by Nancy Fields

This is an honest exploration of some difficulties faced by the author as she embarked on her pastoral career. While expectations from new clergy about their idealized role may be high, old experiences can cause uncertainty. Here are personal tips on how to help clergy use innate belief in God’s healing ways to gaining a strong, redeeming sense of purpose.

by Christine Stopka

The author’s church is located near in the vicinity of the Sandy Hook Elementary School, scene of last year’s school shooting in Connecticut. She intentionally left her church open every day so that anyone seeking solace, to pray, or sit in the quiet could come. Members and non-members were grateful to find a place of peaceful silence.

by Mary Foulke

Sympathy and compassion are related, however, sympathy is more a feeling whereas compassion is both feeling and action. The author uses 2 Samuel, dealing with King David, to flesh out the differences between the two emotions; Jesus was a constant example of a life devoted to compassion for humankind. This intriguing article offers many insights useful to clergy.

by Peggy Adrien

The Gospel according to John starts off powerfully by identifying Jesus as the Word/as God. Within his Gospel, John cites only two healing stories—a cripple and a blind man. Here the author links the healer, Jesus, with the Old Testament demonstrating how these healings supported John’s opening statement about Jesus.

by Agnes McBeth

The author challenges readers to disconnect from the external, mundane practices of searching for God, and regain the healing power potential of connection within God—that relationship between Christ and the penitent heart. God’s healing goes beyond the physical, resulting in freedom. In this worldview, healing is defined by our ability to liberate others.

by Priscilla Marcial

This is an unusual article for our Journal since it deals with a modern day healing of a five-month old baby who had emergency heart surgery; despite the fine reputation of the surgeon and the hospital, the mother felt that the operation had failed, and was terrified. She prayed non-stop for her daughter. A question might be―who was healed?

by Alice Ogden Bellis

While neither Hosea 12:7-9 nor Romans 1:24-25 refers directly to addiction, the problems associated with it can be teased out of Hosea’s historical context. Other parts of Hosea deal with idolatry, as do the focal verses in Romans. The powerful connections among idolatry, addiction, economics, and politics constitute a serious malady today, that could also be observed in biblical times.

by Joseph Crockett

Important for transforming non-adherents into students, followers, and apprentices of a leader, discipline is a necessary, though not the only important, task in the life of a disciple. Jesus and others make clear the crucial connections between discipline and discipleship.

by Jae Won Lee

Human beings are born out of relationships, live in relationship to others, and are remembered through those relationships. Christian discipleship urges us to return to the foundational relationship between Jesus and his disciples, to reflect upon it in our social locations, and embody it in our daily life.

by Moses O. Biney

In an era of cultural and religious diversity and transnationalism, how can faithful discipleship accommodate or at least co-exist with cultural and religious differences? This perennial question calls for new answers, and this article is a move in that direction.

by Christopher S. Peet

The author’s “hermeneutic of suspicion” is aroused when reading a text that seems to demand unquestioning obedience. However, while Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes it clear that in his opinion unquestioning obedience is at the heart of true discipleship, the author offers other suggestions.

by Jennifer M. van Zandt

There are growing numbers of “Spiritual but Not Religious” people leaving the institutional church for their own rituals and ways of relating to God. Too many people in formal churches are assisting in this slow death by focusing on Attendance, Budget, and Children instead of making Disciples.