New Hope Presbytery Resource Center
New Books  - Week of May 9, 2008

In Dying We Are Born

 Deeply ingrained in Western culture, and in the minds of most church leaders, is the belief that there is a solution to every problem. Peter Bush offers a powerful challenge to this approach, arguing that for new life, energy, and passion to arise in congregations, they must die—die to one way of being the church in order that a new way may rise.

Some congregations need to close their doors, bringing to an end years of ministry. Other congregations need to dramatically change their culture and ways of doing ministry, requiring people to give up deeply held understandings of the life and purpose of the congregation.

A skillful storyteller, Bush shows readers why churches must confront their mortality. He examines the role of the prophetic leader, who proclaims both the congregation's death and its resurrection. He explores spiritual practices and the habits of wonder, remembering, and risk taking for congregations that know they are dying or need to die. Only by dying, Bush says, will a congregation find resurrection life, given by God.

“I don’t think most Christians have ever recognized that their primary commitment seems to be to their culture, nation, or ethnic group—when our commitment should be to ‘another’ kingdom. 

Until this is made clear, Christianity cannot have its full and needed effect on the waves of history and in personal lives.”

God is Not a Republican…or a Democrat

 New Your Times bestseller God’s Politics struck a chord with Americans disenchanted with how the Right had co-opted all talk about integrating religious values into our politics, and with the Left, who were mute on the subject. 

Jim Wallis argues that America’s separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values from the public square. 

God’s Politics offers a vision for how to convert spiritual values into real social change and has started a grassroots movement to hold our political leaders accountable by incorporating our deepest convictions about war, poverty, racism, abortion, capital punishment, and other moral issues into our nation’s public life. 

Who can change the political wind?  Only we can.

Pastors are called to equip the people they serve with faith and skills for living the gospel way in the midst of a culture that is increasingly non-Christian. But various forces in that culture — forces both subtle and obvious — can domesticate pastors, too, and pressure them toward fulfilling false expectations for charisma and success, numbers and power.

How can pastors be strengthened for resisting those false goals, for main­taining the freedom to be unnecessary according to the world's criteria?

In this volume, two of today's most respected authors help pastors recover their gospel identity and clarify their vision of Christian leadership. Eugene Peterson and Marva Dawn reconnect pastors with biblical texts that equip them to be countercultural ser­vants of the gospel.

In his chapters Peterson explores 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, draw­ing from them scriptural images for pastoral identity. In alternating chapters Dawn turns to Ephesians for instructions to churches seeking to live faithfully against societal tides.

Packed with encouraging insights from experienced practitioners, this book is a must for anyone involved in church leadership.

 Christian leaders struggle not only to acquire new skills and insights but also to unlearn what they already know. As both the church and the world change, so too must Christian leaders and their very notions of leadership change as well.