The Return

Review: Awakening Faith: Daily Devotions from the Early Church James Stuart Bell with Patrick J. Kelly Zondervan 2013 Who knew?   I certainly didn’t.   What a rich legacy those of the early church have left for us!   And it’s been all but lost to the majority of the believers in modern times.   Lots of reasons for that loss, but this isn’t the place for listing them. What it is the place for is to appreciate what Bell and Kelly, along with all those that make this sort of work happen, have done for us.   The introduction explains a little about the Church Fathers and what some of their concerns were, how they understood their life and times, and some of the encouragement they offered.   A short biographical sketch of each of them is included at the end of the book.   I found that very helpful in placing them in their respective time frame.   Polycarp was very early and Maximus the Confessor about 500 years later. One of them eve...

Review: Ministering to Problem People in Your Church: What to Do with Well-Intentioned Dragons Marshall Shelley Bethany House Publishers 2013 This book covers most of the people issues anyone has encountered if they have hung around the assembled church folks for any length of time.   Some of us have been on both sides of this one, regrettably.   Not fun from anybody’s perspective.   And that is the reason that this book needs to read.   By all of us.    What this author describes may be told from the church perspective, but I think you’d meet the same challenges elsewhere.   But since this is for ministers we’ll stay in that realm.     His list of Dragon Species (42) is pretty thorough and he will introduce the reader to several of them in the reading. My favorite, if I can use that term in that way, involves the charter member’s reaction to a growing church and all the tactics that person used to stay in control. ...