Five hundred years after Luther's famous posting of his 95 Theses in 1517, the church again faces an important crossroads. Sunday worship attendance is shrinking at alarming rates. There are now more «Elvis believers» in the US than Episcopalians and almost limitless spiritual options exist for those who seek faith and trust in something, but are hesitant to commit to a particular path leading to truth. The word prosthesis, normally associated with surgery, is also an apt word to describe the church's need to forge a theological identity that fits our current context. The church faces change and a transformed body, but not at the expense of the biblical richness and tradition that fueled the restlessness of the reformers. The essays gathered here, arranged around the seasons of the church year, address familiar challenges faced by all pastors and leaders in an era of transition, specifically in Christian formation and discipleship. Appropriate for group and personal reflection, 95 Prostheses employs humor and biblical accessibility with the skeptical outsider who may be considering Jesus and his church for the first time in mind.
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Frank G. Honeycutt. 95 Prostheses
95 Prostheses
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction to the Season1
1. Jesus the Safecracker
2. Ready and Waiting
3. The Odd Gift of Endings
4. The Ax at the Root
5. Fire and Soap
6. The One
7. Mom of God
8. Jesus, Son of Joseph
9. God Con Carne
10. Unacceptable
Introduction to the Season
1. King Herod’s Fear2
2. Drenched in Divine Delight
3. Walk on By
4. Sex and Saint Paul
5. Tonic for Demonic
6. Furious with Jesus
7. Jesus Gets Ticked
8. Spring Training
9. Analysis Paralysis
10. Passing on the Mantle
Introduction to the Season1
1. Dust and Return
2. Water and Struggle
3. Nocturnal Midwifery
4. Coercion Aversion
5. Bad News, Front Page
6. Snakebitten
7. Baptism in Seven Scenes
8. Bound in the Boneyard
9. Save Now
10. Giving Tree
Introduction to the Season
1. Scar Show
2. Elliptical Easter
3. Trapper of Air Revisited
4. The Gotcha God
5. Get Up, Gazelles
6. You Know the Way
7. A Life Laid Down19
8. Holy Detour
9. Step by Step24
10. Keeper of the Keys
Introduction to the Season
1. Something on the Edge
2. God at Rest
3. Storm Dozing
4. Trusting in a Lie
5. Delayed Weed-Whacking
6. Persuasive Love
7. Hang on Tightly
8. The Entitled
9. Night Nemesis
10. Man in the Middle
Bibliography
Отрывок из книги
Appendages and Musings for the Body of Christ in Transition
Frank G. Honeycutt
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A couple of springs ago I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway for several days with a bicycling companion. One morning we broke camp and the fog was so thick, pea soup, that it probably wasn’t a very smart thing to be out in it on a bicycle. My friend, Kent, twenty yards ahead of me, would disappear and reappear, in and out of the cloud. It was a weird feeling—ghostly, almost as if he were passing through a door into another world with other people appearing and receding. I have a photo of another friend standing in the fog on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, a friend now dead almost two decades. I look at the picture, through the mist, and time vanishes. We’re on the trail together again and I halfway expect him to speak.
I’ve not seen those three fish again since I saw them in that culvert pool. But I keep looking and watching every day—not because I know they’re really there, but maybe because Advent watchfulness is even more important than verification in the life of faith. We live in the fields of a wonderful world. God reveals luminous truth and light, back-and-forth, up and down; angelic traffic.
