This book will help you examine your beliefs--where they came from, whether they are still applicable today, how they have changed over the years--and decide what new directions you might want to pursue.

This study guide can be used for small group study, intentional communities, conferences, or any group who would like to delve more deeply into the history and the process of living out the core teachings of Jesus. There are discussion questions and space after each point for groups to come up with their own thoughts and ideas.

YOU ARE THE LIGHT! Experience Transformational Spirituality and Discover the Divine Within

Attendance in US churches continues to sharply decline. As church leaders struggle to identify both root causes and possible responses, they often feel a sense of despair... but there is hope!

Women make up over one-half of the world's population, yet throughout history women have been kept out of power; they have been oppressed and disregarded, and have often had their stories ignored. This is a tragedy not only for women but for all humankind, because we all have much to gain by hearing one another's stories, and by experiencing one another in all of our rich fullness – not from a preconceived notion that one group or sex is superior to another.

“In these pages, regardless of how the story has been heard before, there is room for seven year olds and 70 year olds to grow and learn. I’m going to use this book with my congregation.”

Behind all the creation stories there is a basic assumption that God was involved; the “how” of it was a secondary concern to the original writers. If you’ve used Donald Schmidt’s “for Progressive Christians” study guides with the adults in your congregation and have wanted to include all ages within your church, now you can! "Creation: Study and Worship for Progressive Churches" makes the vision of whole congregation sharing not only possible, but easy.

Many people have left the church, or never entered it at all, because they think it is irrelevant. Some people have stayed in the church, not knowing why, because they think it is irrelevant. Those two groups are the people for whom I wrote this manual.

Our 2020 updated version of the 8 Points of progressive Christianity

“At the center of the Christmas story is hope…hope which comes to us in the form of a vulnerable, poor baby. A child, not a king, changes the world. God appears to us as a marginalized, Afro-Semitic, Jewish child from Nazareth in Palestine. A child who grows up to teach us to welcome the stranger. How would our world be different if we loved our neighbors as ourselves?” asks the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church.

How do churches build immunity from racial and ethnic tensions that threaten to divide rather than unite congregations? Jacqui Lewis and John Janka believe that the answer lies in the development of multiracial, multicultural communities of faith.

Work out your faith and renew hope through our film library of spiritual leaders and contemplative pieces.

*** This page has moved - please click here to Order Hard Copy and DVD. To see all Purchase Options Please Click Here.

*** This page has moved - please click here to Order Hard Copy and DVD. To see all Purchase Options Please Click Here.

The Advent season is rich in sensory exploration. Our ADVENT issues follows the Revised Common Lectionary (YEARS A, B, C) and provides youth the opportunity to explore this season through thoughtful selections of art, music and video.

Written by RBTL Founding Editor Bill Dols, this primer explains the Maueitic (midwife) Method of The Educational Center and provides a learning experience that explores “the student is the curriculum.”

Here I offer a church "adult study" that can be completed in one after-worship program, or expanded to multiple sessions. It focuses on one of the most important issues facing voters in the upcoming midterm elections. Use as you wish! And please give me feedback on how you use it and how it is received.

Remember that resurrection is more than mere resuscitation! It is life transformed! It is faith in possibilities, when others are convinced of inevitability.

In May 2017, people from all over the world will gather in Portland, Oregon to share knowledge and wisdom, learn from each other, celebrate, be inspired, and find the tools needed to create and enliven local movements within our communities. Together we will explore sacred oneness, Christ consciousness, eco-spirituality, social justice and the way of universal and personal transformation that honors the Divine in all.

Uppity Women of the Bible is a four volume DVD-based series featuring Hebrew Bible professor Dr. Lisa Wolfe. Combining careful scholarship with humor and fresh insights, Dr. Wolfe presents just what your group needs for lively, thoughtful discussion of Ruth, The Song of Songs, Esther and Judith.

Marianne of First Congregational Church, UCC, Ocala, Florida created the Study Guide for her church discussion group and has made it available to our readers as a free download.

"Love the sinner, but hate the sin." This phrase has been used countless times by some Christians to pretend to offer welcome to LGBT people while condemning the natural consequence of the way God made them. It speaks for a shallow kind of love at most: one that claims to be okay with a person's same-sex orientation while stigmatizing its fulfillment. This noxious phrase also summarizes the underlying attitude of many people of other religions towards sexual minorities. It is a phrase whose time has come - and gone. More than ever, it needs to be excised from the vocabulary of faith, once and for all, as it pertains to homosexuality.

In the church world, you need to know what is and isn’t working. You need metrics. You can’t just keep doing what you enjoy doing if no one is “buying” it, or continue what worked a decade ago without asking whether it is working today.

Worship is a 'receipt' given to God in return for the divine gifts of life which we receive.... It is an artful response to our awe and wonderment at the miracle of creation which surrounds us.....

n this book you will find a profile of what Jesus may have been like within the context of Second Temple Judaism. This is set alongside selected aspects of the Jesus tradition as preserved in the earliest Christian writings. Neither is ascribed primacy over the other, but each casts light on the other and both inform the final part of the book that traces some of the ways in which Jesus communities now might shape their collective and individual lives.

The SALT Project is a not-for-profit project committed to creating beautiful and theologically interesting church media!

This  Study Guide, Shedding Light on the Gospels is based on Bishop Spong's "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." The Study Guide is organized by Discussion Sessions and includes extensive quotations extracted from Bishop Spong’s book. In addition to Bishop Spong’s book, we will be reading the three gospels: Mark, Matthew and Luke (in that order).

If "touches" are the many thousands whom your church touches in any way, "prospects" are touches whom you stimulate to take some interest in who you are as a faith community and what you do, especially in mission and ministering to people. Take it as a given that, at this point, they aren't the least interested in how you worship, the traditions you observe, who presides at your altar, the quality of your facilities, or your history. If that's all you have to tell them, you are lost.

A day did exist when a church could grow and thrive by opening its doors on Sunday and welcoming whoever arrived. Knowing how to welcome regulars and visitors was as much evangelism as a congregation needed to do. That day ended long ago. Nowadays, most churches don’t have enough visitors to offset the inevitable attrition that happens when people die, move out of town, or lose interest. And “regular attendance” now means one or two Sundays a month, not three or four.

An aging Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD returns to Da Nang after 50 years in order to try to do something for those still afflicted generations later by the lingering toxic affects of Agent Orange. His nagging conscience leads to a redemptive act of self-healing and a common good. Spirituality is often an amorphous and bandied about term that too often connotes the merely religious type, as somehow distinct from those who are not. Instead, I appreciate something as equally shared as it is often neglected, namely the human conscience and our sometimes-belated conscious awareness of it.