Performing The Gospel

What really matters about how we perform the gospel in church, and beyond? This is what this book sets out to explore.

Previous thinking regarding "oral tradition" imagined a one-way process of transmission, handing down the fairly intact textual chunks that would constitute what we know as the end result, the written Gospels.

Scholars have long understood that the texts we now know as the Gospels were read aloud in the Greco-Roman world, but few have actually envisioned what a performance of the Gospel of Mark would have been like in the first century and how it would have shaped the experience of its audience. Proclaiming the Gospel shows us. Oral performances in the New Testament world were lively affairs. In the performance of Greco-Roman theater, readers lose their voices from the stress of emotional passages. Audiences cheer for philosophers as if at a rock concert, and in law courts, they are paid for their responses. Storytellers compete for attention with jugglers, and some speakers must fend off hostile crowds. Congregations at churches and synagogues cheer as if at the theater. Shiner reveals the ways that Mark wrote his Gospel to compete in this arena and how his audiences would have responded: applause for the miracles of Jesus, then an altogether different response at the cross. Whitney Shiner is Assistant Professor of Christian Origins at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and the author of Follow Me: Disciples in markan Rhetoric.

The earliest of the four Gospels, the book portrays Jesus as an enigmatic figure, struggling with enemies, his inner and external demons, and with his devoted but disconcerted disciples. Unlike other gospels, his parables are obscure, to be explained secretly to his followers. With an introduction by Nick Cave

In this new biography of St. Francis, Cunningham follows the saint's life in chronological order, placing him within his culture, exploring official developments within the Catholic Church, and highlighting the many conversions of Francis as his life played out.

This volume, which launches the Engaging Worship series from Fuller Theological Seminary's Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts, offers a unique study of sermon delivery. While many books offer advice on how to prepare, write, and preach a sermon, this volume is distinctive in approaching the subject from the perspective of performance. The authors, who teach at a variety of seminaries and divinity schools across the nation, examine how the sermon can bring God's word to life for the congregation. In that sense, they consider the idea of performance from a wide range of theological, artistic, and musical viewpoints. These thoughtful essays will engage clergy and students with new ways of looking at the art of preaching.

2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - Multicultural "I am a man torn in two. And the gospel I inherited is divided." Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past. Wilson-Hartgrove traces his journey from the religion of the slaveholder to the Christianity of Christ. Reconstructing the gospel requires facing the pain of the past and present, from racial blindness to systemic abuses of power. Grappling seriously with troubling history and theology, Wilson-Hartgrove recovers the subversiveness of the gospel that sustained the church through centuries of slavery and oppression, from the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond. When the gospel is reconstructed, freedom rings both for individuals and for society as a whole. Discover how Jesus continues to save us from ourselves and each other, to repair the breach and heal our land.

Christians are called to be thankful. What we believe about God is evident in how we exhibit thankfulness for all he has done. In this book, pastor Sam Crabtree encourages us to express glad-hearted thankfulness for God's unending provision in all circumstances. Through the daily practices of expressing gratitude—saying "thank you" to a neighbor, serving others in practical ways, or simply thanking God for his many gifts—we recognize the absolute and total lordship of God and his sovereignty over all things.