Churchless Christianity

Churchless Christianity
Author: Herbert E. Hoefer
Publisher: William Carey Library
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2001
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780878084449

The purpose of this book is to describe a fact and reflect upon it theologically. The fact is, there are thousands of people who believe solely in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior but who have no plans to be baptized or to join the local church. Churchless Christianity is based on research from the early 1980s among non-baptized believers in Christ in Tamil Nadu, India. This revised edition includes all the original text plus five additional chapters and a new foreword.

Churchless

Churchless
Author: George Barna
Publisher: Tyndale House
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1414395981

Churchless people are all around us: among our closest loved ones, at our workplaces, in our neighborhoods. And more and more, they are becoming the norm: The number of churchless adults in the US has grown by nearly one-third in the past decade. Yet the startling truth is that many of these people claim they are looking for a genuine, powerful encounter with God—but they just don’t find it in church. What are they (or we) missing? How can we better reach out to them? What can we say or do that would inspire them to want to join a community of faith? Containing groundbreaking new research from the Barna Group, and edited by bestselling authors George Barna (Revolution) and David Kinnaman (You Lost Me), 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.

The Invisible Church

The Invisible Church
Author: Steve Aisthorpe
Publisher: Saint Andrew Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2016-04-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0861539168

For anyone who is concerned about Church decline, the contents of this book offer an essential blueprint for building God’s whole community in the coming years. This unique set of resources offers practical help and insight for all who want to grow, enrich and develop their congregational life. The Church of Scotland has drawn on the findings of extensive new research that it has commissioned in order to put together this set of carefully crafted and informed resources aimed at helping every congregation to understand why people leave the Church, how to avoid unnecessary departures and, above all, to develop an enriching, vital Christian fellowship with the large numbers of Churchless Christians in every community across the country. This ground-breaking book, illustrated by Dave Walker, offers information, hope, insight, prayerful reflection and practical ideas for bringing together in fellowship all Christians, whether they are members of an institutional Church or not.

Uncomfortable

Uncomfortable
Author: Brett McCracken
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1433554283

Does your church make you uncomfortable? It’s easy to dream about the “perfect” church—a church that sings just the right songs set to just the right music before the pastor preaches just the right sermon to a room filled with just the right mix of people who happen to agree with you on just about everything. Chances are your church doesn’t quite look like that. But what if instead of searching for a church that makes us comfortable, we learned to love our church, even when it’s challenging? What if some of the discomfort that we often experience is actually good for us? This book is a call to embrace the uncomfortable aspects of Christian community, whether that means believing difficult truths, pursuing difficult holiness, or loving difficult people—all for the sake of the gospel, God’s glory, and our joy.

A Churchless Faith

A Churchless Faith
Author: Alan Jamieson
Publisher: Society for Promoting Christian
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2002
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780281054657

This text is based on research with those who have left churches but are nethertheless pursuing a journey of faith. Most of the church leavers interviewed for this text had been in their churches for over 15 years; most had held key leadership positions, and 40 per cent had been in full time theological study of church work. The text outlines how churches can help leavers and suggests a conversion between post-church groups and churches.

God Laughs & Plays

God Laughs & Plays
Author: David James Duncan
Publisher: Triad Institute, Inc.
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780977717019

Duncan offers a collection of "churchless sermons," stories, memoir, and conversations with the affirmation that the way of life preached and embodied by Jesus is apolitical.

Godless

Godless
Author: Pete Hautman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2008-06-23
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1439107432

"Why mess around with Catholicism when you can have your own customized religion?" Fed up with his parents' boring old religion, agnostic-going-on-atheist Jason Bock invents a new god -- the town's water tower. He recruits an unlikely group of worshippers: his snail-farming best friend, Shin, cute-as-a-button (whatever that means) Magda Price, and the violent and unpredictable Henry Stagg. As their religion grows, it takes on a life of its own. While Jason struggles to keep the faith pure, Shin obsesses over writing their bible, and the explosive Henry schemes to make the new faith even more exciting -- and dangerous. When the Chutengodians hold their first ceremony high atop the dome of the water tower, things quickly go from merely dangerous to terrifying and deadly. Jason soon realizes that inventing a religion is a lot easier than controlling it, but control it he must, before his creation destroys both his friends and himself.

Believing Without Belonging?

Believing Without Belonging?
Author: Vinod John
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2020-11-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532697244

This study examines an indigenous phenomenon of the Hindu devotees of Jesus Christ and their response to the gospel through an empirical case study conducted in Varanasi, India. It analyzes their religious beliefs and social belonging and addresses the ensuing questions from a historical, theological, and missiological perspective. The data reveals that the respondents profess faith in Jesus Christ; however, most remain unbaptized and insist on their Hindu identity. Hence, a heuristic model for a contextualized baptism as Guru-diksha is proposed. The emergent church among Hindu devotees should be considered, from the perspective of world Christianity, as a disparate form of belonging while remaining within one's community of birth. The insistence on a visible church and a distinct community of Christ's followers is contested because the devotees should construct their contextual ecclesiology, since it is an indigenous discovery of the Christian faith. Thus, the "Christian" label for the adherents is dispensable while retaining their socio-ethnic Hindu identity. Christian mission should discontinue extraction and assimilation; instead, missional praxis should be within the given sociocultural structures, recognizing their idiosyncrasies as legitimate in God's eyes and in need of transformation, like any human culture.

Essays in Contextual Theology

Essays in Contextual Theology
Author: Steve Bevans
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004363084

Essays in Contextual Theology is a collection of essays that reflect on the doing of contextual theology from several perspectives. After a general introductory essay, subsequent essays reflect on topics such as contextual theology and prophetic dialogue, criteria for orthodoxy, the nature of tradition, the role of culture, the dynamics of conversion, and the way theology is being done in World Christianity. The collection closes with an autobiographical essay tracing the author’s journey to becoming a “global theologian.”