Zondervan Blog

Common Prayer: A Guidebook for Plotting Goodness Together

Guest post by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.

 

A few years ago, a bunch of activist-types and a bunch of prayer-warriors got together to create a prayer book that would help us live with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. We were all convinced that prayer and action cannot be divorced from each other, and that Jesus and justice have to kiss. So we formed a team of liturgy experts, church leaders, grassroots organizers, and justice activists, and we began plotting goodness together. After a long and expectant labor, we just gave birth… to a little book and web resource called Common Prayer.

 

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Common Prayer is a book for folks who love God and want to make the world a better place. Whether you are over-churched or under-churched, a proud evangelical, a recovering evangelical, or not evangelical at all; whether you are high-church, low-church, or no-church, a skeptic or a Pentecostal; whether you are a political activist, political agnostic, or a political misfit; whether you have found a community or have burnt out on community… we had you in mind as we created Common Prayer.

 

What Men Think (But Don't Say)

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Some things are hard to talk about, especially if you're a man. The value of Wes Yoder's new book, Bond of Brothers, is that it equips men to confront and discuss the elephants in the room. All the meaty stuff is covered here: competition, respect, failure and how it feels, love and marriage and kids, the baggage that can pile up in father/son relationships, and more. Bond of Brothers helps men deal constructively with all of this by helping them open up to one another.

 

Yoder wrote Bond of Brothers for men, but recently in Yoder's interview on the TODAY Show, Ann Curry observed the book also helps women better understand where their men are coming from. To learn more, you can watch Yoder's TODAY Show interview and read chapter 1 from Bond of Brothers.

 

Photo: Wes Yoder and Ann Curry on the set of the TODAY Show. Watch Interview

  - Adam Forrest, Zondervan

More About Wes Yoder Raised on a dairy farm in the Amish and Mennonite community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wes Yoder moved to Nashville in 1973 to work in the music business where he launched the careers of many well-known artists. His projects have included media representation of The Purpose Driven Life and The Shack, and media and literary representation of the #1 New York Times best seller, Mistaken Identity. He has appeared on NBC Nightly News, ABC’s Prime Time, Dateline NBC, CNN Headline News and others. Wes and his wife, Linda, live in Franklin, Tennessee, and have two children and two grandchildren. Learn more at his website www.ambassadoragency.com

Gabe Lyons Live on "Strategy Room," Friday 11-5

Today, author Gabe Lyons will appear on the FOX News online show Strategy Room to discuss the events from this week and “the good news about the end of Christian America.”

 

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Watch Lyons on Strategy Room streaming live, 10-11 am Eastern time today (Friday, 11-5)

 

Personally, I'm very excited to see Lyons. In his books and videos he's always a refreshing presence, a Christian who speaks the truth with love and grace.

 

Lyons' video-based group study The Next Christians hits stores this December. His other Zondervan curriculum include The Faith (with Chuck Colson) and the group discussion series Q Society Room.

 - Adam Forrest

Q Society Room Trailer

 

More About Gabe Lyons Gabe Lyons is a cultural observer and the founder of Q – a learning community that engages Christians with ideas for renewing culture (learn more at Qideas.org). He is also the author of The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America and co-author of UnChristian, a bestselling book that reveals exclusive research on pop culture’s negative perceptions of Christians. Prior to launching Q, Gabe co-founded Catalyst, a national gathering of young leaders. Gabe, his wife Rebekah, and their three children reside in New York City. .

Anyone Can Slay Dragons (But it Takes Guts to Love People)

Guest post by Sharon A. Hersh, author of Begin Again, Believe Again.

What is the first thing you thought about this morning? Prayed about last night? Worried about throughout the day? I imagine if we could have a face-to-face conversation about what you think about, dream for, persistently pray about, risk for over and over again, discuss with your friends, are willing to look like a fool for, and continually hope for more in, we would see your heart for relationships.

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In my new book Begin Again, Believe Again we will look at our hearts for relationships. God created us to long for purposeful, passionate, mutual relationships. I will tell you a bit about my own heart – broken and battered at times – because I know that we all have stories of heartache when relationships falter. We all have conflicts we don’t know how to resolve. We all have children who go a different direction at times than we originally dreamed of for them. We all have friends who promise to be there for us and then forget to invite us to their birthday parties. We all get lonely. And we are all tempted to give up.

 

Begin Again
Beginning again requires the humility to acknowledge that we don’t know what we really want, but God (the Beginning and Ending of every story) remains steadfast in His commitment to use our longing for relationships to bring us to what we most deeply want – Him.

Beginning again means we surrender to the story – a story that often takes two steps forward and three steps back – knowing that in this begin again, believe again story we find Jesus. We encounter the One who is grace, mercy, compassion, truth, hope, and love. We rest in the One who is the plot – the meaning of our stories.