Category Archives: Book Collection

Transforming Congregations For The Future

In this third volume of the Once and Future Church series and sequel to his book The Once and Future Church, Loren Mead picks up where he left off. If God is calling the church to reshape itself, where do we begin? On what basis should we build? The declining numbers of denominational membership and recent […]

Spiritual Awakening

John Ackerman, parish pastor, spiritual director, and consultant on spiritual formation, provides an excellent guide for clergy desiring a congregation-wide approach to developing spirituality rooted in the life of the congregation. A six-week program focuses on developing individuals’ spirituality in small groups and includes leader training and course plans. Practical suggestions assist in developing the […]

Transforming Church Boards

Olsen presents a bold vision of leadership – one that offers church board work as an integral part of congregational leaders’ faith experience and development. Discover inspiring, practical ways your board can make its meetings become opportunities for deepening faith, developing leadership, and ultimately renewing your church.

Discover Your Spiritual Type

From Urban T. Holmes’s spiritual typology and her own experience as a spiritual director and pastoral counselor, Ware provides a framework for people to name and understand their spiritual experience-in much the same way the Myers-Briggs typology provides a framework for understanding personality types. Readers explore four spiritual types–head, heart, mystic, and Kingdom–and exercises allow […]

User Friendly Evaluation

Each congregation must evaluate itself in light of its own mix of gifts, backgrounds, talents, and opportunities. Presenting the best of evaluation theory past and present, Woods shows clergy and lay leaders how to engage in mutual evaluation-not judgment-of ministry, mission, and community as a shared responsibility. The goal is building up the congregation. A […]

Behavioral Covenants In Congregations

This down-to-earth workbook gets to the heart of modern congregational life: how to live creatively together despite differences of age, race, culture, opinion, gender, theological or political position. Alban Senior Consultant Gil Rendle explains how to grow by valuing our differences rather than trying to ignore or blend them. He describes a method of establishing behavioral […]

We Are The Church Together

Is there anything distinctive about what it means to be ‘church’ in a culturally diverse congregation? Does the cultural diversity of a congregation affect the way it seeks to form and renew itself as a community of faith? On-the-scene research in three culturally diverse congregations in a large southern city answers these questions in ways […]

The Congregation: Sign Of Hope

This book affirms congregational life as the unique place where persons encounter Christ. It looks at the unique mission of the congregation and outlines a process by which every congregation can move beyond mere maintenance of the current situation and into true mission. The book blends theory, theology, and practical experience in a readable ‘story’ […]

Arabs & Israel For Beginners

The history of the Middle East goes back about 12,000 years, most of which was not marked by fighting between Arabs and Jews. Documenting the Middle East from ancient times to present, Arabs & Israel for Beginners is one of few books cover the issues of both Jews and Arabs objectively, insightfully and in an […]