Sharable Parables

Teach 15 parables in fun and fresh ways. There is 1 parable per chapter with multiple ideas such as drama, skits, and interactive activities for each age group. Enjoy this library of favorite Bible stories and storytelling techniques developed by award-winning author and professional storyteller Steven James. Each book includes creative storytelling techniques especially suited to help teachers tell God’s story and involve children in the Bible story.

This book is a collection of favorite Bible stories, each written with a creative and meaningful storytelling technique especially suited to help teachers involve young children in the Bible story. Enjoy this library of favorite Bible stories and storytelling techniques developed by award-winning author and professional storyteller Steven James. Each book includes creative storytelling techniques especially suited to help teachers tell God’s story and involve children in the Bible story.

Make familiar Bible stories new again for preteens with this collection of 30 fill-in stories that will allow kids to create a crazy new story with the same powerful point. Enjoy this library of favorite Bible stories and storytelling techniques developed by award-winning author and professional storyteller Steven James. Each book includes creative storytelling techniques especially suited to help teachers tell God’s story and involve children in the Bible story.

If you want kids to do God's Word and not just hear it--you're in exactly the right place. Each session focuses on one key Bible truth--kids will discover it, think about it, talk about it, pray about it, and apply what they learn. You'll drive that point home through Bible exploration, fun discussions, giggle-worthy games, and oh-wow activities that engage kids in multiple ways. Just add an adult or teenage leader to these easy-to-lead sessions to keep kids engaged, entertained, and growing in their faith Each session is Flexible--sessions work for 1 or 2 kids, 12 kids, or more Multi-aged--suitable for all elementary kids Low-prep--using easy-to-find supplies 45 minutes of fun--with time stretchers to fill an hour Relational--children grow close to Jesus and each other Perfect for any children's ministry program--Sunday school, children's church, and more Help kids discover the faith-building, life-changing truths tucked into 13 of Jesus' very cool stories. They will meet a lost and found son, a rich fool, disgruntled vineyard workers, a pretty good Samaritan, and many others. And along the way, kids will explore the eternal truths Jesus wrapped in those stories--and what those truths mean in their lives.

The disciples weren't the only ones who needed help understanding the parables Jesus told. Believers today often need some clarification. Using this six-week interactive Bible study from trusted author and speaker Jennifer Kennedy Dean, you can explore the secrets of the kingdom of God as revealed in the parables Jesus shared. The study, with five daily lessons for each of six weeks, will help you understand what the kingdom of God is and how to release its power in your life.

Learn how theology and psychology can work together to provide effective therapy! Shared Grace provides a framework within which mental health professionals and clergy can work together to provide people in need with appropriate psychological services and spiritual interventions. Breaking down the walls between psychology and religion, this guide offers you proven and tried methods and models from the authors’collaborative work. Comprehensive and intelligent, this vital book will help therapists incorporate a spiritual dimension to their sessions and give patients successful and effective services. Shared Grace is also a book about the healing power of love. It is the very personal, intense account of the authors’ work to help a woman who suffered from dissociative identity disorder heal from the effects of her childhood abuse. Through this poignant story, you’ll find that adding a spiritual dimension into psychotherapy brings increased richness and depth to the therapeutic process. Step-by-step practical suggestions for collaboration between therapist and clergy are included. Issues brought to light in Shared Grace include: transforming damaged and dysfunctional images of God the establishment of support systems within the religious community the use of guided imagery the creation of healthy rituals and ceremonies Shared Grace will help therapists and clergy alike and enable each to obtain the support, education, and training to make interdisciplinary collaboration successful.

Hedrick contends that parables do not teach moral and religious lessons; they are not, in whole or part, theological figures for the church. Rather, parables are realistic narrative fictions that like all effective fiction literature are designed to draw readers into story worlds where they make discoveries about themselves by finding their ideas challenged and subverted--or affirmed. The parables have endings but not final resolutions, because the endings raise new complications for careful readers, which require further resolution. The narrative contexts and interpretations supplied by the evangelists constitute an attempt by the early church to bring the secular narratives of Jesus under the control of the church's later religious perspectives. Each narrative represents a fragment of Jesus's secular vision of reality. Finding himself outside the mainstream of parables scholarship, both ecclesiastical and critical, Hedrick explored a literary approach to the parables in a series of essays that, among other things, set out the basic rationale for a literary approach to the parables of Jesus. These early essays form the central section of the book. They are published here in edited form along with unpublished critiques of a thoroughgoing literary approach and his response.