What God Intended for the Body of Christ Fellowship among believers is more than just talking over coffee after church service. Biblical fellowship in New Testament times—or koinonia—had rich and varied meanings, including covenant relationship, partnership in the gospel, communion with God and others, and the sharing of earthly possessions. In True Community, bestselling author Jerry Bridges guides you through koinonia and its implications for today’s church. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter, this book will help you dig deeper into what Christian community in the twenty-first century should look like. You will come away with a new appreciation for fellowship, the church, and what God intended the body of Christ to be. With a discussion guide for personal or group use.

Building True Community explores how to build a sense of community as an antidote to divisiveness and distrust. Based on more than thirty years of working with the community building model developed by M. Scott Peck, M.D., bestselling author of The Road Less Traveled and co-founder of the Foundation for Community Encouragement, this book provides a detailed description of the community building experience, how to facilitate the experience, and how to integrate its principles and practices into daily life. Learn how to: • deepen and restore relationships, resolve conflicts, and experience the freedom to be your authentic, best self; • dissolve fixed mental perceptions that reinforce the “optical delusion” of our separateness; • confront what keeps divisions in place that separate people and lead to conflict. Other topics include the underlying principles and conditions that make a sense of community possible, how to create conditions for communities to take root and flourish, how the stages of community play out in daily life, and how to integrate community building practices into daily life. The book also looks back at the origins of community and considers the community building experience as a fusion of spiritual practice with a scientific foundation.

In today's frenetic society, people rarely develop intimate friendships. Instead, they spend their lives essentially disconnected from others, rushing through life content with brief visits and casual conversations. But what if one were to develop a community, a spiritual community, of people who walked with and supported each other through life's journey? A community of real friends who listened to each other's personal tragedies without merely trying to fix the problems, who encouraged and nurtured each other's strengths, and who accepted people for who they really are, instead of the image they try to portray. In Becoming a True Spiritual Community (formerly titled The Safest Place on Earth), Larry Crabb explores such a place, where God can heal disconnected people and allow them to reconnect with each other and, ultimately, with Him.

Create visionary learning communities that improve student outcomes by shaping the internal school community and partnering with families and organizations in the external community.

Thomas Merton: Social Critic organizes and critically analyzes the social thought of the Cistercian monk who has become an internationally known symbol of the spiritual element in man. The author evaluated all of Merton's writings, published and unpublished, then discussed his interpretations with Merton personally. The result is a perceptive relation of Merton's social thought to its genesis in his own life experiences and contemplation, a faithful rendering of Merton's thought on the problems of our time. Merton, the author makes clear, called for a spiritual, social, and religious union. It was a poetic and sometimes unimplemented solution to alienation and division, a valid and authentic, if at times limited, response to the contemporary chaos. This study will be greeted by a strong reaction from Mertonians everywhere.

Promoting Health at the Community Level speaks directly to the challenges that foundations and funding agencies face in supporting the work of community-based groups. The seven case studies included in the book correspond to different multi-site initiatives funded by The Colorado Trust, a Denver-based health foundation. Each case study describes the initiative approach, the type of health promotion activities developed by community-based grantees, the various resources and guidelines provided by the foundation, the initial outcomes of the initiative, and lessons learned. In addition, the final chapter pulls together the findings from the seven case studies into a summary set of recommendations for grantmakers, addressing issues such as the level and duration of funding, different approaches to technical assistance, networking among grantees, and the development of healthy funder-grantee relationships. This book is the first book to provide a systematic examination of community-based health promotion. Edited by Doug Easterling, Kaia Gallagher, and Dora Lodwick, this innovative text uses seven case studies to evaluate community-driven health promotion and present promising strategies for initiating and sustaining community-based efforts. Individual chapters describe real-world, multi-site health initiatives and summarize their evaluation outcomes. Presenting different funding scenarios within varying community settings, the case studies cover a wide range of topics, including School health education Teen pregnancy prevention Volunteer service for rural seniors Violence prevention Home-visitation services Promoting Health at the Community Level illustrates a number of different strategies for strengthening the capacity of community-based organizations to develop and implement health promotion programs. The editors provide knowledge-based approaches to encouraging local leaders, nurturing appropriate networks, and creating health promotion programs suited to unique community contexts. Offering unique lessons for community-based coalitions and supportive organizations, this book will also inspire academics and students to further explore this innovative approach to health promotion and disease prevention.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 12.5 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, AIAI 2019, held in Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, in May 2019. The 49 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. They cover a broad range of topics such as deep learning ANN; genetic algorithms - optimization; constraints modeling; ANN training algorithms; social media intelligent modeling; text mining/machine translation; fuzzy modeling; biomedical and bioinformatics algorithms and systems; feature selection; emotion recognition; hybrid Intelligent models; classification - pattern recognition; intelligent security modeling; complex stochastic games; unsupervised machine learning; ANN in industry; intelligent clustering; convolutional and recurrent ANN; recommender systems; intelligent telecommunications modeling; and intelligent hybrid systems using Internet of Things. The papers are organized in the following topical sections:AI anomaly detection - active learning; autonomous vehicles - aerial vehicles; biomedical AI; classification - clustering; constraint programming - brain inspired modeling; deep learning - convolutional ANN; fuzzy modeling; learning automata - logic based reasoning; machine learning - natural language; multi agent - IoT; nature inspired flight and robot; control - machine vision; and recommendation systems.

This is a collection of essential passages on the ministry of the church. By selecting significant sources which share a common assumption concerning the nature of theology and its methodology, the editor presents a single consistent theology of ministry. The book is carefully organised to allow a thorough exploration of the different aspects of ministry. Contributors include Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Küng, Helmut Thielicke and Thomas F. Torrance.