Do you feel overbooked, overworked, overwhelmed, and under-appreciated? Get a fresh perspective on your worth and your work with this Bible study based on the award-nominated Sacred Work in Secular Places.This participant guide complements the Sacred Work in Secular Places Field Manual Leader's Guide. While it's designed to be used as part of a small group study, it can also be used during personal devotional time. This simple guide is your invitation to partner with God in a beautiful broken world and discover how much your life matters in the light of eternity.

Do the women in your small group study feel overbooked, overworked, overwhelmed, and under-appreciated? Give them a fresh perspective on their worth and their work with this Bible study based on the award-nominated Sacred Work in Secular Places.This convenient field manual contains everything you need to lead an intimate and practical six-week Bible study.Whether you are a reluctant new leader or seasoned facilitator, this simple guide will help you create a space where women feel loved, accepted, and comfortable. You will see women blossom as they enjoy relationship-building fellowship while discovering their invaluable worth and work.

Job dissatisfaction rate has reached epidemic proportions. One poll estimates that 80% of employees hate their jobs. This alarming amount of unhappiness is seeping into the fabric of our lives and profoundly affecting our ability to experience joy. Let this book show you how to turn your job hours into joy hours and embrace a life worth living.

The Sacred Secular examines cultural spaces where people are experiencing something sacred. These places are not in the church. They’re in yoga studios, neighborhood potlucks, and TED Talks. Dottie Escobedo-Frank and Rob Rynders see lessons for the church in these spaces. They see new ways we can convey to people that the church is uniquely sacred and significant and that Jesus is for them. These glimpses into the sacred-secular will inspire creative church leaders to set aside their assumptions about what church looks like. The Sacred Secular nurtures empowerment, creativity, spiritual movement, and the courage to embody the sacredness and substance of our faith. “Many of us in the church (including clergy) feel we have more in common with the ‘spiritual but not religious’ than we have with lots of church folks these days. We are just as spiritually hungry and thirsty as ever, but we’re open to finding God in surprising places and spaces . . . including ‘secular’ ones. This beautifully written book is all about that phenomenon. I think you’re going to love it.” —Brian D. McLaren, author/speaker, brianmclaren.net “Be prepared to hear contemporary stories akin to the Apostle Peter discovering God in an ‘outsider’—Cornelius—in twenty-first–century urban America. This book is a jewel from two missional church practitioners in The United Methodist Church. It offers wisdom, vision, creativity, and humility that will mark the gospel-bearing church of the future. I highly recommend The Sacred Secular to pastors, church planters, and laity who want their congregations to know how to develop culturally connected faith communities in our rapidly changing world.” —Elaine A. Heath, Dean, Duke Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC

Focusing on the important relationship between the 'sacred' and the 'secular', this book demonstrates that it is not paradoxical to think in terms of both secular and sacred or neither, in different times and places. International experts from a range of disciplinary perspectives draw on local, national, and international contexts to provide a fresh analytical approach to understanding these two contested poles. Exploring such phenomena at an individual, institutional, or theoretical level, each chapter contributes to the central message of the book - that the ‘in between’ is real, embodied and experienced every day and informs, and is informed by, intersecting social identities. Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular provides an essential resource for continued research into these concepts, challenging us to re-think where the boundaries of sacred and secular lie and what may lie between.

For many centuries a false distinction between "sacred" and "secular" has plagued the church, divided the Body, and discouraged the people of God. For over twenty years, Michael Baer has been writing and speaking about the integration of all of life as sacred under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He is one of the early founders of the modern Business as Mission movement, the founder of International Micro Enterprise Development (aka the Jholdas Project) and the author of numerous books on business, missions, and integrated Kingdom living.