A guide to the seasons, festivals, and rhythms of the Christian yearKeeping time with Christ means more than just remembering when Lent begins or keeping Christmas from overtaking Advent. Christian time is about ordering our days, weeks, years, and lives around the great mystery of faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”Time Made Holy provides an accessible overview of the major festivals and seasons of the Christian year, beginning with and grounded by the...
Designed for pastors and church leaders, this volume explores how the Johannine letters can shape faithful belief, discipleship, and congregational life today.In this volume in the Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible series, Steffen Lösel offers a fresh reading of the Johannine letters, reclaiming them from critiques that have characterized them as overly exclusionary or narrowly doctrinal. Rather than privileging right belief over right action, Lösel argues that these letters hold ort...
Discover how the timeless words of Isaiah speak into today’s crises, offering insight, challenge, and hope for contemporary readers.Preachers and teachers of the Bible know that the present continually reshapes our understanding of the past, including the texts Christians hold sacred. In Isaiah 40–66, Julia O’Brien explores how the authors of Second and Third Isaiah reworked their religious traditions to address the concerns of their own times, how these texts have been read across diverse commu...
A critical preaching commentary that serves as a single, reliable resource for engaging the Gospel of Mark.This comprehensive commentary on the Gospel of Mark is designed for preachers seeking a single, reliable resource that brings together rigorous exegesis and practical homiletical insight. Drawing on a literary approach, O. Wesley Allen, Jr., interprets Mark as a unified narrative that rewards careful attention not only to individual passages but also to the broader movement of the Gospel as...
Discover how the Psalms can speak powerfully to today’s church, offering lyrical theology that shapes prayer, reflection, preaching, and worship.This volume in the Belief series explores how the Psalms speak as lyrical theology in today’s world. Drawing on the Psalter’s genres of praise and lament, the Psalms’ reception in Christian tradition, and their range of musical settings, Kris Kvam and Don Saliers show how the Psalms can teach, comfort, and challenge the church. Giving the biblical tradi...
In God the Creator: Biblical Images of the Divine, Steven Tuell explores the rich tapestry of biblical creation accounts to uncover how Scripture speaks of God, the world, and humanity’s place within it.The Bible doesn’t offer just one image or account of God as creator—it offers many that are held together in a rich and faithful tension. So, then what does it mean to call God “Creator”? Drawing from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Tuell guides readers through the diverse and someti...
Jump-start your preaching with these twenty-four fresh sermon series. Rooted in Scripture, each inspiring theme not only helps you prepare for Sunday but also includes tips and ideas for worship, study, and outreach.Perfect for pastors and occasional preachers looking to bring fresh energy and meaningful depth to the pulpit, A Preacher’s Guide to Topical Sermon Series includes twenty-four creative, ready-to-use sermon series ideas from preachers across diverse traditions. With thoughtful attenti...
Are you a clergy member called to speak on faith, justice, and activism beyond church walls? From Pulpit to Public Square is your essential guide to finding your authentic voice in public, non-ministerial settings.
From Pulpit to Public Square equips preachers to offer prophetic and pastoral witness beyond the pulpit, navigating the challenges of speaking with integrity from a faith perspective. It offers bold strategies for speaking in ways that make a difference. Through insightful reflections...
Scripting a Sermon approaches common challenges for crafting sermons looking toward the essential components of filmmaking to help preachers create more potent sermons.
In this third volume in the "Preaching and…" series, Shauna K. Hannan and Gael Chandler combine their expertise to focus on the convergences between the crafts of homiletics and filmmaking. Looking to enliven the preached word, this book draws attention to the ways in which the sermon is set up to captivate the audience. For exam...
In Proclaiming the Parables, noted preacher and scholar Thomas G. Long moves away from past treatment of the parables primarily as literary devices and moves toward an emphasis on their theological impact as pointers to the kingdom of God.While the parables are indeed significant poetic literary creations that have enchanted readers over the centuries, their main power, he claims, lies in their disclosure of the kingdom of God, which is not merely an idea, nor even just a complex symbol with gen...
"One the greatest challenges the church faces today," writes Jerome F. D. Creach, "is to interpret and explain passages in the Bible that seem to promote or encourage violence" (Violence in Scripture, 1). In the past fifteen years, a number of books have been published to help people make sense of God's violent behavior in the Bible. Yet very little has been written about how to use these (and other) violent texts constructively in church. This leaves religious practitioners—pastors, priests, Su...
Homiletics textbooks often discourage the use of humor in preaching, regarding it as trivializing or distracting. The result is that many preachers have failed to understand humor’s positive power, demoting it to the opening joke to get a guaranteed guffaw to warm up the crowd. Humor Us!, the second volume in the “Preaching and… series,” is a collaborative effort by homiletician Alyce M. McKenzie and humor scholar Owen Hanley Lynch that promotes humor, a force capable of great good, to its right...
The question of what to do with the biblical text in the sermon is perennial. Biblical scholarship constantly evolves and grows, making it hard even for biblical scholars themselves to apply the latest insights in their preaching. The average pastor doesn’t have time to keep up with the changes in biblical studies and, as a result, often defaults to interpretive methods learned in (increasingly distant) seminary years. Preaching the Word addresses those needs by surveying recent developments in ...
This collection of prayers by noted Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann can be used in both public worship and private devotion. These prayers run the gamut from particular days in the church year to special moments in the lives of worshiping communities to events playing out on the world stage. In all cases, the prayers spur us toward acts of justice and peacemaking and call on God to heal and restore God’s hurting and broken people.
Mass trauma is an unavoidable reality in the United States. Trauma from violence, natural disasters, and disease has become all too familiar in the American experience, inevitably raising questions about where God is to be found in the midst of such tragedies. In every case, the aftermath leaves communities’ sense of well-being broken and capacity to imagine a way forward thwarted. Though language often fails us in the midst of trauma, preachers and religious leaders are nevertheless called on t...
Discussions of racial difference always embody a story. The dominant story told in our society about race has many components, but two stand out: (1) racial difference is an essential characteristic, fully determining individual and group identity; and (2) racial difference means that some bodies are less human than others. The church knows another story, says Luke Powery, if it would remember it. That story says that the diversity of human bodies is one of the gifts of the Spirit. That story’s ...
The Thessalonian correspondence represents the earliest writing in the New Testament, according to many scholars. It speaks to a group of Christians struggling with thorny questions, such as: How should we live in the shadow of the coming parousia? What are our obligations to one another as followers of Jesus? How do we learn to trust the truth of the gospel? For Paul, this earliest correspondence was a test of his apostolic authority and also a means to express his genuine warmth and affection ...
Through its shocking incongruities and transgressive forms, the grotesque offers an intriguing lens for exploring the scandal of the gospel and the challenges of Christian preaching. Drawing on diverse sources—from Swedish crime fiction and contemporary poetry to James Cone, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Pussy Riot—this book will examine the theological, homiletical, and social implications of a grotesque gospel for contemporary preachers. The book focuses on three aspects of preaching and the grot...
Focusing on passages about women in the Bible and feminine imagery of God, The Women's Lectionary reimagines the liturgical calendar of preaching for one year. These women are daughters, wives, and mothers. They are also strong leaders, evil queens, and wicked stepmothers. They are disciples, troublemakers, and prophetesses. Ashley Wilcox explores how the feminine descriptions of God in the Bible are similarly varied—how does it change our understanding if God is feminine wisdom, has wings, or i...
Designed to empower preachers as they lead congregations to connect their lives to Scripture, Connections features a broad set of interpretive tools that provide commentary and worship aids on the Revised Common Lectionary.
This nine-volume series offers creative commentary on each reading in the three-year lectionary cycle by viewing that reading through the lens of its connections to the rest of Scripture and then seeing the reading through the lenses of culture, film, fiction, ethics, and ot...
Designed to empower preachers as they lead their congregations to
connect their lives to Scripture, Connections features a broad set of
interpretive tools that provide commentary and worship aids on the
Revised Common Lectionary. This nine-volume series offers creative
commentary on each reading through the lens of its connections to the
rest of Scripture and then seeing the reading through the lenses of
culture, film, fiction, ethics, and other aspects of contemporary life.
Commentaries ...
Designed to empower preachers as they lead their congregations to connect their lives to Scripture, Connections features a broad set of interpretive tools that provide commentary and worship aids on the Revised Common Lectionary. This nine-volume series offers creative commentary on each reading through the lens of its connections to the rest of Scripture and then seeing the reading through the lenses of culture, film, fiction, ethics, and other aspects of contemporary life. Commentaries on the ...
At first glance, preaching and advertising seem worlds apart from one another. One tries to proclaim love of God and neighbor; the other tries to sell you something that you may or may not need. Yet both must compete with other ways we receive and process information in an increasingly distracted world. While most of the time preaching simply tries to muddle through this situation, advertising knows that it must continually relearn how to reclaim its audience's attention–and keep it.
Believing...
Designed to empower preachers as they lead their congregations to connect their lives to Scripture, Connections features a broad set of interpretive tools that provide commentary and worship aids on the Revised Common Lectionary. This nine-volume series offers creative commentary on each reading through the lens of its connections to the rest of Scripture and then seeing the reading through the lenses of culture, film, fiction, ethics, and other aspects of contemporary life. Commentaries on the ...
What was it like to be a woman in the biblical period? It depended, in part, on who you were: a queen, a judge, a primary wife, a secondary wife, a widow, a slave, or some other kind of “ordinary woman.” In Women in the Bible, Jaime Clark-Soles investigates how women are presented in Scripture, taking into account cultural views of both ancient societies as well as our own. While women today are exercising leadership in churches across a number of denominations and our scholarly knowledge r...
1, 2, and 3 John
Author(s):Steffen Losel
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