Showing titles in Social Issues

Reggie McNeal enjoys helping leaders pursue more kingdom-focused lives. He currently serves as a senior fellow for Leadership Network and city coach for GoodCities. In his consulting and speaking, Reggie draws on his experience as a pastor, denominational leader, seminary teacher, and leadership development coach for thousands of church leaders across North America and the world.

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, compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction.

A resurgence of the Social Gospel is energizing many evangelicals, but what does the Bible say about the role of humanitarian works in the Christian life? As new covenant believers, Christians are called to a specific central task: to be ministers of God's message of salvation for sinners. At the same time, the New Testament justifies nearly every concern of the revitalized Social Gospel.

A riveting audiobook about the dramatic changes that will transform the world as we know it. Americans are anxious about the future - the world's and their own. Rosenberg explains the enormous political, economic, and spiritual changes that are underway in the world's most important countries. He answers why these changes are happening, what they mean, and provides insights from exclusive interviews with world leaders.

News reports cover the tragic events - the bombings, the massacres, and the suicide attacks. Our newscasters take time to explain who the players are - from Hezbollah to the Iranian Quds, from ISIS to the Palestinian National Authority. But what is behind these events that fuels atrocity after atrocity?

Is a fetus a person? Is “pro-choice” a neutral position? For 40 years since the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, the abortion debate has been highly charged and politicized. Questions like these have become the common language of the public dialogue on this issue. In Compelling Interest, Roger Resler draws on original sources, including the actual transcripts, the majority and minority opinions, and comments by the lawyers and others involved to take a careful look at the real story.

What is enough? From cleaning out closets to avoiding the grocery store for weeks at a time, Jeff Shinabarger is on a journey to find out what is "enough" in every aspect of life. Follow his community as they ponder one question: What would happen if we created a culture in which we gave away whatever was more than enough for us? How would our habits change if we shed the excess of money, clutter, and food in our lives? In More or Less, Jeff invites us to create our own social experiments to answer the question "What is enough?"

Caleb Kalenbach is the Lead Pastor at Discovery Church in Simi Valley, CA. Raised in the LGBT community, he was exposed to how some Christians treated the LGBT community, and grew to hate Christians. In high school, he joined a Bible study to disprove the Bible, but ended up following Jesus instead. Later, his parents followed Jesus, too. This is the subject of his first book, Messy Grace - holding on to the truth of God's Word while being filled with grace.

Despite the human race's extraordinary capacity for invention and progress, we clearly have a millennia-old blind spot in one all-important area: We don't understand evil -- what it is, how it works, and why it so routinely and effortlessly ruins our lives. Put another way, we don't understand ourselves.

Christians are supposed to represent Christ to the world. But according to the latest report card, something has gone terribly wrong. Using descriptions like "hypocritical," "insensitive," and "judgmental," young Americans share an impression of Christians that's nothing short of . . . unChristian.

The book is a hands-on primer for bringing to life the basic message that Christ brought. In it, Meyer examines what will happen if we each decide that we will refuse to live only for ourselves and love intentionally through action.

Conversational, fresh, and accessible, Barefoot Tribe dares us to break past the safe confines of our manicured suburbs and polished shopping malls to take action, take risks, and remake the world into one more like what Jesus had in mind.The time is now. God wants your life. Will you speak up, step out, and do something incredible...today?

Human trafficking is not just something that happens in other countries. Nor is it something that just happens to "other people," such as runaways or the disenfranchised. Even kids in your own neighborhood can fall victim. But they don't have to.

The year is 2042, and a long-predicted tipping point has arrived. For the first time in human history, the economic pyramid has flipped: The feeble old now outnumber the vigorous young, and this untenable situation is intensifying a battle between competing cultural agendas. Reporter Julia Davidson - a formerly award-winning journalist seeking to revive a flagging career - is investigating the growing crisis, unaware that her activity makes her a pawn in an ominous conspiracy. Plagued by nightmares about her absent father, Julia finds herself drawn to the quiet strength of a man she meets at a friend's church.

Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan - planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history…and the turning point in a young girl's life.

America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin. "It's time we right this unacceptable wrong", says best-selling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo.

In this provocative tell-all, David Gushee gives an insider's look at the frictions and schisms of evangelical Christianity, based on his experiences that began with becoming a born-again Southern Baptist in 1978 to being kicked out of evangelicalism in 2014 for his stance on LGBT inclusion in the church. But Gushee's religious pilgrimage proves even broader than that, as he leads his listener through his childhood experiences in Roman Catholicism, his difficult days at the liberal Union Seminary in New York, his encounters with the Christian Right, and more. In telling his story, Gushee speaks to the cultural divisions of a generation.

Can religious beliefs survive in the scientific age? Are they resoundingly outdated? Or, is there something in them of great importance, even if the way they are expressed will have to change given new scientific context? These questions are among those at the core of the science-religion dialogue.

The least of these have the most to give. In Wherever the River Runs, Kelly Minter invites us on a journey down a river teeming with piranhas and caimans, as well as machete-wielding mothers, heroic jungle pastors, faith-filled children, and miracles too seldom experienced in our part of the world. Kelly's honest and engaging narrative pulls back the curtain on one of the most captivating places on earth as well as on parts of the gospel we may be able to recite but have never fully believed.

Churchless reveals the results of a five-year study based on interviews with thousands of churchless men and women. Looking past the surface of church attendance to deeper spiritual realities, Churchless will help us understand those who choose not to be part of a church, build trust-based relationships with them, and be empowered to successfully invite them to engage.