THE STORY: When a Bronx Borough President is forced by the mortgage crisis into a confrontation with a local minister, the question they confront is one that faces us all: What is the relationship between spiritual experience and social action?

On one level this book tells a very particular story - of a church started by a charismatic woman born just 16 years after the Emancipation Proclamation which not only survived the death of the founder, but also institutionalised power-sharing by female and male elders. On another level, it tells a more universal human story of institution building, establishing community, and pursuing a life of faith while negotiating rapidly changing and often adversarial social realities.

The Confessions of a Storefront Church is a no-holds-barred, cold, hard truth that will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. A real-life observation that hits the target time after time. After his new birth, the Scriptures seemed to jump off the pages and speak to him. Unaware of the ordinance to be licensed or ordained by a church, he knew that the Bible said, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit." His decision to go was controversial in the eyes of many, but looking into the eyes of God, he found inner peace and beauty. Yet back on earth, the reality was that he had entered the ferocious teeth of an unrelenting theological firestorm!

Moving the Rock portrays several generations of African American women whose families migrated from the South to the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s and 1950s. As members of a small storefront church in central Seattle, these women--grandmothers, mothers, daughters--lean on their faith and church to face the challenges of poverty, racism, ignorance, and health. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully obvious that many of us know little about what it is like to be poor and Black in the United States. These powerful, profound stories bring this group of women and their problems, and joys, vividly and movingly to life.

Using Psalm 139, Abbey Wedgeworth walks alongside women suffering the heartbreak of miscarriage. Having experienced the sorrow of miscarriage herself, she acknowledges the isolation commonly felt and the impact that such an experience can have on faith. The 31 biblical reflections in this beautiful and comforting book remind grieving women that God sees them, knows them, loves them, and is actively caring for them. These precious verses will show women that God can bring comfort, assurance, protection, and purpose in the very sorrow that they are experiencing. Includes personal stories of pregnancy loss from others, including Courtney Reissig, Kristie Anyabwile, and Eric Schumacher encouraging sufferers that they are not alone. It is a very helpful book to give to women who are suffering in this way.

Kyle Roberts explores the role of evangelical religion in the making of antebellum New York City and its spiritual marketplace. Between the American Revolution and the War of 1812a period of rebuilding after seven years of British occupationevangelicals emphasized individual conversion and rapidly expanded the number of their congregations. Then, up to the Panic of 1837, evangelicals shifted their focus from their own salvation to that of their neighbors, through the use of domestic missions, Seamen s Bethels, tract publishing, free churches, and abolitionism. Finally, in the decades before the Civil War, the city s dramatic expansion overwhelmed evangelicals, whose target audiences shifted, building priorities changed, and approaches to neighborhood and ethnicity evolved. By that time, though, evangelicals and the city had already shaped each other in profound ways, with New York becoming a national center of evangelicalism."