Brian Kirk – författare

Missional Youth Ministry offers a new paradigm for youth ministry. Using blog entries and responses, authors Brian Kirk and Jacob Thorne invite readers into a conversational, engaging, and compelling discussion about why program-based, entertainment-focused ministries fail to develop young people into life-long participants in the mission of the church. They also propose a new way forward. For all those working "in the trenches" of youth ministry who long to offer teens a deeper, more substantial, more active role as members of the body of Christ, Missional Youth Ministry is a practical and theologically-sound guide for building a ministry grounded in prayer, worship, community, education, mission, and spirituality.

The mainline church in the past few decades has witnessed a ghettoization of youth within the church, segregating them off to a particular room, perhaps in the basement, where they engage in ministry in isolation from the rest of the congregation. They are assigned a “youth minister” or “youth director,” often the staff person with the least experience, freeing up the “real” ministers to serve the adults in the church. They seldom serve on church boards or governing bodies in anything other than a cursory manner. Their leadership in worship is limited to one special Sunday a year; their activities seen more as programming than ministry, and their place often described as “the church of the future” rather than the body of Christ in the here-and-now. For decades, youth ministry in mainline churches has been program-driven, assuming that the primary function of youth ministry was to use activities and events to attract young people to church and keep them occupied until they were ready to be adult members in the faith. In recent years, it has become increasingly obvious that this paradigm has failed to develop youth as life-long participants in the Christian church and in the Christian faith. The result of such a model of ministry is that youth come to see church only as those segregated activities reserved for teenagers, most of which bear little resemblance to the practices of the rest of church life. Consequently, when youth graduate from high school and youth group, they perceive that their most meaningful church experiences are ended. Mainline congregations are now seeing the evidence of the real lack of impact of their youth ministries as the population of young adults in churches continues to shrink – even those young adults who were once regular participants in church youth group programs. In short, the program-driven model of youth ministry has failed to help youth find their place within the mission of the Church. Rethinking Youth Ministry critiques this older paradigm and invites the reader into a dialogue to help rethink many of the deepest assumptions of youth ministry in the mainline church. We challenge the consumerist goal of judging a youth ministry’s success by the number of its participants. We push back against the notion that a youth ministry is the sum total of the events on the calendar. We rethink the place of volunteers and parents, calling for a greater role of adults as spiritual mentors in the lives of church youth. We send out a call for greater understanding of modern methods of teaching and the impact of brain research on the intellectual and spiritual development of youth and we re-imagine a new role for mission within youth ministry which calls youth to see mission not as isolated activities but as the very heart of their faith journey. Rethinking Youth Ministry serves as a theological companion and practical guide for all those “working in the trenches” of youth ministry who are seeking to offer students a deeper, more consequential, and active life-long relationship with God through the ministry of Jesus Christ.

"Kirk’s suspenseful and terror-driven novel employs supernatural elements to capitalize on the dread and horror of reality... [his] handling of visceral horror and human drama make for an immersive tale." - Publisher's WeeklyYou don’t read the book. It reads you.Rumors of a deadly book have been floating around the dark corners of the deep web. A disturbing tale about a mysterious figure who preys on those who read the book and subjects them to a world of personalized terror.Jesse Wheeler—former guitarist of the heavy metal group The Rising Dead—was quick to discount the ominous folklore associated with the book. It takes more than some urban legend to frighten him. Hell, reality is scary enough. Seven years ago his greatest responsibility was the nightly guitar solo. Then one night when Jesse was blackout drunk, he accidentally injured his son, leaving him permanently disabled. Dreams of being a rock star died when he destroyed his son's future. Now he cuts radio jingles and fights to stay clean.But Jesse is wrong. The legend is real—and tonight he will become the protagonist in an elaborate scheme specifically tailored to prey on his fears and resurrect the ghosts from his past.Jesse is not the only one in danger, however. By reading the book, you have volunteered to participate in the author’s deadly game, with every page drawing you closer to your own personalized nightmare. The real horror doesn’t begin until you reach the end.That’s when the evil comes for you.FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launching in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

Nominated for a Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel."A stark and frightening novel. Horror fans should definitely seek this one out." – BooklistSome doctors are sicker than their patients. When a troubled psychiatrist loses funding to perform clinical trials on an experimental cure for schizophrenia, he begins testing it on his asylum s criminally insane, triggering a series of side effects that opens the mind of his hospital s most dangerous patient, setting his inner demons free. FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

Nominated for a Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel."A stark and frightening novel. Horror fans should definitely seek this one out." – BooklistSome doctors are sicker than their patients. When a troubled psychiatrist loses funding to perform clinical trials on an experimental cure for schizophrenia, he begins testing it on his asylum s criminally insane, triggering a series of side effects that opens the mind of his hospital s most dangerous patient, setting his inner demons free. FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

On a practical level it illustrates how active system approach might help our systems become self-evolving.This updated new edition of Active System Control contains new chapters on the system software concept and the future of active systems control and a chapter containing case studies of unsolved aviation safety incidents.

Now in its second edition, this book introduces an approach to active system control. This approach, when applied through design and development improves our technological systems. It extends concepts of system control using data accumulation, state and structural dependencies. The authors define these properties in terms of reliability, performance and energy-efficiency, and self-adaption. They describe how they bridge the gap between data accumulation and analysis in terms of interpolation with the real physical models when data used for interpretation of the system conditions. The authors introduce a principle of active system control and safety - an approach that explains what a model of a system should have, making computer systems more efficient, a crucial new concern in application domains such as safety critical, embedded and low-power autonomous systems like transport, healthcare, and other dynamic systems with moving substances and elements. On a theoretical level, this book further extends the concept of fault tolerance, introducing a system level of design for improving overall efficiency. On a practical level it illustrates how active system approach might help our systems become self-evolving.This updated new edition of Active System Control  contains new chapters on the system software concept and the future of active systems control and a chapter containing case studies of unsolved aviation safety incidents.

A detailed introduction to programming in Oberon-2, the object-oriented succesor of Pascal, this text proivdes a hands-on approach, including many examples to illustrate basic Oberon-2 language features and the full range of object-oriented programming. An accompanying CD-ROM comtains all the examples found in the text.

This book is aimed at students who need to learn the basics of programming or who are studying computing. It is a "hands on" book containing many examples which start by illustrating basic Oberon-2 language features and gradually increase in scope to cover object-oriented programming concepts and constructs. Oberon-2 is a successor to the language Pascal, which was also designed by Prof. N. Wirth [Wir71J. It has quickly become a major language used for teaching purposes. The only thing you need for successfully working through the book is to have access to a computer running Windows 3. 11 or Windows 95. The material in the book is useful to students of schools, colleges, and universities for teaching Oberon-2 and programming at an introductory level. of the book is not focused on software engineering or object­ The scope oriented technology; other books mentioned in the reference section already cover these topics in much greater depth. However, the examples in the book have been designed with these topics firmly in mind. Currently the term "object-oriented" is very much in fashion, having taken over from structured programming of the 1970s and ''80s. In this book we have taken the view that a structured programming approach can be used to teach the fundamentals of programming algorithms. The object-oriented approach is then brought in as a complementary way to think, analyze, design and program.