Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture


Adam S. McHugh - 2009
    But many churches tend to be extroverted places where introverts are marginalized. Some Christians end up feeling like it's not as faithful to be an introvert. Adam McHugh shows how introverts can live and minister in ways consistent with their personalities. He explains how introverts and extroverts process information and approach relationships differently and how introverts can practice Christian spirituality in ways that fit who they are. With practical illustrations from church and parachurch contexts, McHugh offers ways for introverts to serve, lead, worship and even evangelize effectively. Introverts in the Church is essential reading for any introvert who has ever felt out of place, as well as for church leaders who want to make their churches more welcoming to introverts. Discover God's call and empowering to thrive as an introvert, for the sake of the church and kingdom.

Love Is Patient, But I'm Not: Confessions of a Recovering Perfectionist


Christopher West - 2017
    . . but not like this.In this revealing book, renowned speaker and author Christopher West discusses the topic of love and relationships, but he does it through the lens of his own powerful and personal experience. If you've ever wondered what to do with that deep cry of your heart to love and be loved, read on.Love Is Patient, but I'm Not offers West's reflections on Pope Francis book The Joy of Love. It focuses on the heart of the pope's meditations on the famous love is patient and kind passage from 1 Corinthians 13. Its short chapters will take you line by line through the passage, and will also let you in on some intimate aspects of West's faith journey—his wound of perfectionism, his consequent challenges as a husband and father, and the ups and downs he experiences as he struggles to work it all out. As it turns out, we aren't the only ones who find it hard to live out the love St. Paul describes for us.Interspersed throughout the book are short prayers and questions for reflection designed to help you open your heart to God and experience his unconditional, merciful love more fully. Read this book for a dose of spiritual encouragement and for a real-life look at what it means to live the joy of love.

Let Hope in: 4 Choices That Will Change Your Life Forever


Pete Wilson - 2013
    All you have to do is make the choice to let it in. It won't be easy. It won't be quick. But it is possible and we serve a God who promises over and over again that anything is possible.Pete Wilson, pastor and the author of Plan B, presents a new look at the power of healing through hope, revealing 4 unique choices that have the potential to change your life forever.With Wilson's telltale cadence and candor, Let Hope In explores accounts of seemingly hopeless moments in the Bible illustrating God's ultimate plan for healing by letting hope fill the dark places of your past.Discover how pain that is not transformed becomes transferred. Embrace the freedom of being okay with not being okay. Learn that a life of trusting is far more magnificent than a life of pleasing. Because hurt people hurt people, but free people have the power to free people.So make today the day that you get unstuck. The day you fill your past with the light of hope, the day you say good-bye to regret and shame. The day you choose to change your future and embrace who God created you to be, simply by making the choice to let hope in.

Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers


Anne Lamott - 2012
    And in her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals.It is these three prayers – asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us – that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they mean to her and how they have helped, and explores how others have embraced these same ideas.

Living on the Border of the Holy


L. William Countryman - 1999
    All human beings, knowingly or not, minister as priests to one another. All of us, knowingly or not, receive priestly ministrations from one another. Unless we begin here, we are not likely to understand the confusions and uncertainties and opportunities we have been encountering in the life of the church itself in recent years. We shall be in danger, in fact, of creating makeshift solutions to half-understood problems, easy answers to misleading questions, temporary bandages for institutions that need to be healed from the ground up. - L. William Countryman There is a lot of tension in churches today about whose ministry is primary-that of the laity or of the clergy. L. William Countryman argues that we can only resolve that problem by seeing that we are all priests simply by virtue of being human and living, as we all do, on the mysterious and uncertain border with the Holy. Living on the Border of the Holy offers a way of understanding the priesthood of the whole people of God and the priesthood of the ordained in complementary ways by showing how both are rooted in the fundamental priestly nature of human life. After an exploration of the ministry of both laity and ordained, Countryman concludes by examining the implications of this view of priesthood for churches and for educating those studying for ordination.

The Gospel Comes with a House Key


Rosaria Champagne Butterfield - 2018
    However, when the Bible calls Christians to be hospitable, it's calling them to much more. In this book, Rosaria Butterfield invites readers into her home and shows from her own life and experience how "radically ordinary hospitality" can be a bridge for bringing the gospel to lost friends and neighbors—something that she experienced herself on her journey to Christ. Such hospitality welcomes those who look, think, believe, and act differently than us into our own everyday, sometimes messy lives. Christians will be inspired and equipped to use their homes and tables as a way of showing a skeptical, unbelieving world what love and authentic faith really look like.Table of ContentsPreface: Radically Ordinary Hospitality1. Priceless: The Merit of Hospitality2. The Jesus Paradox: The Vitality of Hospitality3. Our Post Christian World: The Kindness of Hospitality4. God Never Gets the Address Wrong: The Providence of Hospitality5. The Gospel Comes with a House Key: The Seal of Hospitality 6. Judas In the Church: The Borderland of Hospitality7. Giving Up the Ghosts: The Lamentation of Hospitality8. The Daily Grind: The Basics of Hospitality9. Blessed are the Merciful: The Hope of Hospitality 10. Walking the Emmaus Road: The Future of Hospitality Conclusion: Feeding the 5000: The Nuts and Bolts and Beans and Rice

Why the Church?


Luigi Giussani - 2000
    He then describes the Church's developing self-awareness of its dual elements of the human and divine. Concerned with verifying the Church's claim to embody Christ, Giussani situates the locus of verification in human experience, arguing that a different type of life is born in those who try to live the life of the Church. Why the Church? is a seminal study that will engage both the scholar and the general reader.

Welcome to the Book of Common Prayer


Vicki K. Black - 2005
    As we use the Book of Common Prayer, Black says, "we discover we are not alone, and this liturgical current of worship, prayer, and praise will indeed take us where we want to go-union with the God we seek to love." Welcome to the Book of Common Prayer shows readers everything from where to find the Sunday collect to how to pray the Daily Office. But it's more than a how-to. It offers history and background that help make the prayer book a more meaningful part of the worship life of individuals and congregations.With thoughtful reflection questions, this is a perfect volume for parish study groups.

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: Unleash a Revolution in Your Life In Christ


Peter Scazzero - 2006
    Even though he was pastor of a growing church, he did what most people do:Avoid conflict in the name of ChristianityIgnore his anger, sadness, and fearUse God to run from GodLive without boundariesEventually God awakened him to a biblical integration of emotional health, a relationship with Jesus, and the classic practices of contemplative spirituality. It created nothing short of a spiritual revolution, utterly transforming him and his church.In this book Scazzero outlines his journey and the signs of emotionally unhealthy spirituality. Then he provides seven biblical, reality-tested ways to break through to the revolutionary life Christ meant for you.“The combination of emotional health and contemplative spirituality,” he says, “unleashes the Holy Spirit inside us so that we might experientially know the power of an authentic life in Christ.”

The Forty-Day Word Fast: A Spiritual Journey to Eliminate Toxic Words From Your Life


Tim Cameron - 2015
    Fasting may even be a frequent part of your prayer life. But have you ever fasted from words? The truth is that even if you consider yourself to be a positive person, you still use damaging words that plague your life and rob you of the spiritual growth you desire.Change your words. Change your life.The Forty-Day Word Fast focuses on several biblically sound mechanisms to help you change your words and your life. Not only will your vocabulary change, your heart also will be transformed in just forty days. “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34 nkjv). With this guaranteed effective form of fasting you will be challenged to eradicate from your speech all words of... Judgment Criticism or sarcasm Negativity Complaining Gossip

The Dusty Ones: Why Wandering Deepens Your Faith


A.J. Swoboda - 2016
    When they are rescued from slavery in Egypt, God sends them into the desert, where they wander for a generation. Jesus and his disciples wander from town to town. In fact, some of God's most important truths are imparted to people with dusty feet as they travel on the road. With his trademark thoughtful introspection, A. J. Swoboda boldly suggests that wandering is not an absence of faith but a central component of faith. In "The Dusty Ones," " "he leads the restless, the frustrated, and the curious on a spiritual journey to uncover the answers to questions like - Do I wander because I'm failing or because God has left me?- Is the desert something I can overcome?- Why is God sometimes "hidden" in the Bible?- What do I do when the end seems nowhere in sight? This compassionate and contemplative book offers hope and peace to Christians and seekers alike as they make their way down the winding road of faith.

Better Together: How Women and Men Can Heal the Divide and Work Together to Transform the Future


Danielle Strickland - 2020
    And it seems no one knows what to do. While it is good for women to expose their pain, what often happens is that they immediately blame the person at the other end of it, which sets up a never-ending cycle of accusations, denial, avoidance, and ultimately devastation for everyone involved.This moment of discovery should not signal the end but instead become an opportunity to create a different world where men and women are better together.Better Together is a beacon of hope in a challenging storm. It’s where thoughts can be rechanneled and hope rekindled as author Danielle Strickland offers steps toward a real and workable solution. Her premise is that two things are needed for change:1) imagine a better world, and2) understand oppression.Understanding how oppression works is an important part of undoing it.Danielle says, “I refuse to believe that all men are bad. I also refuse to believe that all women are victims. I don’t want to be just hopeful, I want to be strategically hopeful. I want to work toward a better world with a shared view of the future that looks like equality, freedom, and flourishing.”

Prayers


Sylvia Browne - 2002
    In each case, the words were "infused" into her by her spirit guide Francine, and of course, by God. Granted, these words are a passive mode of prayer, yet the goal is to recharge your spiritual battery so that you'll be able to go out into the world and do God's work. "Over many years of public work, people have often asked me how to pray. My answer is simple, 'Just talk to God, and make your life a living prayer." "These prayers will lift your soul and let you magnify the Lord. They have done so for me and thousands of others. Many miracles have occurred by the power of prayer, and now I want to share these commanding words with you."

The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness


Timothy J. Keller - 2012
    He’s not after some superficial outward tinkering, but instead a deep–rooted, life–altering change that takes place on the inside. In an age where pleasing people, puffing up your ego and building your résumé are seen as the methods to ‘make it’, the Apostle Paul calls us to find true rest in blessed self–forgetfulness.In this short and punchy book, best–selling author Timothy Keller, shows that gospel–humility means we can stop connecting every experience, every conversation with ourselves and can thus be free from self–condemnation. A truly gospel–humble person is not a self–hating person or a self–loving person, but a self–forgetful person.This freedom can be yours…

Finding the Real Jesus: A Guide for Curious Christians and Skeptical Seekers


Lee Strobel - 2008
    In recent years, however, that picture of Jesus has come under widely publicized attack from sources ranging from critical scholars to Internet pundits to popular historians and others. The new portraits of Jesus seem persuasive. You can’t help but wonder … Did Christianity merely copy its beliefs from earlier mythology? Did the church suppress alternate gospels? Did Jesus never die on the cross or rise from the dead for sinners? Is the New Testament hopelessly riddled with errors? New York Times bestselling author Lee Strobel helps you separate truth from media hype, sound scholarship from bias, and fact from speculation. Digging below the surface, this book provides credible, informed answers to today’s most pressing questions about Jesus.