From the Streets to the Sanctuary: There is a Way Out is my testimony me sharing my deepest darkest secrets, letting you enter my thoughts, and navigating through my life as I guide readers to transition theirs. The book allows readers to become connected with me through the transformation of leaving a worldly life of sin to one that follows Christ. Using raw truth, readers can dig deep into secrets that held me captive to a life of sin. Each journal entry speaks of daily struggles, my thoughts on many questions that young adults face trying to transition to a life of purity after living in a life of sin. Am I really forgiven? Does God truly hear me? How can I be clean after such a lucrative sex life?

What does it mean to be church? Is it spending an hour on Sunday with people who look, think, and act much as we do? Or is it something more incarnational that seeks out those who are different, the ones living on the margins? For centuries, Christians have presumed that we are to take the gospel to the poor. Instead, the author invites us to receive the gospel from the poor. through a series of encounters with incarcerated, homeless, and impoverised individuals, the author experienced the mysterious power of Christian hospitality that turns strangers into family. Her gift of storytelling brings this mysterious transformation to life.... These twenty stories-within-a-story about what ordinary people can do when they come together across racial, economic, and geographic divides to fight poverty will expand your vision of what it means to be the church. With your eyes opened to the needs and gifts of your neighbors, you too can begin to dream God-sized dreams for a hurting world. And as you pray "Thy kingdom come on earth," you will be inspired to live in such a way as to make it happen in your own community. - Publisher info.

What does it mean to be church? Is it spending an hour on Sunday with people who look, think, and act much as we do? Or is it something more incarnational that seeks out those who are different, the ones living on the margins? For centuries Christians have presumed that we are to take the gospel to the poor. Instead, Wendy McCaig invites us to receive the gospel from the poor. Through a series of encounters with incarcerated, homeless, and impoverished individuals, Wendy McCaig experienced the mysterious power of Christian hospitality that turns strangers into family. Her gift for storytelling brings this mysterious transformation to life. Inspired by the dreams of a homeless mother who wanted to help her neighbors, McCaig started a ministry that empowers formerly homeless individuals to live out their dreams. Together these dreamers are transforming their city one person, one community, and one church at a time. Her true stories of the least, the lost, and the forgotten in her community will show you the Good News becoming reality in the midst of injustice in ways that will inspire you and deepen your faith. These twenty stories-within-a-story about what ordinary people can do when they come together across racial, economic, and geographic divides to fight poverty will expand your vision of what it means to be the church. With your eyes opened to the needs and gifts of your neighbors, you too can begin to dream God-sized dreams for a hurting world. And as you pray ""thy kingdom come on earth,"" you will be inspired to live in such a way as to make it happen in your own community. ""From the Sanctuary to the Streets is the story of how one person began to help others--the broken of our world--dream and realize those dreams. She invites us into her world and introduces us to her friends. It is through this eye-opening account of Wendy's story and the individual stories of her friends that we get a glimpse of God's power to heal and mend the broken and transform them into a community of dreamers."" --Eric Swanson co-author of The Externally Focused Church ""McCaig's vision of Christian hospitality involves opening ourselves to the most vulnerable-the abused wife, the drug addict, the ex-felon, the abandoned elderly-and discovering there the presence of God. Friendships with those close at home-family and neighbors-as well as with those across racial and class lines illustrate how 'God never works alone.' This beautifully written book is a call to all of us to embrace our dreams, whether large and small, and in so doing respond to God's call to be Christ's body for the world."" --Elizabeth Newman author of Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers ""This is one of the best, most challenging, and hope-filled books I've read in a long time. What makes From the Sanctuary to the Streets so different from other books on the subject is it's narrative quality--it reads like a novel, chalk-full of personal stories and wisdom born of experience. McCaig has captured qualities of holiness and hope that blossom in some of the most desolate corners of the inner city."" --Stephen Brachlow author of The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570-1625 ""Years ago, God gave Joseph an unpopular but ultimately redemptive dream that altered the course of his nation. Today, God has spoken a dream of the same fabric to my friend and courageous leader Wendy McCaig. Those who are wise enough to listen to this dreamer will become a part of a movement of the Church Distributed and will touch their communities with grace and hope."" --John P. Chandler author of Courageous Church Leadership: Conversations with Effective Practitioners Wendy McCaig is the founder and Executive Director of Embrace Richmond, an urban ministry in inner-city Richmond, Virginia. She holds a MDiv and has worked for more than ten years as a leader in the local church, and for another six years serving the homeless. However, her greate

Madeline City is situated inside a ring of steep mountains and all but covered by the constant clouds that serve as a reminder of the dreary conditions of all who live within the walls. While the people of Bater District, Gnight District, and other less privileged areas of the city suffer by fighting, stealing, and drinking their way through life, the officers of the church execute their Prelate's orders to bring the entire city under militant, fanatical rule. But just who is the goddess Madeline? Or rather, who was she? No longer among her people, she once brought peace, love, and prosperity to her city, but was moved to abandon them after they tarried in their allegiance to her long ago. Now the Magmenian Rebellion claims her as their champion as they strive to overthrow the church's stranglehold on the city, and the Augsburg Church cites divine duty as they scour the alleys and slums, seeking to imprison anyone who would refuse to submit to her holy law. And so it is the innocent and the oppressed who star in this collection about a people seeking to understand the forces at work in their world.

This book has been nominated for both the Sheridan Morley Prize for biography, and the Theatre Book Prize. A story of a man whose star rose very quickly and very early, and fell slowly and inexorably. A story of a man who knew himself perhaps too well, but not particularly wisely. It is exhilarating, perplexing and tragic. This new biography offers the most rounded portrait of Osborne yet seen. By embedding him in a social and cultural as well as a biographical context, Whitebrook presents Osborne in a way that has not been attempted before. It is the first book to properly explore the importance of his early collaborative work with Anthony Creighton, his lasting friendship with Pamela Lane, and his deep spiritual beliefs. It reveals the autobiographical background to Look Back in Anger and Watch It Come Down and places his literary achievement within a quintessentially English tradition. Seldom has a dramatist so compulsively revealed so much of himself – his flaws, his anxieties, his passion and his hatred – as John Osborne. His was a dazzlingly high-octane performance and in a succession of increasingly ambitious plays written during the 50s and 60s, he was able to unite a profound, intuitive intelligence with a caustically honest depth of feeling. By refusing to submit to caution, he laid bare in some of the most poetic and incendiary language heard in the 20th-century theatre, not only his own struggles and contradictions but those of the era. Almost single-handedly, he made the theatre important again. Catapulted from obscurity to being the icon of his age when he was only twenty-five, Osborne was at the height of his fame equally celebrated and derided as ‘the Angry Young Man’. John Osborne: ‘Anger is not about’ examines his fractious, often chaotic personal life against the social and political background of his times. It provides an invigorating insight into his complex, often anguished personality and a fresh critical assessment of his writing. A vivid account not only of what it was like to be John Osborne, loyal and generous, scathing and brutal, but what it was like to be so restlessly a creative artist in the latter 20th century. Click here to read an exclusive extract in The Independent