In partnership with InterVarsity Press, we are pleased to offer a line of books authored by a diverse range of theological practitioners. The books in this series are selected based on the important ways in which they address and embody our values of:

  • Comprehensive Mutuality: Advancing the partnered voice and leadership of women and men among the beautiful diversity of the body of Christ across the lines of race, culture and theological heritage.
  • Hopeful Witness: Advancing a way of being the people of God in the world that reflects an unwavering and joyful hope in the lordship of Christ in the church and over all things.
  • Church in Mission: Advancing a vision of the local church in which our identity and the power of our testimony is found and expressed though our active participation in God’s mission in the world.

These books make a unique contribution to the equipping of Christian leaders for fuller and more faithful participation in God’s mission amid the challenges and opportunities of our day.

Read the original announcement about this strategic partnership here. Additional books will be added on an ongoing basis.


Improvising Church by Mark Glanville

Plenty of books diagnose our post-Christian malaise. Here's a dynamic solution.

The post-Christian cultural turn is creating the conditions for a crisis of confidence in the church and in pastoral ministry. While such changes can be disruptive and disconcerting, our new cultural reality makes the present moment a uniquely exciting time to reimagine churches that bear witness to Christ. How do we move beyond cookie-cutter approaches (which may have worked in the past) to building the creative, compassionate, and incarnational churches we long for?

Biblical scholar and accomplished jazz pianist Mark Glanville plays with a metaphor of improvisation to chart twelve themes as the key "notes" on which Christian communities play as they bear witness to God in the world today. Building on these two dynamic traditions—jazz music and Christian community—Improvising Church unfolds a biblical, practical, and inventive vision for churches seeking to receive and extend the healing of Christ.

Humility Illuminated by Dennis Edwards

The modern church is immersed in a competitive, polarized, and status-driven society. It's hard to have conversations about important issues when so many are defensive and unwilling to learn. Too often, Christians fall into these same traps. The health and witness of the church urgently depend on recovering an essential biblical virtue: humility.

New Testament scholar Dennis R. Edwards illuminates humility as a, if not the, distinctive identity marker of followers of Jesus. Filled with stories from the author's ministry experience, Humility Illuminated addresses common areas of leadership failure and how to avoid them, applies biblical texts on humility to multiethnic ministry and justice work, and issues a compelling challenge to the church.

Finding Freedom in Constraint by Jared Patrick Boyd

The constraints of the spiritual life, practiced in community, are what set us free. Practicing spiritual disciplines can seem difficult, especially when we undertake them as isolated individuals. But we were never meant to practice them alone.

Jared Patrick Boyd reveals how the constraints practiced in Christian community shape us into the way of Christ. Discover a deep conversation on freedom and constraint with six core practices of constraint that can form in us a greater freedom to be and become people who love as God loves. Enter into this vision with your local community (in small groups, church leadership teams, or families), and learn to make greater room to experience the love of God.

Centering Discipleship by E. K. Strawser

Discipleship without mission is discipleship without Christ.
The church often lacks maturity and missional impact because discipleship is at its periphery. In order to get discipleship to the center, leaders need a locally rooted, culturally contextual discipleship pathway to tether disciples who are disciplemakers to the neighborhood or network around them.
Pastor and discipler E. K. Strawser shows that when discipleship becomes central to your leadership and community, then discipleship becomes central to congregational mission and cultural renewal. Centering Discipleship is a gutsy practice-based guidebook for leaders who are doing the hard work of re-imagining and re-structuring their churches and communities to turn spectators into missional, mature followers of Jesus.

Join The Resistance by Michelle Ferrigno Warren

Faith-rooted justice advocate Michelle Ferrigno Warren equips Christians to join Christ's restorative work in the world. From grassroots to grass tops, Warren invites us to understand our place in this moment and learn from the poets and prophets who call us to resist oppression and injustice.

Having The Mind of Christ by Ben Sternke & Matt Tebbe

Despite our deep desire to live in the freedom that Christ offers, we are acutely aware of the gap between a transformed life and our reality. While behavioral changes can bear good results, true transformation requires a change in paradigm. Pastors Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke share eight axioms that help us open ourselves to the transformational change that God wants for our lives.

Speaking By The Numbers by Sean Palmer

It's not just what you say, but how you say it. Combining communication principles with Enneagram wisdom, Sean Palmer teaches leaders, pastors, and teachers how to convey content in ways that both inspire and connect with their audiences. Providing real-life examples of speeches, Palmer develops communication strategies that lead to connection, transformation, and mobilization.

Struggling with Evangelicalism by Dan Stringer

As a lifelong evangelical who happens to be a biracial Asian/White millennial, Dan Stringer has felt both included and alienated by the evangelical community and has wrestled with whether to stay or go. He sits as an uneasy evangelical insider with ties to many of evangelicalism's historic organizations and institutions. Neither "everything's fine" nor "burn it all down," Stringer offers a thoughtful appreciation of evangelicalism's history, identity, and strengths, but also lament for its blind spots, toxic brokenness, and complicity with injustice. From this complicated space, we can move forward with informed vision rather than resignation and with hope for our future together.

Together in Ministry by Rob Dixon

Women and men are designed to work together in fulfilling God's mission on earth. Yet God's original intent for equal partnership has been so distorted that churches and organizations continually struggle to foster healthy mixed-gender ministry collaboration. Is it even possible to return to the Genesis ideal of co-laborers in today's contexts?

Radiant Church by Tara Beth Leach

In an era where the church has lost much of its credibility, pastor Tara Beth Leach casts a vision for Christians to rediscover a robust, attractive witness and form the radiant communities God intends. Challenging idolatrous false images of God and calling out toxic patterns, she shows how we can recover a winsome picture of a kingdom of abundance and goodness.

Uncommon Church by Alvin Sanders

In urban ministry, Christians too often treat the poor as goodwill projects instead of people. How can the people of God develop healthy, local, urban churches that will seek the common good of their communities? In this essential resource, Alvin Sanders engages hard truths about urban neighborhoods and provides a model for how to do ministry in difficult conditions.

Tempered Resilience by Tod Bolsinger

Tempered Resilience by Tod Bolsinger is about forming resilience so leaders can lead through the resistance that always accompanies change. This eight-session study guide is designed to lead to honest conversations for self-discovery as well as offer practices that leaders and their teams can take on together.

Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity by David W. Swanson

Confronted by the deep-rooted racial injustice in our society, many white Christians instinctively scramble to add diversity to their churches and ministries. But is diversity really the answer to the widespread racial dysfunction we see in the church?

A Sojourner's Truth: Choosing Freedom and Courage in a Divided World by Natasha Sistrunk Robinson

In A Sojourner's Truth we are drawn into the journey of a young African American girl from South Carolina to the United States Naval Academy and then into a calling as a speaker, mentor, writer, and teacher.

What Does It Mean to Be Welcoming?: Navigating LGBT Questions in Your Church by Travis Collins

Is your church wrestling with LGBT questions from membership to marriage? Travis Collins has been there. A pastor who has walked congregations through the complex issues surrounding gay Christians, he knows firsthand the confusion and hurt that often follow. He has also seen churches have these conversations with grace and understanding.

Seven Practices For The Church On Mission by David E. Fitch

Jesus gave his followers seven key practices. When we practice these disciplines, God becomes faithfully present to us, and we in turn become God's faithful presence to the world. Pastor and professor David Fitch shows how these seven practices can revolutionize the church's presence in our neighborhoods, transform our way of life in the world, and advance the kingdom.

God is Stranger: Finding God in Unexpected Places by Krish Kandiah

Who is God? Kandiah offers us a fresh look at some of the difficult, awkward, and even troubling Bible passages, helping us discover that when God shows up unannounced and unrecognized, that’s precisely when big things happen. God Is Stranger challenges us to replace our sanitized concept of God with a more awe-inspiring, magnificent and majestic, true-to-the-Bible God.

Emboldened: A Vision for Empowering Women in Ministry by Tara Beth Leach

Women are central to the mission of God. Tara Beth Leach, senior pastor of her denomination's flagship church, issues a stirring call for a new generation of women in ministry: to teach, to preach, to shepherd, and to lead. Providing practical advice and encouragement, Leach shows how God not only permits women to minister—he emboldens, empowers, and unleashes them to lead out of the fullness of who they are.

White Awake: An Honest Look at What it Means to be White by Daniel Hill

You may be white, but don't think you have no culture. Charting his own journey toward understanding his white identity, Daniel Hill shows us the seven stages we encounter on the path to cultural awakening. This timely book will give you a new perspective on being white and also empower you to be an agent of reconciliation in our increasingly diverse and divided world.

Paradoxology: Why Christianity Was Never Meant to be Simple by Krish Kandiah

Many of us have big questions about God that the Christian faith seems to leave unanswered. But what if that tension is exactly where faith comes alive? Paradoxology boldly claims that the paradoxes that seem to undermine belief are actually the heart of our vibrant faith, and it is only by continually wrestling with them that God is most clearly revealed.

Embrace: God's Radical Shalom for a Divided World by Leroy Barber

God's call to the church is to love not just those who are easy to love, but also those we would rather avoid or ignore. Leroy Barber, a leading voice in reconciliation and justice, provides a rousing exhortation to build relationships across barriers, offering practical advice on how to do so. Embrace the challenge to show a divided world the bridge-building power of God's love.

Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines that Shape the Church for Mission by David Fitch

How can the church engage the world, not by judgment nor accommodation but by becoming the good news in our culture? Offering seven distinct spiritual practices, David Fitch helps you re-envision church, what you do in the name of church, and the way you lead a church. Reimagine the church as the living embodiment of Christ, reflecting God's faithful presence to a desperate world.

The Church as Movement: Starting & Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities by JR Woodward & Dan White

JR Woodward and Dan White Jr. have trained church planters all over North America. In this interactive field manual, they help you and your team gain eight key competencies crucial for church planting so that you can create churches that flourish and launch their own sustainable missional and incarnational congregations.

Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations about Sexuality and Spirituallity by Debra Hirsch

Nothing has exposed the gap between the church and the broader society quite like the volatile topics of sexuality, relationships, identities, orientations and even gender. With a pastor's heart and a missiologist's mind, Debra Hirsch helps us discover a holistic, biblical vision of sex and gender that honors God and offers good news to the world.