Bøger udgivet af Urban Loft Publishers

What if we learned to set aside our preconceived plans, methods, and more importantly ourselves, in order to follow God into the world? It's time to put away our books, podcasts, and ideologies. It's time to sit back and listen to God, the author of the church. Armed only with our personal relationship with the One who created all things, and his gospel, we await that still, small whisper from him that will guide our next steps. We wait patiently for him to reveal though Holy Spirit the plan, the people, the where, and those to whom we are to go and present the gospel.

 Let's take time to journey together back to the basics, de-cluttering our lives, learning to sit at the feet of Jesus, and allow his Spirit to guide us. We can become like the people of Israel, the nomads in the desert, packing up only what is needed for the journey, our faith and the gospel, in order to live out a nomadic faith where we set aside the baggage of the past and follow the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night to the place where God wants us.

The twin forces of globalization and urbanization are transforming the context of global missions. While the Western church grapples with the challenges of evangelism in an age of globalization, new evangelistic opportunities are emerging that blur the conventional boundaries between local and global outreach. Even as the rise of a persistent post-Christendom presents new challenges for the church, global migration is rearranging the religious and ethnic makeup of our cities. Cities are centers of constant change, and in an urban world, current missionaries will need to become adaptable. Furthermore, contemporary missions strategies will need to engage a world organized along networks that may transcend geographic boundaries. Painting a picture of evangelism and church planting in our urban and global world, Crossroads of the Nations utilizes contemporary data and together with missionary accounts - both actual and recent - tells a story of transnational missions impacting our world.

This story is supplemented by other authors who live in different parts of the city, at other socio-economic levels, and from different communities of faith in the city. A dialogue has developed between us on the margins where our stories overlap. Together we will find these margins to be a place of meeting, a gathering where we can look at the commonalities and differences of our stories, a thus develop a "real book" of Christianity in Los Angeles and not, as Adamic put it, "a mere booster pamphlet" for my particular point of view.

Small Voice, Big City sets urban mission, the mission of Jesus, in a broad context: people, land, and the kingdom of God. This book focuses on the power of the gospel -- often outwardly weak, small, foolish -- to heal the nations and redeem earth's cities. The gospel proved powerful in the first-century world, when the church was born; it still is today.

The Bikeable Church: A Bicyclist's Guide to Church Planting is an off-the-cuff look and exploration into the bicycling world in Portland. More than that, it pokes and prods church planting in the urban petri dish to discover what it'd be like to plant pedal-powered churches. Chalked full of stories, antics, and slightly questionable research, The Bikeable Church spins forward the church planting revolution in light of the changing transportation infrastructure in cities like Portland, and asks whether we can truly start churches where the primary vehicle of use is the bicycle. This book is for the everyday bicyclist and ordinary church planter. You'll be happy to hear that no spandex was worn for the writing of this book.

In our journey with the poor, we are confronted with material objects we are attached to. We are challenged to ask, what is it we cannot live without? The goal is not to turn into rigid stoics, or Spartans who reject luxuries or extravagance. The goal is to find our freedom. Without a community, we can have no ministry. The gospel is not just about being saved to Jesus, it also means becoming part of a community, the people of God.Join Raineer Chu as he shares his experiences and stories from his own journey with the poor. --Includes Discussion Questions for Personal Reflection or Small Group studies

What does it look like for a congregation to give and receive hospitality by cultivating life-giving partnerships with people of peace and goodwill? In Eat What is Set Before You, Scott Hagley offers a vivid picture of the habits and postures necessary for congregations to join God's mission in the neighborhood. Drawing from congregational research and his own experience as a pastor and consultant, Hagley describes three different crisis moments that congregations must navigate practically and understand theologically as they learn to dwell with and within their neighborhood. In so doing, he unearths the tensions, temptations, and possibilities missional churches face in the current North American context.---Endorsements: "If your church sets out to become a life-giving presence in the neighborhood, you're in for a wild ride! It all seems simple enough, until you start doing it. That's why you need this book. It is going to give you astonishing insight into what you have been going through as a church. It is going to give you a rich practical theology for understanding how to improvise for what's coming next. And it is taken from a deeply personal and particular account of Scott Hagley's experience of participating in a neighborhood church, which makes it resonate deeply and concretely with your real experience. This is one of the most helpful guidebooks I have encountered in the past twenty years of parish ministry."- Paul SparksCo-Author of the award-winning book The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship, and Community and Co-founding Director of the Parish Collective."Finally-a book that develops a usable congregational missiology! The author presents a biblically and theologically framed, yet profoundly practical missiology for any and every congregation to take seriously its participation in God's mission within its own local context..."- Dr. Craig Van GelderEmeritus Professor of Congregational Mission, Luther Seminary ..". This is an outstanding book, which I will use in my church, my networks and the classroom. It is full of stories and a depth of wisdom about how we may encourage people in our congregations to live out the gospel in our current contexts."- Dr. Cameron RoxburghVP of Missional Initiatives for NAB, National Director of Forge Canada, and Senior Pastor of Southside Community Church..". Hagley does theology in, with, under, against, and for a local church within a deep reading of contemporary culture. Good reading for teachers of theology and local lay and clergy leaders of the practice of missional church. Bravo!"- Patrick R. SeifertProfessor Emeritus of Systematic TheologyLuther Theological SeminaryPresident and Director of ResearchChurch Innovations Institute

For too long church planting literature and training has been primarily focused on starting churches in low-density parts of our cities predicated upon auto-based commuting patterns. However, the reality of the global city is that millions upon millions of people worldwide do not live that kind of lifestyle. Rather, life revolves around getting from Point A to Point B via on foot, bicycle, or public transportation. What would church planting then look like with those common transportation realities? Instead of basing strategies and methodologies on a car-based lifestyle, The Multi-Nucleated Church reduces the scale to walkable neighborhoods, districts, city centers, and central cities. The common denominator is truly high-density urban contexts. The Multi-Nucleated Church explores the theoretical framework of constructing an ecclesiology that finds its home in the multi-nucleated high-density mega-global city.

As a young urban youth worker, Ted Travis was captivated by a question posed by Christian community development pioneer Dr. John Perkins: "How do we build incentive in inner-city youth, motivating them toward Christ and a life of meaning and purpose?" Over the next 30 years, Ted wrestled with this question as he and his wife Shelly ministered to hundreds of teens in Denver's Five Points neighborhood- an inner-city community facing the daunting challenges of poverty, gangs, crime, and unemployment. Along the way, Ted pressed biblical principles and tried-in the-trenches strategies into a philosophy of youth leadership development he calls "transformational discipleship." In Building Cathedrals, Ted shares his blueprint for transformational discipleship (as well as accounts of its profound impact on young people) and exhorts today's youth workers to reimagine their ministries and raise up a new generation of visionary urban leaders. This book has been revised and expanded, including the addition of a index.

"The sense of being lost, displaced, and homeless is pervasive in contemporary culture. The yearning to belong somewhere, to be in a safe place, is a deep and moving pursuit. Loss of place and yearning for place are dominant images ..." (Brueggemann, The Land) Fragmentation, mobility, dualism--these forces work against our belonging, and work against our richly dwelling in the places we live. Add to these the rise of "virtual" place and relationships, and our sense of displacement only increases. It has been difficult to embrace a call to life as mission in this world under these conditions, and equally difficult to embrace a call to place. Are there "sacred" places? If every place is sacred, does the word lose its meaning? What is it that God loves about place? Can architecture contribute to our ability to engage in a place? How do experiential human questions like "belonging" intersect with a theological lens? Does a biblical view of place imply an ecology and an ethic? How do pilgrimage and place relate? How can the arts assist us in place-making? This book addresses these questions and more, in a lively dialogue between theology and culture.

Often times the Bible is associated with rural pastoral settings. The Israelites wandering in the desert wilderness living in tents, David playing his harp for sheep out in the pasture, and Jesus strolling along dusty roads between remote villages. But what if I told you that the Bible is an urban book and that the center stage for where the drama of biblical events played out was truly the city? Starting in Genesis, all of the way to the end of the Bible in Revelation, the whole trajectory of humanity and the focal point for the Missio Dei was and is urban and not rural. When Jesus erupted into history through the womb of a teenager he lived in the most urban region in the world. The early church was birthed in the city and spread to the largest most influential cosmopolitan urban centers of the day. For the first-century Christian, to be a follower of Jesus was synonymous with being an urbanite. The Urbanity of the Bible explores the urban nature of the Bible and displays the urban trajectory of the Missio Dei. The city was and is a dominant theme of the setting, backdrop, and purposes of God throughout history. As the world today has flooded to the cities this book is good news. We were meant to live in the city.