Take advantage of the summer sun to catch up on some reading. Select from one of six best-selling novels and unpack the content with friends, a group or a book club, using discussion guides that will help you connect the content to your faith. Each Summer Reading study lasts six weeks.
Interested in starting a group? Let us know! Want to join a group? Check out Group Finder!
2034
In, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, two former military officers have written a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034 – and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration. This is a futuristic dystopian view of how technology could lure us into World War Three. Ties to the book of Revelation are apparent but our hope is that you will have some great conversation around the question of whether Jesus’ teachings can be applied to a nation.
Atomic Habits
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you it’s your system. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Atomic Habits will teach you how to design habits that work for you rather than against you. This is a popular book right now and people will be clamoring to discuss the application of these ideas.
The Kindest Lie
The Kindest Lie is the story of an American family and reveals the secrets we keep and the promises we make to protect one another. The book chronicles the difficult few months of a very successful Black woman who, as a teenager, gave birth to a baby boy and gave him up for adoption. As her husband is pushing to start a family, he hears for the first time that she has a child and it drives a wedge between them. She must go back home and sew up some old wounds before she is ready to be a mother again. We’re encouraging open, honest conversation about race relations and justice with sensitivity to different cultures and views, in discussions that lean more spiritual than political.
Live No Lies
We are at war. Not with a foreign government or domestic terrorists or a creepy new artificial intelligence bent on taking over the world. No, it’s a war we feel deep inside our own chests: we are at war with lies. In Live No Lies, John Mark Comer writes a powerful book that addresses deception and the struggle to keep faith strong. This is a book centered around the spiritual battles we all face, touching on contemporary themes while hitting the core essentials of the faith.
Rest and War
Rest & War is a field guide for the spiritual life; a book of ancient methods of transformation transposed into a modern key. You don’t have to live in this world long before discovering that the pursuit of intimacy with God occurs within the context of adversity. It is a fight. Yet it is a fight in which our King has won the decisive victory. You have been set free … into a raging battle. But there’s good news: your struggles do not mean you’re doomed, rather they’re a sure sign that you are alive. Now you must learn to struggle well, for Jesus did not free you from the fight, he freed you for the fight.
The Stranger in the Lifeboat
What would happen if we called on God for help and God actually appeared? In The Stranger in the Lifeboat, Mitch Albom’s profound new novel of hope and faith, a group of shipwrecked passengers pull a strange man from the sea. He claims to be “the Lord.” And he says he can only save them if they all believe in him. This group conversation will mostly center around interpersonal issues like forgiveness and faith – and whether God could do something like this – just show up randomly.