After fifteen plus years of vocational ministry, Ben Connelly had an epiphany. He had missed the great commission. He was really good at keeping Christians happy and really bad at making disciples. A Pastor’s Guide to Everyday Mission helps those in paid ministry positions rediscover—and live—their life as God’s missionaries, even as they minister to God’s people. Without burdening you with the guilt and shame he once felt, Connelly charges his peers in ministry to look over the walls of our Christian castles and realize that there are always more people “out there” than there are “in here.” A Pastor’s Guide to Everyday Mission will free you to let down your drawbridge, go out to the people to whom God sent you, and lead others across the bridge and into the world with you.

A Pastor's Guide for Everyday Mission: Navigating the Paradox of Leading God's People and Pursuing God's Mission

Religion & Spirituality

Connelly, Ben

Christian Books & Bibles

GCD Books

Surprise - whoever you are, you're a missionary! If you call yourself a follower of Jesus, God calls you his missionary. You may never go halfway around the world. You may not raise financial support. But because of God's gospel work in you, you are on mission: to people in your work, school, neighborhood, and those in need. As everyday missionaries, God has sent us to live out his Great Commission in the ordinary, normal, all-too-busy, and even most mundane moments of our lives. <ul>
<li>But what exactly does an everyday missionary do? </li>
<li>Where and when does everyday mission happen? </li>
<li>And how can you possibly share the gospel, without killing your relationships? </li>
</ul>
A Field Guide for Everyday Mission answers these questions and more for individuals, churches, small groups, and missional communities. Many resources exist on missional theory, leadership, and stories. But based on their years of helping people tangibly demonstrate the gospel, pastors and practitioners Ben Connelly and Bob Roberts Jr. have created a resource to help ordinary followers of Jesus put the idea of mission into everyday practice. Each day's reading includes an immediately practicable biblical principle and ends with a few ways to help you live it out. By the end of day 30, you'll have 101 different ways to demonstrate the gospel in your daily life. And along the way, practitioners such as Jeff Vanderstelt, Rick McKinley, and Lance Ford share stories from their unique contexts. A Field Guide for Everyday Mission is a tool designed for you, whether you're newly considering the missional idea, have never heard the word before, or have spent years trying to figure out how to put it into practice.

A Field Guide for Everyday Mission: 30 Days and 101 Ways to Demonstrate the Gospel

ROBERTS, Bob

Moody Publishers

<div> I'm surrounded by people at church . . . so why do I feel so alone? You show up at church every Sunday. You see people you know. You listen to a sermon together. And then you go home feeling just as isolated as you did before. What's going on? We all know that a church is supposed to be a community. The trick is to actually make it one. Communities don't happen by chance--certainly not in our Lone Ranger culture that values independence and individualism. A truly Christian community must be built by intentional practices that allow for deeper connections, centered on the unity that can only be found in Christ. In A Field Guide for Genuine Community, longtime pastor and discipleship trainer Ben Connelly shows you that the biblical model for community is the family of God. In twenty-five short, practical readings, he takes you beyond the surface and helps you learn to connect with your brothers and sisters as true family members. The church isn't meant to be a collection of strangers. God intends for you to find a unified and purposeful household where you truly belong. </div>

A Field Guide for Genuine Community: 25 Days & 101 Ways to Move from Façade to Family

Don’t keep asking God for forgiveness. Do judge one another. And you’re not going to heaven for all eternity! 
How have we misunderstood the teachings of Jesus? Often His message to the leaders and disciples was: You’re getting this wrong! Somewhere along the way you got confused, lost, way off track. Would He have the same assessment of us today? 
In Reading the Bible, Missing the Gospel, pastor and author Ben Connelly shows us how to recover God’s original intentions in light of the story of redemption. Connelly helps us celebrate and understand how Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are truly good news for the tangible situations in our everyday lives. Biblical misunderstandings can lead to a small view of God—but truth overturns that. It expands our hearts for God and enables us to truly love others! 
Using theology, humor, and practical examples the author reveals shockingly common ways we get the Bible wrong. Connelly invites Christians to see themes and teachings with new eyes—or, rather, with old eyes—on topics like confession and forgiveness . . . what it means to be blessed or happy . . . whether we’re commanded to or prohibited from passing judgement. How does the gospel inform our understanding and answer these questions? Connelly gives readers a new gospel-focused lens that addresses common frustrations and helps them see with renewed hope, clarity, and courage.

Reading the Bible, Missing the Gospel: Recovering from (Shockingly Common) Ways We Get the Bible Wrong in Our Everyday Lives

Enter the mind and practice of Zen: apply the insights of one of Zen's classic poems to your life--here and now. Shitou Xiqian's "Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage" is a remarkably accessible work of profound depth; in thirty-two lines Shitou expresses the breadth of the entire Buddhist tradition with simple, vivid imagery. Ben Connelly's Inside the Grass Hut unpacks the timeless poem and applies it to contemporary life. His book delivers a wealth of information on the context and content of this eighth-century work, as well as directly evokes the poem's themes of simple living, calm, and a deep sense of connection to all things. Each pithy chapter focuses on a single line of the poem, letting the reader immerse himself thoroughly in each line and then come up for air before moving on to the next. Line by line, Connelly shows how the poem draws on and expresses elements from the thousand years of Buddhist thought that preceded it, expands on the poem's depiction of a life of simple practice in nature, and tells stories of the way these teachings manifest in modern life. Connelly, like Shitou before him, proves himself adept at taking profound and complex themes from Zen and laying them out in a practical and understandable way. Eminently readable, thoroughly illuminating, Inside the Grass Hut shows the reader a path of wholehearted engagement -- with the poem, and with the world. Destined to become a trusted, dog-eared companion.

Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitou's Classic Zen Poem

Buddhism

Wisdom Publications

A practical guide to Vasubandhu's classic work "Thirty Verses of Consciousness Only" that can transform modern life and change how you see the world. In this down-to-earth book, Ben Connelly sure-handedly guides us through the intricacies of Yogacara and the richness of the “Thirty Verses.” Dedicating a chapter of the book to each line of the poem, he lets us thoroughly lose ourselves in its depths. His warm and wise voice unpacks and contextualizes its wisdom, showing us how we can apply its ancient insights to our own modern lives, to create a life of engaged peace, harmony, compassion, and joy. In fourth-century India one of the great geniuses of Buddhism, Vasubandhu, sought to reconcile the diverse ideas and forms of Buddhism practiced at the time and demonstrate how they could be effectively integrated into a single system. This was the Yogacara movement, and it continues to have great influence in modern Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only,” or “Trimshika,” is the most concise, comprehensive, and accessible work by this revered figure. Vasubandhu’s “Thirty Verses” lay out a path of practice that integrates the most powerful of Buddhism’s psychological and mystical possibilities: Early Buddhism’s practices for shedding afflictive emotional habit and the Mahayana emphasis on shedding divisive concepts, the path of individual liberation and the path of freeing all beings, the path to nirvana and the path of enlightenment as the very ground of being right now. Although Yogacara has a reputation for being extremely complex, the “Thirty Verses” distills the principles of these traditions to their most practical forms, and this book follows that sense of focus; it goes to the heart of the matter—how do we alleviate suffering through shedding our emotional knots and our sense of alienation? This is a great introduction to a philosophy, a master, and a work whose influence reverberates throughout modern Buddhism.

Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara: A Practitioner's Guide

Religious Studies

Go beyond mere mindfulness—and deepen your connection to your self, the people in your life, and the world around you. Mindfulness is an ancient and powerful practice of awareness and nonjudgmental discernment that can help us ground ourselves in the present moment, with the world and our lives just as they are. But there’s a risk: by focusing our attention on something (or someone), we might always see it as something other, as separate from ourselves. To close this distance, mindfulness has traditionally been paired with a focus on intimacy, community, and interdependence. In this book, Ben Connelly shows us how to bring these two practices together—bringing warm hearts to our clear seeing. Helpful meditations and exercises show how mindfulness and intimacy can together enrich our empathetic engagement with ourselves and the world around us—with our values, with the environment, and with the people in our lives, in all their distinct manifestations of race and religion, sexuality and gender, culture and class—and lead to a truly engaged, compassionate, and joy-filled life

Mindfulness and Intimacy (1)

Self-Help

Personal Transformation

A plain-English commentary on Vasubandhu's classic Treatise on the Three Natures that shows us an integrative path of personal and social healing and liberation.\nIn this book, Ben Connelly shows the power of integrating early Buddhist psychology with the Mahayana emphasis on collective liberation. You’ll discover how wisdom from fourth-century India can be harnessed to heal and transform systems of harm within ourselves and our communities.\nThe three natures (svabhavas)—the imaginary, dependent, and complete, realized natures—are inherent aspects of all phenomena. The imaginary nature of things is what we think they are. Their dependent nature is that they appear to arise from countless conditions. The complete, realized nature is that they aren’t as we imagine them to be: things that can be grasped or pushed away. The three natures form the backbone of Yogacara philosophy, and by showing us how to see beyond our preconceived notions of ourselves and others, beyond the things that we’re convinced are “true,” they open up a path to personal and communal healing.\nDive into this empowering approach to freedom from suffering, from harmful personal and social patterns, and to finding peace and joyfulness in the present.

Vasubandhu's "Three Natures": A Practitioner's Guide for Liberation

What do you do when you find out the train you're on is going the wrong way? If you're Mrs. Picklebottom, you simply jump onto the roof of a train passing in the other direction!Nine-year-old Charlotte Connelly (and her dad) invite you into the whimsical world of Mrs. Picklebottom and her fanciful friends -- the loyal Mr. Conductor and the British Lord and Lady Tomatotop -- who inspire imagination and joy in these four delightful short stories. The Adventures of Mrs. Picklebottom combines the values of deep friendship and problem-solving, with quirky characters and fanciful settings - passenger trains and their various stops. Adults and children alike will laugh out loud and turn pages with anticipation, waiting to see how Mrs. Picklebottom gets out of each story's unique predicament.Look for more Mrs. Picklebottom coming soon... Learn more and follow along with Mrs. Picklebottom: picklebottom.net==="I enjoyed these stories so much. They read beautifully aloud which is particularly great! It was comforting for me as a kid to have characters you can grow to love and rely on while the circumstances change. I still love that!"--Alison Whitehurst, Broadway actress and star of "Beautiful: The Carole King" US Tour"These stories are delightful and I like how they work together... By the time you're done you want to go back and read them again now that you know more about these friends."--Ben & Bethany Fort, director of Four Day Weekend Sketch Comedy Training, & children's librarian

The Adventures of Mrs. Picklebottom: Four Terrific Train Tales for Tots & Tykes

Children's Books

Connelly, Charlotte

Literature & Fiction

Independently published

Whether you’re just beginning a relationship with Jesus or you’ve been a follower of Jesus for a long while, many of us have a hard time translating the truths we believe in our mind, to the reality of our everyday life. Given our tendency to wander away from God, we need both encouragement and tools to keep the gospel at the center of our action in the everyday stuff of our lives.This 8-week guide offers an all-of-life approach to being disciples who make disciples of Jesus. The questions, activities, prayers, and exercises will prompt you to do exactly that—put your thoughts and theology into hands-on practice. Designed for both group and individual use, each week will build on the next, aligning your heart with the will of God, examining your core identity beliefs, and launching you into mission.When God’s people commit together to sow gospel seeds in the everyday rhythms of life, a ripple effect moves through our lives, out toward the whole earth, saturating it with the good news of Jesus.

Saturate Field Guide: Principles & Practices For Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life

Vanderstelt, Jeff

Saturate

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