Ecumenical and Eclectic
Ecumenical and Eclectic

Author: Anna M. Robbins

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-06-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1556354789

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Alan Sell is a prolific author producing a vast output of high quality research across many disciplines. From philosophy and theology to ethics and history his work has been received with acclaim for its clarity and incisiveness, as well as for its relevance to contemporary issues faced by the church. Throughout, Sell has maintained an unwavering commitment to Reformed faith and the unity of the church universal. His work continues to deliver challenges and inspire reflection for those who are interested in thinking deeply about issues of living under the cross of Christ in the world today. In this book, several colleagues, friends, and admirers have gathered together to honor Alan Sell's contribution to scholarship and to the life of the church. Leading Christian scholars--including Gabriel Fackre, Clyde Binfield, Keith Clements, and Donald McKim--here offer reflections on Professor Sell's work, and other related themes under the banner of the unity of the church in the contemporary world. The essays explore the foundations of unity, its historical context, and some of the challenges of ecumenism today. Together they make a unique contribution to the theme which has occupied so much of Sell's attention over the years, and which continues to be of crucial importance to the life of the church in a new era.

The Quest for Authority
The Quest for Authority

Author: Matthew Prevett

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-10-29

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1532680473

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Authority lies at the very center of what it means to be called together in an ecclesial community and shapes how the Church understands its purpose and orders its activity. It can manifest itself as something owned and used by those in power, yet it is something fundamental to the entirety of Church life. However, while some polities exude authority in every pronouncement and every action, other ecclesiologies find it more difficult to locate and express authority, often needing a quest to explore and discover the authority that shapes the Church’s life. Focusing on the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom, this book explores the particular shaping and bringing together that is a characteristic of a United and Reformed ecclesiology and examines how this influences ecclesial polity and practice. Matthew Prevett argues that authority in ecclesial life can be understood historically and empirically, drawing deeply from the well of tradition and history yet inspired by the social, political, and technological challenges of the twenty-first century.

Ecumenism in Retreat
Ecumenism in Retreat

Author: Martin Camroux

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-05-27

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1498234011

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In his enthronement sermon as archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 William Temple famously declared the ecumenical movement to be "the great new fact of our era." In this book Martin Camroux tries to face honestly how hope met reality. By the end of the century the enthusiasm had largely dissipated, the organizations that represented it were in decline, and organic unity looked further away than ever. One significant ecumenical merger took place in Britain--the creation in 1972 of the United Reformed Church, which saw its formation as a catalyst for ecumenical renewal. Its hopes, however, were largely illusory. With the failure of its ecumenical hope the church had little idea of its purpose, found great difficulty establishing an identity, and faced a catastrophic implosion in membership. This first serious study of the United Reformed Church also includes groundbreaking analysis of the unity process, the mixed fortunes of Local Ecumenical Projects and how the national ecumenical organizations withered. All of this is put in the wider context of religion in British society including secularization, individualism, and post-denominationalism. What failed was not ecumenism but a particular model of it and the book ends with a commitment to a renewed ecumenical hope.

A Historical Theology of Worship
A Historical Theology of Worship

Author: Elaine Sarah Colechin

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2024-10-29

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13:

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Why does the church worship as it does? Worship is central to the life and vocation of the church. Yet the church's understanding of worship is more often connected to practicalities and a congregation's likes or dislikes. This book seeks to take the reader beyond the practical; to explore where God is in worship and the impact worship should have on the life of the church. Through a historical narrative of the evolution of worship in a British Free Church (the United Reformed Church and its antecedents, the Congregational Church in England and Wales and the Presbyterian Church of England), freedom, order, and participation are identified as the key elements of worship. Investigation into their interrelationship develops a theology of worship that is applicable not only to churches of the Free Church tradition in Britain, but potentially to the universal church.

Spiritual Home
Spiritual Home

Author: Charles D. Cashdollar

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780271043555

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A Spiritual Home explores congregational life inside British and American Reformed churches between 1830 and 1915. At a time when scholars have become interested in the day-to-day experience of local congregations, this book reaches back into the nineteenth century, a critically formative period in Anglo-American religious life, to examine the historical roots of congregational life.Taking the perspective of the laity, Cashdollar ranges widely from worship and music to fund-raising and administration, from pastoral care to social work, from prayer meetings to strawberry festivals, from the sanctuary to the kitchen. Firmly rooted in broader currents of gender, class, notions of middle-class respectability, increasing expectations for personal privacy, and patterns of professionalization, he finds that there was a gradual shift in emphasis during these years from piety to fellowship. Based on records, publications, and memorabilia from about 150 congregations representing eight denominations, A Spiritual Home gives us a comprehensive, composite portrait of religious life in Victorian Britain and America.

Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches
Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches

Author: Ian Jones

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 0567239101

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The growth of women's ordained ministry is one of the most remarkable and significant developments in the recent history of Christianity. This collection of essays brings together leading contributors from both academic and church contexts to explore Christian experiences of ordaining women in theological, sociological, historical and anthropological perspective. Key questions include: How have national, denominational and ecclesial cultures shaped the different ways in which women's ordination is debated and/or enacted? What differences have women's ordained ministry, and debates on women's ordination, made in various church contexts? What 'unfinished business' remains (in both congregational and wider ministry)? How have Christians variously conceived ordained ministry which includes both women and men? How do ordained women and men work together in practice? What have been the particular implications for female clergy? And for male clergy? What distinctive issues are raised by women's entry into senior ordained/leadership positions? How do episcopal and non-episcopal traditions differ in this?

Evangelicalism in Modern Britain
Evangelicalism in Modern Britain

Author: David W. Bebbington

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1134847661

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This major textbook is a newly researched historical study of Evangelical religion in its British cultural setting from its inception in the time of John Wesley to charismatic renewal today. The Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the variety of Nonconformist denominations and sects in England, Scotland and Wales are discussed, but the book concentrates on the broad patterns of change affecting all the churches. It shows the great impact of the Evangelical movement on nineteenth-century Britain, accounts for its resurgence since the Second World War and argues that developments in the ideas and attitudes of the movement were shaped most by changes in British culture. The contemporary interest in the phenomenon of Fundamentalism, especially in the United States, makes the book especially timely.

Restoring the Reformation
Restoring the Reformation

Author: Kenneth J. Stewart

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1597527203

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This book traces British missionary initiative in post-Revolutionary Francophone Europe from the genesis of the London Missionary Society, the visits of Robert Haldane and Henry Drummond, and the founding of the Continental Society. While British evangelicals aimed at the reviving of a foreign Protestant cause of momentous legend, they received unforeseen reciprocating emphases from the Continent which forced self-reflection on Evangelicalism's own relationship to the Reformation.

Reformation Pastors
Reformation Pastors

Author: William J. Black

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1597527688

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This work examines Richard Baxter's understanding and practice of pastoral ministry from the perspective of his own stated concern for reformation and in the broader context of Edwardian, Elizabethan, and early Stuart pastoral ideals and practice. It investigates Baxter's major treatise on pastoral ministry, 'Gildas Salvianus, the Reformed Pastor' (1656), and explores the background of each aspect of his pastoral strategy. Far from being novel, Baxter's practice of pastoral ministry certainly reflects aspects of his puritan predecessors' practice, if not their rhetoric. Black argues, however, that the primary contours of Baxter's ministry look back, not to the puritan pastoral ideals and strategies dominant after the Elizabethan Settlement, but to the Edwardian reformation emphases of the exiled Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer. The book concludes by considering the impact of Baxter's pastoral legacy, both on the lives of individual pastors and on the subsequent discussion of puritan ministry.

Elsie Chamberlain
Elsie Chamberlain

Author: Alan Argent

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1317543874

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Elsie Chamberlain was a leading figure in British broadcasting and religious life. She was a pioneer in many areas: the first woman chaplain to the armed forces; the first nonconformist minister to marry an Anglican clergyman; the first woman producer in the religious broadcasting dept of the BBC and the first woman to present the daily service on the radio. Her broadcasting accustomed many listeners to the idea of a woman leading public worship. And she became the first woman to occupy the chair of the Congregational Union of England and Wales and almost certainly the first woman anywhere in the world to head a major denomination. Elsie Chamberlain is the first full biography and a critical appreciation of this exceptional woman. Using original church and BBC archive sources, the book tells the story of a woman who did more than any other to change the way Christian women ministers are viewed.