Best Practices from America’s Best Churches

This book offers groundbreaking strategies to revitalize both individuals and communities and shows how to create a welcoming church environment • transform ordinary churchgoers into enthusiastic lay leaders • successfully get members to tithe their time, talents, and treasure • reach youth, the unchurched, and the marginalized • prevent pastoral and lay leader burnout.• better meet the needs of the community and surrounding neighborhood.

Excellent Protestant Congregations
Guide to Best Places and Practices

While many individuals might seek after an assortment of spiritual practices and approaches, the local congregation still remains the place where most Christians turn for religious education, nurture, ritual, and a sense of community. Yet many congregations struggle to respond to the spiritual needs of new faces in their pews.

In Excellent Protestant Congregations, respected religious journalist Paul Wilkes profiles eight dynamic, geographically and denominationally diverse congregations that have a distinct ability to create a vibrant community of worship. Wilkes draws out the "points of excellence" that lie beneath each congregation’s success and vitality. From hosting luncheons after funerals to organizing powerful life-changing retreats, from developing a capital campaign to getting volunteers to cheerfully do work for the church, Excellent Protestant Congregations provides real-world insights that are both inspiring and applicable in a local congregation. The geographic listing of over 300 excellent Protestant congregations and an index guiding readers to specific topics such as stewardship, bereavement, and how to reach Gen Xers, make Excellent Protestant Congregations an invaluable resource for church life.

In Mysterious Ways:
The Death and Life of a Parish Priest

Originally published to extraordinary acclaim, selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the winner of the Christopher Medal, In Mysterious Ways is widely recognized as one of the best books about Catholicism today -- a modern-day Diary of a Country Priest. Paul Wilkes paints an intimate and affecting portrait of Father Joseph Greer, the pastor of St. Patrick's Church in Natick, Massachusetts, as he struggles with a terminal case of bone marrow cancer. Even as it depicts the pastor's harrowing fight to live, In Mysterious Ways is ultimately an uplifting story of transcendence. As we watch him overcome his own pain, it is impossible not to admire and learn from Father Greer, who is certainly no saint but rather, as Wilkes makes clear, an ordinary person like anyone else. In Mysterious Ways offers a powerful vision of fortitude, leadership, and the limitless capabilities of a strong human spirit.

Beyond the Walls:
Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life

Paul Wilkes believes that monastic spiritual wisdom can be accessible to all. Over the course of a year, he made monthly visits to Mepkin, a Trappist monastery; during each visit he focused on a particular aspect of monastic life and each month's visit comprises a chapter of this book. Each chapter begins with concrete descriptions of that month's trip to Mepkin, profiling Wilkes's personal transformations through his private thoughts and interactions with individual monks. These visits serve as the platform to explore difficult topics such as faith, prayer, community and discernment. Using the Rule of St. Benedict as a reference, Wilkes amplifies his discussion with a variety of sages, including the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, the Indian monastic Raimundo Panikkar and Catholic thinkers such as Thomas Merton. Each chapter ends with his exit from the cloister, as he tries to incorporate insights gained into his cluttered world as father, husband, teacher, writer and lay minister. The spiritual journey Wilkes describes is one of continual conversion in which the end goal is never reached. Rather, monastic wisdom speaks to the journey itself, leading the traveler to discern his or her way of faith "beyond the walls." Wilkes has created a loving book that will help laypeople find--or learn to create--peace in their busy lives.

My Opportunity for Giving
creates an “attitude of gratitude” by carefully leading your members through a thoughtful consideration of the time, the talent and the treasure they have been given by God. And how, in sheer gratitude, they want to return some portion of those gifts.

New Beginnings:
My Opportunity for Giving

Stewardship as a Way of Life
Stewardship Kit Introductory price
only$249.95
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