Seven Stories that Shape Your Life , livre ebook

Lion Hudson - (Author) Kelly Gerard

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151 pages

English

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The most basic questions everyone faces in life is Why am I here? What is my purpose? Gerard Kelly presents the stories that make up the overall story of God in the world. And here we find our purpose for each of our individual Christian lives. Our purpose is as distinctive as our fingerprint and we will connect with it when we connect with our identity and origin in God. God remembers how he made us and is committed to the fruitfulness and fulfilment of our potential. We discover the importance of finding our place of service and usefulness, knowing that our lives have meaning in the purposes of God.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

Christianity

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Publié par	Lion Hudson
Date de parution	15 février 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780857216359
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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“I have been waiting for this book! Gerard has addressed questions many Christians like myself have been asking. If I have been recruited into the church solely so that I can recruit others, I may miss the primary calling on my life; I am here on planet earth to find my purpose! He tells stories about people of faith who are doing precisely that in very different ways. ‘They are all about bringing people into a place of welcome and hospitality and, more, to believing, in faith, that the welcome of God will also be tasted’. I am inspired to do the same.”
Debra Green OBE, Founder and Director, Redeeming Our Communities (ROC)

“At last a book that gives us the full sweep of God’s missional heart and our part in his grand plan of renewal. This book is accessible, inspiring and biblically rooted in the key texts that make up the seven facets of missional theology. Kelly draws on his own adventurous missional journey, blending into the book his love of art, poetry and storytelling, alongside some serious missional theology. This is not, however, simply a creative academic book: I found it personally challenging, spiritually deepening and missionally motivating.”
Rev Roger Sutton, Director of GATHER and co-chair of the Trafford Borough Partnership, Greater Manchester

“Gerard is such a unique writer – with the soul of a poet, the mind of an academic and the style of a novelist, he makes reading both pleasant and purposeful. You will love this book. Wisdom and insight leak brilliantly from every page.”
Cathy Madavan, Speaker, writer, member of Spring Harvest planning group and author of Digging for Diamonds

“Is Gerard Kelly telling stories, or is he teaching theology? His genius is that he wouldn’t answer a question like that. Just like Jesus. In these stories you will find yourself and your purpose, because you will find the beautiful, brazen mission of God artistically illuminated.”
Andy Flanagan, Singer-Songwriter and Director of Christians on the Left

“Gerard Kelly is a master storyteller and this book tells the Master’s story but it also tells your story and mine. The Seven Stories that Shape Your Life is a missional curriculum – a tool to help followers of Jesus to see how their lives are connected to the story and mission of God. Yet this is no dry text book. It’s more like the menu for a great banquet. Kelly invites us to sit at his table so we can hear from theologians, contemporary commentators, poets and musicians, Biblical heroes and ordinary Christians, and then turns to us so we can tell our story too. For the ‘greatest story ever told’ must be told afresh in each generation through the storied lives of all who believe it.”
Jim Memory, European Christian Mission (ECM) and Redcliffe College (UK)

“What always appeals to me about Gerard’s writing and speaking is that his word pictures and perspectives help me to see familiar things in new light, to make fresh application of age-old truths in our contemporary settings, and to take a fresh, candid look at myself. This book is no exception. This book is the author’s invitation to us ‘to imagine an engagement with the mission of our maker that more fully embraces his story’. So what are we waiting for?”
Jeff Fountain, Director, Schuman Centre for European Studies

“I always felt that my personal mission was doing God’s will in the places I was called – in my case into frontline politics as an MP. This is why the book resonated and made sense of a life I thought I had tried to lead – our mission is Gods will. To know your life is significant in the eyes of God and to use your calling to achieve this is a powerful message for all of us who feel we may have failed if we are not called to traditional mission. If you want to understand your role in God’s mission to create heaven on earth there is no better place to start than this book by Gerard Kelly.”
Andy Reed, OBE, Director, SageImpact Ltd, MP for Loughborough 1997 to 2010

Text copyright © 2016 Gerard Kelly
This edition copyright © 2016 Lion Hudson
The right of Gerard Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Monarch Books an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England Email: monarch@lionhudson.com www.lionhudson.com/monarch
ISBN 978 0 85721 634 2 e-ISBN 978 0 85721 635 9
First edition 2016
Acknowledgments
Scripture quotations marked “NLT” are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked “NIV” are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised. Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica, formerly International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. “NIV” is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790 Scripture quotations marked “KJV” are taken from the Authorized (King James) Version: rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press. Scripture quotations marked “The Street Bible” are taken from “The Word on the Street”. Copyright © 2003, 2004 by Rob Lacey, formerly titled “The Street Bible”. This title is also available as a Zondervan ebook product. Visit www.zondervan.com/ebooks for more information. Scripture quotations marked “NKJV” are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpts pp. 83 and 269–70 taken from The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-up, and Burnt Out by Brennan Manning, copyright © 1990 by Brennan Manning. Used by permission of WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright

Foreword
Introduction
Chapter
1 Creation: Walk with the Worldmaker
2 Vocation: Depend on the Dreamgiver
3 Liberation: Be Changed by the Chainbreaker
4 Formation: Hold on to the Heartseeker
5 Limitation: Find Strength in the Faithbuilder
6 Incarnation: Follow the Footwasher
7 Restoration: Be Filled by the Firestarter
Endword
Endnotes
Foreword
It is a great gift, sometimes, for the familiar to be made strange.
Good art does this: an arresting line in a poem makes us think again about the familiar, realize it is different from what we had always assumed. A well-taken photo can make us see something, even in our own children, that we had never consciously noticed before. A great painting invites us to see reality differently, often precisely by exaggerating and distorting what was seen.
The art of public speaking is all in making the familiar strange. To re-awaken hope in those who have dismissed all politics as corrupt and irrelevant. To convince jaded consumers that this product is different. To challenge a church congregation to actually live truths they have always believed.
In my own world of the university, most good teaching starts the same way. What if something we’ve always thought was obvious isn’t? What if the evidence in that area is flawed? Students arrive at university confident in what they think; we try hard to confuse them, to make the familiar strange, before encouraging them to reconstruct a set of convictions more carefully.
It is a great gift, sometimes, for the familiar to be made strange.
In this book, Gerard Kelly makes the familiar strange. He takes the Christian story we all know so well, and looks at it from an oblique angle, showing us sides of the story we had never seen before. Many of us have heard the gospel told in four stories: creation, fall, redemption, and final consummation. Gerard does not say that this is wrong, but he does say that there are other ways of looking, ways that will help us to see more of the glory of God’s story.
There is a story that he does say is wrong: the gospel as a pyramid selling scheme, people being converted in order to convert others. The problem here is not, as he makes clear, with a missional account of God’s purpose. Rather, this is an unbearably thin account of what Christian mission is all about. Right at the beginning of the life of the church, Irenaeus, saint, pastor and, probably, martyr, wrote that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”. We are called not just to decision, but to life in all its fulness. This is the gift of God in Christ, made real by the Spirit.
Gerard offers us seven stories to understand our missional calling. Created and called by God, we are set free and remade, but also circumscribed, because God has come in Jesus to save us, and to send us to be a part of his purposes in restoring all things. The mission is God’s; it is our purpose and our privilege to be called to be a part of it. The goal is the renewal of creation, not an escape from a failing world.
The vision of this book is delightfully—and rightly—positive. God is at work, and God’s purposes will not be frustrated. The vision of this book is also profoundly realistic. We bring with us the baggage of wounds and failures which distort us, and God renews our lives so that we may be a part of the renewal of the life of the world. So stated, this sounds like a story we are all familiar with, but Gerard’s genius is to retell it in ways that are profoundly new.
It is a great gift, sometimes, for the familiar to be made s