Do you long for genuine relationships where you can know others and be known by them? Do you desire more than just gathering in the same space with others without any real connection? Yet, simultaneously, do you find yourself occasionally pushing back when someone gets too close? Why do you think you have that longing, and why do you think deep-abiding relationships are such a struggle to find and maintain? In this book, Pastor Neal Ledbetter makes the case that the gospel of Jesus Christ gives us answers. In the gospel, we are offered the endless treasure of Jesus and the never-ending, overflowing supply of treasures found in him. One of the rare jewels that comes with a new identity in Christ is a new gospel community, kingdom-family, and people to which we belong and in which we can know and be known. Paul calls it our inheritance in the saints (Eph 1:18), our citizenship with the saints, and our membership among the household of God (Eph 2:19–22). This new gospel community and kingdom-family is simply too important and too wonderful a treasure to ignore, avoid, or treat as unnecessary, unimportant, or secondary to our lives. This study will explore the extraordinary gift we have been given in gospel community. We’ll see how the gospel transforms us individually and simultaneously forms us into a new people. We’ll survey how we are intended to live together and the only sustaining motive and power for doing so. And finally, we’ll examine several characteristics necessary to experience the rare jewel of gospel community.

Research on “following Jesus” has mostly been done in terms of what Jesus’ followers ought to do. In this unprecedented study, Kim presents “following Jesus” in John’s Gospel through the perspective of what Jesus does for his followers. “Following Jesus” is a journey towards the place where Jesus leads his followers, that is, to a relationship with the Father. It is ultimately participating in the Son’s communion with the Father. Jesus, who was in the bosom of the Father, descended from him and ascends to him, taking his followers with him, so that they may be with him where he is with the Father in glory and love. Kim develops this thesis by examining the term akolouthein (“to follow”) and correlated motifs in John’s Gospel.

These essays explore the reconception of the Gospels as first-century compositions of sound performed for audiences by storytellers rather than the anachronistic picture of a series of texts read by individual readers. The new paradigm implicit in these initial experiments is based on the recent realization that the majority of persons--85 to 95 percent--were illiterate and experienced the Jesus stories as members of audiences. Either from memory or from memorized manuscripts, the evangelists performed the Gospels as an evening's entertainment of two to four hours. The audiences were predominantly addressed as Hellenistic Judeans who lived in the aftermath of the Roman-Jewish war. When heard whole, the Gospels were vivid experiences of the central character of Jesus. These studies of audience address and the interactions between first-century storytellers and audiences reveal a dynamic performance literature that functioned as scripts for an ever-expanding network of storytelling proclamations whose envisioned horizon was the whole world. When the Gospels were told at one time from beginning to end, they invited the listeners to move from being peripherally interested or initially opposed to Jesus to identifying themselves as disciples of Jesus and believers in him as the Messiah.

New Testament scholars typically assume that the men who pervade the pages of Luke's two volumes are models of an implied "manliness." Scholars rarely question how Lukan men measure up to ancient masculine mores, even though masculinity is increasingly becoming a topic of inquiry in the field of New Testament and its related disciplines. Drawing especially from gender-critical work in classics, Brittany Wilson addresses this lacuna by examining key male characters in Luke-Acts in relation to constructions of masculinity in the Greco-Roman world. Of all Luke's male characters, Wilson maintains that four in particular problematize elite masculine norms: namely, Zechariah (the father of John the Baptist), the Ethiopian eunuch, Paul, and, above all, Jesus. She further explains that these men do not protect their bodily boundaries nor do they embody corporeal control, two interrelated male gender norms. Indeed, Zechariah loses his ability to speak, the Ethiopian eunuch is castrated, Paul loses his ability to see, and Jesus is put to death on the cross. With these bodily "violations," Wilson argues, Luke points to the all-powerful nature of God and in the process reconfigures--or refigures--men's own claims to power. Luke, however, not only refigures the so-called prerogative of male power, but he refigures the parameters of power itself. According to Luke, God provides an alternative construal of power in the figure of Jesus and thus redefines what it means to be masculine. Thus, for Luke, "real" men look manifestly unmanly. Wilson's findings in Unmanly Men will shatter long-held assumptions in scholarly circles and beyond about gendered interpretations of the New Testament, and how they can be used to understand the roles of the Bible's key characters.

This book, first published in 1995, introduces, retells and analyses the Gospel of Matthew.

""African American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was just sixty years old when her heart finally gave out on January 27, 1972, as she lay alone in her sick bed at Little Company of Mary Hospital just south of Chicago. Obituaries faithfully recounted the best-known story lines of her unlikely career: how the power of her voice was rooted in her devout Baptist upbringing; her birth in 1911 and rise from dire poverty in Uptown New Orleans to international celebrity; a dedication to the black freedom struggle that further elevated her to the status of cultural and political symbol. Together, Jackson's voice, faith, prestige, and activism, made her at the time of her death, in the assessment of her friend Harry Belafonte, "the single most powerful black woman in the United States." Yet her reputation is also complex. Invoking the charisma of Martin and Malcolm, the persuasion of statesmen and despots, and the splendor of divas and diadems, Maceo Bowie's letter to the editor of the Chicago Defender seems to both celebrate and grapple with the substance of Jackson dynamism as a gospel singer and her consequence as an illustrious black public figure. In an editorial in the Defender following Jackson's death, E. Duke McNeil acknowledged Jackson's habitual acclaim as the "Queen of the gospel singers," while also observing: "You can almost say that Mahalia was the 'greatest' because she was the only gospel singer known everywhere." Indeed, for scholars of black gospel, the music itself is often hidden in plain sight. On the one hand, gospel voices are inescapable, audible not just within the music industry, where they have become a lingua franca for pop singers, but also in recurring representations of the black church, in the omnipresent sound of the black gospel choir, and in the personal histories of many black artists. On the other, in comparison with such genres as jazz, blues, country music, and hip hop, documentation of black gospel music, which has thrived in in-group settings, is relatively scant, leaving researchers with limited sources and largely reliant on oral history. Fortunately, the scope and coverage of Jackson's caereer produced a paper trail that enables us to study her personal and professional life while gaining insight into the black gospel field of which she was such an integral part. In compiling a wide swath of these sources on Jackson, The Mahalia Jackson Reader seeks to paint a fuller and more vivid picture of one of the most resonant musical figures of the second half of the twentieth century. This volume offers a wealth of biographical detail about Jackson, though it also reveals that Jackson was many things to many people. This is reflected in the book's organization by topic and type of writing, though, as often as possible, Jackson's own voice joins the dialogue, offering her side of the story. Jackson always identified as a child of New Orleans and the documents in Part I convey her recognition of the singularity of that city and of her legacy as the grandaughter of enslaved and emancipated African Americans. Stories about Jackson's upbringing are recounted by the esteemed critics and commentators in Part II, though these writers also ruminate upon the essence of her artistry, her relationship to jazz, her significance as an African American woman in the public eye, and the ways in which she became an increasingly complicated crossover figure as her visibility grew beyond the bounds of the black church. Newspaper coverage in Part III offers "hot takes" on Jackson's appearances, the pop-cultural cachet of postwar gospel singing, and the singer's transatlantic reception. Already in the 1950s, though even more in subsequent decades, it is evident that beyond being an exemplar of gospel singing, Jackson was read through various investments in the sociopolitical significance of black expressive culture. In 1931, Jackson moved from New Orleans to Chicago where she became immediately immersed in a burgeoning modern gospel movement. The testimony of Jackson and her associates in Part IV are more personal and allow us to understand her less as an exceptional individual than as a musical colleague and as a member of a black South Side community. Yet another perspective on Jackson emerges from the writing directed toward a scholarly audience in Part V, which seeks to contextualize the singer historically and offer enterprising interpretive claims"--

“Name it and claim it!” “Just have faith!” “Give and you will get!” Catchphrases like this have convinced many Christians that trusting in God will bring health and wealth. But the gospel does not promise prosperity without pain or salvation without sanctification. Femi Adeleye draws on his wide-ranging experience as he examines the appeal and peril of this new gospel of prosperity that has made deep inroads in Africa, as well as in the West.