Six New Things – Week of January 16, 2023

We’re drawing lines from personal transformation to neighborhood renewal, congregational awareness to social engagement, and from particular change-makers to systemic justice work. It’s a week of individual inspiration leading to faith-based community action!

ONE

Spark your own and your congregation’s metamorphosis with Catching Fire, Becoming Flame – 10th Anniversary Edition: A Guide for Spiritual Transformation (Paraclete) and/or Living the Kin-dom: Exploring the Lord’s Prayer as a Spiritual Practice for Social Transformation (Riva Tabelisma; published by UMW Mission Resources)

TWO

‘Help adoptive and foster families – and the church called to care for the vulnerable in our midst – to help their children heal, grow, and thrive’ with Thriving Families: A Trauma-Informed Guidebook for the Adoptive and Foster Journey (Herald).

And help families welcome new folx to the block or the congregation with All Are Neighbors (Knopf).

THREE

Expand on personal, familial, and neighborhood transformation: follow the lead of folx featured in Genius of Justice (Cascade); for your tweens and teens: Better Than We Found It: Conversations to Help Save the World (Candlewick).

Find more inspiring individuals in reads for all ages in our new Change-Makers lib guide.

FOUR

If you’re looking for specific roads to rectifying racial injustices, share Ten Lives, Ten Demands: Life and Death Stories and a Black Activist’s Blueprint for Racial Justice (Beacon).

For specifics on eco-justice, check out the video released by the UCC, UUA, EESI, LRC (Lutherans Restoring Creation), and Interfaith Power & Light, outlining congregations’ access to Federal Funding Resources for Nonprofit and Houses of Worship.

FIVE

If congregational life is your focus, step outside the overwhelm with a new perspective from Carey Nieuwhof’s 5 Faulty Assumptions about The Future Church; find additional Reimagining Church perspectives in our lib guide.

SIX

And if all this has you feeling like you’re running on empty, this Lent might be a good time to consider Running from Empty, ‘a daily invitation to embrace the empty places we might prefer to avoid; to breathe deeply, love full, act justly, and to find Jesus in the stillness and the storm’.

Find more Lenten Devotionals and Online and In-Person Opportunities in our lib guides.

Let the Spirit breathe transformational life into you, your families, your neighborhoods, your congregations, and the world!!