We need Jesus. The whole Jesus.
The American church is in decline. Secularism is fast gaining traction in culture. Ministry leaders and Christians who love the church are rightly concerned about this momentum. We’re scrambling to find solutions.
Longtime Christian journalist, researcher, and ministry leader Rick Lawrence believes that the driving force propelling the church into irrelevance is its propensity reduce Jesus. Deeply researched and comprehensively sourced, Editing Jesus, explores the 8 ways the Jesus of the contemporary church has been edited to fit the spirit of the age. Lawrence writes on:
The Co-Mingling of Kingdoms
The Marginalization of the Poor
The Golden-Calfing of Materialism
The Dismissing of the Supernatural
The Siren-Song of Platforming
The De-Prioritizing of Justice . . . and more
This book is for every person who loves Jesus and His church—who longs to see the real Jesus worshiped and exalted. And it’s for every person who wonders how the wheels came off Western Christianity and harbors a hunger that goes unmet in the church. When we discover and return to the unedited Jesus, it’s impossible to remain unchanged.
The church begins and ends with Jesus. The whole Jesus.
This is a book for people who are struggling to find their way out of a cave of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts-and for anyone who cares for someone who's been lost in that cave.
Suicide is now the leading cause of death among young adults 18-34, and the fourth-leading cause of death among the middle-aged.
Just as a computer's hardware determines its foundational capabilities and its software determines how it interfaces with the world, humans' hardware is tied to our biology and our software dictates how we relate to others and ourselves. Together, these parts of our identity determine our functionality, limitations, and possibilities.
We become the story we have decided to live inside. When Jesus said, 'I have come to set captives free,' He meant that He came to "de-bug" our programming. Jesus invites us to partner with Him to bring to the surface and then move past our debilitating bugs.
This book is a conversation between a minister and a psychiatrist. Informed by the clinical realities of anxiety, depression, and suicide, the authors draw from the transformational relational strategies of Jesus to chart a path into life and freedom.