Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility
by Duane Elmer
$15.00 Paperback

With careful biblical exposition and keen cross-cultural awareness, author Duane Elmer gives Christians practical guidance for serving internationally with sensitivity and humility. He shows how our actions and attitudes often contradict and offend local cultures and sensibilities while offering principles and guidance for avoiding misunderstandings and building relationships in ways that honor host cultures.

From Nomads to Pilgrims: Stories from Practicing Congregations
edited by Diana Butler Bass and Joseph Stewart-Sicking
$17.00 Paperback

From Nomads to Pilgrims reads as a series of first-hand dispatches from pastors on the road to an emerging style of congregational vitality, one centered on the creative and intentional use of traditional Christian practices such as hospitality, discernment, contemplative prayer, and testimony. The highly anticipated follow-up to The Practicing Congregation by Diana Butler Bass, this book should prove helpful to any congregational leader searching for positive models that challenge conventional thinking and inspire creative experimentation. These are stories of congregations that have discovered a renewed sense of identity and mission; these are stories worth sharing.

Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations
by Gil Rendle and Alice Mann
$25.00 Paperback

Planning can be challenging when people share a common faith and values but may have very different preferences and needs. Authors Gil Rendle and Alice Mann approach planning as a "holy conversation," a congregational discernment process about three critical questions:

Who are we? ~ What has God called us to do or be? ~ Who is our neighbor?

Rendle and Mann equip congregational leaders with a broad and creative range of tools and processes for planning. By choosing resources that best suit their own needs, congregations will shape their unique holy conversation - leading to a path that is faithful to their identity and their relationship with God.

Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change by Mark Lau Branson
$18.00 Paperback

How can faithful and effective congregational change be accomplished without focusing on the negative elements of people, money and influence? In Memories, Hopes, and Conversations, author Mark Lau Branson shows how any congregation can use the collaborative and highly participatory change process called Appreciative Inquiry to generate conversations in a positive way. Branson first steps through the foundations of AI and explores biblical texts for understanding it in a faith context. He then uses a four-step process -- Initiate, Inquire, Imagine, Innovate -- to help congregations recognize their innate strengths and construct "provocative proposals" to help shape their church's future.

The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church
by Diana Butler Bass
$17.00 Paperback

Conventional wisdom maintains that mainline Protestantism is a dying tradition, irrelevant to a postmodern society, unresponsive to change, and increasingly disconnected from its core faith tenets. Historian and researcher Diana Butler Bass argues that there are signs that mainline Protestant churches are indeed changing, finding a new vitality intentionally grounded in Christian practices and laying the groundwork for a new type of congregation. The Practicing Congregation provides a hopeful and exciting vision of “the once and future church” that Alban founder Loren Mead first named over 10 years ago.

Other Bass titles in stock: Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community / Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship