Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837 1911) was the elder statesman of the student missionary movement and the leading evangelical advocate of foreign missions in the late 1800s. Occupy until I Come, the first biography of Pierson in more than a century, explores the life, thought, and legacy of this major figure in American religious history. Working from the best available sources, Dana Robert illumines the relationship between A. T. Pierson's role in the surging foreign missions movement and the development of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Pierson was famous in his day as a Bible teacher, a leader in Keswick holiness piety, and an urban pastor who cared passionately for the poor. An original editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, Pierson also carried on a transatlantic preaching ministry that made him famous in Scotland and England. In covering both Pierson's career and his context, this book is not only the finest available biography of A. T. Pierson but also a valuable portrait of America's religious landscape at a key point in history.

Welcome to the spiritual neighborhood of Fred Rogers “I like you as you are Exactly and precisely I think you turned out nicely And I like you as you are.” Fred Rogers fiercely believed that all people deserve love. This conviction wasn’t simply sentimental: it came directly from his Christian faith. God, he insisted, loves us just the way we are. In Exactly as You Are, Shea Tuttle looks at Fred Rogers’s life, the people and places that made him who he was, and his work through Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She pays particular attention to his faith—because Fred Rogers was a deeply spiritual person, ordained by his church with a one-of-a-kind charge: to minister to children and families through television. Tuttle explores this kind, influential, sometimes surprising man: the neighborhood he came from, the neighborhood he built, and the kind of neighbor he, by his example, calls all of us to be. Throughout, Tuttle shows how he was guided by his core belief: that God loves children, and everyone else, exactly as they are.

In 1857, Charles Spurgeon—the most popular preacher in the Victorian world—promised his readers that he would publish his earliest sermons. For almost 160 years, these sermons were lost to history. Beginning with this inaugural volume, these rediscovered sermons can finally be read, studied, and enjoyed by the millions around the world who admire Spurgeon’s spiritual insights and literary grace. This multi-volume set includes full-color facsimiles of Spurgeon’s original handwriting, transcriptions of his outlines and sermons, biographical introductions, and editorial commentary that further illuminate Spurgeon’s work. Taken together, The Lost Sermons of C. H. Spurgeon will add approximately 10 percent more material to Spurgeon’s total body of literature, making it a must-have for pastors and scholars as well as the multitude of Spurgeon enthusiasts around the world. Volume 1 contains an introduction to the series, an overview of Spurgeon’s life and times, seventy-eight sermons he preached itinerantly and as pastor of Waterbeach Chapel, and an analysis of these sermons by editor and Spurgeon scholar Christian T. George.

"The history books may write it Reverend King was born in Atlanta, and then came to Montgomery, but we feel that he was born in Montgomery in the struggle here, and now he is moving to Atlanta for bigger responsibilities."—Member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 1959 Preacher—this simple term describes the twenty-five-year-old Ph.D. in theology who arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to become the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954. His name was Martin Luther King Jr., but where did this young minister come from? What did he believe, and what role would he play in the growing activism of the civil rights movement of the 1950s? In Becoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader, author Troy Jackson chronicles King's emergence and effectiveness as a civil rights leader by examining his relationship with the people of Montgomery, Alabama. Using the sharp lens of Montgomery's struggle for racial equality to investigate King's burgeoning leadership, Jackson explores King's ability to connect with the educated and the unlettered, professionals and the working class. In particular, Jackson highlights King's alliances with Jo Ann Robinson, a young English professor at Alabama State University; E. D. Nixon, a middle-aged Pullman porter and head of the local NAACP chapter; and Virginia Durr, a courageous white woman who bailed Rosa Parks out of jail after Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person. Jackson offers nuanced portrayals of King's relationships with these and other civil rights leaders in the community to illustrate King's development within the community. Drawing on countless interviews and archival sources, Jackson compares King's sermons and religious writings before, during, and after the Montgomery bus boycott. Jackson demonstrates how King's voice and message evolved during his time in Montgomery, reflecting the shared struggles, challenges, experiences, and hopes of the people with whom he worked. Many studies of the civil rights movement end analyses of Montgomery's struggle with the conclusion of the bus boycott and the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Jackson surveys King's uneasy post-boycott relations with E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks, shedding new light on Parks's plight in Montgomery after the boycott and revealing the internal discord that threatened the movement's hard-won momentum. The controversies within the Montgomery Improvement Association compelled King to position himself as a national figure who could rise above the quarrels within the movement and focus on attaining its greater goals. Though the Montgomery struggle thrust King into the national spotlight, the local impact on the lives of blacks from all socioeconomic classes was minimal at the time. As the citizens of Montgomery awaited permanent change, King left the city, taking the lessons he learned there onto the national stage. In the crucible of Montgomery, Martin Luther King Jr. was transformed from an inexperienced Baptist preacher into a civil rights leader of profound national importance.