In Pursuit Of Faithfulness

This inspiring true story is about a young woman's journey with God. As a little girl, she meets Him in the most unlikely place--her broken heart. He walks with her through her poverty and shame. When He calls her forth, she dares to follow and discovers that through suffering and redemption, God makes Himself real to anyone who has the faith to pursue Him.

In 1841, four Amish Mennonite families left their homes in southwestern Pennsylvania and traveled in horse-drawn wagons to Elkhart County, Indiana. Their journey was distinctly American, as they joined a wave of white settlers searching for new and cheaper lands where they could live, work, and worship. It was also distinctly Anabaptist, as they sought to live out complicated commitments to Christ, nonviolence, and community. In this lively narrative, historian and journalist Rich Preheim investigates the heritage and innovations of Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, an area conference of Mennonite Church USA, that have profoundly shaped Mennonite faith and practice since the nineteenth century. Standing at the crossroads of tradition and change, Mennonites in Indiana and Michigan wrestle to pursue faithfulness to Christ in the twenty-first century.

Fifteen essays aimed at voters on a variety of topics such as faithful citizenship, how Catholics perceive and talk about issues such as war, life issues, character issues, and how our bishops teach.

Strange how one little word, the Greek word pistis, can make a profound difference in understanding the Bible. Pistis is usually translated “faith,” but in different contexts of the New Testament the word can have several other meanings such as “faithfulness,” “trustworthiness,” “solemn promise or oath,” “proof or pledge,” “conviction,” and “doctrine (of the Christian faith).” This book will challenge the reader’s understanding of Paul’s expression pistis Christou, “faith/faithfulness of Christ,” and the use of the pistis word group (verb, noun, and adjective) throughout the New Testament. Given the Old Testament background to this word, one will learn how the apostle Paul utilized an obscure phrase from the prophet Habakkuk to refer to a coming Messiah who in turn lived in faithfulness to the Father’s will to die on a cross for the sins of the world. This book will reveal how the gospel is emphasized throughout the New Testament in terms of “the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.” New and fresh interpretations of various texts will challenge the traditional understandings of such texts. When a person comprehends pistis as God’s faithfulness and the Messiah’s faithfulness, the only human response is pistis itself, meaning faithfulness as described in Hebrews 11. God is faithful and Jesus is faithful. Will he find us faithful?

This is a book about the enormous changes that took place at Baylor University from 1991 to 2003, as seen through the perceptive eyes of its provost at the time, Donald D. Schmeltekopf. On the front end was the charter revision, a change that permanently restructured the legal governance of the university. On the back end was Baylor 2012, a grand vision for the university issued by the Board of Regents on September 21, 2001. There were several critical crossroads along the way to what has now been created at Baylor, a Christian research university, one of a kind among church-related universities in the Protestant orbit. These memoirs tell the story of this transformation from the perspective of one who was leading at the crossroads.

The metaphor of performance has been applied fruitfully by anthropologists and other social theorists to different aspects of human social existence, and furnishes a potentially helpful model in terms of which to think theologically about Christian life. After an introductory editorial chapter reflecting on the nature of artistic performance and its relationship to the notions of tradition and identity, Part One of this book attends specifically to the phenomenon of dramatic performance and possible theological applications of it. Part Two considers various aspects of the performance of Christian identity, looking at worship, the interpretation of the Bible, Christian response to elements in the contemporary media, the shape of Christian moral life, and ending with a theological reflection on the shape of personal identity, correlating it with the theatrical metaphors of 'character' and 'performing a part' in a scripted drama. Part Three demonstrates how art forms (including some technically non-performative ones - literature, poetry, painting) may constitute faithful Christian practices in which the tradition is authentically 'performed', producing works which break open its meaning in profound new ways for a constantly shifting context.