6. two kids books that influenced me greatly

My list of books that influenced me greatly this past decade would not be complete without acknowledging that, yes, there have been two books that were written for children that have changed my life significantly.

The first is a method we have used for our kid's ministry in Oasis. It is called Godly Play. The Godly Play method features:

1. Simple story-telling without the hype. Through this quiet, deliberate and thoughtful method of story-telling, children have time and space to "wonder" about the story.

2. Wondering. After the story is told, the children consider a few simple "wondering questions". These wondering questions are not "yes or no" kinds of questions. Rather, they help the children enter into the story and interface it with their own life. My kids have often shown me new things in Bible stories through this wondering time, things I would have never noticed had I not taken the time to look at the story through the eyes of a child.

3. Speaking of that, Godly Play is not age-specific. The story is appropriate for any age, even adults. Younger children are free to wonder about the story on their level and older children can wonder in a more complex fashion. There is no need to separate out children by age group with Godly Play. This helps them grow accustomed to much-needed diversity and helps the children learn to be mindful of others.

4. Response. Once the story has been told and the children have had a chance to "wonder" about the story, there is a time for response. During the response time, the children have many options available to them. In a typical "Sunday School" this would be the time where the "craft" happens, but what's different about Godly Play is that the children are not given all the same craft to do; they are free to use their imagination as to how they'd like to respond to the story.

5. Godly Play is holistic. First, the children are visually reminded every week of the story that binds all Christians together: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Second, the children are visually surrounded by the entire story of the Bible and have access to it any week of the year. Third, there is time for simple fellowship, free singing, meal sharing and voluntary prayer. This part of the Godly Play session is called "the feast" and it is designed to prepare children for communion and its essence: family.

There is more, but suffice to say this children's ministry method has changed me significantly.

Another children's book that has influenced me is The Young Reader's Bible. It has been our family custom these past 6 or 7 years to have a time in the morning before the kids go to school to say a few short prayers and read a short story from this particular Bible. I've lost track of how many times we've gone through it, but I'm glad we've done it because it has been a much-needed reminder to me of simple, unchanging truths concerning God and his people. Often, I find myself reflecting on the goodness of God through these simple children's stories.

I list these two books as particularly influential for me because learning to view my faith through the eyes of children has been wonderfully liberating. Maybe you'd like to try the same.

5. three books on grace that influenced me

In the past decade there are three books on grace that have changed my life.

1. What's So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey
This was, believe it or not, my first introduction to the centrality of grace in Christian faith and practice. I had already been a Christian for years by the time I read this book but I'm embarrassed to say that all that time I had never really thought much about grace. Yancey begins his book with a powerful illustration that demonstrates how grace has gone missing from the church nowadays. I have become convinced this is the first thing that goes missing from churches today, which is a great tragedy since it is the very first thing for which Jesus was known among the so-called "sinners" of his day.

2. TrueFaced by William Thrall, Bruce McNicol and John Lynch
This book helped me see how grace enables one to be honest about one's own weaknesses, shortcomings and sin. Only in an environment of grace can we be true-faced with one another (as opposed to showing one thing on our face while another thing is happening under the surface). This book shows two paths the Christian can take: the path of pleasing God or the path of trusting God. Only on the path of trusting can real inner transformation take place because it is only in the light of grace that we feel we can trust. In short, grace is sufficient to sanctify us.

3. The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning
Manning was once a priest and he is a recovering alcoholic. He is a great story-teller. Rarely does one encounter a non-fiction book that could be described as a page-turner. This one qualifies. Manning reinforces the two messages in the books mentioned above while throwing in his own personal experience with those truths. The Ragamuffin Gospel has recently been reprinted by a publisher that has a series of "classic reprints". Indeed, this book deserves the title of classic.

4. a book of prayer that influenced me greatly

This is part four in a series that highlights books that have influenced me greatly in the past decade. Today, I feature Celtic Daily Prayer by The Northumbria Community.

Ever since I took a church history course in college, I've been fascinated by the historical roots of our Christian faith. I find that what has gone before captures my spiritual imagination and sets me to thinking what's needed today from the reservoir of the past.

That's what first piqued my interest in this book of daily prayer. I think my good friend Kelly Crull found it when he was doing some research on worship resources for our church. Kelly, if you're the one that put me on to this book, thank you! (And forgive me for my fuzzyplushtoy memory, please!)

At any rate, I have been using this book as a guide in my daily prayer for the past six or seven years. It is a rather thick book. I still have yet to exhaust its treasures. But, in spite of its thickness, the core of this book can be found in just a few thin pages towards the beginning, in which is contained the liturgies for The Daily Office. Daily Office is a practice that's rooted in monasticism. It is a rhythm of prayer that seeks to help one orient one's entire day around the practice of prayer. So, there are prayer times set aside for morning, midday, evening and bedtime. Within the morning and evening prayer time, small nuggets of Scripture are provided (from the Psalms, Old Testament, and New Testament) on which the disciple can meditate slowly. Further, the midday office contains the Lord's Prayer, among other Scripture-prayers. Praying the Lord's Prayer every day is a wonderfully liberating thing. My appreciation for it has grown because of the experience.

Finally, this book has not only influenced me, but my whole family, since most days our family (kids included!) say the morning and evening prayers together. In the morning, we even stand together in a circle, hold hands and pronounce the final blessing on each other. Celtic Daily Prayer is best used in community, whether the "community" is just "two or three gathered in Jesus' name" or with a dozen or a thousand. When used this way, it has the effect of binding us together around Jesus, the center of our lives.

Having said that, I began using Celtic Daily Prayer individually. Once I saw how great it was, I encouraged its use in our week-in, week-out family life.

And, by the way, don't let "guests" or "visitors" in your home stop you from praying together. When it comes time for prayer, if we have guests in our home, we just hand them the prayer sheet and ask them to join in. When that happens, we've just made our family that much bigger.

And that triggers my final thought: Celtic Daily Prayer is not all "serious" as I'm perhaps making it sound. Sometimes we even laugh our way through prayers. And that's okay, too.

3. two books about hard work and sacrifice

This is my third post on books that influenced me this past decade. Today I feature two books that were rather humbling. They are:

-Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

and

-The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw

These two books put in perspective just what it is to work hard and why one would sacrifice so much for something. They also gave an inspiring picture of what can be accomplished if we put our mind to it as well as providing powerful examples of true vision. Speaking of great accomplishments, I’m slowly chipping my way through Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas. Incredible.

2. books by henri nouwen have influenced me greatly

This is my second post on books that influenced me this past decade. Today I feature two books by Henri Nouwen.

1. In The Name of Jesus
I read this book as part of my training/preparation for team leadership. My mentor Brian Newman had me read it because Nouwen posed some powerful thoughts on "the nature of Christian leadership in the 21st century". More than what was written, what impacted me just as much was the gentle character of Nouwen's writing and the power of Nouwen's own story: he gave up a prestigious career at Harvard to work among mentally handicapped people in Canada. This experience stripped him of his own self-importance and reminded him of the basis of simple love in Christian ministry. This "stripping" of self is critical to all truly authentic ministry.

I have prepared a study guide to go with this book. If you’d like a copy of it, just email me and I’ll pass it along. Or, if you like, I can post it on t(r)oymarbles and you can grab it that way.

2. The Way of the Heart
In this book Nouwen gleans insights from the Desert Fathers and Mothers so as to propose the idea that there are three disciplines which are particularly vital to healthy Christian ministry. I have become convinced that they truly are indispensable and, sadly, underused. The disciplines are solitude, silence and prayer. One thought that I (as a preacher) find provocative is the idea that good preaching helps people enter into silence so they have time and space to hear God speaking to them. Healthy preaching actually helps people befriend their own silence. This is important because silence is a practice that has even become fearful in today's wordy world. Fascinating thought, eh?

I am two-thirds finished with the writing of a study guide to go with this book as well, so if you’d like what I have so far, just ask.

You can use either of the two study guides for personal/individual purposes or you can use them as primers to get some small group discussion going.

1. three books on theater that have influenced me greatly

I was tagged in a Facebook note. My good friend Gibby did a "10 + 10 most influential books" list and that got me to thinking of the books or articles that have influenced me greatly over these past ten years. Rather than just list them, I thought I'd use this as an excuse to do some self-reflection (and perhaps you'll find it interesting too) so I'm going to divide up my "most influential books" into a handful of different posts so as to be easier on my bloggy readers.

Let's start with three books from the world of the theater that have influenced my ministry greatly. It may seem strange to you that books on theater-craft can help a minister, but there you have it. By way of general explanation, I find concepts related to the creation of healthy acting ensembles to be applicable in team ministry settings, since ministry is more like art than business or science (not to mention the fact that both ministry and drama have a common crazy glue: conflict). Below, a further explanation:



-Impro by Keith Johnstone has influenced me a lot. I have particularly used ideas inspired by the chapter in this book that deals with “Status Transactions” to illustrate the complexity we encounter in the many subtle power-plays that people make to gain the upper hand in everyday interpersonal relationships. I find the many insights that come from looking deeply at everyday status transactions and their motivations to be indispensable when it comes to managing conflict. Because of this, ideas presented in this chapter form the backbone of much of the team building work I’ve done.



-I have also been influenced deeply by a book called A Practical Handbook for the Actor by Melissa Bruder, et al. There are quite a few concepts discussed in this book that I find helpful in life (in general) and ministry (in particular). The concepts include Defining the Nature of Action, Keeping the Theater Clean, The Magic If, The Test of an Action, and Responding Truthfully to the Given Circumstances (among others). If you’re curious what these concepts are and how they apply to spiritual development, just ask and I’ll see if I can write some about it.



-One final book on acting that has influenced me alot is titled On Method Acting by Edward Dwight Easty. In particular, this book helps actors learn to concentrate and relax. Of course, concentration and relaxation are important skills for anyone, really, so (again) a book on acting really can teach us a lot about life and spirituality. More specifically, I have found the techniques of Sense Memory and Affective Memory to be useful in helping people tap into greater spiritual sensibilities. Both of these types of "memory" can help one develop greater emotional and spiritual health and awareness. In fact, I recommend using Sense Memory in reading Scripture with greater imagination, since creativity is an underused faculty by most of us when it comes to reading the Bible. I have also found concepts in this book useful in that it teaches that certain physical sensations/recollections can effect specific emotional/spiritual states and vice-versa. This truth has led me to believe that spiritual formation can follow a dual trajectory—that of inside-out and outside-in (we needn’t think either/or about this).

Well, there you have it: three books on the theater that have helped me as a minister. Who woulda thunk it, eh?