Christian Practices Resources:
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Books with Multiple Christian Practices
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Three Foundational Books on Christian Practices
Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra, editors (Jossey-Bass, 2010 and Fortress, 2019) Dorothy Bass and the other contributors to this multi-denominational collection show how they can shape a faithful way of life during challenging times at work, at home, and in the community. This book explores the stuff of everyday life, placing ordinary activities in a biblical and historical context, and discovering in them opportunities to realize God’s active presence in life. This is the first book in the Christian practices series and describes twelve practices of the Christian life. The practices include: Honoring the Body, Hospitality, Household Economics, Saying Yes and Saying No, Keeping Sabbath, Testimony, Discernment, Shaping Communities, Forgiveness, Healing, Dying Well, and Singing Our Lives. On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life Dorothy C. Bass and Susan R. Briehl (Upper Room Books, 2010) Early adulthood is a time of possibility, uncertainty, decision, and hope. During these years, individuals determine how they will approach life challenges and opportunities. In this book writers from a variety of backgrounds address topics of particular relevance to young adults. The essays are grouped in 5 sections with individual practices
Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens Dorothy C. Bass and Don C. Richter (Upper Room Books, 2002) "I want to find a way to live that keeps me involved in what God is doing in me and in the world around me. Do you know a way to live that is like that?" Eighteen teens and 18 adults tackle that question; and their different points of view and personal stories make living a Christian life real. Way to Live includes the following practices: The Story (Bible), Bodies, Stuff, Food, Creation, Creativity, Work, Play, Time, Truth, Choices, Friends, Welcome, Forgiveness, Justice, Grieving, Music, and Prayer. ***** An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith Barbara Brown Taylor (Harper One, 2010) Barbara Brown Taylor reveals meaningful ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see, from simple practices such as walking, working, and prayer. Something as ordinary as hanging clothes on a clothesline becomes an act of meditation if we pay attention to what we're doing and take time to notice the sights, smells, and sounds around us. Making eye contact with the cashier at the grocery store becomes a moment of true human connection. Allowing yourself to get lost leads to new discoveries. As we incorporate these practices into our daily lives, we begin to discover altars everywhere we go, in nearly everything we do. Through Taylor's expert guidance and delicate, thought-provoking prose, we learn to live with purpose, pay attention, slow down, and revere the world we live in. Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith Diana Butler Bass (HarperOne, 2006) As Diana Butler Bass delved into the rich spiritual life of various Episcopal, United Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, and Lutheran churches, certain consistent practices—such as hospitality, contemplation, diversity, justice, discernment, and worship—emerged as core expressions of congregations seeking to rediscover authentic Christian faith and witness today. This hopeful book reveals the practical steps that congregations are taking to proclaim an alternative message about a Christianity that strives for greater spiritual depth and proactively engages the needs of the world. The book is organized in three parts: Part 1 What Happened to the Neighborhood Church? (The Vanished Village, Remembering Christianity, The New Village Church, and Finding Home), Part 2 Ten Signpost of Renewal (Hospitality, Discernment, Healing, Contemplation, Testimony, Diversity, Justice, Worship, Reflection, and Beauty), Part 3 From Tourists to Pilgrims (Transforming Lives, Transforming Congregations, and Transforming the World). The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus Rich Villodas (Waterbrook, 2020) During our chaotic times, discover five forgotten values that can spark internal growth and help us reconcile our Christian faith with the complexities of race, sexuality, and social justice. Most believers live in the state of “being a Christian” without ever being deeply formed by Christ. Our pace is too frenetic to be in union with God, and we don’t know how to quiet our hearts and minds to be present. Our emotions are unhealthy and compartmentalized. We feel unable to love well or live differently from the rest of the world—to live as people of the good news. Rich Villodas says we must restore balance, focus, and meaning for our souls. The Deeply Formed Life lays out a fresh vision for spiritual breakthrough following five key values: Contemplative Rhythms, Racial Justice, Interior Examination , Sexual Wholeness, Missional Presence. Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices (Ancient Practices Series) Brian McLaren (Thomas Nelson, 2010) There are ancient ways that can teach us to practice peace, joy, self-mastery, and justice. The old disciplines—fasting, contemplative prayer, simplicity, spiritual reading, meditation, solitude, silence, observing the holy days—do for our souls what exercise does for our bodies or study does for our minds. These ancient practices are the means by which we prepare for grace to surprise us. They are the habits by which our souls grow weighty; actions of mind, body, and will that close the gap between the character we want to possess and the character we currently have. Finding Our Way Again is a guidebook to these ancient practices. Liturgy of the Ordinary Tish Harrison Warren (IVP Books, 2016) In the overlooked moments and routines of our day, we can become aware of God's presence in surprising ways. How do we embrace the sacred in the ordinary and the ordinary in the sacred? Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something—making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys—that the author does every day. Drawing from the diversity of her life as a campus minister, Anglican priest, friend, wife, and mother, Tish Harrison Warren opens up a practical theology of the everyday. Each activity is related to a spiritual practice as well as an aspect of our Sunday worship. The Walk: Five Essential Practices of the Christian Life Adam Hamilton (Abingdon Press, 2019) How do we walk with Christ—daily follow him, grow in him, and faithfully serve him? In the Gospels, Jesus modeled for us the Christian spiritual life. The apostles taught it in their writings. And the Church has, through the last 2,000 years, sought to pursue this Christian spiritual life. In The Walk, Adam Hamilton focuses on five essential spiritual practices that are rooted in Jesus’ own walk with God and taught throughout the New Testament: worship, study, serving, giving, and bearing witness to our faith. In each chapter, Hamilton explores one of these practices, its New Testament foundation, and what it looks like to pursue this practice daily in our personal life and together in the life of the church. |
Christian PracticesThe following practices emerge repeatedly in the Bible and Christian tradition, and have demonstrated their importance in forming a distinctively Christian way of life. These practices are illustrative of the wisdom available to us in building a Christian way of life that speaks to the challenges of living faithfully today.
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Books Focused on One Christian Practice
Body
Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice
Stephanie Paulsell (Fortress, 2003, 2019)
Stephanie Paulsell offers readers a much-needed guide for cherishing the human body and countering the corrosive cultural messages that prevent us from knowing that we are children of God in our bodies as in our spirits. Honoring the Body does more than help us cope with issues such as weight gain and loss, body image, illness, birth and death, it helps us enrich our practice of faith. Paulsell draws on resources from the Christian tradition to show how we can learn to celebrate the body’s pleasures, protect the body’s vulnerabilities, and develop the practices that will ultimately transform our troubled relationship with our bodies to one of honor and joy. From Paulsell, we can learn how to regain a sense of awe and wonder about our bodies and to cultivate the healing practices that lead to joyful and embodied living.
*****
Food
Sharing Food: Christian Practices for Enjoyment
L Shannon Jung (Fortress, 2006)
Our everyday personal, familial, and communal practices of eating, says Jung, have the potential for making us more attentive to our life purposes, more attuned to our communal identities, and even more mindful of the presence of God.
Juxtaposing practices with values, Jung explores how food and eating function culturally today. He explores the larger dimensions of personal and group eating, the great resonance that feasting and food and fasting have within the Christian tradition, and how all this figures very practically in Christian lifestyle. His work culminates in a chapter on the Lord’s Supper as a model for eating and the Eucharist as an occasion for sharing with the worldwide family of God.
*****
Hospitality
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
Christine D. Pohl (Eerdmans, 1999)
Although hospitality was central to Christian identity and practice in earlier centuries, our generation knows little about its life-giving character. Making Room revisits the Christian foundations of welcoming strangers and explores the necessity, difficulty, and blessing of hospitality today. Combining rich biblical and historical research with extensive exposure to contemporary Christian communities—the Catholic Worker, L’Abri, L’Arche, and others— this book shows how understanding the key features of hospitality can better equip us to faithfully carry out the practical call of the gospel. The book is organized in three parts: Remembering Our Heritage, Reconsidering the Tradition, and Recovering the Practice.
Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers
Elizabeth Newman (Brazos Press, 2007)
Christian hospitality is more than a well-set table, pleasant conversation, or even inviting people into your home. Christian hospitality, according to Elizabeth Newman, is an extension of how we interact with God. It trains us to be capable of welcoming strangers who will challenge us and enhance our lives in unexpected ways, readying us to embrace the ultimate stranger: God. Newman restores hospitality to its proper place within God’s story, as displayed most fully in Jesus Christ. Worship, she says, is the believer’s participation in divine hospitality, a hospitality that cannot be sequestered from our economic, political, or public lives.
*****
Household Economics
Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life
Margaret Kim Peterson (Jossey-Bass, 2007)
Keeping House is a wide-ranging and witty exploration of the spiritual gifts that are gained when we take the time to care for hearth and home. Margaret Kim Peterson examines the activities and attitudes of keeping house and making a home. Debunking the commonly held notion that keeping house is a waste of time or at best a hobby, Peterson uncovers the broader cultural and theological factors that make housekeeping an interesting and worthwhile discipline. She reveals how the seemingly ordinary tasks of folding laundry, buying groceries, cooking, making beds, and offering hospitality can be seen as spiritual practices that embody and express concrete and positive ways of living out Christian faith in relationship to others at home, in the church and in the world.
*****
Justice
Lord Have Mercy: Praying for Justice with Conviction and Humility
Claire Wolfteich ( Jossey-Bass, 2006)
How can we respond to violence in our neighborhoods or in battle zones thousands of miles away, to layoffs in a nearby corporation, or to troubling and conflicted moral questions? What does it really mean to use prayer in bringing faith to life—in the workplace, in daily tasks, in the voting booth? Lord Have Mercy is a guide for those who want to move prayer beyond private devotion and engage faithfully with the questions, decisions, policies, and movements that shape our lives in society. Claire Wolfteich includes stories from around the world to show how the practice of prayer has been embodied in actual communities in times of historic confrontation with social injustice.
*****
Music
Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice
Don Saliers and Emily Saliers (Fortress, 2005, 2019)
Church musician and liturgical theologian Don Saliers joins with daughter Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls fame to reflect on the what, the how, and the why of music as a vital spiritual dimension of our lives. Don and Emily reflect on how music shapes our souls in relation to justice, grief, delight, healing, and hope. This book bridges two generations, two approaches to the life of faith, and two genres of music—the music of Saturday night and Sunday morning. They open the way for those who seek to embrace new spiritual practices by creating music, sharing music, and developing their musical skills as a spiritual practice.
*****
Prayer
A Praying Congregation
Jane E. Vennard. (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2005) [$17]
A Praying Congregation develop the skills to become a teacher of prayer and spiritual practices. It includes easily accessible lesson plans which enable you to share Vennard’s insights with others while infusing the activities with their own spirit and creative ideas. Readers are invited to gently explore questions such as, who taught you to pray and how? what do you believe about prayer? what is your image of the God to whom you pray? and what is prayer anyway? Chapters include: Praying Congregations, Learning to Pray, What Do You Believe about Prayer? Images of God, Praying All Ways and Always, Becoming a Teacher of Prayer, and Teaching Prayer Forms and Spiritual Practices.
In Constant Prayer (Ancient Practices Series)
Robert Benson (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008) [$17.99]
Robert Benson explores the ancient practice of fixed-hour prayer, a structure for our lives where we can live in continuous awareness of God’s presence and reality. This classic discipline of praying at fixed times during the day and night has transformed the lives of millions around the world. Benson’s goal is to open up some of the mystery of the daily office for those who have had little or no exposure to this ancient way of Christian prayer. He shares the benefits that will accrue to us if we begin to participate in this ancient tradition that has sustained the Church through the ages.
Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone
James Martin S.J. (HarperOne, 2021)
Learning to Pray explains what prayer is, what to expect from praying, how to do it, and how it can transform us when we make it a regular practice in our lives. A trusted guide walking beside us as we navigate our unique spiritual paths, Martin lays out the different styles and traditions of prayer throughout Christian history and invites us to experiment and discover which works best to feed our soul and build intimacy with our Creator. Father Martin makes clear there is not one secret formula for praying. But like any relationship, each person can discover the best style for building an intimate relationship with God, regardless of religion or denomination. Prayer, he teaches us, is open and accessible to anyone willing to open their heart.
Sacred Rhythm: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation
Ruth Haley Barton (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006) [$16]
Spiritual disciplines are activities that open us to God’s transforming love and the changes that only God can bring about in our lives. Picking up on the monastic tradition of creating a “rule of life” that allows for regular space for the practice of the spiritual disciplines, Sacred Rhythms takes you more deeply into understanding seven key disciplines along with practical ideas for weaving them into everyday life. Each chapter includes exercises to help you begin the practices—individually and in a group context. The spiritual disciplines include: Solitude, Scripture, Prayer, Honoring the Body, Self-Examination, Discernment, and Sabbath. The final chapter, A Rule of Life, puts it all together in a way that will help you arrange your life for spiritual transformation.
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices that Transform Us (Revised and Expanded)
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun. InterVarsity Press, 2015.
In Spiritual Disciplines Handbook Adele Calhoun gives us directions for our continuing journey toward intimacy with Christ. While the word discipline may make us want to run and hide, the author shows how desires and discipline work together to lead us to the transformation we're longing for—the transformation only Christ can bring. Instead of just giving information about spiritual disciplines, this handbook is full of practical, accessible guidance that helps you actually practice them. The book includes over 80 spiritual disciplines (practices).
Spiritual Practices in Community: Drawing Groups into the Heart of God
Diana Shiflett (IVP Books, 2018)
Diana Shiflett has been leading groups of all descriptions in spiritual practices for many years. In this personal, hands-on guide, Shiflett walks us through a wide array of spiritual practices, from communal silence and Scripture meditation to active prayer and corporate discernment. She proves a reliable guide, offering step-by-step instructions, pointing out hazards and pitfalls, and sharing her own experiences with honesty and humor. With this book as a guide, these spiritual practices can become life-giving resources in your ministry setting for years to come.
*****
Sabbath
Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time
Dorothy C. Bass (Fortress, 2001, 2019)
Dorothy Bass invites readers into a way of living in time that is alert to both contemporary pressures and rooted ancient wisdom. She asks hard questions about how our injurious attitude toward time has distorted our relationships with our innermost selves, with other people, with the natural world, and with God. Receiving the Day offers a language of attention, poetry, and celebration. Bass encourages us to reevaluate our understanding of the temporal and thereby to participate fully in the Christian practice of knowing time as God’s gift. Embraced in this way, time need not be wrestled with each day. Instead, time becomes the habitation of blessing.
Living the Sabbath
Norman Wirzba (Brazos Press, 2006)
Our traditional understanding of Sabbath observance is resting from our otherwise harried lives one day a week. Norman Wirzba leads us deeper into the heart of Sabbath with a holistic and rewarding interpretation of what true Sabbath-keeping can mean in our lives today. Wirzba teaches that Sabbath is ultimately about delight in the goodness that God has made—in everything we do, every day of the week. He then shows how this understanding of Sabbath teaching has the potential to elevate all our activities so that they bring honor to God and delight to the world. With practical examples, Wirzba unpacks what that means for our work, our homes, our economy, our schools, our treatment of creation, and our churches.
*****
Testimony
Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian
Thomas G. Long (Jossey-Bass, 2004)
In this groundbreaking book, Thomas G. Long—a theologian and respected authority on preaching—explores how Christians talk when they are not in church. Testimony breaks the stained-glass image of religious language to show how ordinary talking in our everyday lives— talk across the backyard fence, talk with our kids, talk about politics and the events of the day—can be sacred speech. In a world of spin, slick marketing, mindless chatter, and easy deceptions, Testimony shows that the hunger for truthful, meaningful, and compassionate speech is ultimately grounded in truth about God.
Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice
Stephanie Paulsell (Fortress, 2003, 2019)
Stephanie Paulsell offers readers a much-needed guide for cherishing the human body and countering the corrosive cultural messages that prevent us from knowing that we are children of God in our bodies as in our spirits. Honoring the Body does more than help us cope with issues such as weight gain and loss, body image, illness, birth and death, it helps us enrich our practice of faith. Paulsell draws on resources from the Christian tradition to show how we can learn to celebrate the body’s pleasures, protect the body’s vulnerabilities, and develop the practices that will ultimately transform our troubled relationship with our bodies to one of honor and joy. From Paulsell, we can learn how to regain a sense of awe and wonder about our bodies and to cultivate the healing practices that lead to joyful and embodied living.
*****
Food
Sharing Food: Christian Practices for Enjoyment
L Shannon Jung (Fortress, 2006)
Our everyday personal, familial, and communal practices of eating, says Jung, have the potential for making us more attentive to our life purposes, more attuned to our communal identities, and even more mindful of the presence of God.
Juxtaposing practices with values, Jung explores how food and eating function culturally today. He explores the larger dimensions of personal and group eating, the great resonance that feasting and food and fasting have within the Christian tradition, and how all this figures very practically in Christian lifestyle. His work culminates in a chapter on the Lord’s Supper as a model for eating and the Eucharist as an occasion for sharing with the worldwide family of God.
*****
Hospitality
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
Christine D. Pohl (Eerdmans, 1999)
Although hospitality was central to Christian identity and practice in earlier centuries, our generation knows little about its life-giving character. Making Room revisits the Christian foundations of welcoming strangers and explores the necessity, difficulty, and blessing of hospitality today. Combining rich biblical and historical research with extensive exposure to contemporary Christian communities—the Catholic Worker, L’Abri, L’Arche, and others— this book shows how understanding the key features of hospitality can better equip us to faithfully carry out the practical call of the gospel. The book is organized in three parts: Remembering Our Heritage, Reconsidering the Tradition, and Recovering the Practice.
Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers
Elizabeth Newman (Brazos Press, 2007)
Christian hospitality is more than a well-set table, pleasant conversation, or even inviting people into your home. Christian hospitality, according to Elizabeth Newman, is an extension of how we interact with God. It trains us to be capable of welcoming strangers who will challenge us and enhance our lives in unexpected ways, readying us to embrace the ultimate stranger: God. Newman restores hospitality to its proper place within God’s story, as displayed most fully in Jesus Christ. Worship, she says, is the believer’s participation in divine hospitality, a hospitality that cannot be sequestered from our economic, political, or public lives.
*****
Household Economics
Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life
Margaret Kim Peterson (Jossey-Bass, 2007)
Keeping House is a wide-ranging and witty exploration of the spiritual gifts that are gained when we take the time to care for hearth and home. Margaret Kim Peterson examines the activities and attitudes of keeping house and making a home. Debunking the commonly held notion that keeping house is a waste of time or at best a hobby, Peterson uncovers the broader cultural and theological factors that make housekeeping an interesting and worthwhile discipline. She reveals how the seemingly ordinary tasks of folding laundry, buying groceries, cooking, making beds, and offering hospitality can be seen as spiritual practices that embody and express concrete and positive ways of living out Christian faith in relationship to others at home, in the church and in the world.
*****
Justice
Lord Have Mercy: Praying for Justice with Conviction and Humility
Claire Wolfteich ( Jossey-Bass, 2006)
How can we respond to violence in our neighborhoods or in battle zones thousands of miles away, to layoffs in a nearby corporation, or to troubling and conflicted moral questions? What does it really mean to use prayer in bringing faith to life—in the workplace, in daily tasks, in the voting booth? Lord Have Mercy is a guide for those who want to move prayer beyond private devotion and engage faithfully with the questions, decisions, policies, and movements that shape our lives in society. Claire Wolfteich includes stories from around the world to show how the practice of prayer has been embodied in actual communities in times of historic confrontation with social injustice.
*****
Music
Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice
Don Saliers and Emily Saliers (Fortress, 2005, 2019)
Church musician and liturgical theologian Don Saliers joins with daughter Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls fame to reflect on the what, the how, and the why of music as a vital spiritual dimension of our lives. Don and Emily reflect on how music shapes our souls in relation to justice, grief, delight, healing, and hope. This book bridges two generations, two approaches to the life of faith, and two genres of music—the music of Saturday night and Sunday morning. They open the way for those who seek to embrace new spiritual practices by creating music, sharing music, and developing their musical skills as a spiritual practice.
*****
Prayer
A Praying Congregation
Jane E. Vennard. (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2005) [$17]
A Praying Congregation develop the skills to become a teacher of prayer and spiritual practices. It includes easily accessible lesson plans which enable you to share Vennard’s insights with others while infusing the activities with their own spirit and creative ideas. Readers are invited to gently explore questions such as, who taught you to pray and how? what do you believe about prayer? what is your image of the God to whom you pray? and what is prayer anyway? Chapters include: Praying Congregations, Learning to Pray, What Do You Believe about Prayer? Images of God, Praying All Ways and Always, Becoming a Teacher of Prayer, and Teaching Prayer Forms and Spiritual Practices.
In Constant Prayer (Ancient Practices Series)
Robert Benson (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008) [$17.99]
Robert Benson explores the ancient practice of fixed-hour prayer, a structure for our lives where we can live in continuous awareness of God’s presence and reality. This classic discipline of praying at fixed times during the day and night has transformed the lives of millions around the world. Benson’s goal is to open up some of the mystery of the daily office for those who have had little or no exposure to this ancient way of Christian prayer. He shares the benefits that will accrue to us if we begin to participate in this ancient tradition that has sustained the Church through the ages.
Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone
James Martin S.J. (HarperOne, 2021)
Learning to Pray explains what prayer is, what to expect from praying, how to do it, and how it can transform us when we make it a regular practice in our lives. A trusted guide walking beside us as we navigate our unique spiritual paths, Martin lays out the different styles and traditions of prayer throughout Christian history and invites us to experiment and discover which works best to feed our soul and build intimacy with our Creator. Father Martin makes clear there is not one secret formula for praying. But like any relationship, each person can discover the best style for building an intimate relationship with God, regardless of religion or denomination. Prayer, he teaches us, is open and accessible to anyone willing to open their heart.
Sacred Rhythm: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation
Ruth Haley Barton (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006) [$16]
Spiritual disciplines are activities that open us to God’s transforming love and the changes that only God can bring about in our lives. Picking up on the monastic tradition of creating a “rule of life” that allows for regular space for the practice of the spiritual disciplines, Sacred Rhythms takes you more deeply into understanding seven key disciplines along with practical ideas for weaving them into everyday life. Each chapter includes exercises to help you begin the practices—individually and in a group context. The spiritual disciplines include: Solitude, Scripture, Prayer, Honoring the Body, Self-Examination, Discernment, and Sabbath. The final chapter, A Rule of Life, puts it all together in a way that will help you arrange your life for spiritual transformation.
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices that Transform Us (Revised and Expanded)
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun. InterVarsity Press, 2015.
In Spiritual Disciplines Handbook Adele Calhoun gives us directions for our continuing journey toward intimacy with Christ. While the word discipline may make us want to run and hide, the author shows how desires and discipline work together to lead us to the transformation we're longing for—the transformation only Christ can bring. Instead of just giving information about spiritual disciplines, this handbook is full of practical, accessible guidance that helps you actually practice them. The book includes over 80 spiritual disciplines (practices).
Spiritual Practices in Community: Drawing Groups into the Heart of God
Diana Shiflett (IVP Books, 2018)
Diana Shiflett has been leading groups of all descriptions in spiritual practices for many years. In this personal, hands-on guide, Shiflett walks us through a wide array of spiritual practices, from communal silence and Scripture meditation to active prayer and corporate discernment. She proves a reliable guide, offering step-by-step instructions, pointing out hazards and pitfalls, and sharing her own experiences with honesty and humor. With this book as a guide, these spiritual practices can become life-giving resources in your ministry setting for years to come.
*****
Sabbath
Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time
Dorothy C. Bass (Fortress, 2001, 2019)
Dorothy Bass invites readers into a way of living in time that is alert to both contemporary pressures and rooted ancient wisdom. She asks hard questions about how our injurious attitude toward time has distorted our relationships with our innermost selves, with other people, with the natural world, and with God. Receiving the Day offers a language of attention, poetry, and celebration. Bass encourages us to reevaluate our understanding of the temporal and thereby to participate fully in the Christian practice of knowing time as God’s gift. Embraced in this way, time need not be wrestled with each day. Instead, time becomes the habitation of blessing.
Living the Sabbath
Norman Wirzba (Brazos Press, 2006)
Our traditional understanding of Sabbath observance is resting from our otherwise harried lives one day a week. Norman Wirzba leads us deeper into the heart of Sabbath with a holistic and rewarding interpretation of what true Sabbath-keeping can mean in our lives today. Wirzba teaches that Sabbath is ultimately about delight in the goodness that God has made—in everything we do, every day of the week. He then shows how this understanding of Sabbath teaching has the potential to elevate all our activities so that they bring honor to God and delight to the world. With practical examples, Wirzba unpacks what that means for our work, our homes, our economy, our schools, our treatment of creation, and our churches.
*****
Testimony
Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian
Thomas G. Long (Jossey-Bass, 2004)
In this groundbreaking book, Thomas G. Long—a theologian and respected authority on preaching—explores how Christians talk when they are not in church. Testimony breaks the stained-glass image of religious language to show how ordinary talking in our everyday lives— talk across the backyard fence, talk with our kids, talk about politics and the events of the day—can be sacred speech. In a world of spin, slick marketing, mindless chatter, and easy deceptions, Testimony shows that the hunger for truthful, meaningful, and compassionate speech is ultimately grounded in truth about God.
