Bøger af Bryan Fraser

In the last century we proclaimed the gospel to a boomer generation that grew up with the Judeo-Christian premises of absolute truth and fixed moral standards. Our message addressed the problem of guilt before a holy Lawgiver. But how should we craft our gospel message for the diversity-oriented generation born since the early 1980's that doesn't bring that same pre-packaged starting point? Countless books on evangelism and apologetics insist we must convert their minds to a theistic worldview before the gospel can convert their souls; that millennials must first believe in God's law, sin, and judgment before they can believe in Jesus for eternal life. This book offers an alternative approach that explains why the New Testament gospel does not demand such a two-step conversion for those "without law" (1 Corinthians 9:21). It lays out the biblical basis for going directly to the one problem the gospel solves for this lawless generation (hint: it's not guilt!). The author traces the origins of our present 'legal' gospel to its roots in the Protestant Reformation and explores how the Reformers reversed the Bible's sequence of gospel before law in a manner that far overshot the simplicity of the Apostles' gospel. He clearly lays out how we have allowed many elements of post-belief discipleship to creep into our gospel that only serve to create resistance in the 21st-century mind.

We're all supposed to invite our friends to church, right? An unchurched "pagan" for his first 23 years, pastor Bryan Fraser calls into question the wide-spread practice of "magnet" evangelism we all take for granted. He explains how unbelievers need to hear the gospel from a different angle than Christians do. He then describes what goes wrong when we bring them into our fish bowl on Sunday morning and start cleaning them before we catch them. Fraser clearly lays out the theological, cultural, anthropological, and historical reasons we need to reconsider Jesus' command to go into the world individually as the seeds, salt, and leaven of the gospel. The book discusses: - What the natural man can and can't understand about the gospel, - The only thing a person must believe about Jesus in order to believe in Jesus, - How our familiar "sinner's prayer" gospel reverses the biblical sequence of belief and discipleship, - How we have hybridized gospel and law in a manner that far overshoots the simplicity of the New Testament gospel, and - Why the gospel addresses the problem of sin after belief, not before.

Today's high-profile evangelical men's ministries focus almost entirely on how men can overcome addictive behaviors through teaching, mutual encouragement, and discipline. While this approach is helpful for the unsnared, it crushes men already captive to pornography. This book exposes the demonic energy behind three delusions common to Christian men addicted to pornography: - "My compulsions originate internally rather than externally, so I can't deny who I am," - "I deserve to act out this way because God made me with these irresistible compulsions," and - "I can temporarily indulge in pornography and then return unchanged to the point where I fell away." Using the testimony of his own deliverance from pornography addiction, a seminary-trained pastor pleads for the church to exercise its rightful authority in spiritual warfare to drive out the unclean spirits that masquerade as our own thoughts.

Pastors, churches and individual Christians are constantly searching for the right strategies for success in their ministries. Yet our production-driven culture has led us to ask the wrong question. The Bible repeatedly points us back to a deeper issue: who must I be? Contradiction, hypocrisy and neglect of our hidden lives too often choke off any fruit that God would bring forth. The flesh compels us to work to bear fruit. But just the opposite is true: it is our works that make us barren. We so easily compartmentalize and isolate inconsistencies in our hidden lives and think that we can still move forward in God's service. As a result, much of what we "do" for God is unnecessary, unproductive and unfruitful. For God brings forth His fruit not in those who do?, but in those who are?.

No, Lord takes a penetrating look at Bible characters who gave God some pretty serious pushback and gained his approval in the process. We know these stories by heart, yet we have no theology for them. We've heard them in Sunday school and listened to preachers praise these heroes' faith, audacity, and courage. But if we place them in the category of "people who knew when they had permission to challenge God's revealed will," what exactly did they know at the time? And what lessons should we take away from these stories? In dozens of everyday situations we must discern when to carry out God's command to the letter and when to defer instead to some higher guiding principle. This book explores the 'radical' idea that the same Spirit who inspired the Bible is ready and willing to hear my questions, objections, and complaints about the real-time choices I have to make today. It describes how we don't worship a God who wraps his commands around bricks and impersonally tosses them down from heaven, but who is still open for business and isn't scared off when we cry out, "No, Lord."

Addiction's First Casualty is God's Character Men who indulge compulsive addictions for any length of time not only suffer from delusion about their own identity and condition, but they turn God into an insensitive, unrealistic, brick-counting Pharaoh. Whatever their flavor of addiction has been--drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, gluttony, or something else--and whatever physical, biochemical, emotional, spiritual, or generational factors ushered them down that dark path, they all share one common factor: they concluded early on that God was a "hard man." They decided their reality was populated with unconquerable appetites, desires, lusts, temptations, and pressures that God was simply unable or unwilling to address. A critical element of recovery, therefore, is to begin thinking rightly about God's character. This reflective book helps men in recovery replace the harsh, demanding "God" of their addicted imaginations with the Father of Mercies.

Apostolic Christianity recognized the importance of communicating the gospel to two radically different cultures: those under the law and those without the law. Up until forty years ago, Western civilization was a culture under the law: a world that accepted the premise of a Lawgiver outside of creation who decrees absolute truth and an unchanging morality. But even though that society disappeared a generation ago, Christianity''s presentation of a timeless gospel has failed to adjust to today''s postmodern mindset. Winning a Generation Without the Law examines ten battles Christianity continues to regard as integral to its gospel message, but which needlessly bring the law to bear on a culture that will not tolerate it. Here is a plea for Christians to once again become wise as serpents and harmless as doves as they proclaim Christ in a 21st-century world without boundaries.Bryan Fraser is a professional forester and has previously served as a pastor, youth pastor and police chaplain. He presently ministers among the Haida First Nation in coastal British Columbia. He holds the Master of Christian Studies and Master of Divinity degrees from Regent College.

This book tells the story behind the determination of William Garforth and his family, not only to introduce that solution, but also to improve the working and social environment of the British working classes. Here he tells the significant story of William Garforth, along with the West Riding miners' own memories of working down the pits.

A history of Normanton