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Churches often realize they need to change. But if they're not careful, the way they change can hurt more than help. Leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers a new paradigm for understanding the congregation in contemporary ministry. He articulates why congregations feel pressured by the speed of change in modern life and encourages an approach that doesn't fall into the negative traps of our secular age.

In Faith Formation in a Secular Age, the first book in his Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy, Andrew Root offered an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulated how faith can be formed in our secular age. In The Pastor in a Secular Age, Root explores how this secular age has impacted the identity and practice of the pastor, obscuring his or her core vocation: to call and assist others into the experience of ministry.

Post-Christian life and society do not eliminate a desire for the transcendent; rather, they create an environment for new and divergent spiritual communities and practices to flourish. We are flooded with spiritualities that appeal to human desires for nonreligious personal transformation. But many fail to deliver because they fall into the trap of the self. In the last book of the Ministry in a Secular Age series, leading practical theologian Andrew Root shows the differences between these spiritualities and authentic Christian transformation.

When storms hit and the mess of life comes crashing down, it is easier to sink into the undertow than fight to stay above water. When you focus on the waves, you miss the hand reaching down to help you. With warmth and wisdom, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Jentezen Franklin reminds you that no storm is so fierce it can't be calmed and no obstacle is too big it can't be moved.

During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president—the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate—but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium.

Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield was a watchman on the wall of orthodoxy. His temperament, training, and talent—together with his deep love for Christ and amazing breadth of knowledge—shaped him into the twentieth century's greatest defender of the faith. His writings have been studied with profit for well over a hundred years—a tribute to his clear, careful, cogent, gospel-centered exposition of orthodox Christianity, which he called "the redemptive religion" and which he fearlessly defended.