Books by David Lowry

Participation

Being In Christ

The beauty of the world and our experience of human empathy and compassion collide with our experience of bitter discord between individuals, severe societal divisions, brutal oppression, war, and profound estrangement from our environment. All manner of rational analysis and proposed solutions have not solved these elemental problems, the basis of which is spiritual. This book focuses on the spiritual nature of participation. It is about participation in a humanity rooted in Holy Mystery, in God who is in all things. It is about what is essential to being human: the experience of transcendence expressed in faith, hope, and love. It is about “being in Christ.” In part, it is a meditation on the apostle Paul’s insistence that we participate in Christ in whom we find our true humanity and through whom we are transformed in our relationship to ourselves, others, and the world. Being rooted in Christ, we gain discernment and power for transformative action in the world as it is, with all its wonder, beauty, and brokenness. This book moves from the inner reality of participation in Christ to the outer reality of engagement with the world.

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Following Jesus

In an Age of Hypocrisy

We live in a time when many view the church as a relic of ancient traditions and cosmologies, often reactionary, mean-spirited, nationalist, and racist. They see those who call themselves Christians reacting in fear to the changes around them, rather than, like Jesus, boldly declaring and living out God’s compassion and justice. Some, who view themselves as nonbelievers, point out, often with great clarity, the distance between so-called Christian witness and the teaching of Jesus. This book takes us back to the first followers of Jesus and their attraction to Jesus and his teaching. It reexamines what they encountered in Jesus that led them to follow him, and it analyzes the dynamics of following. This exploration becomes a call to let Jesus lead us into God’s presence and liberating action. By doing so, we experience a stripping away of our false religiosity, misplaced commitments, and idolatries. As we join with others in a community of Jesus’s followers, gathered by Jesus to be sent out, we exercise true, society-altering witness.

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Released Outward

Liberating Congregations to Do Justice, Love Mercy and Live Faithfully

Drawing from the experience of a church on Chicago’s south side, Released Outward addresses the situation of congregations that have turned inward and become isolated from the needs of the world around them. It addresses the question of how churches, addicted to their cultural and ecclesial traditions, are set free to engage the world with God’s justice, mercy, and faithfulness. The journey outward is a spiritual one. Like all who are in bondage to false dependencies, congregations must come out of denial, realize that the mission God has given them has become unmanageable, and that they must surrender life and mission to God. This book is about congregations being liberated from false attachments and from theologies that do not support radical change. And it is about liberated people becoming witnesses to God’s liberation in its many forms. The way forward is through seeing ourselves in the mirror of Jesus’s witness, having Christ formed in us, and being empowered and guided by the Spirit. At the heart of this change is God’s governance made concrete and specific.

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