Out of Print Books

Several books by Hartford Institute faculty have gone out of print and we are working to make these available online.

Currently, we have the following book available for download in .pdf format.  If you do not have Adobe Acrobat to view these files, you may download it for free from their web site.

Building Effective Ministry:
Theory and Practice in the Local Church (1983)
Edited by Carl Dudley

This seminal book in the field of congregational studies was the result of a project in which scholars from different academic disciplines reported on the distinctive perspectives each could bring to our understanding of congregations. Each chapter takes a different view of one congregation, Wiltshire Church, and shows just how complex and multifaceted a social reality the local church is.

Church and Denominational Growth:  What Does (and does not) Cause Growth or Decline (1993)
Edited by David A. Roozen and C. Kirk Hadaway
Hoge and Roozen edited the first scholarly collection of research on the Oldline Protestant declines in 1979.  After nearly 20 years of embrace, resistance, ambivalence and application of the so-called church growth movement (or, from some perspectives, the church growth debacle), Roozen and Hadaway return with funding from the Lilly Foundation and over a dozen impartial experts to examine the claims about what was happening, what was working, and who was helping to grow denominations and congregations in the USA and Canada.  

Handbook of Congregational Studies (1986) 
Edited by Jackson W. Carroll, Carl S. Dudley, William McKinney
This is the book that systematized the study of congregations for seminarians and clergy professionals, placing the congregation itself rather than individual scholarly disciplines at the center of congregational analysis. It provides techniques for studying the congregation as well as a framework for understanding the nature of the congregation.

Note: A more recent version of this book was released in 1998.  More information can be found on this site.

Women of the Cloth: A New Opportunity for the Churches (1983)
Jackson W. Carroll, Ph.D., Barbara Hargrove, Ph.D., Adair T. Lummis, Ph.D.
Cultural images do not change easily, especially those weighted with the aura of sacred tradition.  This book is about changes that one such image is undergoing as increasing numbers of women enter the ordained ministry of several Protestant denominations.

A Study of Doctor of Ministry Programs (1987)
This study was conducted under the auspices of Auburn Theological Seminary and Hartford Seminary's Center for Social and Religious Research (HIRR). Reported by Jackson W. Carroll and Barbara G. Wheeler and based on research by Jackson W. Carroll, Adair T. Lummis, David A. Roozen, and Barbara G. Wheeler with special financial studies conducted by Badgett Dillard and Anthony Ruger.

Changing the Way Seminaries Teach: Globalization and Theological Education (1996)
David A. Roozen, Alice Frazer Evans, Robert A. Evans
The 1980s and 1990s produced a significant body of theoretical and normative literature on both the globalization of theological education and the character of seminaries.  Almost totally absent in this discourse was any concrete attention to how one might actually embody such thinking in the life and practice of teaching institutions -- until  “Changing …”  It is a critical analysis – successes, failures and learnings; and concrete examples of innovative courses and faculty reflection on mutuality, contextuality and global economics -- of 12 seminaries that cooperatively worked five years to sharpen their respective thinking about globalization and then try to incorporate it into the core of their respective institution’s ethos and curriculum.  And along the way, the book develops the first systematic organizational theory of seminaries for assessing bridges and barriers to change.

Volume I in the Hartford Seminary Series on Innovation in Theological Education

This book is about teaching, interfaith dialogue and theological education. The core of the book: six critical case studies of seminary taught, degree courses in interfaith dialogue. The cases give expression to a broad range of dialogical pedagogies and course formats, and they include the courses’ syllabi and bibliographies. By critical case we mean one that describes not only the context, content, methods and related goals and rationale of the course, but also presents an evaluation of the course and discussion of the implications of the evaluation for teaching interfaith dialogue in theological institutions.

Volume II in the Hartford Seminary Series on Innovation in Theological Education