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Ruth Haley Barton

Logos Book Award
Do you long for a deep, fundamental change in your life with God? Do you desire a greater intimacy with God? Do you wonder how you might truly live your life as God created you to live it?
Spiritual disciplines are activities that open us to God's transforming love and the changes that only God can bring about in our lives. Picking up on the monastic tradition of creating a "rule of life" that allows for regular space for the practice of the spiritual disciplines, this book takes you more deeply into understanding seven key disciplines along with practical ideas for weaving them into everyday life. Each chapter includes exercises to help you begin the practices--individually and in a group context. The final chapter puts it all together in a way that will help you arrange your life for spiritual transformation.
The choice to establish your own sacred rhythm is the most important choice you can make with your life.

IVP Formatio

Transforming Resources

Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

Logos Book of the Year
Meetings can sap our energy, rupture community and thoroughly demoralize us. They can go on forever with no resolution. Or they can rush along without consensus just to "get through the agenda." What if there was another way?
Church boards and other Christian leadership teams have long relied on models adapted from the business world. Ruth Haley Barton, president of the Transforming Center, helps teams transition to a much more suitable model—the spiritual community that discerns God's will together.
In these pages you will discover personal and group practices that will lead you into a new way of experiencing community and listening to God together.

Pursuing God's Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups

In our frenzied culture, the possibility of living in balanced rhythms of work and rest often feels elusive. This rings especially true for pastors and leaders who carry the weight of nonstop responsibility. Most know they need rest but might be surprised to find within themselves a deep resistance to letting go and resting in God one day a week, let alone for longer seasons of sabbatical.
The journey to a meaningful sabbath practice is slow and gradual, and it is a journey we need to take in community. Sharing her own story of practicing sabbath for the past twenty years, Ruth Haley Barton offers hard-won wisdom regarding the rhythms of sabbath, exploring both weekly sabbath keeping as well as extended periods of sabbatical time.
Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest grounds us in God's intentions in giving us the gift of sabbath, providing practical steps for embedding sabbath rhythms in churches and organizations. Each chapter concludes with "What Your Soul Wants to Say to God," an opportunity to reflect and engage God around your own journey with the material. Sabbath is more than a practice—it is a way of life ordered around God's invitation to regular rhythms of work, rest, and replenishment that will sustain us for the long haul of life in leadership.
Includes a conversation guide for small groups and communities.

Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again

Rory Noland

Spiritual formation is the key to the survival of our faith.
There is an urgent need today for church services that are substantive and purposeful. Stigmatized by scandal, the church in North America and throughout Europe has been branded as useless and irrelevant. To stem the tide of nominal Christianity, we need to get serious about making disciples who can make other disciples.
Rory Noland is a worship leader who has led in contexts ranging from megachurches to small retreat settings such as the Transforming Center with Ruth Haley Barton. Combining discipleship and worship—what Noland calls transforming worship—he offers a vision for worship as spiritual formation. We need to reclaim our worship services as a formative space, and through that we will become the light of Christ in a dark world.

Transforming Worship: Planning and Leading Sunday Services as If Spiritual Formation Mattered

Academy of Parish Clergy Top Ten List
"Come away and rest awhile."
Jesus invites us to be with him, offering our full and undivided attention to him. When we choose retreat, we make a generous investment in our friendship with Christ. We are not always generous with ourselves where God is concerned. Many of us have tried to incorporate regular times of solitude and silence into the rhythm of our ordinary lives, which may mean that we give God twenty minutes here and half an hour there. And there's no question we are better for it! But we need more. Indeed, we long for more.
In these pages Transforming Center founder and seasoned spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton gently leads us into retreat as a key practice that opens us to God. Based on her own practice and her experience leading hundreds of retreats for others, she will guide you in a very personal exploration of seven specific invitations contained within the general invitation to retreat. You will discover how to say yes to God's winsome invitation to greater freedom and surrender.
There has never been a time when the invitation to retreat is so radical and so relevant, so needed and so welcome. It is not a luxury, but a necessity of the spiritual life.

Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away with God

"I'm tired of helping others enjoy God—I just want to enjoy God for myself." With this painful admission, Ruth Haley Barton invites us to an honest exploration of what happens when spiritual leaders lose track of their souls. Weaving together contemporary illustrations with penetrating insight from the life of Moses, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership explores topics such as

- responding to the dynamics of calling
- facing the loneliness of leadership
- leading from your authentic self
- cultivating spiritual community
- reenvisioning the promised land
- discerning God's will togetherEach chapter includes a spiritual practice to ensure your soul gets the nourishment it needs. Forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God is the best choice you can make for yourself and for those you lead. This expanded edition includes the popular "How Is It with Your Soul?" assessment for leaders and a flexible six- or twelve-week guided experience for groups.

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

M. Robert Mulholland Jr.

M. Robert Mulholland Jr. defines spiritual formation as "the process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others." Compact and solid, this definition encompasses the dynamics of a vital Christian life and counters our culture's tendency to make spirituality a trivial matter or reduce it to a private affair between "me and Jesus."
In Invitation to a Journey, Mulholland helps Christians new and old understand that we become like Christ gradually, not instantly. Not every personality is suited to an early morning quiet time, so Mulholland frees different personality types to express their piety differently. He reviews the classical spiritual disciplines and demonstrates the importance of undertaking our spiritual journey with (and for the sake of) others.
This road map for spiritual formation is profoundly biblical and down to earth. In the finest tradition of spiritual literature, it is a vital help to Christians at any stage of their journey.
This edition is revised and expanded by Ruth Haley Barton with a new foreword, practices and study guide.

Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

As you journey deeper in the Christian pilgrimage, you come to realize that the Christian life is more than merely replicating particular spiritual disciplines or practices. You begin to understand that at the core of Christian faith is the transformation of your very identity. M. Robert Mulholland Jr. exposes the false selves that you may be tempted to hide behind and helps you to instead discover the true self that comes from being hidden with Christ in God. If the goal of the Christian journey is Christlikeness, then you must reckon with the unhealthy ways that you root your sense of being in things other than God. Along the way, you will discover a growing sense of intimacy and abandonment to God. Not only will you encounter the joy of discovering your own self, you will also find a greater love for others and compassion for the world. The expanded edition includes a study guide for individual reflection or group discussion.

The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self

Adele Ahlberg Calhoun

Maybe you long for a more intimate prayer life or deeper insight from God's Word but just don't know how to get there. Or maybe you want to learn about new spiritual disciplines like visio divina, unplugging or attentiveness. In Spiritual Disciplines Handbook Adele Calhoun gives us directions for our continuing journey toward intimacy with Christ. While the word discipline may make us want to run and hide, the author shows how desires and discipline work together to lead us to the transformation we're longing for—the transformation only Christ can bring. Instead of just giving information about spiritual disciplines, this handbook is full of practical, accessible guidance that helps you actually practice them. With over 80,000 copies in print, this well-loved catalog of seventy-five disciplines has been revised throughout and expanded to include thirteen new disciplines along with a new preface by the author. Mothers, fathers, plumbers, nurses, students—we're all on a journey. And spiritual disciplines are for all of us who desire to know Christ deeply and be like him. Here is direction for our desire, leading us to the ultimate destination: more of Christ himself.

Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us

Best Book of Spiritual Formation, from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore
Have you joined a church or small group in hopes of experiencing real life change, only to be disappointed?
Have you sat through inspiring sermons about what is possible when Christians gather together in mutually edifying relationships, only to recognize how cynical you have become after many failed attempts?
Community may be one of the most over-promised, under-delivered aspects of the Christian life today. Individuals remain selfish and stuck in their ways. Communities become spiritually lifeless or even fall apart because we don't know how to experience transformation together.
Transforming community does not come primarily from listening to inspiring preaching or adding another church program. It emerges as we embrace a shared commitment to the attitudes, practices and behaviors that open us to Christ in our midst. And that's where Life Together in Christ comes in. Reflecting on the story of the two disciples who meet Christ on the Emmaus Road, Ruth Haley Barton offers this interactive guide for small groups of spiritual companions who are ready to encounter Christ in transforming ways—right where they are on the road of real life.