Parenting in the Pew


Book Description

In this upbeat book Robbie Castleman shows parents how to guide their toddlers and teenagers to participate more fully in the worship of the church. This significantly revised and updated edition includes a new preface and new appendices with ideas for children's sermons and intergenerational community.




The Children's Pew


Book Description




Pew Sisters


Book Description

Every woman in the pew has a story of God's faithfulness, and women love nothing better than to revel in one another's experiences and celebrate the sisterhood of believers. Pew Sisters helps get that celebration started. Devotional in both tone and form, this twelve-session study tells what God is doing in the lives of real women today. From depression to grief to cancer, women from all over the Church share their stories here for the consolation and encouragement of their sisters in faith. We are all one in the Body of Christ, so these beautiful women are your pew sisters. Their joys are your joys, and their sorrows are your sorrows. They share the same faith as you, eat at the same table as you, and inherit the same paradise as you. Join them in the pages of this study and in your own small group. Book jacket.




Pew


Book Description

WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020. “The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths. Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.




From Pew to Pulpit


Book Description

A down-to-earth, practical introduction to the ins and outs of preaching for lay preachers, bivocational pastors, and others newly arrived in the pulpit. Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the amount of financial resources required to support a full-time pastor in the local congregation. In addition, large numbers of full-time, seminary trained clergy are retiring, without commensurate numbers of new clergy able to take their place. As a result of these trends, a large number of lay preachers and bivocational pastors have assumed the principal responsibility for filling the pulpit week by week in local churches. Most of these individuals, observes Clifton Guthrie, can draw on a wealth of life experiences, as well as strong intuitive skills in knowing what makes a good sermon, having listened to them much of their lives. What they often don't bring to the pulpit, however, is specific, detailed instruction in the how-tos of preaching. That is precisely what this brief, practical guide to preaching has to offer. Written with the needs of those for whom preaching is not their sole or primary occupation in mind, it begins by emphasizing what every preacher brings to the pulpit: an idea of what makes a sermon particularly moving or memorable to them. From there the book moves into short chapters on choosing an appropriate biblical text or sermon topic, learning how to listen to one's first impressions of what a text means, moving from text or topic to the sermon itself while keeping the listeners needs firmly in mind, making thorough and engaging use of stories in the sermon, and delivering with passion and conviction. The book concludes with helpful suggestions for resources, including Bibles, commentaries, other print resources and websites.




Snickers from the Front Pew


Book Description

A hilarious collection of stories about growing up as preacher's kids! The authors prove that a good sense of humor helps put everything in better perspective-including that wonderful institution called the Church. Fun cover, clever illustrations-and a theme that almost everyone in our society can relate to at some level-makes this a great impulse purchase! You will laugh until you cry as you read this "tell-all" about growing up in the church from two guys who witnessed it all from the very front row. Stories that will have you rolling in the aisles include: "Special Music: What to Do When It's Not So Special" "The Day Our Dog 'King' Got Saved" "The Church Softball League: Pansies Need Not Apply" "The Night Chad Got on Fire for the Lord."




Blood on a Pew


Book Description

On June 18, 2003, at two thirty in the morning, my eldest son, Billy, fell through the tile ceiling of a church, crashing into a hard, wooden pew thirty feet below. At the time, he was temporarily staying in the shuttered convent of this Catholic church located just outside Pittsburgh and was attending a late-night party in the church rectory with a few of his University of Pittsburgh football teammates and the parish priest. The priest hosted the event and provided the alcohol. Every one of the football players in attendance, including my son, was underage. Tragically, later the same day, Billy was pronounced brain dead at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. He was nineteen years old. Billy Gaines was a gifted athlete and promising wide receiver on the University of Pittsburgh football team. His untimely death shook his father, Bill Gaines, to the core. He felt grief as any parent would after the loss of a child. He also felt anger, not just toward the priest who provided alcohol to Billy that tragic night, but also toward God for letting Billy die. As the details surrounding his son's death surfaced, Bill faced some tough questions: What was Billy doing in a church crawlspace at two thirty in the morning? Who was responsible for Billy's death? What could he as a father have done to prevent Billy's death? Why did God allow Billy to die? As Bill Gaines puts the pieces together and tries to find answers to his questions, he finds himself on a spiritual journey. Join him as he finds healing and forgiveness in his faith and learns what led to Blood on a Pew.




Preaching from the Pew


Book Description

In this deeply spiritual and prophetic collection of sermons, meditations, and prayers, Pat Brown takes the reader on a personal journey into and out of some of the most critical challenges facing the church in these turbulent and confusing times. She unveils her story of God's handiwork in shaping her life as a child of the Reformed tradition and as the mother of a special needs son. In a time when the call for justice withers on the vine as the church struggles with itself, this book is required reading for every perplexed servant of Jesus Christ.




Waiting for Tomorrow


Book Description

A debut picture book for fans of I Dream of Popo, Between Us and Abuela, Watercress, and Fry Bread. Appa is coming home tomorrow after a long time away, and sisters Haejin and Hanna want to make something very special to greet his return. They spend the day preparing their favorite treat—hotteok, a brown-sugar-filled Korean pancake. But when their batter is ruined, how will they make something special for tomorrow? Julie Kwon’s illustrations are full of sweetness with a dash of eye-winking mischief, perfectly illuminating Haejin and Hanna’s everyday adventure. From warm hugs to sticky fingers, Waiting for Tomorrow is debut author Susan Yoon’s ode to the ordinary days that nourish the most special thing of all—family.




The Old Peabody Pew


Book Description