The Pharisee Factory

A factory produces, but what if the product was not what the manufacturer ordered? In this book, The Pharisee Factory, Glenn describes where the church has drifted off mission""choosing rules, knowledge, and power over God's glorious reflection of himself. Like the Pharisees, who started out trying to protect the words of God, they move toward controlling the words of God. Powerful leaders chose to operate much like the very ones that Jesus called "white washed sepulchers." Who is responsible for the condition of the modern church? It lies with us, the local church leadership. We may know about the New Testament leadership model, yet we continue to sustain and promote practices that Jesus hated. Church leaders and church attenders have always known there is something off with our current model of "doing" church. They just didn't know exactly what went wrong and why. We now realize the modern model is too top-heavy, hierarchical, and authoritarian when held up next to the flattened, gift-rich, and flexible style of the New Testament church. We may even know the historical damage that our modern models have caused. But have we actually looked at the results of our systems and structures over the past couple millennia? The book just asks a simple question: have we produced more Pharisees than disciples?

William E. Correll (Life Treatment Center) "This book describes the way alcoholics actually think better than anything I have ever read." The world of the good old-timers of the early Alcoholics Anonymous movement comes alive in this book. It tells the interlocking stories of seven people from diverse backgrounds--men, women, black, white, wealthy, poor--who lived and taught the A.A. program with such clarity and spiritual depth, that people came from miles away to sit at their feet and be taught by them. This account was originally written for the local intergroups, to tell how A.A. began during the 1940's and 50's in the cities and towns along the St. Joseph river, as it wound its way through Indiana and Michigan to empty into the Great Lakes. But then all across the country, people struggling with alcoholism and addiction began asking for copies, and psychotherapists and counselors too. It spoke to the heart, they said. It made the twelve step program come alive and showed how it really worked. And above all, they reported, they had found that the words of these men and women were filled with a kind of spiritual wisdom and deep compassion which had the power to heal the soul. So this new edition of The Factory Owner & the Convict has now been prepared, with the last half now printed as a separate volume entitled The St. Louis Gambler & the Railroad Man.

Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd; Ellen Johnston’s “Autobiography”; and James Myles’s Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy. This Broadview edition also includes a remarkably rich selection of historical documents that provide context for these works. Appendices include contemporary responses to the autobiographies, debates on factory legislation, transcripts of testimony given before parliamentary committees on child labour, and excerpts from literary works on factory life by Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.