Obviously this will not be an objective book review as some of the other ones since I’m the author. At the same time I wanted to let you know about Church Search because I believe that many of church leaders reading this blog will find information helpful for them.

Three years ago, Christianity Today wrote an article on the church online stating 80 to 85 percent of people are finding their church based on websites. This percentage has only increased over time. Unfortunately, what I have found is that many churches desiring to attract new people have purchased a nice website but have not thought through how people find that website. Therefore most churches and ministries are missing free advertising and prospective visitors by neglecting some simple search engine optimization tactics for their website.

The goal of this book is to educate ministry leaders on the importance of having a presence online for their church or ministry, how to leverage the power of search engines to help people find that online presence, and how to determine if people are viewing the pages desired once they find that website. This book is not intending to take the place of the work of the Holy Spirit in drawing people to Jesus, and it is not intending to steal from the work of other ministries that churches are engaged in for the benefit of the body of Christ. Rather I desire that the tools received from this book would enable non-believers to stumble upon churches’ websites—to discover the work Christ is doing through the church and to be drawn to investigate further at that place of worship. Similarly, I hope this book will help Christians who have just moved to a new area to more quickly find a church home by selecting some potential places through a few minutes online.

Church Search is packed with practical steps to get your ministry to show up in search engines and lead to new visitors. As with everything you do, pray through the suggestions. Ask God to point out the ones He has for you. Online tricks will never replace the work of God through you, but as a co-laborer with Christ, these tips can help grow the effectiveness of the time and money invested in reaching your target audience.

One of my professors in school started his first lecture with the question, “Who are marketers?” The simple answer was we all are. Everything you do leaves an impression on those around you. Therefore, as ministers of the Gospel, marketing implies being wise in the way we act to outsiders and making the most of every opportunity.

• For the next couple months, I will give a free copy to anyone who agrees to read and write a review of it on their blog or publication. You can just request a copy from me either by DM on my Twitter account @KevinShorter or emailing me at (my first name) @praytel.net.
• You can also purchase Church Search at Barnes and Noble for $9 or at Westbow Publishing for $10.

Shame Off You is written by Alan Wright, the pastor of church I was a member. I also had the priviledge of leading a 4-week follow up class for Pastor Alan after he held a conference at his church, Reynolda. I say this as a disclaimer, but it is a very good book and worthy of your time. Shame is an important topic that often goes ignored and therefore many people are hindered in their walks with God as shame goes unaddressed. Shame will keep you from approaching God with your requests and keep you from living out who God has called you to be. Here are some thoughts from the book that I hope would encourage you to take the time to read it.

1. The world is filled with people under the weight of shame. Knowing you have to measure up in order to feel acceptable while knowing that you can’t quite measure up leaves you with a gnawing anxiety that wreaks havoc in your soul. We might recognize them as lies, but since the shame feels true, we live out of them. Other people also put shame on us. It is a common motivator in today’s world, and while it can get us to try harder, it never sets us free.


2. No matter what degree of shame you have experienced, you have a chance to let go of judgment, bitterness, and unforgiveness. Healing comes not just from the acknowledgment of the pain, but the forgiveness you choose to give. Forgiving does not mean denying or excusing the shame you suffered, but rather means letting go of its hold on your heart. The issue is never the capacity to forgive, but whether you desire to forgive.


3. God never uses shame to motivate us toward right living or excellence. He never motivates us by withholding His love from us.


4. One of shame’s greatest goals is to get you hiding from God. Fear of exposure leads us into hiding. In a shame‐free relationship, every ounce of Adam and Eve’s relationship went to exploring their future rather than covering their tracks. The humiliation and guilt of shame erode our self‐esteem and breeds deviousness and manipulation as a means of no letting our self’s to be exposed. Shame can only be healed once it is exposed.
   
   Doesn’t God already know us completely? Why then do we hide? We are afraid that he might expose it and shame us some more. We are afraid He may confirm our fears of rejection and unloveliness. God is not hiding from us; He wants to be known. He wants to heal us so we can experience the abundant life He is offering.


5. God’s answer for our shame is not personal success nor God’s pledge to take away our pain. God’s answer is, and always has been, to be with us in our pain, to bear our shame, and nourish us for the journey ahead. We do not overcome shame by focusing on our success. The effort to hide the truth of our inadequacies through the façade of success builds more walls around our hearts. Shame is overcome by walking with God.


6. Christians don’t substitute idols for God; they add idols in addition to Him. We raise up idols in our lives to salve the wounds of our past. Something happens to us and we make a commitment never to be hurt like that again, so we establish an idol to protect us from that pain. Ultimately the idol doesn’t give you peace, instead it gives you constant pressure to always please it. When we don’t perform well enough for our idols, it mocks us and sends us back to even deeper shame.

If you want to lead a class at your church based on this book, here are my handouts for Shame Off You Follow Up Class (PDF).

I also led a small group through the principles of this book. We were primarily focused on as parents how do we keep shame off our kids, but one major point is shamed people shame... wounded people wound. You are welcome to the Shame Off You Bible Study (PDF), just know that some of it will ask parenting questions. The small group focused on the following concepts.

Chapter 1: The Power of Words
Chapter 2: The Power of Marriage
Chapter 3: The Power of Forgiveness
Chapter 4: The Power of Confession
Chapter 5a: The Power of God’s Voice
Chapter 5b: The Power of Celebration
Chapter 6: The Power of Mom and Dad
Chapter 7: The Power of Boundaries
Chapter 8: The Power of Walking With Jesus
Chapter 9: How to Change Others
Chapter 10: How the Church Tries to Change You
Chapter 11: How the Gospel Tries to Change You
Chapter 12: How Idols Keep You from Real Change

I will strongly encourage you getting this book. It would be a great start experiencing more of the grace of Christ in your life.

The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer is probably my favorite book. If you want to experience the joys of Christian living, I highly encourage you to read this book.

I first read the Pursuit of God about 12 years ago. It immediately began to stir things in my devotion to God that few things ever had. It put words to things I had felt were true, but had not been hearing (or probably had not grasped before). Tozer's goal of this book was to aid God's hungry children so to find Him (via preface of book).

Here are some of the things I love about this book.

1. "The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him."

Tozer explains the paradox of the importance of pursuing God. Even though as Christians we are going to heaven and we experience God's unchanging love, there are still privileges of continuing to dive into God. "Draw near to Me and I will draw near to you" (James 4:8). God is looking for people He can lavish His blessings on, and those people are the ones who are diving into their relationship with Him. He loves to be loved. He wants to be wanted.

2. "Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us."

Jesus' death on the cross removed the veil that was hinder us from coming to God. Hebrews 4:16 entreaties us to go with confidence to the throne of God. There is nothing on God's end keeping us from experiencing the presence of God. And yet, most of us do not experience God personally or experientially in life. Why is this? We keep ourselves from God. Either from selfish desires of mis-interpretations of who God is. Whatever it is, it needs to be put to death so that we can experience all that God has for us. He loves us immeasurably. Why would we not want to come?

3. "To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but He remains personally unknown to the individual."

If God is real, then He must be relevant to our lives. Jesus says that we are called friends. Friends are experienced. They walk with us through life sharing our joys and struggles. We tend to think that there is a separation between the spiritual and the "real," which pushes the spiritual in our minds to that of unreal. God is always present, but He is only perceived by those who are looking.

4. "It is the nature of God to speak, to communicate his thoughts to others."

God is not silent. He wants to share with His friends those things that we need to fulfill the plans He has given each person. God did not forget how to talk when the Bible was finished. He loves you. He sees where you are hurting and He wants to tell His view of it. He sees that plans He has for your life and wants to lead you into them. He has created you for success, and He wants to help you get there. God is not silent. He is waiting for us to listen.

5. "Jesus taught that His power lay in His continual look at God" (John 5:19-21).

This is still a kind of radical thought for me, but Jesus did nothing on earth out of His Godhead. Everything He did is something we can do through the power of the Holy Spirit. Ephesians says He emptied Himself as a man. He did nothing except what He saw His Father doing. And, we would do greater works than He did. The key is to continually gaze at Jesus. Faith is the gaze of the soul at the lover of our soul.

6. "One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas - the sacred and the secular."

One of the common things that we discussed with students while I was on staff with Crusade is whether they would go into ministry or get a secular job. It is so hard for people to see it all as ministry. Whatever we do we should do it all for the Lord. We need to correct our thinking in that we can only serve God fully in ministry. Having a career for the Lord will look different than the world, but it does not mean it cannot be beside those in the world. "Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there."

I would highly recommend the Pursuit of God to anyone wanting to go deeper with God. I am sure if you read it you will get something different than what I laid out above, but I believe whatever you get would greatly help your relationship with Jesus. 

I would love to hear what you have gotten out of it. Please use the comments below to share your thoughts.

I have been a fan of the Cloud - Townsend duo for some time, as they are highly respected Christian psychiatrists. As soon as I saw Where Is God? by Dr. John Townsend, I jumped on it. The concept of addressing answers to people's struggle to find out where God is in their struggle fits well with my heart for people, which you can tell from previous posts on How Can We Thank God for Difficult Events and How Can God Make Good Out of This?.

So many people are walking around with baggage about past events that hinders them from seeing that God cares for them personally. This book was written to address these questions and to try and offer hope - hope that God's love for will move Him to act on your behalf. Townsend's ideas are formed by three organizing principles:

1. God is for you
2. Your experience matters
3. The Bible is our source for understanding God's ways in hard times

Overall, I think the book does a good job offering hope, but I particularly feel that chapters 5 & 7 provide the greatest impact. Chapter 5 lists out ways that people view God - ways He is not really like. I prayerfully looked at this chapter to see if there were any misconceptions that I needed to confess myself. Chapter 7 looks at where is God during my pain. This is something that I feel most people asking the "Where is God?" question are struggling. If God is always present, always good, and all powerful, where was He when I needed Him? Chapter 7 addresses this.

Finally, I enjoyed how Townsend stresses being connected to others. We are not meant to go it alone. We need the body of Christ, and when we face hardships, this is no less true. This book will be helpful for those struggling, but probably even more for those coming alongside those who are in hardships.

I just finished reading The Shack by William Paul Young and highly recommend it to anyone. The story does a great job getting past our preconceived ideas about God and challenges the lies that we believe about Him. (see our blog post on We Love Because God First Loved Us).

The story follows the character Mack through his struggle with coming to grips with a loving God and deep tragedy. As with any good book, it begins with setting the stage. This may be hard for some to read – for those who emotionally connect with stories like me. But, this beginning is necessary to understand the depths of struggle Mack will have later on trying to balance the anger he feels and the emotions he feels are being asked of him.

The unhealed pain and unresolved issues of our lives h

ave a tendency to feed lies into our hearts about ourselves and/or about God. These lies often live deep within our hearts which we keep safely hidden from others because we intellectually know they do not match the words of truth in Scripture. Unfortunately while we can keep them hidden from everyday thought, when push comes to shove we act out of those lies.

• God will not provide for me, so I spend more time away from my family to provide for them.
• I will never be free of this addiction, so I will never share it with anyone else.
• God will not take care of me, so I will live in fear of potential tragedies.
• I will never be able to manage my emotions, so I distant myself from other in order not to hurt them.
• God does not really care about me, so I manage the hurt of my life myself.
• I can never forgive my parents, so I will justify my anger to those I feel are against me.

With each of these lies, we need allow God to expose them and speak His truth to our hearts. Then we need to choose to walk out in the light of those truths. The Shack does a great job creating a story of a loving God reaching down to a hurting man to expose the lies and allow him to see the freedom of the truth.

One of the on-going lies Mack believes about God is not loving because of the tragic event that happens. In one occasion, the God figure answers Mack…

“Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.” “I did not purpose [that bad thing], but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it for good.”

It is encounters like this which is why I like the Shack. I believe this book will encourage your pursuit of God and deepen your prayer life.

For other of you who have read the book, what are your thoughts?

Gary Thomas is becoming a quick favorite in the Christian community with his series of books. I just recently finished leading a group at my church through a study of the his Sacred Marriage book and would encourage it to you. In a society that views life from the filter of what is in it for me, Thomas lays out a thesis in the Sacred Marriage that marriage is about making you holy. This book should challenge your thinking and redouble your efforts to work on your marriage. There is a choosing to follow God with your marriage; you cannot just let it come on its own.

Marriage is meant to be hard because it is two incomplete people trying to make life work together. The glory of this union is that as you succeed in making it work, you also learn how to make that same type of union work with God. That to me is one of the greatests gifts of marriage is the insight it provides to our relationship with God. Your marriage to your spouse is intended to represent Christ's love for the Church (Ephesians 5:31-32). That means that every aspect of marriage will teach us more about God's love for us. This is the angle I took on the study questions for Sacred Marriage (PDF) I put together our class. Each lesson looks at Thomas' teachings and than goes through a Bible study related to that topic.

I recommend this book as it will encourage you in your marriage, and it is easy to read. This make it great for group discussions. I was able to do more than one chapter per week, and even though my crowd was parents of preschoolers, they were able to find time to read the chapters.

It is so easy to become complacent in our marriages, so this book would be a good reminder to value and love your spouse - God's perfect gift for you. While you are at, let this book re-ignite your love for God. Marriage is meant to remind us of His love afterall.

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About a month ago Michael Hyatt gave away 100 copies of It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It by Craig Groeschel, founding and senior pastor of Lifechurch.tv. I was able to get my hands on one and started right in after finishing Obstacles Welcome. Groeschel, like de la Vega, wrote a book to help leaders. While de la Vega definitely has the experience and education, Groeschel has what I found missing in Obstacles Welcome. Groeschel has ‘it.’

‘It’ was written to explain that unknown character that successful churches seem to have. This character, which Groeschel calls ‘it’, draws people in, gets them involved, and calls them to things they could never had done alone. Groeschel spells out seven factors that contribute to ‘it:’ They are:

1. Vision
2. Focus
3. Team
4. Innovation
5. Willing to Fail
6. Outreach
7. Generosity

Groeshel explains each of the seven clearly and gives examples of what each has looked like in his life. At the end of each chapter, he has a profile of other pastors that exemplify that particular profile. The list of other pastors range from Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA to Perry Noble, pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, SC and others with churches in between them. While these simple approaches to effective ministry are clearly explained, I especially appreciated how he balances the principles with the need to keep God at the center of the tactics.

Finally, I highly recommend this book mainly for the last two chapters. In fact if the book was only these two chapters, I would still recommend it. It is in these chapters where Groeschel explains his own falling away from ‘it’ and how to get ‘it’ back. Groeschel’s falling away is a welcome and honest introspection of a period where a pastor lost focus. The chapter on how to get ‘it’ back really underlines Groeschel’s heart behind the book. The seven factors mentioned above are only gauges to help you determine where you are or how you can grow in the principles from this last chapter. In this chapter he looks at your relationship with God focusing on three requests to God: stretch me, ruin me, and heal me.

Ultimately God is more concern with you than any ministry you could ever do for him. Too often we think that God is pleased with us because of what we can do for Him—as if He needs our help. The truth is God is pleased with us because He loves us. Any ministry we do should be an outflow of the confidence that God is already pleased with us. Yes, He does call us into ministry (works for Him), but they are not to prove us as worthy of His esteem for us. He calls us into these works because we were created for them, and He knows that we will be ultimately satisfied as we are trusting Him to work through us. God would much rather let our ministries fail to get us to grow in Him then allow our ministries to succeed while hearts slowly turn away from Him.

The examples in ‘It’ are for church or ministry leaders, but the principles can easily be applied to the secular work force. You do not have to be in ministry for God to want you to be successful. He wants you to succeed at whatever He has called you to. If you pray through these principles and the factors at the end of the book, you can find ‘it’ for your own.

I recently joined the Thomas Nelson book review blogger. It allows for me to read new books from Thomas Nelson as long as I review them online. For my first book I chose “Obstacles Welcome” by Ralph de la Vega. I thought this would be a good book for most reader of this blog as it was business book by a Christian publisher.

Ralph de la Vega is the CEO of AT&T Mobility, which in itself is a strong recommendation for a business book. The book focuses in on six major obstacles he had to overcome in his life and how he allowed them to mold him into the person he is today. The stories are interesting drawing you into de la Vega’s life. Interspersed through these examples, he weaves in business principles that are important for the business minded individual. He uses charts and lists to allow these principles to be driven home. There is also a strong encouragement from de la Vega to give back.

As a business book, this is good. It is not the most entertaining or the easiest to follow, but de la Vega is someone who has accomplished a great deal by the main principle of not running from challenges but viewing them as opportunities. His story is very admirable.

Unfortunately, this book should not be on a marketed as Christian. No where in the book does he draw in the leading of the Holy Spirit and gives the encouragement to put work over all else. In one example he said, “between work and the studies, there was little time with my family. What kept me going was the doors I knew it would open to me…” Elsewhere he says sacrifice happens all the time in business. You do it because you “believe there’s a better future for you, and hopefully for your family, in doing so.”

This is a very common business approach to life. I felt it while I was getting my MBA, and there are seasons where this may be the case. This should not be the norm. The order is God, family, then work. Sacrifices are not made to improve your work situation. Sacrifices are to be made when God leads you to them. The rationale of this mindset is that if you can earn enough then you will be better off.

This rationale is a lie. Money is not the answer to all things. The truth is that the more you trust in God the better off you will be because the Creator of the Universe who loves you extravagantly will take better care of you than money. We need to get our priorities straight.

Getting an MBA was definitely a sacrifice for my family, but we felt very strongly God led us to it. Therefore we trusted Him through the process–not in the promised larger salary on the other side. Sacrifice will be required at times, but that decision should be made with your spouse directed in prayer.

In conclusion, “Obstacles Welcome” is a good business book. For those in business or wanting to improve their leadership skills, this book will be helpful to you. The idea that adversity in your life is an opportunity to grow is an important truth to know and walk in. But ultimately climbing the corporate ladder is not a sign of success. The sign of success for the Christian is doing the best you can in what God called you to do. Only God has the right to tell you if you are a success. It is His affirmation we are hoping for, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”