckner Poverty and Paul's Gospel / Bruce W. Longenecker Response to Longenecker / Aaron Kuecker A Patristic View of Wealth and Possessions / Helen Rhee Response to Rhee / Bradley Nassif Blessings, Curses, and the Cross / Kelly Johnson Money and Possessions: A Biblical Perspective / Jonathan J. Bonk Response to Bonk / Liz Mosbo VerHage Decorum and Deeds in 1 Timothy 2:9-10 in Light of Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus / Gary G. Hoag Response to Hoag / Lyn Nixon Wealth, Lordless Powers, and the Rule of Christ / Mark Husbands Response to Husbands / William Myatt Money and Possessions / Will Willimon

If you know God loves your work, you can—as Paul put it—“work at it with all your heart.” But too often even Christians find it hard to engage fully with what occupies them for hours every day. This book will help you relate your work to God’s eternal kingdom purposes. Here you will find not just one or two but several biblical reasons for getting up and going to work. During your lifetime you will spend, perhaps, 100,000 hours working in paid or unpaid work. Will you see spiritual significance in those hours? In the end, will they really matter? These easy-to-read chapters will help you view your daily work within a new and much larger perspective. For example, what if you were to begin seeing your work as a worship offering that God gladly receives? Or what if you were to discover how he intends to use your work to further your own spiritual growth? Get set to move from “Thank God, it’s Friday!” to “Wonderful, it’s Monday again!”

This book by theologian-ethicist Lewis Mudge offers fresh philosophical and theological concepts, economic and political insights, and practical financial proposals to counter the causes and lasting effects of the worldwide recession that began in late 2007. The historical and global dimensions of Mudge s perspective and his open-ended suggestions keep the book s arguments highly relevant today, little affected by daily changes in a world economy still suffering from the reverberations of the credit collapse several years ago. Editorial references in footnotes provide up-to-date data and add nuances to the major issues raised by Mudge. To help foster the ecumenical dialogue Mudge calls for, We Can Make the World Economy a Sustainable Global Home includes responses from Elliott N. Dorff, John C. Knapp, and Djamel Eddine Laouisset a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim.