Samuel Wells

Northern Lights

Church Leadership & Ministry

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Ordaining Women

Women

“Benjamin Wayman has brought out of the treasure of Free Methodist heritage something new and something old. His rendering of Benjamin Roberts's prophetic text is a study in how the church changes for the better: recognizing the wideness of the Father's mercy, the extent of the Son's redemption, and the inclusivity of the Spirit's fruits. It is a humbling read, showing us how easily we make God's love too narrow by false strictures of our own, and demonstrating how the impoverishment of the church is largely due to its willfully refusing the abundant gifts God relentlessly bestows.”

Pastoral Work

Church Leadership & Ministry

“Here is a book that will deepen, challenge, inform, enrich, and renew ministry in just the same way and to just the same degree as the work of its subject, Eugene Peterson. Peterson's legacy will not finally be in the written word but in the reflective practice of his countless disciples, shaping communities in ways inspired by his words and example. To read this book is to feel encouraged, hopeful, and moved to prayer and service; and relieved to rediscover that one's ministry is not a lone quest but a shared joy.”

Preaching the Luminous Word

Preaching & Worship

“Ellen Davis's preaching has a fierce intimacy, a deft poetry, a profound playfulness, and a rigorous passion. Just like the Bible. And just like God.”

Rehearsing Scripture

Bible Studies & Devotionals

“In this book Anna Carter Florence goes on a wild rumpus invigorating God’s people to be a repertory church searching for something true. Treating Scripture as a fridge full of promise rather than a ready-made meal waiting to be microwaved, she provides a recipe to enliven Scripture reading and performance in our lives. Her Rehearsing Scripture will renew your practice and awaken your imagination.”

Rhythms of Faithfulness

Theology

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s the greatest merit of these closely observed and finely argued essays that they not only draw deeply on the substance of John Colwell’s admirable work but also follow its trajectory. In these pages one senses not just wisdom, or insight—but love.”

Spiritual Healing

Theology

“By making the ‘spiritual’ not an alternative to the physical but a window on the divine, and by making ‘healing’ not a synonym for magic but a way of encapsulating our longing for salvation, Sarah Coakley and her companions offer an intelligent, accessible, and inspiring study of perhaps the greatest interdisciplinary subject of them all. Highly recommended for anyone who cares about body, mind, and spirit—in local parish or theological seminar alike.”

Suicide and the Communion of Saints

Counseling, Grief & Mental Health

“Suicide is a mixture of what we can never fully know about ourselves and one another, and what we wish always to trust about forever and God. Rhonda Mawhood Lee embraces the former and articulates the latter in a care-full, compassionate, and compelling way. This study plumbs the depths of what suicide means but rises with the glory of who God still is.”

The Art of Living in Season

Christian Living

“Sylvie Vanhoozer's winsome and infectious compendium is about learning in practical and endearing ways to use our imaginations and behold Jesus becoming incarnate in the seasons of our days. But more profoundly, it is about letting our lives be transposed so we become characters in the story of God in Christ. Here you will find something for body, mind, and spirit to cluster round Christ's earthy throne of grace. This book will make your soul grow.”

The Beatitudes through the Ages

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Rebekah Eklund’s heart is large, and her imagination broad; her eye for detail is sharp, and her curiosity winsome; her energy to pursue an unlikely hypothesis is generous, and her patience to unearth an esoteric source unending; her passion for truth is relentless, and her joy in Christ’s upside-down kingdom infectious. Blessed are those who read every word of this book and treasure it: for the glory and playfulness of God’s good future are theirs.”

The Good News of Church Politics

Church Leadership & Ministry

“This is a book about recentering. It maintains, with compelling examples and incontestable argument, that a truly theological politics is not about parties, egos, campaigns and votes, but about the daily practice of how we live together. Ross Kane demonstrates that there is nothing more political than church, because church is the embodiment of how we live with one another and with God, now and forever. If you think faith is about heaven, this book will shake you into contemplating the politics of heaven. If you think faith is useless for thinking about earth, this book will stir you into seeing how each of your political commitments are first theological ones. Politics is often portrayed as a tussle between heart and head. This book will persuade you that it’s about body and soul.”

The Incarnation as God's First Intention

Theology

“Edwin van Driel is an exemplary scholar. His philosophical argumentation is delicious in its meticulousness and rigor. The Christology for which he contends in this book reaches back before the foundation of the world and thus has transformative ramifications for fundamental commitments in theology. He presents a truly theocentric vision of the gospel that is far more exciting than the lame, anthropocentric versions the church has propagated for centuries. This is the best kind of theology—the kind that brings us to praise the living God more profoundly and humbly than we did before we read it.”

The Practice of Prophetic Imagination

Preaching & Worship

“Walter Brueggemann's early work on prophecy and imagination has become foundational for a whole generation of preachers and scholars, including me. Here he returns to perhaps the most characteristic of all his myriad ventures, with unaltered vigor and razor-sharp edge. Prophets are not just provocateurs: they are those who profoundly love their people, deeply know their tradition, and can't but speak of what they both love and know. Brueggemann both loves and knows. That's what makes him a prophet. Would that we were more like him. Reading this book is a healthy first step.”

The Preacher as Liturgical Artist

Preaching & Worship

“In an age taken up with technique, this study dwells on character. In an era given over to image, Johnson explores the spoken word. There's nothing wrong with preaching that a clear sense of identity, a clear understanding of role, a thorough theological grasp of Christianity as practical wisdom and thrilling news, and an artist's playfulness and imagination cannot put right. In this impressive and encouraging work, Johnson gives us hope in preaching, but more significantly, hope in the gospel.”

The Sunrise Liturgy

Arts & Literature

“The liturgists of creation, from St Francis to Thomas Traherne, have always been a minority Magnificat. . . Here Mia Anderson joins their throng, introduces environmentalists to the liturgical year, challenges churchy believers with the swoops of a heron, and juxtaposes contemporary idiom with echoes deeply textured in the Christian tradition. The fine membranes between poetry and prayer, prophecy and play, perception and percussion become invisible. God's grandeur is alive once more as she hovers on the wind of the Spirit.”

The Theater of God's Glory

Theology

“David Taylor’s extraordinary study of Calvin and the liturgical arts consistently surprises and delights. Its greatest strengths are its command of Calvin’s full works, not just the Institutes, and its ability to think with Calvin but far beyond his self-imposed strictures. The result is a more profoundly incarnational Calvin and a more deeply scriptural rendering of the liturgical arts.”

The Unknown God

Apologetics

“The New Atheists applaud science and berate religion, but the science they uphold is unrecognizable to most scientists and the religion they berate is unrecognizable to most Christians. In this absorbing and measured collection some leading contemporary Christian voices take the New Atheist challenge as a stimulus to the renewal of theology and the church. One is almost grateful to the New Atheists for provoking such lively thought as this.”

The Way of the Kenotic Christ

Theology

“Sam Youngs persuasively asserts that Jurgen Moltmann’s Christology is the center of his whole theological project, and rightly recognizes that it has not been the subject of sufficient scrutiny. Moltmann’s work has arguably done more than any modern theologian to lodge kenotic notions in the imagination of the church at large and the theological academy in particular. Youngs shows a sure hand across a wide range of subtle, passionate, and intense debates, bringing clarity, order, and plausibility where confusion and oversimplification have often reigned.”

The Work of Theology

Theology

“Stanley Hauerwas writes unputdownable theology — because he believes in a God who will never put us down until it's clear how our story comes out.”

Unsettling Arguments

Theology

“"Stanley Hauerwas is a public provocateur, a ravenous reader, a restless wrestler with the truth, and an eccentric devotee of baseball, murder mysteries, and liturgically-shaped discipleship. But most of all is he is a devoted, demanding, and dogged academic father to dozens of doctoral students. The breadth of his character takes a community to display. Here, more than ever before, that community of character does in public what Hauerwas and his students do best: tussle, and refine, and introduce new interlocutors, and dismiss out of hand, and rephrase more charitably, and rediscover ancient wisdom, and go back to Aquinas, and quote Barth, and dismantle platitudes, and unsentimentally face the gift and demands of Christ for church, academy, and politics today. This is a work of love turned into a call to renewal, a family reunion transformed into a symposium, a tribute in the guise of a challenge. Admirers and critics of Hauerwas will be enriched by these compelling essays, an ordered array of disagreements in love.”