Religion Community

Corrymeela is Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. At its heart is a simple pattern of daily worship that is structured around meditation on the Gospels. This prayer book captures the essence of the Corrymeela prayer experience for everyone who wishes to incorporate its spirituality into their regular prayer practice.

Fast cars. Fast and furious. Fast forward. Fast...church? The church is often idealized (or demonized) as the last bastion of a bygone era, dragging our feet as we're pulled into new moralities and new spiritualities. We guard our doctrine and our piety with great vigilance. But we often fail to notice how quickly we're capitulating, in the structures and practices of our churches, to a culture of unreflective speed, dehumanizing efficiency, and disintegrating isolationism.

Are you and your church making a difference in your community? Are you meeting needs in a positive, proactive, and loving way? Too often when churches are presented with a need outside their walls, they operate on the principle of "Say no unless you have to say yes." Don't want that to be your church's legacy in your community? Drawing on more than 30 years of service to the community surrounding Faith Church in Indiana, pastor Stephen Viars shows you how to develop a giving relationship with your community, one in which your natural response to needs is "Yes! How can we help?"

Jenn Johnson has come to realize that the pursuit of perfection is unrealistic and unfair. Instead, we need to pause and reflect on what's in front of us. But how? How can we slow down? How can we remain focused on what's important and do things with intention? What can we pursue that represents God's heart for us, things that are true, noble, right, pure, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy? By pursuing all things "lovely".

Author and pastor David Kim shares his experiences with loneliness as a Korean American immigrant and delivers compelling research about belonging that includes the revolutionary five anchors for developing meaningful relationships.

Our God is an English translation of Hamara Khuda written by Hazrat Mirza Bashir Ahmad (ra), M. A. in the prime of his youth. The book was written largely for the youth who were being swept by the onslaught of atheist literature. It is as relevant today as then; rather more so. The book mainly addresses the issue of existence of God from the point of view of rational arguments. It furnishes cogent reasons as to why we cannot see God. The beauty of God lies in his being hidden from our physical eyes, and yet being apparent to us through his creation and revelation.

I’m surrounded by people at church...so why do I feel so alone? You show up at church every Sunday. You see people you know. You listen to a sermon together. And then you go home feeling just as isolated as you did before. What’s going on? We all know that a church is supposed to be a community. The trick is to actually make it one. Communities don’t happen by chance - certainly not in our Lone Ranger culture that values independence and individualism.

Join J.C. Ryle as he explains the benefits of reading (and rereading) the Bible, and find inspiration for your daily devotions in this classic work.

The life of one man has perhaps never been the centre of such passionate debate as with the case of Jesus the Messiah, peace be upon him. While some consider him imposter, others believe he was saved from being hung on the cross by ascending into the heavens physically. In this book, with compelling testimony, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, peace be upon him, presents the true and accurate biographical findings on the life of Jesus.

From the author of Messy Grace, a former pastor raised by gay parents, comes a compassionate playbook to help Christians, church staff, and ministry leaders create a culture of belonging without sacrificing theological convictions.

Fighting, disagreements, hatred, dissension, and silence. These things seem common in the wider Christian community today. Politics, theology, and even personal preference create seemingly insurmountable rifts. It’s hard not to see ourselves as “at war” with each other. We’re not doomed to be stuck here, though. There is a twofold path out of this destructive war, out of seeing our brothers and sisters as enemies―and into a spacious place of loving each other even as we disagree.

​In times of isolation, heartbreak, and brokenness, reaching out to each other, being in conversation, finding ways to connect with compassion and openness can help us heal and thrive. This powerful, positive guide coaxes us to go beyond our individual and collective grief and courageously re-enter and reclaim our sense of community—which then further strengthens our spiritual practice.

It’s easy to dream about the “perfect” church - a church that sings just the right songs set to just the right music before the pastor preaches just the right sermon to a room filled with just the right mix of people who happen to agree with you on just about everything. This audiobook is a call to embrace the uncomfortable aspects of Christian community, whether that means believing difficult truths, pursuing difficult holiness, or loving difficult people - all for the sake of the gospel, God’s glory, and our joy.

No one is a stranger to loneliness. Despite how social we are via text, chat, and notifications, we are far from being truly connected. We all want someone else to really see us and choose us for who we are. We want a place to finally fit in. But what if finding the right people or the right place is not the answer? From her community-building background, Sarah E. Westfall takes our longing to belong as an invitation to embrace and extend the deep love of God.

This book seeks to provide a guided examination of what unites and divides the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communities. With over 25 years of experience teaching in the subject area, Dr. Fritz Wenisch begins to unravel this complex and often contentious topic by first discussing the legal injunctions applying to religious studies courses at secular U.S. universities. He investigates the type of monotheism each religion shares before providing an in-depth overview of each religion, one by one.

In Sticky Church, author and pastor Larry Osborne makes the case that closing the back door of your church is even more important than opening the front door wider. He offers a time-tested strategy for doing so: sermon-based small groups that dig deeper into the weekend message and tightly velcro members to the ministry. It’s a strategy that enabled Osborne’s congregation to grow from a handful of people to one of the larger churches in the nation - without any marketing or special programming.

Jesus’ death paid for our sins – the guilt, the death, and the punishment. Jesus does not repay the man who got ripped off when we stole from him. According to the Bible, the person who comes to the Lord in repentance is to pay the one he stole from the value of the stolen goods plus one fifth of the value. But what if it is a candy bar you took twenty years ago? The amount stolen and the time since the theft do not make it yours.

American life and politics are suffering from a raging knowledge crisis, and the church is no exception. In Untrustworthy, Bonnie Kristian unpacks this crisis and explores ways to combat it in our own lives, families, and church communities. Drawing from her extensive experience in journalism and her training as a theologian, Kristian explores social media, political and digital culture, online paranoia, and the press itself. She explains factors that contribute to our confusion and helps Christians pay attention to how we consume content and think about truth.

Modern culture is increasingly hostile to Christians, and Christians are increasingly aware that they need to form strong communities to do for them what the culture no longer can. This is a good thing, but it will only work if we, like Nehemiah, remain committed to resisting the dictates of our culture. In this short book, Pastor Douglas Wilson describes some of the most important ways to create and maintain countercultural Christian communities. Whether it's the need for kids to get calluses or the necessity of love and loyalty within churches, Wilson brings decades of wisdom.

God is good, all the time. Jim Wilson was born in 1927 and raised in a Depression-era farming family. At the age of 16, at the height of World War II, he became the primary breadwinner for his parents and four younger siblings. At age 17, eager to fight for his country, he enlisted in the Navy. Germany surrendered while he was in the recruiting office, and the war was over by the time he entered boot camp. But God had a plan for Jim Wilson in the US Navy.