Recent leadership and academic title releases, upcoming releases, and selected reference resources are highlighted below.
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Learn what it means to be a United Methodist Christian.How may we describe United Methodists? Where do we come from? What do we believe? How do United Methodists act? What are our distinctive characteristics? What is required to be a member of our denomination? How do we grow as disciples of Jesus Christ within this...
James White’s classic Christian worship text, revised and updated.The book students of worship have read and re-read is now revised and updated for the first time in more than twenty years.Author Ed Phillips, one of White’s graduate students, is joined by practitioners and teachers from emerging generations, who...
Guide your church to proactively make decisions and deal with conflict.Calm: How to End Destructive Conflict in Your Church is a guidebook written for United Methodist churches and church leaders to help them proactively make decisions and deal with conflict. This book equips pastors and other leaders with the skills...
A Vision of United Methodist Life Together.Our world needs love during these desperate days of radical polarization and division. Our United Methodist churches yearn to embrace love more completely because God first loved us. Our “faith” (including doctrine) is important; Christian “hope” (including renewal) is...
Daily prayer the Wesleyan way.Prayer is a spiritual practice, and daily prayer uses the repetition of forms and words to cultivate a deep, meaningful ritual, drawing the individual into an ever-closer relationship with God. This book is organized by liturgical season, but is undated, so the individual is free to begin...
Part of the most comprehensive collection of Wesley’s writings.The correspondence presented in this fifth volume of Wesley’s letters includes a large number of his pastoral letters to various female and male lay persons in his societies. It also traces the fluctuations of Wesley’s stance on the British colonists...
THE RIGHT WORDS FOR EVERY SITUATION, AT YOUR FINGERTIPS.Pastors and congregational care ministers of all kinds must offer the right words and presence in any place, at a moment’s notice: Words of scripture offering comfort, encouragement, and wisdom. Words of truth providing accurate information. Words of prayer...
Discipleship and witness are not self-sustainable. Preaching equips God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ (Eph. 4:11).The gospel is news that passes from the lips of one who has heard to the ears of one who has not yet heard, then (God willing) it burrows in the soul, energizing the...
Talk the talk and walk the walk.The challenge of the Christian life is learning to talk Christian. Somebody has got to tell us, give us the words that open the door to the faith called Christian. Each of us is due the delight of discovery that in submitting to God’s talk to us.God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of...
The Psalms can help us during a time of disruption and division.Deep Calls to Deep demonstrates a new and generative way of reading the Bible, which looks for differences among texts to engage in dialogue over critical issues that are not only biblical but also are relevant to our contemporary crises. Bill Brown...
Learn to engage with a dangerous God, to preach the sermons your community needs today.Every sermon has a theology, and a god of that theology behind it. Preaching is more effective, and has more integrity when preachers understand the god behind their theology. Specifically, whether the god is a universal God, like...
Learn to capably lead others in prayer, in any setting, on any occasion.Leading congregations and other groups in prayer is a significant challenge for many pastors and other ministry leaders. What to say, and how to say it? Most public pray-ers have received very little training and have not had the chance to develop...
A new articulation of pastoral theology, care, and counseling.Too often we think and teach in ways that reinforce a mind-body split. This can lead people to self-alienation, impeding holistic, healthy relationships between people, God, and each other. Body Connections takes a different approach, teaching us to see the...
YOUR CHURCH, MINISTRY, OR ORGANIZATION CAN BECOME A FORCE FOR POSITIVE CHANGE.LEARN HOW AND START NOW!Pastors, other leaders, and people in every community yearn to bring change. To in?uence people and systems for good. To work for morally rooted social change.What is the best way to do this work?...
Pastors and church leaders genuinely want to care for people in their congregations and communities. But pastors cannot care for an entire church, and most laypersons don't have the training to do it. The Caring Congregation Ministry is a model for person-to-person care that's been proven to work in small and large...
The Care Minister's Manual is the personal training workbook and reference guide for Congregational Care Ministers (CCM's), who serve a central role in the Caring Congregation Ministry. CCM's receive in-depth training, where they learn the theological foundations of congregational care, plus the behaviors, habits, and...
While some people might become pastors to offer counsel, I expect that many pastors see counseling as a daunting, disorienting, and even dreaded part of the job. It can even be scorned by some who consider this pastoral work an unnecessary distraction from leadership and mission. Yet pastoral counseling is a...
Women preachers are everywhere. The pulpit, once a bastion of male presence and power, has become, in many denominations, a place where women regularly exercise their gifts, leading congregations and proclaiming God's word each week. The number of women scholars who are publishing and teaching in the field of preaching...
Pastors and others who lead Christian worship want to offer worship that is truthful and hopeful. They yearn to create worship that involves and includes everyone in their midst. To develop new approaches to planning, so that their worship can reflect and respond to the realities of the community. To create worship for...
The many voices in scripture form a dialogue with readers, which produce theological truths that are larger than the individual parts. This introduction is informed by both literary theory and theology. It groups sections of the whole Bible together by genre. Each section identifies and describes the genre (such as...
Traditioned innovation is a habit of being and living that cultivates a certain kind of moral imagination shaped by storytelling and expressed in creative, transformational action. Moral imagination is about character, which depends on ongoing formation that takes place in friendships and communities that embody...
“Impact Investor” Kim Tan challenges the church to ask whether or not the gospel as we interpret it today really embodies the jubilee vision of the Bible. Imagine a group of forty adults living in a community, assisting each other to buy houses, sharing material wealth and releasing the surplus to help others as a...
For more than 200 years, millions of Methodists have shared God’s love with the world. Baked into the theological purpose of our mission is the compassion and resolve to relieve human suffering by offering healing, hope, and holiness everywhere in the world. Millions of Methodist people on every continent persist in...
Ten personal narratives reveal the shared and distinct struggles of being Black in the Church, facing historic and modern racism. It’s uncertain that Howard Thurman made the remark often attributed to him, “I have been writing this book all my life,” but there is little doubt that he was deeply immersed in...
It’s been said that prayer is the vocabulary of faith. This book offers a wealth of resources from forgotten places to help us create a new vocabulary for worship and prayer, one that is located amidst the poor and the major issues of violence and destruction around the world today. It is a collection of prayers,...
At its beginning Christianity was surprising, powerful, creative, world-shaking.Today in the West it is many times familiar, common, andexpected, losing its power to surprise and transform. We have developedsocietal amnesia and ignorance of what Christianity originally was – andwhat it still can be. We need to...
Preachers Dare is adapted from Will Willimon’s Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale and is inspired by a quote from the great theologian Karl Barth. In a world in which sermons too often become hackneyed conventional wisdom or tame common sense, preachers dare to speak about the God who speaks to us as Jesus...
Reviewing game film is a discipline that sports teams often incorporate after each game. Teams watch game videos to identify mistakes, make adjustments, consider radical changes, and highlight successes. The goal of this analysis is to facilitate individual and team improvements that will positively affect subsequent...
Are there places in your life you need to come back from? Maybe it’s around family brokenness or a friend’s betrayal. It could be classmate drama or a family divorce. Perhaps money problems or health issues have caused a loss. Whatever the case, it feels like life has been against you. Come Back: Returning to the...
Our church buildings, synagogues, and other religious places – which once stood as beacons of hope and reverence for its community – have become a burden for the organizations who seek to keep them standing. In efforts to patch leaky roofs and paint over years of wear, leaders are putting more and more money each...
Pastors and other leaders feel trapped in systems and institutions where actions and decisions often seem to have little to do with the scripture they read or the theology they profess. They are swept into leadership norms that resemble business models more than mission. They see in others and (sometimes) recognize in...
"While physical training has some value, training in holy living is useful for everything. It has promise for this life now and the life to come." ~ 1 Timothy 4:8Christians crave a deeper, more intimate relationship with God. Spiritual disciplines are activities and practices that guide you in your daily walk through...
Preachers increasingly see the need to deliver sermons that are"dangerous" in a variety of ways: the way they challenge hearers'comfort levels and challenge established powers and hierarchies. Author Frank Thomashelps readers understand those dangers—especially the forces of powerand hierarchy that are so intrinsic...
Is there a way to do the prescribed or suggested orders of worship from denominational worship resources—such as the United Methodist Book of Worship, Evangelical Lutheran Book of Worship, the Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), or the Book of Common Prayer—in a way that feels legitimately...
