Many of us, perhaps all of us, need help when it comes to prayer. We may struggle with a lack of discipline in prayer, with a constantly distracted mind while we are praying, with only praying small prayers, or maybe with praying very little at all. I am quite confident that wherever you are at with prayer, Peter Adam’s Prayerfulness will be an immense help.
Part memoir, part critique, Disillusioned: Why I Left the Eastern Orthodox Priesthood and Church details the reflections of Joshua Schooping on his experience as an Orthodox convert and five years as a Russian Orthodox priest. He describes his growing disquiet in this way: I had overlooked the constant Semi-Pelagianism, the confusion surrounding the Atonement, the unscriptural pietism, the Toll Houses, the prayers to saints, the excessive elevation of Mary, and so much more, even defending some of them openly, but when it became clear that the Orthodox Church formally confuses the Gospel through its iconology, its ecclesiology, and even through its...
So many great books have spurred me on in my Christian walk and stirred me to change my attitudes and actions in 2025. It is my hope that these books can also be of encouragement to you too.
“What are we fighting for? What are we defending?” These are important, if deep, questions about complementarianism that conference participants raised over lunch at CMS Summer School. I’m not sure that we answered those questions adequately. Gregg Allison’s recent publication, Complementarity, is a helpful contribution which answers these questions, though not in a way that we might expect.
All ministers and ministry leaders should be eager for guidance and encouragement to make their missionary activity church-centred. A healthy church is committed to and supportive of evangelism, both locally and globally: healthy evangelism establishes new converts in churches. A healthy missionary has both a sending church and receiving church: a healthy missionary agency strengthens these missionary–church bonds. Prioritizing the Church in Missions, along with a companion volume, Prioritizing Missions in the Church, makes this case. “Christianity is church-shaped,” write Jonathan Leeman, Brooks Buser, and Scott Logsdon in the 9Marks Church-Centred Missions series preface (p. ix). This short book’s theological...
