Problems of Christian Leadership
John Stott (InterVarsity Press)
Stott's decades of public ministry took him around the globe to exhort evangelical audiences. Problems of Christian Leadership brings together four short speeches Stott gave to a conference of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Ecuador. These addresses—delivered in 1985 but never before published in English—offer practical advice to Christian leaders about persevering through discouragement, sustaining spiritual self-discipline, building strong relationships, and handling the burdens of leadership while still comparatively young.
The Question That Never Goes Away
Philip Yancey (Zondervan)
Yancey, a CT editor at large, has been reflecting on human suffering ever since his classic Where Is God When It Hurts? In The Question That Never Goes Away, published earlier this year as an eBook, he returns to the subject, writing in the shadow of 12 months that brought such horrific events as the Newtown shootings, the Boston Marathon bombings, and the explosion of a fertilizer plant in small-town Texas. Yancey moves seamlessly from newspaper headlines to private letters, from major tragedies to mundane hurts, to offer a spiritual framework for the "pain [that] plays as a kind of background static to many lives."
Essential Eschatology: Our Present and Future Hope
John E. Phelan Jr. (IVP Academic)
Eschatology (the study of the "last things") often divides Protestant believers into two camps: They either dismiss it as arcane and irrelevant to the practical aspects of faith, or they pore over prophecies in a quest for chronological certainty. Here, Phelan, who teaches at Chicago's North Park Theological Seminary, hopes to restore the centrality of the "last things" to Christian faith and practice. He insists that "neither indifference nor obsession do justice to the importance of eschatology. . . . Far from being at the periphery of the faith, it is no exaggeration to say that eschatology is the heart of Christianity."
