William Bjoraker

The Other Half of Church

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“I believe that as the church embraces and practices the wisdom in this book, we will see a relational revolution that will equip the church for leadership training, mission, and the completion of the Great Commission. This "other half of the church" will be necessary for the immense challenges that lie ahead in our time.”

The Story Ripples of the Bible

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“In our late modern era, people are looking for more than left-brain analytical, abstract thinking. They want more than lectures, outlines and bullet points. They are hungry for stories. The genius of the Bible is that it is the grand and true story of the world. Long after all the dissertations have been written, defended, and collected dust on shelves, these stories will continue to resound, reverberate, and ripple to the end of time. With her master metaphor of ‘story ripples,’ Elisabeta Karp has illuminated for us the inspired dynamic of Scripture, and the supernatural providence of God in ‘HisStory.’ The Creator drops these stones—of the archetypal stories of real events recorded in the Hebrew Bible—into the deep waters of history. And when their waves and ripples hit you and me, we are immersed in the same primordial flow of living water that was God’s relational activity with his earliest people. Karp helps us understand how the mother of all Bible studies on the road to Emmaus must have transpired (Lk 24:27). How did Jesus explain how Moses wrote of him? Surely messianic prophecy is not merely stated predictions in propositional form but also embedded in the stories of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible, as they pre-figure the Messiah. The church will not be successful in fulfilling her mandate to win the Jewish people to Messiah (Rom 11:11-14) by philosophical apologetics or systematic theological discourse. She will need to re-tell their stories showing how they inherently point to Messiah Jesus. With fresh language and insights into the deep patterns of story, Karp’s work demonstrates the unity of the Bible as one book, with waves going in one direction, toward the Messiah and the consummation of his kingdom. Whether we are communicating with younger late modern Westerners, the majority non-Western world, or the Jewish people, we need the biblical communication dynamics of Karp’s The Story Ripples of the Bible.”