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When you hear the word “father,” do you think of someone who is loving…or angry? Someone who is pleased with you…or constantly disappointed? Someone who is always available…or someone who is too busy, preoccupied, or distant? When you think of “Father God,” what images come to mind?

Regardless of the type of father you grew up with—or without—it is likely that your view of God is influenced by the relationship you had with your father. Author John Bishop wants to help you discover that God is not just like your dad. Instead, God is the Father revealed in Scripture, where the truth is clear. God is a father who is:

Filled with biblical insight and practical tools for reflection, healing, and restoration, God Distorted will enable you to break free from the lies of the enemy and see your heavenly Father as He truly is.

Dangerous churches should be norm. Church leaders and church people alike shrink back from danger because we want safety. Jesus said that he's overcome the world and its troubles. Dangerous churches put everything on the line for the one thing that matters most: reaching lost people.It's dangerous not to be a dangerous church. The book is less about methods or even the message of God, but about a church that risks everything it has to reach lost people. Living Hope was birthed 8 years ago and has grown from five families to 5000 attendees, grown from one to 19 services on many campuses, and baptized 5,000 people along the way. A dangerous church sees what "only God" can do when it acts upon what the church is supposed to be. It risks everything to reach people.God wants us to live on the edge of our margin when it comes to mission and methods. So much of Living Hope's journey has been going back to the Book of Acts and trying to live authentically with the givens of who they were, where they were and what they had to work with. They learned to abandon agendas and short-sighted human plans, especially ones that copy what other churches are doing. That's when they found God's blessing. "We went from being a good church to being God-honoring church," he reports.Drawing insight from the book of Acts, this book unfolds the very personal journey of a pastor, and then his entire church, when they finally began to live a dangerous faith. The transition had a dramatic impact on the pastor's life and marriage, as well as on the congregation and its outreach. It opened a new sense of mission and incredible spiritual fruitfulness. The pastor is not only a radically different person today, but the entire church has become an atmosphere that values taking dangerous steps of faith. It will lead Christ's followers to become risk-takers who change the world through a revolution that begins with a dangerous grace. The book is story-rich with examples of the grace-filled culture from Living Hope Church through the experiences of its pastor, John Bishop. It will avoid a smug attitude that implies "we've arrived," "we're the first to live out grace" or "we're the best at giving grace." Instead, the book will convey a humble attitude of "we've got a lot to learn," including examples of mistakes the church has made along the way. The rapid transition of Living Hope will not be projected as a speed for other churches to follow (lest the book invite a crash-and-burn outcome at other churches). Thus the book will find its primary story in and from Living Hope.In 2007 Outreach Magazine ranked Living Hope as the seventh fastest growing schurh in the US. They have also been listed among the 50 most influential churches in America.

If you’re a man of a certain age you’ll know there comes a point in life when getting a sports car and over-analysing your contribution to society sounds like a really good idea.

With a good job in sales and marketing and a nice house in Manchester that he shared with his wife and kids, John Bishop was no different when he turned the dreaded 4-0. But instead of spanking a load of cash on a car that would have made him look like a senior stylist at Vidal Sassoon, he stumbled onto a pathway that ultimately lead him to become one of the nation’s best loved comedians. It was a gamble, but boy, did it pay off.

How Did All This Happen? is the story of how a boy who, growing up on a council estate dreaming of ousting Kenny Dalglish from Liverpool FC’s starting line-up, suddenly found himself on stage in front of thousands of people nationwide, at an age when he should have known better.

In his own inimitable style, John guides us through his life from leaving the estate and travelling the globe on a shoe string, to marriage, kids and the split that led him to being on a stage complaining to strangers one night – the night that changed his life and started his journey to stardom.

Wonderfully entertaining and packed with colourful reminiscences and comical anecdotes, this is a heart-warming, life-affirming and ultimately very, very funny memoir from one of the nation’s greatest comedians.

James Joyce’s preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical—is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce’s writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce’s formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts—or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.

What did the world’s most populous country contribute to World War One? Not much, apart from the 140,000 labourers who signed up to work on the Western Front and found themselves under a casually-racist military jurisdiction. The Chinese Attack dramatises their situation through the eyes of 2nd Lieutenant Jack Reynolds, sent to find evidence of unfolding mutiny among them after he himself has been charged with inciting protest at the War’s direction – this a consequence of the loss of his men in a futile decoy attack at the Battle of Passchendaele. Jack’s growing realisation that he is being used to further injustice leads him to rebel and fight to stop his Chinese charges’ being sacrificed to mindless prejudice. Against a backdrop of the chaos unleashed by the Allied collapse in the Spring of 1918, Jack’s mission to save his servant Tien becomes a pell-mell dash for freedom to escape from the firing squad. In the course of which he struggles to regain his own will to live. While the central plot is fiction, the routine experiences of the Chinese are based on fact and bring to life a neglected aspect of the War, which both contributed to post-war Chinese political and economic developments and fed the anti-imperialist propaganda of more recent Chinese governments.

"My dear lady, why don't you go home and sit still?" So, in August 1914, the War Office dismissed Lady Hester Dunranald's offer to ‘do her bit.’ And if it hadn’t been for 14 year-old Harry Butler’s love of cars – and his desperation to ‘see action’ that made him lie about his age – at home she would have stayed. Instead, Harry drives Lady Hester’s private ambulance across the channel to Belgium, where he, Lady Hester and her two female companions rescue wounded as the beleaguered Belgian army strains to hold the German invaders. Once the British Army has again rejected Lady Hester's offer of help! When the Belgians open the sea dykes in a final desperate attempt to block the German advance, the ambulance crew is caught up in the ensuing chaos. Blundering behind the German lines, they evade death at the hands of marauding Uhlans, only to be mistaken for the inmates of a German Army brothel. Capture condemns them to be shot as spies in Ypres, where the Kaiser intends to celebrate the imminent final conquest of Belgium. John Bishops’s third novel shows the drift into a war no one wanted. Its initial, shocking reality is seen through the eyes of Harry, a 14-year-old boy who, caught up in the hysteria of the time, bluffs his way into seeing action – and sees far more than he bargained for. When even just surviving becomes a form of purgatory, Harry only has the desire to forget... Refuse to Forget is a novel that takes its characters into a cataclysmic war that will change their worlds forever.