As the summer draws to a close and the weather cools, our lives seem to only heat up. There is more to do with the start of the school year, sports activities, and even fellowship opportunities. While these can all be wonderful experiences and opportunities, the busyness of life can make it hard to make time to focus on our spiritual life. This month’s CE reading recommendations all center around engaging in spiritual practices to strengthen ourselves, our families and the community we have chosen to be with. Many book are made for families but that doesn’t have to be just kids or even immediate families, it can also be friends or small groups. So grab a partner, your family or group and dive deeper in your spiritual relationship with God.
Faithful Families: Creating Sacred Moments at Home Paperback by Traci Smith
Add family faith moments to your daily routine with little or no prep, and share meaningful spiritual experiences with your children! Traci Smith, a pastor and mother of three, offers ways to discover and develop new spiritual practices as a family, whether you’re a new seeker or a lifelong follower. Faithful Families is brimming with easy, do-it-yourself ideas for transforming your family’s everyday moments into sacred moments.
Faithful Families helps you: connect faith to your family’s everyday life; add family faith moments into your daily routine; learn new spiritual practices alongside your children; teach your children to appreciate religious diversity with time-tested non-Christian and Christian spiritual practices; respond to life’s everyday challenges and opportunities with meaningful practices
Getting It Together: Spiritual Practices for Faith, Family, and Work by Carol A. Wehrheim
As modern persons struggle to cope with the many commitments that consume our lives and the increasing–and seemingly insurmountable–demands on our time, Carol Wehrheim offers this much-needed work. In Getting It Together, she offers a direction toward relief, showing how a Christian foundation of faith can provide a sense of balance amidst the struggle. Each chapter begins with a selection from Scripture and concludes with a spiritual discipline. Including both a participant’s section and a leader’s guide, Getting It Together is ideal for group study.
Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From
Most Christian parenting books are ready with exact practices every family should follow in order to raise obedient children. In this obedience-training model, faith is a wall, constructed brick by brick, as adults tell children what to believe and how to behave.
But what if obedience is not the goal of Christian parenting? What if it’s our job as parents to instead help our kids get to know God and discover that God can be trusted? And what if faith is not constructed brick by brick, but rather woven strand by strand.
Much like a spider’s web, in which anchor strands and internal threads combine to form a unique web, Woven can help children anchor to who God is and have faith practices that are rich, textured, and all their own. Kids need space to explore the Bible, ask big questions, and even change their understanding of God and faith along the way. With Woven, families can nurture the kind of faith that can flex and grow, be broken and repaired. This is the sort of faith that can stand up to the life a child will live, the doubts they will encounter, and the questions that will come up along the way.
So many parents want to pass along their faith, but know that God is so much bigger than the list of do’s and don’ts they were taught about as children. They want to pass along a faith their child doesn’t have to heal from. Woven is the guidebook parents have been looking for. With a deep reverence for scripture and suggested activities to help your family grow in faith together, Woven is for parents who want to go beyond a list of do’s and don’ts and pass along a resilient faith based on genuine love for and trust in God.
Imaginative Prayer: A Yearlong Guide for Your Child’s Spiritual Formation Paperback by Jared Patrick Boyd
Joy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your Congregation By Lynne M. Baab
Although interest in spiritual practices has grown in recent years, most of the books available address individuals who wish to try Christian disciplines such as fasting or fixed-hour prayer. This book, by contrast, offers guidance and examples to Christian leaders as they seek ways to involve their congregations or small groups in spiritual practices.
In Joy Together, Lynne M. Baab describes six spiritual practices that congregations can attempt together: thankfulness, fasting, contemplative prayer, lectio divina, hospitality, and Sabbath keeping. She goes on to explore how these practices can help with congregational life and discernment and provides practical instructions for communicating with group members. Discussion questions are included at the end of each chapter so groups can delve into the topics more fully.
Growing in the Life of Faith, Second Edition Education and Christian Practices by Craig Dykstra
In this new edition of his popular book, Craig Dykstra explores the contributions of the traditions, education, worship practices, and disciplines of the Reformed Christian community in helping people grow in faith. In doing so, he makes the case that the Christian church, in its own traditions, has a wealth of wisdom about satisfying spiritual hunger and the desire to know God deeply–wisdom that offers coherent, thoughtful guidance in such diverse settings as congregational life, families, youth groups, and higher education.