In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.

Theologian Steven Félix-Jäger offers a theology of renewal worship, including its biblical foundations, how its global nature is expressed in particular localities, and how charismatic worship shapes the community of faith. With this guidance, the whole church might better understand what it means to pray, "Come, Holy Spirit!"

This text concentrates on eight forms of renewal, through: missions, initiation, spirituality, places and communities, mass gatherings, worship, service and healing. Each chapter begins with an introduction, followed by case studies of renewal and ending with a prayer that is related to the theme.

This NAO report examines the Government programme of Housing Market Renewal, established to tackle problems of acute low housing demand in the North of England and the Midlands. Neighbourhood decline and deprivation has resulted where there are high concentrations of properties that are difficult to let or sell, where there is a loss of population and an inability to attract new households. Nine new sub-regional partnerships or "pathfinders" were set up, with considerable freedom in determining their approach to low housing demand. The NAO has set out a number of recommendations, including: the Department of Communities and Local Government should clarify arrangements for the delivery of the Housing Market Renewal programme alongside local authority housing market assessments; the Department should also clarify the role of Government Offices in helping to support regional delivery as well as the terms of reference for both Government Offices and the Department in matters of leadership, oversight and monitoring of the programme; the Department should be clearer about its expectations for the renewal programme's contribution to delivering non-housing regeneration, such as better schools, transport and neighbourhood management; that any Housing Market Renewal demolition schemes are based on up-to-date market analysis; the Department should also clarify how it is expected to achieve alignment with regional strategies for higher housing growth; the Department should also develop the performance framework, including value for money indicators and that there should be a comparison of outcomes between low demand areas subject to Housing Market Renewal and those low demand areas that are not.

Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal comes about at an incredibly important point in history, and it offers a genuinely new paradigm. This book attempts what few others have tried—to bring together knowledge and literature around school reform and community renewal through authentic ethnographic stories of real schools and communities.