The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

What happened on this date in church history? From ancient Rome to the twenty-first century, from peasants to presidents, from missionaries to martyrs, this book shows how God does extraordinary things through ordinary people every day of the year. Each story appears on the day and month that it occurred and includes questions for reflection and a related Scripture verse.

The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

A church free from state control and a state free from church control--Such is one of the radical insights of a baptist vision of church and society. -- What exactly is a baptist vision of the church? -- What are the biblical, historical and theological roots of this approach to Christian community? -- What is the place of such a vision in the context of a global church that includes alternative notions of the body of Christ? Free Church, Free State is a textbook on baptist ways of being church and a proposal for the future of baptist churches in an ecumenical context. Nigel Wright argues that both baptist (small 'b') and catholic (small 'c') church traditions should seek to enrich and support each other as valid expressions of the body of Christ without sacrificing what they hold dear. Written for pastors, church planters, evangelists and preachers, Nigel Wright offers frameworks of thought for baptists and non-baptists in their journey together following Christ.

Did the Labour Party, in Morgan Phillips' famous phrase, owe 'more to Methodism than Marx'? Were the founding fathers of the party nurtured in the chapels of Nonconformity and shaped by their emphases on liberty, conscience and the value of every human being in the eyes of God? How did the Free Churches, traditionally allied to the Liberal Party, react to the growing importance of the Labour Party between the wars? This book addresses these questions at a range of levels: including organisation; rhetoric; policies and ideals; and electoral politics. It is shown that the distinctive religious setting in which Labour emerged indeed helps to explain the differences between it and more Marxist counterparts on the Continent, and that this setting continued to influence Labour approaches towards welfare, nationalisation and industrial relations between the wars. In the process Labour also adopted some of the righteousness of tone of the Free Churches. This setting was, however, changing. Dropping their traditional suspicion of the State, Nonconformists instead increasingly invested it with religious values, helping to turn it through its growing welfare functions into the provider of practical Christianity. This nationalisation of religion continues to shape British attitudes to the welfare state as well as imposing narrowly utilitarian and material tests of relevance upon the churches and other social institutions. The elevation of the State was not, however, intended as an end in itself. What mattered were the social and individual outcomes. Socialism, for those Free Churchmen and women who helped to shape Labour in the early twentieth century, was about improving society as much as systems.

The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

"In addition to considering such key issues as poverty, wealth and power, theocracy and pluralism, civil religion, the culture wars and political cooperation between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Bolt also draws extended comparisons between Kuyper's views and the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord John Acton, Pope Leo XIII, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Jonathan Edwards. A distinctive feature of this study is its focus on the rhetorical, poetic character of Kuyper's public theology and practice as a political leader. Bolt shows how focusing on Kuyper's rhetorical and mythopoetic perspective, rather than on his theological and philosophical ideas, provides contemporary evangelicals with a more credible and effective theology for the public square."--Jacket.