Spiritual Church

God wants you to know, feel, and believe in his love and presence in your life each and every day—so don't put him off any longer!

Many of us have questions about what it means to live as a Christian in the context of a local church. You may even catch yourself asking: If I believe in Jesus, why do I need to join a church? To put it simply, when you are saved from your sin, you are saved into a community characterized by fellowship and accountability.

This collection includes two fantastic early learning titles from accomplished author Crystal Bowman.

Here is a compelling tract for our times, addressed to evangelicals, designed to set the agenda for the coming years. It calls for presenting Christ credibly to the 21st century, rehabilitating the term "evangelical" to mean good news, and engaging in spiritual and social transformation.

And so he gathered together a people for himself, and fostered them with many liberal distributions of his bounty, and, after so often finding them most ungrateful, ever exhorted them to repentance and sent out the voices of the universal company of the prophets to prophesy. By and by, promising freely the grace which in the last times he was intending to pour as a flood of light on the universal world through his Spirit, he bade the baptism of repentance lead the way.

Did you know that God isn't expecting you to clean up your life? Shocking right? God's goal for you goes so much deeper than your actions, his goal is to give you something most people dream of...new life. All of us have things in our past that we are not proud of. We probably have some things in our present we aren't too fond of either. What if God's plan for you was to let the past be the past...literally count the old you who messed up as dead, and let a new, better you be reborn. Well, that is his plan! This book holds the best news I have ever heard.

Traditionally, many churches offered unique Sunday school, Sunday morning, Sunday night and midweek services. Is that old-fashioned now? Should we still do that? Is there a precedent in God's Word to having evening services? A Case for Sunday Evening Church is a compelling look at some biblical, logical and practical reasons why our church chooses to conduct unique Sunday evening services.

The Bible teaches us that we are to love our neighbors and even our enemies. In fact, Jesus said that this would be a distinguishing characteristic of his followers. In Love Is the Answer, Pastor Rick White walks us through 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. Pastor Rick will show scripturally how we can represent this love in our day to day lives.

If our oneness was not important, Yahshua would not have declared and decreed it prior to His death, burial and resurrection. If our oneness is optional then we will never be one. My question is, how can we continue to support, foster, and even celebrate our division and relational dysfunction?

Senior Minister, Reverend Matt Broadbent of Los Altos, California Foothill Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, spoke with this writer by phone and webcam via Skype in February, 2010 about same sex marriage and same sex blessings. This is the first of a series of interviews with different clergy denomination members on the subject. Two other upcoming interviews are with The Rt. Reverend Marc Andrus of The Episcopal Church, USA (San Francisco Bay Area known as Diocese of California), and Rabbi Stephen Pearce of Reform Temple El Emanuel, San Francisco.