Advocacy organizations and collective action
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Item Symposium on the Role of Women in the Church(Zondervan, 1984-08-28)The Biblical Research Institute (BRI) of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has been involved since 1972 with committees, councils, and research papers on the roles of women in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. At times they were encouraged to believe that the papers written on the subject could be published for the benefit of concerned individuals within the church and the information of similar persons outside the membership of the church.* Until the present time there have been various factors which have led the administrative leadership of the church to postpone such publication. The general reason given for the reluctance to publish was the fear that certain countries in the world family of Adventist churches would be embarrassed, if not offended, by actions that could result in placing women in leadership roles in the church, the home, the school, or the family. Persons or organizations hearing of the existence of these papers could purchase copies from the Biblical Research office. Some copies have been distributed under these terms. Now the BRI’s Administrative Committee has voted to publish this set of papers. The following provides an overview of them so that the reader may better anticipate their contents. One of the issues receiving the attention of Christian churches in the past fifteen years has been the roles that the women of these churches can best fulfill. This subject is of particular concern to those women who feel that they have been, or are, prevented from carrying out certain roles in the church, for which they believe they have a competency or a potential capacity. Others share their concern. It is of interest also to those—both men and women—who are aroused by present-day agitation in society for women to be freely admitted to those areas from which custom and tradition have hitherto excluded them. Such persons want to know whether and how the church is affected by, and is relating to, this general movement in society—how it is treating its women. For many, the church’s profession of Christ is judged on this issue.Item CLASSICAL APOLOGETICS A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics(Zondervan, 1984-04-04) R. C. SPROUL; JOHN GERSTNER and ARTHUR LINDSLEYChristianity is rational. But because it provokes passion, devotion, prayer, worship, and aspirations to obedience, its purely rational element can easily be submerged or concealed from view. It has been called variously a “religion,” a “way of life,” an “experience,” a “faith,” and an “ideology.” That Christianity involves more, much more than rationality, is evident. That it is eminently rational is not always evident. Throughout this work, the authors, John Gerstner, Arthur Lindsley, and R. C. Sproul, affirm the primacy of the mind in the Christian faith. To suggest the primacy of the mind is outrageous to some, particularly to those who equate rationality with rationalism. We also affirm the primacy of the heart. The scope of this volume focuses primarily on the rational aspect of Christianity. Our emphasis on this part, however, must not be misconstrued as a summary of the whole.Item UNDERSTANDING CHURCH GROWTH(Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970-09-29) DONALD A. McGAVRANOne of the greatest privileges of my life has been to associate closely with Donald A. McGavran. After sixteen years as a missionary to Bolivia, I ac cepted his call in 1971 to join him on the faculty of the Fuller Theologi cal Seminary School of World Mission in Pasadena, California. For ten years, until his retirement in 1981, we worked together teaching church growth, supervising graduate theses and dissertations in the field, train ing missionaries and pastors, and consulting with churches and mission agencies. I was honored in 1984 to be invited to become the first incum bent of the Donald A. McGavran Chair of Church Growth. Understanding Church Growth is one of those classics which has be come the indispensable foundational text for an academic field. No one can claim to be a serious student of church growth who has not read and absorbed the content of Understanding Church Growth. I was one of the first to be introduced to the content of this book, in classroom lectures in the late 1960s while it was yet being written. The first edition was pub lished in 1970, and the revised edition was expanded and updated by McGavran in 1980. In this 1990 edition the language has been modern ized, the flow of ideas somewhat streamlined, the content also reduced, mostly by eliminating redundancies, ideas and illustrations updated, and a bit of new material such as the chapter on divine healing introduced. But through it all, Donald McGavran is the one who speaks.Item THE SPIRIT OF THE LITURGY(CENSOR DEPUTATUS, 1935-07-27) ROMANO GUARDINIAN old theological proverb says, "Nothing done by nature and grace is done in vain." Nature and grace obey their own laws, which are based upon certain established hypotheses. Both the natural and the supernatural life of the soul, when lived in accordance with these principles, remain healthy, develop, and are enriched. In isolated cases the rules may be waived without any danger, when such a course is required or excused by reason of a spiritual disturbance, imperative necessity, extraordinary occasion, important end in view, or the like. In the end, however, this cannot be done with impunity. Just as the life of the body droops and is stunted when the conditions of its growth are not observed, so it is with spiritual and religious life--it sickens, losing its vigor, strength and unity.Item The 5 Levels of Leadership : Proven Steps to Maximize your Potential(Center Street, 1989-03-01) John C.MaxwellToo often when people think of their journey into leadership, they envision a career path. What they should be thinking about is their own leadership development! Good leadership isn’t about advancing yourself. It’s about advancing your team. The 5 Levels of Leadership provides clear steps for leadership growth. Lead people well and help members of your team to become effective leaders, and a successful career path is almost guaranteed.Item Leadership in Turbulant Times(Simon & Schuster, 1832-07-12) Doris Kearns GoodwinAbraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson—the lives and times of these four men have occupied me for half a century. I have awakened with them in the morning and thought about them when I went to bed at night. By immersing myself in manuscript collections, personal diaries, letters, oral histories, memoirs, newspaper archives, and periodicals, I searched for illuminating details that, taken together, would provide an intimate understanding of these men, their families, their friends, their colleagues, and the worlds in which they lived. After writing four extensive books devoted to these men, I thought I knew them well before I embarked on this present study of leadership nearly ve years ago. But as I observed them through the exclusive lens of leadership, I felt as if I were meeting them anew. There was much to learn as the elusive theme of leadership assumed center stage. As I turned to works of philosophy, literature, business, political science, and comparative studies, in addition to history and biography, I found myself engaged in an unexpectedly personal and emotional kind of storytelling. I returned to fundamental questions I had not asked so openly since my days of college and graduate school.Item GOD, MAN AND POLITICS: THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY OF JACQUES MARITAIN(UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, 1962-02-12) HWA YOL JUNGThe author vould like to express his deep gratitude to Professor Manning J. Dauer, the chairman of his doctoral supervisory counnittee, for his discerning guidance and warm personal encouragement without which this dissertation would have been impossible. He is also grateful for the assistance in the beginning of this dissertation given by Professor Alfred Diamant, who is now teaching at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. He is deeply indebted to his doctoral conmiittee members: Professors Oscar Svarllen, Ernest R. Hartley, Frederick H. Hartmann, Arnold J. Heidenheimer of the Department of Political Science and Professor George R. Bartlett of the Department of Philosophy. The author is grateful to his wife who has read and typed a part of this dissertation. Finally, this dissertation is a token expression of the author's appreciation for the teachers and friends who have given him their moral support and financial aid since his arrival in this country in 1934.Item HOW GOOD PEOPLE MAKE TOUGH CHOICES Resolving the Dilemmas of Ethical Living(Perfectbound Choices, 1986-06-19) Rushworth M. KidderThe seeds of this book were sown when, one warm summer afternoon at her home in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in 1986, I had a quiet, long, and thoughtful conversation with Barbara Tuchman. A historian of what she called “the small facts, not the big Expla nation,” she had twice won the Pulitzer Prize—and earned high praise for such books as A Distant Mirror, which used the fourteenth century and its Black Plague as a “mirror” for the twentieth century’s con fusions and violence. As a columnist and staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, I was interviewing her for a series of articles based on the ideas of twenty-two leading thinkers around the world. Ultimately published as An Agenda for the 21st Century (MIT Press, 1987), this series sought to discover the major, first-intensity, high-leverage issues that humanity would have to address in order to negotiate the coming century successfully. As we talked, I asked her how, if she were a twenty-first-century historian looking backward, she would characterize our century. “I would call it an Age of Disruption,” she said. She warned of the nuclear threat. She called attention to environmental problems. But her central concern, she said, lay in “the real disruption in public morality.” “There have always been times when people have acted immor ally,” she continued. But what was new, she felt, was “the extent of public immorality making itself so obvious to the average citizen.”Item Creative Church Administration(1965-03-17) Lyie E.SchailerWhy another book on church administration? In responding to that question it may be helpful first to review the changing emphases in church administration since the turn of the century. The first books to be published on church administration can be described simply as sharing experiences. They are to church administration, as we know it today, what reminiscences and autobiographies are to history. The value of these early efforts to systematize the experiences of a "successful" pastor should not be dismissed lightly, however. Their authors made several significant contributions, among them the sharing of "lessons from experience," the recognition that there were skills that could be transmitted from one person to another, and the focusing of attention on another dimension of the minister's work in addition to the traditional responsibilities of preaching, visitation, and evangelism.Item Christian Counseling. A Comprehensive Guide(Word Books Publisher, 1980-07-12) Gary R.CollinsThis manuscript was completed and sent to the publisher exactly ten years after the completion of my first book. It is interesting for me to look back over a decade of writing to ponder how my work has changed and hopefully improved through the production of more than two dozen books. Some of these works have been well received and sold many copies; others have had less influence, but each has forced me to face the dis cipline, the long, lonely hours, and the risk of expressing ideas in print, where all can see, criticize, and sometimes applaud. I once asked Paul Toumier which of his many books was the best. “That’s easy,” he said with a twinkle in his eye—“the next one.” I can appreciate Toumier’s sentiments. I am not interested in judging whether this book will be better or worse than the next one, but I do know that this volume has been the most difficult to write and the most time- consuming. It is also the lengthiest of all my books. I hope it will also be the most helpful to date. In the following pages I have tried to summarize much of what we know about counseling methodology and about the major problems which peo ple face today. This book has been prepared as a resource tool for pastors and other Christian counselors, as a study guide for lay helpers, and as a textbook for use in seminaries and colleges. Besides being written for these audiences, this is the reading book for a multi-media resource en titled The Christian Counselor's Library. The library contains twenty- eight audio cassettes, a Counselor’s Manual, and counselee worksheets (besides this book), and was produced by Educational Products Division of Word, Incorporated, 4800 W. Waco Drive, Waco, Texas 76710. In the past decade of writing, I have never before felt the support and encouragement of so many people. Joey Paul and his colleagues at Word, Incorporated, first invited me to do this project, gave constant encourage ment, and waited more or less patiently through several delays as the work was completed. My secretary Marlene Terbush and my graduate assistants Charles Romig and James Beesley helped in innumerable ways as did a team of typists which included Kathy Cropp, Marilyn Secor, Lenore Scherrer, Sharon Regan, Nancy Fister and Lora Beth Norton. In addition each of the people who produced tapes made a significant contribution. Their names are listed elsewhere. Dr. Kenneth Meyer, Pres ident of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, my colleagues in the psy chology department, and my students all showed incredible flexibility 7 8 Preface and encouragement, allowing me to juggle my schedule to complete this project in the midst of a busy school year.