We all long to have a deeper faith, a closer walk with God. But how do we get there? We’re pretty sure God wants us to have a faith that’s truly ours, but what does that even mean? How do we find our own faith, our own relationship with God? As author Donette Bayne discovered, the journey to find that faith can be exciting, terrifying and always unconventional. The pages of this book invite you on a journey to find that faith, to walk through the questions, struggles and victories we all encounter as we move to embrace the Kudzu Faith God desires for each of us.

Junior Jenkins, influenced by a large family, poverty, faith, and the ever-present kudzu vine, mingles fact, fiction and homegrown wisdom to remember those cotton picking days in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

Transplanted New York caterer Faith Fairchild returns as a movie crew and murder come to her adopted Massachusetts home.

Many progressive christians struggle with prayer –or, at least, with the kinds of prayer they are often exposed to: shouted, whispered, forceful, timid, begging, and demanding; everything from essay lengthy scripted petitions, to poetry read from a book, to rote recitations that no one pays much attention to, to pronouncements, to communications in a “prayer language.” They are often gripped by the power of the Christian faith but are simply unable or unwilling to endorse or engage with many of its traditional beliefs, including traditional beliefs about God and prayer. If we're not trying to connect with the kind of God who takes notes, answers “yes” or “no,” and grants or withholds favours, what or whom are we trying to connect with? And so often our words seem to travel no further than the ceiling, no matter what we believe. The situation for people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” isn’t much different. They may not “pray” in the traditional sense or in traditional ways, but many long to connect or communicate with something larger than themselves – as good a definition of “prayer” as any – whether they name that something “the divine,” “big love,” or “spirit”; or think of it as a “force” or “energy” that connects all things. This is not an academic book, nor a “how-to” document. Rather, it poses questions that are important to progressive Christians and to the “spiritual but not religious.” Working only with the assumption that prayer might have value even for those who are not sure what, or who, or even if God is, this book is about opening oneself to the “possibility of God.”

In How Far is Heaven? Ronnie McBrayer explores the "kingdom parables of Jesus" and finds in them an urgent challenge for Christians to reassess the gospel they believe and the role their professed faith plays in the world today. He argues that the gospel cannot be reduced to apocalyptical escapism, whereby the true believers will one day be rescued from the sufferings of planet Earth; nor can faith be used as a type of benefits program, providing the individual with the privileged comfort of membership.

This 12-volume series covers all of the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with moveable occasions. For each lectionary text, preachers will find brief essays--one each on the exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical challenges of the text. Each volume also contains an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of it.

In sixteen-year-old Tessendra Rockwood's world, natural resources are at an all-time low. Most of the remaining supplies are funneled into Eden, known as the "powerful city of shining abundance," while citizens of the Badlands eat gelatinous gray porridge and drink reddish iron water. Tess was born an Edenite, but after the death of her scientist mother she decides to combat this inequality by joining a rebel group called Kudzu. Together they uncover a shocking government plot to carry out genocide in the Badlands using artifical intelligence. Unofrtunately, Tess has some complicated ties to the project that test her loyalty. Robots, renewable resources, and romance get tangled together as Tess risks her life to bring justice to Eden.