As I've mentioned before in this blog, my goal is to read 50 books a year. I reached that goal again this year. Last year I reported I had more than doubled my goal due to Covid restrictions, but I had also began reading books from the Star Wars series. I continued that trend this year and read a number of books from that series. With over 250 Star Wars books available to read, and more being published every year, I'm not apt to run out of any to read for a time. However, it is time that I report on my top 10 favorite reads of 2021. Today I will go through the bottom five and share the top five tomorrow.
10. Soul Detox: Clean Living in a Contaminated World by Craig Groeschel is a book I read a few years ago when it was released. This year I read it for my devotional reading early in the year. Let's face it, life can get confusing. No matter how long one has been a Christian, we can allow bad things to enter our lives and begin to contaminate us and our witness. In this book the author challenges us to identify the false beliefs that often hold us hostage, to uncover the hidden sins in our lives, to deal with unresolved anger and many other such issues. This is a great book to use to check your heart and the way you live your life.
9. Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life is another book by Groeschel. This is another book I used for devotional reading, and it is another re-read. The first words in the introduction hooked me: "Our lives are always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are." How true this is, so what we think about ourselves, God and life will determine the person we will become. This book will challenge the way you think about these things. Zig Ziglar used to call negative thinking "stinkin' thinkin'" and he always pointed out the ways such thinking damaged us as God's creation. If you struggle with such thinking, this book can help you.
8. Does anyone need another book on how the culture is impacting the church? Yes, if that book is Positively Irritating: Embracing a Post-Christian World to Form a More Faithful and Innovative Church by Jon Ritner. The author believes that the church needs to learn to embrace the challenges our churches face in this present culture. He served as pastor of a megachurch and left feeling called to plant a new church in a very unchurched region in Europe. He then returned to lead a church in Los Angeles. His experiences help him bring a perspective that church leaders need to understand.
7. Pastoring a church during the Covid pandemic has been a challenge. Thom Rainer helps us understand how to survive this challenge in his little book The Post-Quarantine Church: Six Urgent Challenges and Opportunities That Will Determine the Future of Your Congregation (Church Answers Resources). He identifies six challenges for the church and suggests how to best address them. This little book is only 111 pages, but I encourage you to slow down to absorb what Rainer is suggesting. I think this is a valuable book for the time in which we live.
6. Side Door: How to Open Your Church to Reach More People by Charles Arn is a book I've used a lot this year as I encouraged our church to begin small groups to provide side doors into the church. In a time when people are reluctant to attend church services it's possible to encourage them to enter through side doors. These side doors enables the church to connect with people and begin to introduce them to the person of Jesus Christ. I believe such evangelistic efforts are necessary today, and Arn does a great job of detailing how to do it right.
Tomorrow I will share my top 5 reads for 2021.
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