In Educating Faith, Dr. Joyce Bellous offers an approach to spiritual formation that is based on the lifelong process of learning to be people of faith. There are two parts. The first is spiritual education that everyone needs whether or not they are religious. The second promotes maturity based on a spiritual foundation. The book describes an education that encourages people to make authentic connections with scripture, Christian culture and tradition, so that they think critically, at the same time that they learn to know God.

Children know God. They encounter God in diverse ways as they walk along the spiritual journey. Amidst this diversity, four distinct avenues for connecting with God emerge in the lives of children: word, emotion, symbol, and action. These are the four spiritual styles, broad approaches to spirituality and faith through which children experience God and make sense of their lives in the world around them.Children's Ministry that Fits blends insightful research, relevant theory, and practical ministry into a guidebook for discovering and understanding children's spiritual styles. Drawing from theology, personal experience, and the spiritual lives of children, David M. Csinos offers practical wisdom that will help pastors, parents, and teachers to move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to children's ministry and begin nurturing the spiritual lives of children in welcoming and inclusive environments.

Western culture is changing. Postmodern exigencies are encroaching on all aspects of our lived experiences. With them, these exigencies bring tremendous pressures and challenges to Spiritual Leadership-challenges that must be met and overcome, lest this traditional institution render itself out-dated and outmoded. We are now confronted with the advent of an empowered, educated, and democratically geared population-an epistemological culture that is engaged in its own determination, that has information at its fingertips, that feels entitled to its own points of view, that passionately pursues its own development, and that wants to feel validated in all these pursuits. Postmodern Western society expects its Spiritual Leaders to be able to engage it at a level of depth that is sufficiently cogent to honor individual complexity, personal trajectory and evolution, philosophical differences, scientific relevance, empirical cogency, cultural sensitivity, religious background, emotional inheritance, and existential mystery. It is a sophisticated and elegant culture, steeped in autonomous entitlement and ready to easily discard that which it feels is no longer useful. In the face of such a stark and startling challenge, what can Spiritual Leaders do to keep up? How do we approach our work when so much is demanded of us? How do we conceive of our vocation in such as way as to avoid the slide into potential cultural 'obsolescence'? This book sets forth a framework of spiritual growth and spiritual leadership that addresses these very issues. In its pages, cherished traditional messages are interwoven with post-modern therapeutic and care-giving outlooks, resulting in a product that is a must read for Spiritual Leaders today. Spiritual Leadership must find a way to remain relevant, cogent, and integrated as it toils to disseminate its essential message of growth and transformation into this post-modern world. This book tells us how. "Gedeon calls for a new vision of spirituality and a renewed role for spiritual leadership by creatively fusing the horizons of ancient Scripture and contemporary human experience. This work of theologized psychology is provocative, forcing all who read to reflect on their own spiritual journey and leadership." --Mark J. Boda McMaster University, Ontario "Building Vision is an important fusion of human development and spirituality, providing valuable perspectives for spiritual leaders. While many books on spiritual leadership lack intellectual challenge and substantive disciplinary grounding, Building Vision offers articulate and provocative perspectives that are argued thoroughly and persuasively. Buy this book . . . we need more like it." --Don Ratcliff Wheaton College Jean-Paul Gedeon is a lecturer, counselor, educational consultant, and the Executive Director of the Shining Through Centre for Education.

The Bible is honest about suffering. For Crying Out Loud is a book of forty meditations that focus on loss and recovery. Everyone is affected by loss and relational suffering goes very deep. Some of the psalms are bold in saying how much we hurt and are hurt by other people. These meditations focus on psalms that are biblical cries of the heart. Underlying the words on every page of this book is a hope that you will be able to connect so deeply with what is said in scripture that you sense more clearly what goes on in your own heart and realize that painful experiences are felt and named by other people, some of who lived thousands of years ago. Scripture shows us that, for various reasons that are human and divine, we need to cry out to the Lord when we are in pain.