Books published by Westminster/John Knox Press,U.S.

Money is a key issue in today's Christian faith communities but it can be a touchy subject to address. With this book, pastors and clergy finally have a practical resource for managing money in the church. Ministry and Money serves as an excellent primer on accounting practices, church financial reports, and church budgets. Throughout, the...

In this book, pastor and distinguished church leader John Buchanan reviews the history of the Christian community, examines the realities of the church worldwide, and looks forward to the future where a new church may be needed to meet the challenges of a new world. Buchanan describes changes impacting the church and invites Christians to be...

This book provides a curriculum for teaching adults and older youth with disabilities about the church. Doris Clark offers experienced and comprehensive advice about how to set up church classes geared to the requirements of adults with special needs and how to integrate them into the church...

Addressing such questions as "Are You Saved, or Are You Presbyterian?" and "Is the Bible the Literal Word of God or Just a Long, Boring Book?" this is an easy-to-understand, slightly irreverent appraoch to theology and the kind of theological musings that many youth and others have today. Bring Presbyterian in the Bible Belt Today helps...

In this classic guide, William Barclay offers a concise introduction to each of the New Testament books. In particular, he discuses the main theme of each book as he attempts to answer the question, is there a dominant and unchanging theme in the New Testament? And, he asks, if so, what is the New Testament saying about God and God's...

In this rich and thoughtful commentary Richard Boyce makes Leviticus and Numbers come alive for serious and lively preaching and teaching. In a clear and direct style, Boyce explains the various rituals and regulations in these books, while always showing what today's believers can learn from them. Attentive to the particularities of the text...

The Bible Speaks to You is for those who want to know more about the Bible and how studying the Bible can change their lives. Arranged topically as a series of answers to questions--including, where did the Bible come from? what makes Jesus so important? and what happens when I die?--this book is helpful, insightful, and...

In this engaging book aimed at pastors, teachers, and laypeople in Christian churches, W. Eugene March helps the reader develop theological clarity about how to live in a religiously diverse society. Following up on the success of his previous book, The Wide, Wide Circle of Divine Love, March goes deeper into specific biblical texts, uncovering...

Drawing on their research involving urban pastors from across the United States, Bryan Stone and Claire Wolfteich identify and examine spiritual practices that foster excellence in urban ministry. After discussing the specific challenges facing urban pastors and presenting the kinds of excellence required of them, Stone and Wolfteich explore...

Conflict is all too common in the church today. But as Frances Taylor Gench reminds us in this book, conflict over scriptural interpretation has been with the church since its earliest days. Gench reflects on those early experiences of conflict, presenting substantive studies of biblical texts showing that discord (such as Romans 14-15; Matthew...

Drawing from Jesus' words to the disciples to become like children, Marilyn McCord Adams presents more than two hundred fifty original prayers that serve as powerful and practical examples of how adults can pray in a manner that combines the complexity and richness of their adult experiences with the candor and expectations of a child. The...

When first published in 1961, Treasure in Earthen Vessels was hailed by H. Richard Niebuhr as "the first real sociology of the church." In this landmark work, James M. Gustafson examines the church as a human institution that must, and does, participate in the social structure of all human communities. His penetrating analysis remains an...

Over half of all North Americans live in the suburbs. In The Suburban Church, retired pastor Arthur H. DeKruyter encourages Christians to "go where the people congregate" and illustrates how to plant, grow, and renew suburban congregations. Throughout this book, DeKruyter relies on forty-five-plus years of pastoral ministry experience in which...

Convinced that several crucial historical trends are moving in the wrong direction, John Cobb Jr. and his coauthors urge Christians to live in countercultural ways--as individuals and as communities. Consumerism, inequality, imperialism, and global warming, they contend, are of such magnitude that the only real response for progressive...

William Willimon, one of the world's most admired preachers, offers his practical and sage advice for some of the most basic tasks of ministry: preparing, delivering, and evaluating sermons; planning, leading, and evaluating worship services; offering public prayers; and celebrating baptism and the Lord's Supper. In addition, Willimon provides...

Preaching's most able practitioners gather in this book to explore and explain the idea that preaching is a practice that can be taught and learned. Arguing that preaching is a living practice with a long tradition, an identifiable shape, and a broad set of norms and desired outcomes, these noted scholars examine pedagogical approaches that...

In groundbreaking fashion Donald Capps builds on Erik Erikson's work on the eight stages of life by focusing on the decades of life. This important modification allows developmental theory to be applied to the way people discuss life stages--in ten-year periods. Capps integrates the insights of psychology with those of pastoral care to show...

In News to Me: Gospel Stories for the Real World, Lawrence Wood brings together insights from Scripture with his own observations of the "real world" to create thirty-two moving reflections on the Christian life. Drawing from the wells of history, the lives of famous and not-so-famous people, and his own observations of popular culture, Wood...

In this compelling book, G. Lee Ramsey Jr.mines the riches of southern fiction and discovers a colorful assortment of ministers who arise out of the religious South. At once mystical and mischievous, these ministers haunt the margins of southern life while preaching a gospel that startles and compels. But their oddness is also their appeal--and...

Since its discovery in the mid-1940s, the Gospel of Thomas has aroused the interest of scholars and general readers alike. Thomas, the Other Gospel provides a clear, comprehensive, nontechnical guide through the scholarly maze of issues surrounding the Coptic text. Nicholas Perrin argues that the Gospel derives not from the era of Jesus or even...

Focusing on a dozen psalms, J. Clint McCann Jr. leads readers through some of the church's favorite psalms as well as some lesser-known gems. Each chapter lets the reader understand the original meaning of the psalm and considers ways that our life of faith today can be enriched through these scriptural treasures. McCann is an international...

Written in a humorous, accessible style, this book is an easy-to-understand guide to the kinds of theological questions that many United Methodist youth and others are asking today. Being United Methodist in the Bible Belt will help any United Methodist youth, parent, or educator better understand their unique brand of Christianity in light of...

This classic work by Shirley Guthrie probes the important question: how can Christians maintain their identity in a pluralistic society without becoming exclusive, intolerant, and irrelevant? Now, in this new edition, three distinguished theologians reflect on Guthrie's original question while commenting on and enlarging other key themes in...

Asian American Christianity is one of the fastest-growing forms of American Christianity, and it has already proven to be one of the richest and most innovative movements in North American religion. With a deep understanding of their roots in classic Christianity as well as the diversity of Asian culture, these theological voices have...

It was in the sixth century BCE that the state of Judah fell and along with it the temple of Yahweh, the place of divine presence offering divine protection. This introductory textbook throws fresh light on this crucial period in the history and theological development of ancient Israel and Judah. Taking into account new archaeological evidence...

In this hopeful book, Erik Kolbell, an insightful writer and caregiver, looks back through Scripture and finds that it reveals a God of second chances. The Bible is rich with words like re-conciliation, re-demption, re-vival, and re-surrection, and Kolbell eloquently explores one "re" word in every chapter, each pointing to a well-recognized...

Paul's letters to early churches form one of the largest and most theologically rich parts of the New Testament. Walter Wilson examines each passage from every one of Paul's letters--including those that some scholars believe were written by someone else--and shows how they overlap and connect with passages from a broad spectrum of ancient...

Ira Brent Driggers examines the character of God as portrayed in the Gospel of Mark, paying particular attention to the way God factors into the unfolding conflict between Jesus and his disciples. Arguing that Mark depicts God as acting in two logically opposite ways, both independently of Jesus (as a distinct character) and through Jesus...

Theologian and writer David Cunningham draws from novels, poems, and plays to give a resource for humans who face suffering, death, and new life. He provides a religious reading of important literary texts, with three studies for each of the three themes--drawn together by the weekly sequence of Friday-Saturday-Sunday and the events of Good...

How far away is God? How different is God from human beings? This is the theological question of transcendence, and theology has long struggled to find answers that affirm a human relationship with God. In this provocative new work, Mayra Rivera's answer is that God is not within human grasp but is always within human touch. With a strikingly...