Christians wrestling to apply the teachings of Jesus to their everyday lives. Communities plagued by divisiveness and hypocrisy, with an emphasis on wealth and status. That’s the book of James ... and the story of our modern lives. A Youth Worker's Commentary on James has the entire NIV Biblical text printed alongside a deeply rich, yet readable, look into the meaning of this marvelous book. The book includes dozens of word studies, with fascinating historical accounts and personal stories, followed by a large section of thought provoking questions to get your students thinking and talking. Written for youth workers, ministry volunteers, and everyday people who want to probe deeper into the Book of James, youth workers will find it an invaluable aid for message and lesson preparation. Using this book to achieve a solid understanding of James, including its historical context, rationale, and meaning, youth workers will then apply this pertinent wisdom to the needs and issues they and their youth groups are working through. A Youth Worker's Commentary on James also includes bonus material and activities that make the passages come to life.

When a youth pastor is preparing a lesson, it’s sometimes challenging to find a curriculum that really offers depth into the Scripture passages and goes beyond a cursory look at the text. A Youth Worker’s Commentary on John is the first in a new series of commentaries developed with youth workers in mind. An in-depth, yet readable approach to the gospel of John, this first volume includes commentary, word studies, personal and historical stories, and discussion questions that will help get students thinking and talking. The gospel of John is the most personal and revealing of all the portraits of Jesus in the New Testament. This commentary has the entire NIV biblical text printed alongside a rich, deep look into the meaning of this gospel. Youth workers will find this to be an invaluable aid for message and lesson preparation. They’ll get a solid understanding of the gospel of John, including its historical context, rationale, and meaning, to see how to apply what they uncover to the needs and issues the teens in their group are dealing with.

Following the first volume of this series, A Youth Worker’s Commentary on John, Vol 2 digs deeper into the miracles and teachings of Jesus as told by John. Covering the remainder of John’s gospel, chapters nine to twenty-one, you’ll find this resource to be an invaluable aid for your message and lesson preparation. The authors give you a solid understanding of the Gospel of John, including its historical context, rationale, and meaning. You’ll see how to apply the wisdom gained from these passages to the needs and issues you and your students are working through. Written specifically for youth workers, A Youth Worker’s Commentary on John, Vol 2 has the entire NIV biblical text printed alongside a deep, yet readable, look into the meaning of this marvelous gospel. The book includes dozens of word studies, historical accounts and personal stories, followed by a large section of in-depth, thought provoking questions to get your students thinking and talking.

Therapeutic Residential Care For Children and Youth takes a fresh look at therapeutic residential care as a powerful intervention in working with the most troubled children who need intensive support. Featuring contributions from distinguished international contributors, it critically examines current research and innovative practice and addresses the key questions: how does it work, what are its critical “active ingredients” and does it represent value for money? The book covers a broad spectrum of established and emerging approaches pioneered around with world, with contributors from the USA, Canada, Scandinavia, Spain, Australia, Israel and the UK offering a mix of practice and research exemplars. The book also looks at the research relating to critical issues for child welfare service providers: the best time to refer children to residential care, how children can be helped to make the transition into care, the characteristics of children entering and exiting care, strategies for engaging families as partners, how the substantial cost of providing intensive is best measured against outcomes, and what research and development challenges will allow therapeutic residential care to be rigorously compared with its evidence-based community-centered alternatives. Importantly, the volume also outlines how to set up and implement intensive child welfare services, considering how transferable they are, how to measure success and value for money, and the training protocols and staffing needed to ensure that a programme is effective. This comprehensive volume will enable child welfare professionals, researchers and policymakers to develop a refined understanding of the potential of therapeutic residential care, and to identify the highest and best uses of this intensive and specialized intervention.

The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work presents and illustrates an anthropological model of child and youth care work and explores the associated benefits of such an approach. Author Rivka A. Eisikovits’model enhances workers’on-the-job effectiveness with clients and co-workers and improves intra- and inter-organizational communication with other human service providers. This book prepares child and youth care providers, educators, researchers, administrators, consultants, supervisors, and organizers to become change-sensitive, process-oriented observers, analysts, and co-designers of the systems within which they function and those with which they interact, such as families, communities, and referral agencies. The model presented in The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work offers readers an organic continuum between everyday work experience and conceptual practice, organizing such haphazard events into a systemized body of knowledge. Although providing specific skills, it is more than a technology--it is a humanistic worldview from which a humanistic practice philosophy can be derived. Specific points of this philosophy that child and youth care professionals learn about include: the cultural learning theory ethnographic inquiry and description staff-client relations the sick-role trap microcultural events in residential settings the relationship between treatment and education subsystems a heuristic approach to service delivery family cultural ethnography for cultural sensitization Eisikovits’anthropologic perspective broadens the horizons of child and youth care work and equips practitioners to transcend narrowly drawn organizational boundaries. By presenting caregivers as cultural translators between their clients and various decision-making forums, The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work prepares them to face the challenges of a dynamic emergent profession and helps them perform successfully in a rapidly changing social context that requires constant assessment of needs and evaluation of performance.

What would it look like if an Avenger turned up to help in youth work? Perhaps it would breathe a fresh sense of purpose. Maybe the primary response would be relief that backup had arrived. They would certainly pull a crowd for a few weeks at least. Looking for a superhero might be a good idea. But there is a better one. It’s called the church. Boring? Irrelevant? All dressed up but nowhere to go? Looking Good Naked strips off the ill-fitting outfits and recovers a biblical theology of the church as the body of Christ, drawing on the narratives of youth work and ministry. Written for the student of youth ministry, full-timer, part-timer or extra-timer, it is an engaging, practical, and deep book, seeking to renew our confidence in who we are in light of whose we are, so we can better engage with young people.

Africa is a necessary but an often neglected continent. So also is the letter of James necessary but neglected. Yet there is perhaps no biblical text that speaks to the life situation in Africa in the twenty-first century more directly than the book of James. An African Commentary on the Letter of James is an attempt to hear the message of James’s letter from a non-Western social and cultural setting. It seeks to demonstrate how one’s worldview, language, culture, economic status, and religion make a significant difference in appropriating the message of the biblical text. The commentary explores how the written word impacts the readers in a predominantly oral culture. It attempts to hear what James is saying from a different context but, in doing so, explains James with a different “voice.” Like the letter of James itself, the commentary uses pithy sayings, proverbs, and aphorisms to explain the meaning of the text.

Within a historical and contemporary context, this book examines major policy practice and research issues as they jointly shape child welfare practice and its future. In addition to describing the major problems facing the field, the book highlights service innovations that have been developed in recent years. The resulting picture is encouraging, especially if certain major program reforms I are implemented and agencies are able to concentrate resources in a focused manner. The volume emphasizes families and children whose primary recourse to services has been through publicly funded child welfare agencies. The book considers historical areas of service—foster care and adoptions, in-home family-centered services, child-protective services, and residential services—where social work has an important role. Authors address the many fields of practice in which child and family services are provided or that involve substantial numbers of social work programs, such as services to adolescent parents, child mental health, education, and juvenile justice agencies. This new edition will continue to serve as a fundamen-tal introduction for new practitioners, as well as summary of recent developments for experienced practitioners.