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Author: Thomas Reeves
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1998-01-07
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780684836072
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →At a time when Americans are searching for spiritual and moral renewal, millions of parishioners are abandoning the churches that once embodied the very values they seek. "The Empty Church" offers the first cogent explanation of why his has occurred--and tells what can be done about it.
Author: Chrissy Stroop
Publisher:
Published: 2019-12
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781946093073
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Shannon Nichole Craigo-Snell
Publisher:
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 221
ISBN-13: 0199827923
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why go to church? What happens in church and why does it matter? The Empty Church presents fresh answers to these questions by creating an interdisciplinary conversation between theater directors and Christian theologians. This original study expands church beyond the sanctuary and into life. Shannon Craigo-Snell emphasizes the importance of liturgical worship in forming Christians as characters crafted by the texts of the Bible. This formation includes shaping how Christians know, in ways that involve the intellect, emotions, body, and will. Each chapter brings a theater director into dialogue with a theologian, teasing out the ways performance enriches hermeneutics, anthropology, and epistemology. Thinkers like Karl Barth, Peter Brook, Delores Williams, and Bertolt Brecht are examined for their insights into theology, worship, and theater. The result is a compelling depiction of church as performance of relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by Scripture, in hope of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical worship, at its best, forms Christians in patterns of affections. This includes the cultivation of emotion memories influenced by biblical narratives, as well as a repertoire of physical actions that evoke particular affections. Liturgy also encourages Christians to step into various roles, enabling them to make intellectual and volitional choices about what roles to take up in society. Through liturgical worship, the author argues, Christians can be formed as people who hope, and therefore as people who live in expectation of the presence and grace of God. This entails a discipline of emptiness that awaits and appreciates the Holy Spirit. Church performance must therefore be provisional, ongoing, and open to further inspiration.
Author: Mark Bohaichuk
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2018-04-23
Total Pages: 181
ISBN-13: 1641912235
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Empty Church is a street-level discussion that explores the modern-day Christian Church attendance and why it seems to be dwindling. Mark Bohaichuk walks the reader through logical and clear ways of thinking about Christianity and the decline in church attendance. Is it a coincidence that as people leave the Christian faith for materialism that our world is slowly being submerged in chaos and an out-of-control politically correct movement? Is the waning of the world's moral barometer related to the weakening of our faith? The Empty Church begins an informal discussion on why we may be seeing these declines. The author takes us on an explorative journey to the forces that continue to relentlessly pressure and push people out of the Christian Church. A society of materialism and fast-food-like gratifications lure the gentle sheep of the church out into a world of ravenous wolves. The Empty Church is a great place to start a dialogue with your friends and fellow believers about the condition and health of our modern society and how it may tie in with the decline in our church attendance. Has our faith in God been lost in the stampede of atheistic pleasures of our fast and furious society? Can we reclaim the faith and refill the churches with followers of the truth and the life and once again become the change agents that our society so desperately needs? The Empty Church looks at possible reasons there exists a decline in our faith and looks at the ways we can once again become the salt and the light to the nations.
Author: Robin Gill
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-12
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 1351775987
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This title was first published in 2003. When did churches start to appear more empty than full - and why? The very physicality of largely empty churches and chapels in Britain plays a powerful role in popular perceptions of 'religion'. Empty churches are frequently cited in the media as evidence of large scale religious decline. The Empty Church Revisited presents a systematic account of British churchgoing patterns over the last two hundred years, uncovering the factors and the statistics behind the considerable process of decline in church attendence. Dispelling as myth the commonly held views that the process of secularization in British culture has led to the decline in churchgoing and resulted in the predominantly empty churches of today, Gill points to physical factors, economics and issues of social space to shed new light on the origins of empty churches. This thoroughly updated edition of Robin Gill's earlier work, The Myth of the Empty Church, presents new data throughout to explore afresh the paradox of church building activity in a context of decline, the patterns of urbanisation followed by sub-urbanisation affecting churches, changes in patterns of worship, and changes within the sociology of religion in the last decade.
Author: Robin Gill
Publisher:
Published: 1993-01-01
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9780281046430
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Mike Regele
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 0310200067
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Our culture is changing at a dizzying rate. But the church seems to be left behind, caught in subcultural backwaters that have little or no impact on mainstream society. Based on the quantitative research of his group, Percept, Regele analyzes the forces in our culture and discusses how the church can fulfill its mission in the face of them.
Author: Robin Gill
Publisher: Society for Promoting Christian
Published: 1993-05
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9780687858354
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Shannon Craigo-Snell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-08
Total Pages: 221
ISBN-13: 0190630094
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why go to church? What happens in church and why does it matter? The Empty Church presents fresh answers to these questions by creating an interdisciplinary conversation between theater directors and Christian theologians. This original study expands church beyond the sanctuary and into life. Shannon Craigo-Snell emphasizes the importance of liturgical worship in forming Christians as characters crafted by the texts of the Bible. This formation includes shaping how Christians know, in ways that involve the intellect, emotions, body, and will. Each chapter brings a theater director into dialogue with a theologian, teasing out the ways performance enriches hermeneutics, anthropology, and epistemology. Thinkers like Karl Barth, Peter Brook, Delores Williams, and Bertolt Brecht are examined for their insights into theology, worship, and theater. The result is a compelling depiction of church as performance of relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by Scripture, in hope of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical worship, at its best, forms Christians in patterns of affections. This includes the cultivation of emotion memories influenced by biblical narratives, as well as a repertoire of physical actions that evoke particular affections. Liturgy also encourages Christians to step into various roles, enabling them to make intellectual and volitional choices about what roles to take up in society. Through liturgical worship, the author argues, Christians can be formed as people who hope, and therefore as people who live in expectation of the presence and grace of God. This entails a discipline of emptiness that awaits and appreciates the Holy Spirit. Church performance must therefore be provisional, ongoing, and open to further inspiration.
Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2014-02-01
Total Pages: 179
ISBN-13: 1782395040
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. Here, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.
