Zondervan Blog

Sacred Rhythms: How Leaders Can Cultivate Contagious Spiritual Transformation, by Ruth Haley Barton

 

Guest post by Ruth Haley Barton. Barton shares how her Transforming Center® ministry assists pastors and Christian leaders in spiritual transformation. She also discusses how her new video curriculum, Sacred Rhythms, provides Christian leaders with an intentional approach for bringing spiritual transformation into your church, organization or small group. 

One thing I know for sure these days is that many Christians and other spiritual seekers are longing for more in their spiritual lives. They want more than information about God; they want transformation in God’s presence. They want more than externally imposed “oughts” and “shoulds”; they want a way of life that is congruent with their heart’s deepest spiritual desires. They want more than momentary inspiration; they want to experience the spiritual disciplines that open us to God’s transforming presence.

 

A community simply cannot become a place of spiritual transformation unless their leaders are being transformed...

The other thing I know for sure is that many people have given up on having these longings met in their churches so they are seeking this kind of experience elsewhere. This is most unfortunate! It is why the Transforming Center® has been working in such an intentional way for the last ten years to help churches and Christian organizations become communities of authentic spiritual transformation.

 

Begin with Leadership Transformation
The Transforming Center's first area of focus has been to help pastors and Christian leaders experience deeper levels of transformation. A community simply cannot become a place of spiritual transformation unless their leaders are being transformed and leading from the reality of transformation in their own lives. Scores of pastors and Christian leaders are experiencing real transformation through our 2-year program Transforming Community, and they are bringing different aspects of their experiences to their ministry settings in ways that are deeply impactful.

 

 

Looking Behind "Heart of Lies" with Jill Marie Landis

 

Guest Post: Jill Marie Landis shares what inspired her new historical novel Heart of Lies, the second of three volumes in her Irish Angel Series. Set in the Louisiana bayou in the 1870's, this story of kidnapping, deception, and conflicting loyalties is full of romance and suspense.  Jill writes:  

 

Before she follows her heart … she has to change her ways.

 

Maddie Grande grew up as a thief and a beggar in a tribe of street urchins in New Orleans. As an adult hoping for a new life, she moves to the bayou with her twin “brothers”—who were fellow tribemates—and learns to love the serenity of the swamp. But when her brothers stubbornly continue their lawless ways and kidnap the daughter of a wealthy carpetbagger, Maddie is forced to hide the precocious eight-year-old.

Suddenly Maddie finds herself at another crossroad in her life—the perfect place to start a different story. This is where a heroine’s journey begins: where crises arise and choices are made—some good and some bad—epic choices guided by either a strong faith or the struggle it takes to survive while searching for one.

 

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I try to create heroines who are out of the ordinary—determined women who are strengthened by the adversities they have to face. Maddie was inspired by The Little Robber Maiden from "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen; Oliver in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens; and from news accounts of children who were kidnapped, brainwashed, and raised by their captors. Out of those stories came Maddie Grande, a lovely young woman who wanted to do the right thing but didn't know how—especially if it meant giving up a long-held dream.

 

To me the setting of a novel is just as important as a lead character. The setting must sweep the reader away as they become immersed in a sense of time and place—which are usually past times and places that resonate with me.

By placing Heart of Lies in the Louisiana bayou, I was able to work with one of my favorite settings—the swamp. Years ago, I traveled to southern Illinois for research and was taken to Heron Pond, a bald cypress swamp along the Lower Cache River.

 

Crystal Meth: The Enemy's Scheme, by Terri Blackstock

Guest Post: Terri Blackstock reveals the inspiration behind her latest novel Vicious Cycle, which hit the New York Times bestseller list this week.

If you’ve read the papers or watched television lately, you’ve probably been thinking that it looks like the world has turned upside down. In fact, it has. In 1 Peter 5:8, the Bible tells us that “your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (ESV).

 

If Vicious Cycle can offer hope to even one addict who wants out of bondage ... then I’ll consider this book successful. The Holy Spirit will take it from there.

I imagine the enemy in a planning meeting with his demons, concocting the next big scheme to bring down humanity. “I know!” one of them says. “What if we mixed up a special concoction of poisons—things in battery acid and rat poison—and offer it to them as a drug that will give them the high of their life, one that’s cheap and easy to make at home?”

The enemy cackles. "Yes," he says. "That sounds like something that could get millions of them into true bondage. We’ll use it to rot out their teeth, make their hair fall out, change the bone structure of their faces, burn holes in their brains, age them years in just months ... And best of all, they’ll be in total bondage to us.”

 

So he created methamphetamine, also known as crystal meth and ice, because it looks like beautiful snowflakes. And what can be more innocent than a snowflake?

 

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I wrote Vicious Cycle because I wanted to raise awareness about this cunning drug, which is right out of Satan’s toolbox, meant to destroy people, and meant to keep them in bondage. During my journey through my own daughter’s drug abuse, I met many people whose lives had been ruined by meth addiction. The pull of that drug was stronger than that of a mother’s love of her child—thus, women all over the country have lost their children, because they couldn’t break their bondage to that poison.

My daughter wasn’t on crystal meth, thankfully. She chose other drugs, but I’ve already written about them in Intervention. So in this book, I wanted to raise awareness about this drug, which is most prevalent in states not normally thought of as drug dens—like Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s an equal opportunity drug, sinking its talons into middle-class and upper-class kids just as often as poor kids. Even many adults are succumbing to its lure, to the detriment of their children and families.

 

5 Lessons Learned by a Travel Junkie, by Lisa Harris

Guest post by Lisa Harris, whose latest thriller Blood Covenant just hit stores.

Now Available

I guess you could call me a travel junkie. Ever since my first overseas trip to Kenya while in college, I’ve been hooked on wanting to see the world. Now my family has been blessed with being able to travel extensively as well as live on four continents.

I love the fact that traveling and living in different countries has widened my worldview and given me a greater understanding of the lives of other cultures. I’ve met people from all walks of life who have taught me about sacrifice, friendship, endurance, and true giving.

I've learned through my travels that:

1. I need to look to God’s standards for living and not my culture’s or the world’s standards.
2. If God isn’t first in my life, then I’ve failed, because in the end that’s all that really matters.
3. True peace is found in simplicity, being in the will of God, and serving others.
4. I don’t ever want to just exist, but live life to the fullest.
5. Living life to the fullest isn’t a bigger car, a bigger house, or more possessions, because living life to the fullest isn’t defined by the world’s definition.

(What lessons would you add to this list? I'd love to hear from you, so leave a comment on my blog at  myblogintheheartofafrica.blogspot.com.)

 

Currently, our family is living in Mozambique where our primary ministry is discipleship and church-planting, but there is another aspect of life that we can’t ignore as we are faced daily with the physical needs of those around us.

With the help of fellow author and friend Lynne Gentry during this last year, we started the ECHO Project to help promote Education, Compassion, Health, and Opportunity in southern Africa. Through micro-loans, medical aid, orphan care, and other ways, this ministry helps us to "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves ... the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice" (Proverbs 31:8).

You can find out more about what God is doing through this project at www.theECHOproject.org and find ways to get involved. Or stop by my website at www.lisaharriswrites.com or my blog, which comes straight from the heart of Africa, at myblogintheheartofafrica.blogspot.com. I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to stop by and drop me a note!

About the ECHO Project
The ECHO Project works under the African Outreach Ministry to ensure no child's voice goes unheard. They benefit the forgotten through Education, Compassion, Health and Opportunity, and you can join them by investing in lives today. Learn more about how you can donate.

 

About Lisa Harris' Mission Hope Series, Book 2: Blood Covenant
New Paige Ryan and Nick Gilbert are trapped in an overpopulated African refugee camp where an outbreak of measles erupts and renegade soldiers block their only way out. Desperate for vaccines, they must put their own lives in the hands of God as they fight for the safety of the refugees under their protection. Learn More

 

Chocolate: My Comfort & Deliverer by Lysa TerKeurst

This post is adapted from Day 1 of Lysa TerKeurst's new email series, the "Made to Crave" 21-Day Challenge. To receive the rest of Lysa's inspirational emails, subscribe to the Challenge.

21-Day Challenge Sign up to take the challenge

God made you wonderful. Psalm 139 says you are wonderfully and fearfully made. You are beautiful and loved, no matter if you’re a size zero or a size thirty. You are beautiful just the way you are. But God loves you so much that He doesn’t want you to stay in a place of defeat.

There was a time when I felt utterly defeated in the area of food and health. I knew that I needed to make changes not because of the number on the scale or what clothing size I was. I knew it because of the battle that raged in my heart. I craved, I desired, I thought about, and arranged my life around food.

Yet I was a Bible teacher. I was a woman who loved Jesus. Why couldn’t I figure this out? I had found victory in so many areas of my life, but this area alluded me. I constantly asked, “Why shouldn’t I indulge?”

 

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One day I looked up the definition of the word indulge, which means “unrestrained action.” And for me, it was unrestrained eating. You see, eating in its proper context is not the problem. God gave us food for nourishment, strength, and even celebration. But when pleasure becomes unrestrained, there’s a problem.

I had to get honest enough to admit it that I relied on food more than I relied on God. I craved food more than I craved God. Chocolate was my comfort and deliverer. Cookies were my reward. Salty chips were my joy. Food was what I turned to in times of stress, sadness, and even in times of happiness.

I knew it was something God was challenging me to surrender to His control. Really surrender. Surrender to the point where I’d make radical changes for the sake of my spiritual health perhaps even more than my physical health.

Part of my surrender was asking myself a different question, a really raw question. May I ask you this same question? Is it possible we love and rely on food more that we love and rely on God?

Jesus: Favorite Uncle or Uptight Boss? by Scot McKnight

Guest post by Scot McKnight, who blogs at www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed. Scot's latest book is One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow.

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I don’t know about you, but I get tossed between absolute wonder and utter frustration when I read the moral challenges of Jesus. Some days I wonder if we ought not call Jesus a "moral zealot" to chase away our beliefs that he is an avuncular Lord. Consider words like this: "Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" or "Let the dead bury the dead," or the always yougottabekiddin’ me! line of Jesus that if we don’t give up our possessions we can’t be his disciple.

 

Sometimes, if I were to confess the deepest truth, I can almost unconsciously dismiss these lines with "that’s just the way Jesus talked," but I can’t for one conscious moment think Jesus said some of the following things and didn’t mean business:

• If you don’t have surpassing righteousness you can’t enter the kingdom (Matt. 5:20)

• If you don’t do the will of my Father you can’t enter into life (Matt. 7:21-27)

• If you don’t become like children you can’t enter the kingdom (Matt. 18:1-4)

It's the "you can’t enter" stuff that disturbs me.

My years of studying these lines (and I teach some of them nearly every semester and encounter them more times a year than I care to count) has convinced me that they are designed at their deepest core to confront us with the singular challenge Jesus gives to us as a daily summons. It goes like this:

A Place of Peace: The Inspiration Behind the Story

Guest post by novelist Amy Clipston. Amy shares about her new book, A Place of Peace, in the normal type below; and in the Bold type, she shares about life events which have laid this story on her heart.

 

A Place of Peace is the third installment of my Kauffman Amish Bakery Series, featuring an Amish family in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

 

My fascination with the Amish way of life began after my father, a German immigrant, told me that the Amish speak the same dialect as my German relatives. I visited Lancaster as a child, and their culture made an impression on me.

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In A Place of Peace, tragedy brings Miriam Lapp back to her family’s Amish community, the place where she left her family, here identity, and her heart.

 

Amidst Miriam’s grief over her mother’s death, and the consequences of painful lies from her past, Miriam is forced to face the people who rejected her. Losing her one-time fiancé and being shunned by her father becomes an excruciating test of her faith.

 

Stories of Christmas Songs

Guest post by Ace Collins. For more Christmas info and discussion from authors Ace Collins, Amy Clipston and others, visit Facebook.com/ReclaimingChristmas.

 

Christmas songs never really leave us. Like clockwork, they come back annually to set the holiday mood. They are less like old songs and more like familiar friends—just like the folks who sing them. Without holiday hits, entertainers like Bing Crosby and Perry Como may have faded into the past and their hit songs would have been buried in another era. But because of their holiday hits, these performers now come back to us each year with the regularity of Santa himself. Yes, Bing and Perry, as well as so many others—including a group of mischievous rodents, The Chipmunks, and a rocker named Elvis—make our holidays sing.

 

If you think about it, Christmas songs are like time machines: just hearing a few notes from our favorite holiday tunes can magically transport us to a cherished moment from our past. These carols are powerful musical greeting cards reminding each of us of the joy that is coming this Christmas season, as well as the wonderful love and glad tidings from past holidays as well.

 

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.

 

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.