Deconstructing Your Faith Without Losing Yourself

How to heal religious trauma by releasing harmful beliefs Have you experienced #ChurchHurt? Are you frustrated by judgmental church people supporting oppressive systems? Do you have doubts about the faith tradition you were raised in but are afraid of losing your community? Angela J. Herrington has been there. And with over a decade of experience as a life coach, she can teach you how to begin healing religious trauma through deconstruction. Lively and empathetic, Angela will gently guide you through deconstructing your faith. This concise and actionable handbook will • give you permission to trust yourself, • show you how to seek new perspectives and information, • teach you how to embrace vulnerable exploration and self-compassion, and • help you release unhealthy beliefs that are harming you and marginalized persons. Deconstructing your long-held beliefs can be isolating and overwhelming. But you don’t have to do it alone. Begin your healing journey with Deconstructing Your Faith without Losing Yourself.

In this National Bestseller, Mary Katherine Backstrom shares heartbreaking and hilarious stories of how God uses each "mess" in our lives to bring us closer to Him. She shows us that it's okay to celebrate exactly where we are right now--holy, hot mess and all. A lot of people struggle with the concept of being holy. But the fact is, even the hottest of messes are being shaped--right now--into Jesus' likeness. In this book, Mary Katherine shares the sometimes-hidden evidence of God's work in her life and shows you that it's okay to embrace the hot messes. Mary Katherine will share both hilarious and vulnerable stories about faith, friendships, motherhood, marriage, and depression. She will cover the topics that plague our hearts every day with raw, honest truth and a side of laughter. Mary Katherine invites you into her story as a friend, encouraging you to embrace the hot messes in your life. Because we are all a work in progress, and as long as we are alive, we are under construction--and construction sites tend to be messy.

We make thousands of decisions each day, and while most of them are simple and relatively easy, many of us get stuck in the larger, life-altering decisions. This can lead to frustration, anxiety, and confusion. "It would be so much easier if life just came with a road map!" But life doesn't work like that--it's full of twists and turns, the unexpected and the unforeseen. And yet, the uncertainty of life also brings adventure and exploration, surprises and wonder. In Make a Move, pastor and coach Stephanie Williams O'Brien offers practical advice and action steps for moving through the experiments of life. These steps help us narrow down the choices when it seems like the options are endless, and allow us to discern God's leadership in a way we never could while standing still. It's time to move from a disoriented life to a life of direction and intention. It's time to make a move!

Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it? Award-winning author, pastor, and professor A. J. Swoboda has witnessed many young people wrestle with their core Christian beliefs. Too often, what begins as a set of critical and important questions turns to resentment and faith abandonment. Unfortunately, the church has largely ignored its task of serving people along their journey of questioning. The local church must walk alongside those who are deconstructing their faith and show them how to reconstruct it. Drawing on his own experience of deconstruction, Swoboda offers tools to help emerging adults navigate their faith in a hostile landscape. Doubt is a part of our natural spiritual journey, says Swoboda, and deconstruction is a legitimate space to encounter the living God. After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them. Foreword by pastor and author John Mark Comer.

“Will resonate with any readers interested in understanding American landscapes where white, evangelical Christianity dominates both politics and culture.” —Publishers Weekly In the wake of the 2016 election, Lyz Lenz watched as her country and her marriage were torn apart by the competing forces of faith and politics. A mother of two, a Christian, and a lifelong resident of middle America, Lenz was bewildered by the pain and loss around her—the empty churches and the broken hearts. What was happening to faith in the heartland? From drugstores in Sydney, Iowa, to skeet shooting in rural Illinois, to the mega churches of Minneapolis, Lenz set out to discover the changing forces of faith and tradition in God’s country. Part journalism, part memoir, God Land is a journey into the heart of a deeply divided America. Lenz visits places of worship across the heartland and speaks to the everyday people who often struggle to keep their churches afloat and to cope in a land of instability. Through a thoughtful interrogation of the effects of faith and religion on our lives, our relationships, and our country, God Land investigates whether our divides can ever be bridged and if America can ever come together. “God Land, Lyz Lenz’s much-anticipated debut book, is a marvel. Not only is it a window into the middle America so many like to stereotype but fail to fully understand in all of its complexity, but it mixes reportage, memoir, and gorgeous prose so seamlessly I wanted to know how she did it.” —Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita

From the popular blogger and provocative author of Jesus Feminist comes a riveting new study of Christianity that helps you wrestle with—and sort out—your faith. In Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey—award-winning blogger and author of Jesus Feminist, which was hailed as “lucid, compelling, and beautifully written” (Frank Viola, author of God’s Favorite Place on Earth)—helps us grapple with core Christian issues using a mixture of beautiful storytelling and biblical teaching, a style well described as “narrative theology.” As she candidly shares her wrestlings with core issues—such as who Jesus is, what place the Church has in our lives, how to disagree yet remain within a community, and how to love the Bible for what it is rather than what we want it to be—she teaches us how to walk courageously through our own tough questions. In the process of gently helping us sort things out, Bessey teaches us how to be as comfortable with uncertainty as we are with solid answers. And as we learn to hold questions in one hand and answers in the other, we discover new depths of faith that will remain secure even through the storms of life.

In 2002, while touring North America with his wife in an RV, John Suk -- lifelong Christian, longtime pastor, and noted leader in the Christian Reformed Church -- experienced a crippling crisis of faith. He emerged from that dark time with a strange new gift -- doubt. In Not Sure Suk takes readers on an eyes-wide-open, deeply personal voyage through the past and present of Christian belief, reexamining Christian faith -- in his own life and in fifteen centuries of Christian history -- through a skeptic's eyes. He exposes major pitfalls of modern Christian movements and questions what he considers to be faulty paradigms: the "personal relationship with Jesus," the "health-and-wealth gospel," and traditional ethnicity-based belief systems. In the end he is left clinging to what is for him a truer, wiser kind of faith in Jesus Christ -- faith that struggles and lives with doubt.