Pressing Reset Recentring Your Faith And Church On What Really Matters

How can you be sure your faith is established on the right things? In changing and uncertain times, Pressing Reset is a journey of rebuilding on strong foundations and keeping Jesus at the centre. This book is written to encourage healthy personal, family and church realignment.

''Pressing Reset is the description of a dynamic journey undertaken by Life Church, Christchurch, New Zealand. Founded by Pastors Paul and Jill Bennetts, leadership has now passed to Carl and Angela Crocker. Globally, it is estimated that only fifteen percent of church leadership transitions from one generation to the next are successful''--Foreword.

For more than twenty-five years, R. Kirby Godsey has been a regular in the Chapel Services at Mercer University as a proclaimer of the Word. Collected for the first time, these sermons reveal a vision for the Christian living out one's faith in the world. Godsey's unique prospective requires that the hearer/reader be a critical thinker in their faith. Brought to print for the first time in this book, these sermons serve as a clarion call for faithful and radical discipleship and honesty.

We are all on journeys. We set off on journeys far away from home and journey in our everyday lives—through obstacles and accomplishments, ups and downs, stages of life and everything in between. And when we infuse our journeys with meaning and intention, they become Sacred. Pilgrimage is a Sacred journey—a movement that brings us toward the Divine. It speaks to our longing for something more, and our search for answers to life's deepest questions:Who am I? Who is God? What makes me come alive? Though ancient in its roots, the practice of pilgrimage is alive and well today, beckoning a new generation of seekers to journey beyond the edge of daily life into terrains of mystery, wonder, revelation, delight, acceptance, and transformation. But you don't have to leave home to begin living like a pilgrim. To live as a pilgrim at home, all you need to do is see your life as a journey and your role as a seeker of the Sacred. In Pilgrim Principles: Journeying with Intention in Everyday Life, author Lacy Clark Ellman leads you on a seven-week journey to embrace the practice of pilgrimage right at home. Each week, she explores a different guiding principle of the pilgrim, with themes ranging from looking for the Sacred in the ordinary and immersing oneself in culture, to uncovering the true self and the presence of the Divine within. Daily readings include practices and reflections to make the principle personal, guiding readers on a holistic search for meaning and Sacred Encounter in daily life. At the end of this seven-week journey, eager seekers will find themselves transformed and ready to set off on their next Sacred adventure.

Biblicism, an approach to the Bible common among some American evangelicals, emphasizes together the Bible's exclusive authority, infallibility, clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. Acclaimed sociologist Christian Smith argues that this approach is misguided and unable to live up to its own claims. If evangelical biblicism worked as its proponents say it should, there would not be the vast variety of interpretive differences that biblicists themselves reach when they actually read and interpret the Bible. Far from challenging the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Smith critiques a particular rendering of it, encouraging evangelicals to seek a more responsible, coherent, and defensible approach to biblical authority. This important book has generated lively discussion and debate. The paperback edition adds a new chapter responding to the conversation that the cloth edition has sparked.

"52 Ways to Ignite Your Congregation: Generous Giving" is biblically centered, liberally evangelical, and practically oriented. This second volume in the "52 Ways to Ignite" series gives pastors, lay leaders, and stewardship/mission committees fifty-two thoughtful and action-oriented ideas that will encourage members to become disciples who give—and give generously. William Green begins each idea with a Bible passage, to invite you into reflection and discussion, igniting you to experience even greater responsiveness to God’s generosity.

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.