Our first guest today is Bobby Harrington who is the founder and lead pastor of Harpeth Community Church in Franklin, Tennesse. He is also founder of discipleship.org. He will tell us more about his book, Dedicated: Training your children to trust and follow Jesus.
Joining Kerby next is Vice President and Middle East Director of E3parters, Tom Doyle. He tells us more about his book, Killing Christians: Living the Faith Where It’s Not Safe to Believe. Through this book, Doyle pulls back the curtain on the headlines from the Middle East.
Finally, British author Colin Duriez, tells us about his book, Bedeviled: Lewis, Tokien and the Shadow of Evil. In this book, Duriez considers the events and suffering in our world today from the perspective of great writers like Tolkien and Lewis.
Vice President, Middle East Director - E3partners
As the Vice President and Middle East Director for e3 Partners since 2001, Tom's experience in the heart of these Islamic nations is extensive. A gifted storyteller, Tom brings God's astounding work in these nations to light. Whether in his books, on television (FOX News, The 700 Club), on the radio (Focus on the Family, Janet Parshall Live), at conferences (Epicenter, Passion), or in local churches, Tom shares fresh, compelling, and thought-provoking reports of God's activity. Tom graduated from Biola College in 1979 and Dallas Theological Seminary in 1983. He is an officially licensed guide for the State of Israel and has led over 60 tours to the land of the Bible. After pastoring churches in Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico for 20 years, he became the Middle East director for e3 Partners/I Am Second. His wife of 34 years, JoAnn, serves with him at e3 as the director of Not Forgotten, a ministry to women of the Middle East. They have six children and three grandchildren. Tom has written 7 books including the best selling: Dreams and Visions-Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World?
Killing Christians: Living the Faith Where It's Not Safe to Believe
To many Christians in the Middle East today, a “momentary, light affliction” means enduring only torture instead of martyrdom. The depth of oppression Jesus followers suffer is unimaginable to most Western Christians. Yet, it is an everyday reality for those who choose faith over survival in Syria, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, and other countries hostile to the Gospel of Christ. In Killing Christians, Tom Doyle takes readers to the secret meetings, the torture rooms, the grim prisons, and even the executions that are the “calling” of countless Muslims-turned-Christians.
Each survivor longs to share with brothers and sisters “on the outside” what Christ has taught them. Killing Christians is their message to readers who still enjoy freedom to practice their faith. None would wish their pain and suffering on those who do not have to brave such misery, but the richness gained through their remarkable trials are delivered—often in their own words—through this book. The stories are breathtaking, the lessons soul-stirring and renewing. Killing Christians presents the dead serious work of expanding and maintaining the Faith.
Author
Colin Duriez lives in the Lake District National Park in north-west England and writes books and poetry, edits and lectures. He has appeared as a commentator on the extended version boxed set of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, Walden/Disney’s special edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, BBC television’s The Worlds of Fantasy, PBS’s The Question of God (about C.S. Lewis and Freud), the bonus DVD for an audio dramatisation of The Screwtape Letters (which has the great Andy Serkis as Screwtape), and the Sony DVD Ringers about Tolkien fandom and the impact of Tolkien on popular culture. Colin has also contributed to an upcoming one-hour public television documentary to be called, A Quest For Meaning – Myth, Imagination & Faith in the Literature of J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis. He has spoken at a variety of conferences and events on Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and the Inklings in the USA, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, Finland, Britain, the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland.
Bedeviled: Lewis, Tolkien and the Shadow of Evil
The battle between good and evil—in both the seen and unseen worlds—was as clearly at play in the era of C.S. Lewis and his friends in the Oxford literary group, the Inklings, as in our own era. Some of the members of the Inklings carried physical and psychological scars from World War I which led them to deeply consider the problem of evil during the dark era of World War II. Were they alive today, their view of a spiritual conflict behind physical battles would undoubtedly be reinforced. Among the Inklings, Lewis was at the forefront of writing on human pain, suffering, devilry, miracles and the supernatural, with books like The Screwtape Letters and more. It is no surprise, then, that he provides the main focus of this book by expert Inklings writer Colin Duriez. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy offers another rich resource with much to say to the World War II era and beyond. Other Inklings writings and conversations come into play as well as Duriez explores the writers' considerations of evil and spiritual warfare, particularly focused in the context of wartime. Delving into the interplay between good and evil, these pages enlighten us to the way of goodness and the promise of a far country as we explore the way out of the shadow of evil.