Building King's Beloved Community

Building King's Beloved Community
Author: Donald M. Chinula
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2009-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1608991431

How does oppression manifest itself in the structures and systems of society? What are the psychological and theological issues surrounding the phenomena of a tortured self-identity and diminished self-esteem? Through the study of King's life and witness, Building King's Beloved Community seeks to inspire and suggest a prophetic practice that will broaden and inform the paradigm for pastoral caregiving in responding to the needs of oppressed people in any context--especially where Christianity is practiced.

Building God's Beloved Community

Building God's Beloved Community
Author: Taylor Croissant
Publisher: The United Church of Canada
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2022-06-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1551342677

Drawing on the expertise of United Church theologians and ministers from across the country, Building God’s Beloved Community outlines the church’s approach to some of the big questions, while offering insight into United Church worship, tradition, and history. An accessible and engaging primer designed to accompany those during their period of preparation—adult baptism, confirmation, or deeper study—Building God’s Beloved Community will draw you closer to God as it invites you into beloved community and encourages you to move out into the world to love and serve.

A More Perfect Union

A More Perfect Union
Author: Adam Russell Taylor
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506464548

America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the Beloved Community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the Beloved Community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one"), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the Beloved Community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, tapping into our most sacred civic and religious values, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.

Welcoming Justice

Welcoming Justice
Author: Charles Marsh
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830873902

Historian and theologian Charles Marsh partners with veteran activist John Perkins to chronicle God's vision for a more equitable and just world. Now updated to reflect on current social realities, this book shows how abandoned places are being restored, divisions are being reconciled, and what individuals and communities are now doing to welcome peace and justice.

Spiritual Gifts, the Beloved Community, and Covenant

Spiritual Gifts, the Beloved Community, and Covenant
Author: Emily Provance
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9780875744612

God speaks to all people and gives us all spiritual gifts-and yet these gifts are not all the same. We are organizers, pray-ers, workers, carers, innovators, provocateurs, and healers. Why? Because we're made to fit together like puzzle pieces, as we name, affirm, and nurture spiritual gifts and ministries. In the author's view, this fitting together is at the heart of what it means to be a covenant people, a people given to the care of one another and charged with building the kingdom of God on Earth. It's easy to settle for less than covenant; it's scary to stretch for the wholeness of God's promise. We, collectively, face a choice of who to be. A version of this pamphlet was given as the 2019 Weed Lecture at Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston. Discussion questions included.

The Church Cracked Open

The Church Cracked Open
Author: Stephanie Spellers
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2021-03-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1640654259

"This book will make a profound difference for the church in this moment in history." — The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry Sometimes it takes disruption and loss to break us open and call us home to God. It’s not surprising that a global pandemic and once-in-a-generation reckoning with white supremacy—on top of decades of systemic decline—have spurred Christians everywhere to ask who we are, why God placed us here and what difference that makes to the world. In this critical yet loving book, the author explores the American story and the Episcopal story in order to find out how communities steeped in racism, establishment, and privilege can at last fall in love with Jesus, walk humbly with the most vulnerable and embody beloved community in our own broken but beautiful way. The Church Cracked Open invites us to surrender privilege and redefine church, not just for the sake of others, but for our own salvation and liberation.

The Beloved Community

The Beloved Community
Author: Charles Marsh
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2008-07-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0786722193

A noted theologian explains how the radical idea of Christian love animated the African American civil rights movement and how it can power today's social justice struggles Speaking to his supporters at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that their common goal was not simply the end of segregation as an institution. Rather, "the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community." King's words reflect the strong religious convictions that motivated the African American civil rights movement. As King and his allies saw it, "Jesus had founded the most revolutionary movement in human history: a movement built on the unconditional love of God for the world and the mandate to live in that love." Through a commitment to this idea of love and to the practice of nonviolence, civil rights leaders sought to transform the social and political realities of twentieth-century America. In The Beloved Community, theologian and award-winning author Charles Marsh traces the history of the spiritual vision that animated the civil rights movement and shows how it remains a vital source of moral energy today. The Beloved Community lays out an exuberant new vision for progressive Christianity and reclaims the centrality of faith in the quest for social justice and authentic community.

Community

Community
Author: Brad House
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011-09-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1433523175

Community within the church today is hemorrhaging. Attention spans are dwindling, noise levels are increasing, and we can't seem to find time for real relationships. The answer to such social fragmentation can be found in small groups, and yet the majority of small groups—at least in the traditional sense—are often not the intentional, transformational community we really want and need. Somehow we need to get our groups off life support and into authentic community. Pastor Brad House helps us to re-imagine what gospel-centered community looks like and shares from his experience leading and reproducing healthy small groups. With wisdom and candor, House challenges us to think carefully about our own groups and to take steps toward cultivating communities that are able to glorify Jesus, bless one another, and participate in the mission of God.

Spiritual Defiance

Spiritual Defiance
Author: Robin Meyers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2015-04-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 030021376X

During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry. Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active—sometimes even subversive—defiance of the ego’s temptations, of what he terms “the heresy of orthodoxy itself,” and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.

Search for the Beloved Community

Search for the Beloved Community
Author: Kenneth L. Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780817012823

Updated from the original version published in 1974, this book examines the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the influences that shaped it. Kenneth L. Smith's firsthand knowledge of King's seminary studies provides the background for an incisive analysis of the influences of the Christian tradition.