Reddit mentions: The best christian ministry books

You asked why, not for a deductive argument proving the truth of our answers.


If you have intellectual worries about God, feel free to browse the various categories of responses to questions concerning His existence.


If you have doubts about Jesus, only you can answer those for yourself. We believe that He's divine and approaches us all relationally. Read a Gospel or two (John and Mark are my favorites). Get to know the story and seriously ask yourself if this Christ person, as character, speaks to you in any way.


NT Wright is a pretty well regarded orthodox Christian scholar by both Christians and Non-Christians, so you may want to read some of his work if you have questions to address about the truth of this character. Who Was Jesus? and Simply Jesus may help you.


If you find any of that compelling and wish to dig into some Christian theology of Jesus, a couple excellent books which portray my personal take fairly well are King Jesus Gospel and Start Here.

And, of course, if you wish merely to approach the idea of Christianity in general, C.S. Lewis famously asserted many fundamentals in his classic Mere Christianity.


If you want me to assert the truth Christianity by disproving all other religions, I will not. I believe that religion is, fundamentally, a search for the divine or God. If divine truth exists, I would expect it to be echoed throughout the mythic language of all attempts to know Him (religions). Conversely, I assert the goodness and truth of Jesus Christ, who I see as central, and anything else that matters falls naturally into place.

I got you.

Gloria Fuhrman's Missional Motherhood (no, you don't need to be a mom to enjoy this topic.)

Also, Nancy Guthrie has many study materials. And she is fantastic. One of the best women to cover OT stuff.

Wendy Alsup did a study on Ephesians a while back that was excellent. I gotta be honest, I have no idea where she leans theologically these days. But this study specifically is solid.

Here's an article on how to choose studies for women's groups. I feel like most of this applies to women studying on their own.

Also, not a female author but Tim Keller has an excellent study on Galatians. Very good stuff.

Revive our Hearts/Nancy Leigh DeMoss is totally noooot my style. At all. But she co-authored a study on femininity with Mary Kassain and I bought it. It's very good.

Former Protestant pastor here. My only experience with Catholicism is my friendship with Catholics, and attending Mass with a family I stayed with for a year. So my sample data may not be representative.

In my experience, Protestantism and Catholicism both tend to emphasize sin, both as an act and as a state of being, as something which incurs punishment. They disagree, at least on the surface, about how a sinner can experience pardon and gain admission into the presence of God. But both see the passion and resurrection of Christ in terms of an atoning, substitutionary sacrifice for human sins.

Protestants, to varying degrees, tend to frame salvation in terms of pardon or forensic justification (God chooses to call you righteous, because of Christ.) Sanctification is usually treated as separate from justification/salvation, for fear of mixing "faith and works" which are seen in Luther's terms as radically different things. Catholic laymen, in my experience, likewise hope in the forgiving mercy of God, but without the "assurance of salvation" that developed in 20th-century Protestantism. Heaven and hell [and purgatory] are still seen primarily in moral terms.

TL;DR: Heaven and hell and salvation are moral issues, and salvation is a matter of receiving pardon, in order to gain heaven in place of hell.

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You'll certainly meet OrthoFolks with similar worldview. (And Catholics & Protestants with a much more holistic Gospel - cf. Scot McKnight.)

But Orthodoxy tends to frame sin, death, salvation, and deification in terms of the soul's condition of sickness, fragmentation, alienation, darkening - and healing, reconciliation, purification, illumination and union with God.

Justification [becoming righteous in our present experience] and sanctification [becoming holy in our present experience] are aspects of our personal participation in the life of Christ. That participation comes about through faith, in the form of prayer, service, self-discipline, and sacramental worship.

Orthodox pastors speak about passions as roots from which acts and compulsions of sin grow. Passions comes from the same Greek word for suffering that gives us pathetic, pathology, and refers to sicknesses of soul that God means to heal in us. Christ's Passion and resurrection meet us in our own passions, and he saves us by healing us. (Significantly, in the Gospels, "Your faith has saved you" and "Your faith has made you whole" translate the same Greek words. The Greek word for salvation encompasses wholeness of soul and body.

TL;DR: Death and hell, salvation, sanctification, and union with God are the current state of the human soul. Redemption and holiness refer to the individual's personal participation in Christ. Rather than a forensic declaration of righteousness, the Orthodox Christian trusts God to enable his repentance with divine power in synergy.

I'd also like to recommend a book, if I may. I think Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel might open up the story of Jesus for you in a way you've never seen.

I grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical church, and ended up becoming an atheist because of some of the same things you're struggling with--inconsistencies in the Bible, the lack of any compelling direction from the faith. What brought me back to Christianity was engaging with Jesus, his teachings, and his vision of the Kingdom of God transforming the world. He wants to make everything about our lives and society different, and he wants you to help! Not by forcing others to live by a code of behavior, but by learning to practice a lifestyle of such humility, grace, and peace that you puncture other people's narratives when you come into contact with them. He wants to colonize Earth with the Kingdom of Heaven, and he wants you to be his eyes and ears and hands and feet in the process.

This book and this site are probably the two things I have used the most. Basically I just go line by line and translate as I read, and if I stumble upon something which is vague but important theologically, I spend more time on it and search around on jstor or google scholar.

The first step is getting the alphabet down, practice just writing it out once a day, it's ok if you're 'cheating' at first, the point initially is ust memorization through repetition, then you can move onto reading easier.

Note: The book is not a dictionary of Greek words, you can find that online anywhere, it is instead a dictionary of terms you will need to reference while you are learning Greek in general.

To get a biblical perspective on the Gospel and the life of faith that follows I'd recommend The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight and Social Holiness: A Way of Living for God's Nation (aka Journey Towards Holiness) by Alan Kreider.

short answer: The gospel is the story of Jesus as he answers the story of the Hebrews.

long answer: you should definitely read The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight.