Mission Studies

The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel.

In the young readers’ edition of his New York Times best-selling book, Fox News anchor Bret Baier examines the historic transition and Eisenhower’s last chance to lead the country he loved through his legendary farewell address and his personal appeals to Kennedy. Baier paints a vivid picture of the contrasts between old and new at the beginning of a decisive decade in American history. Eisenhower and Kennedy were very different men.

This book offers the inspirational story of an unlikely friendship and the two men who collaborated in an extraordinary way to begin to help heal centuries-old wounds. For two decades Sir Gilbert Levine and Pope John Paul II collaborated on symbolic acts of reconciliation: a series of internationally broadcast concerts designed to bring together people from all religious backgrounds under the auspices of the Vatican.

Theology shapes who we are and how we organize to transform the world. Especially written for required United Methodist classes, this accessible book uses a Wesleyan theological frame—connection—to help listeners understand United Methodism's polity and organization as the interrelationship of our beliefs, mission, and practice. The book is organized into four parts—United Methodist beliefs, mission, practice, and organization. Polity and organization are primary embodiments of The United Methodist Church.

Ex-British Army Soldier, John Carney, ran a close protection operation in Iraq for oil executives when he was asked by the family of a young Dutch woman to extract her from the collapsing Islamic State in Syria. Hearing first-hand of the shocking living hell of tricked naive young girls, many from the West, trapped, sexually abused and enslaved by ISIS, he knew only one thing - he had to get them out. Armed with AK-47s and 9mm Glocks, he launched a daring, dangerous and deadly operation to free as many as he could.

A Bigger Table invites listeners to envision a church that is big enough for everyone, by holding up a mirror to the modern church and speaking clearly on issues at the heart of the Christian community: LGBT inclusion, gender equality, racial tensions, global concerns, and theological shifts. John Pavlovitz shares moving personal stories, his careful observations as a pastor, and his understanding of the ancient stories of Jesus to set the table for a new, positive, more loving conversation on these and other important matters of faith.

In Resurrecting Justice, theologian Douglas Harink invites listeners to rediscover Romans as a treatise on justice. He traces Paul's thinking on this theme through a sequential reading of the book, finding in each passage facets of the gospel's primary claim - that God accomplishes justice in the death and resurrection of Jesus Messiah. By rendering forms of the Greek word dikaiosyne as "just" or "justice", Harink emphasizes the inseparability of personal, social, and political uprightness that was clear to Paul but is obscured in modern translations.

Pay attention, people of faith. Dark clouds are gathering. The winds of intolerance are blowing. There’s a great storm approaching. American Christians are facing uncertain times. Our nation’s values are under assault. Religious liberty has been undermined. We live in a day when right is now wrong and wrong is now right. The vicious left-wing attack against the recent traditional marriage stance of Chick-fil-A should serve as a wake-up call to people of faith. It’s not about a chicken sandwich. It’s about religious liberty. It’s about free speech. It’s about the future of our nation.

Religious liberty is under attack in America. Your freedom to believe may not last much longer. To all those who say they don't care about the culture war, Erick Erickson has only one response: "The Left will not let you stay on the sidelines. You will be made to care." Now the former editor in chief of RedState.com joins with Christian author Bill Blankschaen to expose the war in America on Christians and all people of faith who refuse to bow to the worst kind of religion - secularism - one intent on systematically imposing its agenda and frightening doubters into silence.

The Japanese army's brutal occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as the rape of Nanking. As they slaughtered an estimated 300,000 people, the invading soldiers raped more than 20,000 women - some estimates run as high as 80,000. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected 10,000 Chinese women and children.

Meet Sister Simone Campbell, who traversed the United States challenging a Republican budget that threatened to severely undermine the well-being of poor Americans; Sister Megan Rice, who is willing to spend the rest of her life in prison if it helps eliminate nuclear weapons; and the inimitable Sister Jeannine Gramick, who is fighting for acceptance of gays and lesbians in the Catholic Church.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump exposed a deep divide in American politics and culture, one that pollsters and pundits didn't seem to realize was there. But Trump did, and he used it to his advantage in ways that surprised nearly everyone, even those who voted for him. Perhaps the biggest question on many people's minds is how, exactly, did a crass, unrepentant reality TV star and cutthroat business tycoon secure the majority of the religious conservative vote?

Doctrinal identity unites black and white evangelicals, but divisions along ethnic and cultural lines have long tarnished the movement's witness. With desegregation on the horizon, Martin Luther King Jr. said, "I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." As with the country, if we hope to fully integrate the American Evangelical church, we must do so as firefighters. In A Burning House Audio Study, pastor Brandon Washington challenges American Evangelicalism to embrace its historical commitment to orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

Since 2000, America's most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small Christian school that has earned the nickname "God's Harvard". Most of these students are home-schoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. The school grooms them to become the Christian elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science to wage the battle to take back a godless nation.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth, America’s rival in the Cold War claimed victory on a new frontier. The Space Race had begun, and the United States was losing. Closer to home, a decade of turbulence would soon have Americans reeling, with the year 1968 alone seeing the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as well as many violent clashes between police and protesters. Americans desperately needed something good to believe in.

Since astronauts first ventured into space in the early 1960s, the human race has been thinking about the bigger picture: Could we ever live in space? Where would we plant our new roots? Explore the ways engineers, researchers, and astrophysicists are pushing our scientific limits every day to get us closer to living on another planet.

A spiritual aspirant’s journey is sprinkled with many battles overcoming mind over matter through different sadhanas (spiritual practices). One such sadhana is going on a pilgrimage, which provides challenges for the body, mind, and intellect.

God goes to great lengths to rescue lost and hurting people, and that is what The Story is all about: the story of the Bible, God's great love affair with humanity. Filled with intrigue, drama, conflict, and redemption, this dramatized audio download of Chapter 29—Paul's Mission from The Story, NIV sweeps you into the stories, poems, and teachings of the Bible.

There is a tug of war going on for the future of America. At one end of the rope are those who think America is a secular nation; at the other end are those who believe religion is at the root of our country's foundation. In this audio release of the thought-provoking America's Real War, renowned leader and speaker Rabbi Daniel Lapin encourages America to reembrace the Judeo-Christian values on which our nation was founded and logically demonstrates why those values are crucial to America's strength in the new millennium.