Pastors, churches and individual Christians are constantly searching for the right strategies for success in their ministries. Yet our production-driven culture has led us to ask the wrong question. The Bible repeatedly points us back to a deeper issue: who must I "be?" Contradiction, hypocrisy and neglect of our hidden lives too often choke off any fruit that God would bring forth. The flesh compels us to work to bear fruit. But just the opposite is true: it is our works that make us barren. We so easily compartmentalize and isolate inconsistencies in our hidden lives and think that we can...

We're all supposed to invite our friends to church, right? An unchurched "pagan" for his first 23 years, pastor Bryan Fraser calls into question the wide-spread practice of "magnet" evangelism we all take for granted. He explains how unbelievers need to hear the gospel from a different angle than Christians do. He then describes what goes wrong when we bring them into our fish bowl on Sunday morning and start cleaning them before we catch them. Fraser clearly lays out the theological, cultural, anthropological, and historical reasons we need to reconsider Jesus' command to go into the world...

"No, Lord" takes a penetrating look at Bible characters who gave God some pretty serious pushback and gained his approval in the process. We know these stories by heart, yet we have no theology for them. We've heard them in Sunday school and listened to preachers praise these heroes' faith, audacity, and courage. But if we place them in the category of "people who knew when they had permission to challenge God's revealed will," what exactly did they know at the time? And what lessons should we take away from these stories? In dozens of everyday situations we must discern when to carry out...

Today's high-profile evangelical men's ministries focus almost entirely on how men can overcome addictive behaviors through teaching, mutual encouragement, and discipline. While this approach is helpful for the unsnared, it crushes men already captive to pornography. This book exposes the demonic energy behind three delusions common to Christian men addicted to pornography: - "My compulsions originate internally rather than externally, so I can't deny who I am," - "I deserve to act out this way because God made me with these irresistible compulsions," and - "I can temporarily indulge in...