Refresh, renew, rekindle passion for ministry by helping others revisit their stories.

Reinvigorate your ministry as you help others. Author Dr. Karen Scheib says that to experience a new sense of freedom in caring for others, we must first help them attend to their story and connect their story with others and God. But to do so effectively, we must be willing to revision our own story, so that we can exemplify Christian happiness and offer others a path toward fulfillment.

Schism and heresy are not doctrinal divisions but failures to love.

Common worship? Yes, because a broken church cannot repair a broken world. Common worship is evidence of our engagement with Christ’s prayer “that we may be one.” Anderson says, “To say that Christian liturgy is a place and set of practices through which we come to inhabit the habit of Christ means that how and what we worship says something about the character of the church’s life in the world.”

The year 2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the historic decision in 1956 to accord full clergy rights to women clergy in The Methodist Church. Courageous Past-Bold Future chronicles this historic journey of passion, struggle, courage, and hope. In a moving early chapter, Thompson recounts the stories of the 27 women from 19 annual conferences who were received on probation at the 1956 General Conference, as well as three women elders from The Methodist Protestant Church still serving that year.