Each year, our church staff shares some of the books that have shaped, stretched, and encouraged us over the past year. Not all of them were published in 2025, but each one has helped us grow in meaningful ways.
While we don’t necessarily agree with everything in every book, we believe there is deep value in engaging thoughtfully with a variety of voices. Reading beyond our comfort zones refines our convictions, deepens our empathy, and cultivates the kind of wisdom needed to live faithfully in a complex world.
As you scroll through this list, pay attention to where God might be inviting you to focus your attention this year.
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Breath as Prayer: Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, and Renew Your Soul
by Jennifer Tucker
Buy on Amazon →
Submitted by Mac McCarthy
This isn’t a book you read through — it’s a book you pray through. Breath as Prayer offers 84 short devotionals that turn Scripture passages into simple breath prayers designed to replace worry and anxiety with trust and surrender, while helping calm and center your body. Each devotional invites you to slow down, breathe deeply, and rest in God’s presence as you meditate on the truth of His Word.
This book became a meaningful staple for our staff this year, often guiding the way we began our meetings together. Personally, I found it to be a grounding companion in my own times of prayer — a gentle way to quiet my mind, steady my breathing, and reconnect with Jesus in the midst of a busy day.
“The science of breathing and the practice of praying God’s Word can work hand-in-hand to help calm your body and reorient your mind toward Christ.”
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The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space Between Our Beliefs & Experience of God
by Steve Cuss
Buy on Amazon →
Submitted by Mac McCarthy
Have you ever felt stuck in your relationship with God? You’re not alone. Not only are you in good company, but there’s also a real breakthrough waiting as you pay attention to that sense of stuckness. Steve Cuss — who, by the way, is absolutely hilarious — is a wise and trusted guide in naming the subtle obstacles that get in the way of deeper connection with God. He offers practical tools and spiritual practices for moving around them, over them, and through them.
If you feel like your relationship with God has plateaued, or you simply long for a deeper, more honest, and more authentic connection with Him, I can’t recommend this book enough. Just take your time — the goal isn’t to get through it, but to work through it in God’s presence.
“Many of us struggle with a gap between what we believe about God and what we experience from God. We believe things about God that we actually struggle to encounter in our daily lives.”
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Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church
by Michael Kruger
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Submitted by Mac McCarthy
Spiritual abuse is painfully disorienting — and, sadly, all too common in the church today. Few things are more damaging or confusing than mistreatment coming from those entrusted to lead and care for the people of God. In Bully Pulpit, Michael Kruger offers a thoughtful and courageous look at how spiritual abuse takes root in ministry settings and what healthy, Christlike leadership truly looks like. He writes with both clarity and compassion, helping pastors, elders, and church members recognize unhealthy dynamics and pursue genuine, gospel-shaped leadership.
As someone who has personally experienced abusive leadership, walked alongside others in their healing, and cares deeply about the health of the church, I can’t recommend this book enough. Reckoning with the darker side of church leadership can be unsettling, but it’s also a necessary and deeply redemptive step toward healing and wholeness.
“Some of the leaders we are producing—and, if we are honest, some of the leaders we are wanting—have characteristics that are either absent from or completely opposed to the list of leadership characteristics laid out in Scripture.”
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Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies
by N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird
Buy on Amazon →
Submitted by Katie Ignatowski
I talk to many people in the church who feel discouraged, disillusioned, and even disengaged with politics. The political landscape in the U.S. often feels like standing between two shouting tribes, each demanding total allegiance. Many Jesus followers are left feeling politically weary and unsure how to faithfully engage without being absorbed by the very forces of power that Jesus resisted.
In this book, N.T. Wright and Michael Bird offer a grounded and Jesus-centered pathway forward, one which invites readers to recover a distinctly Christian political witness - one shaped not by apathy nor fear but by the crucified and risen Messiah who exposes, critiques, and ultimately reorders the powers of the world. Wright and Bird remind us that Christian political faithfulness begins with fixing our eyes on Christ and allowing his kingdom vision to shape how we speak, vote, advocate, and hope.
“We [would] do well to remember that the whole purpose of Christian influence is not the pursuit of Christian hegemony but the giving of faithful Christian witness.”
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The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion
by N.T. Wright
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Submitted by Katie Ignatowski
Many people in the church have inherited a view of the cross that is mostly about escaping earth and getting into heaven someday. As a result, the crucifixion can feel more like a transaction than a world-changing, life-reorienting event. This book offers a biblical understanding of the cross as the decisive launching of God’s new creation project– the moment when God’s covenant love confronted the powers of sin and darkness in the world, broke their grip, and inaugurated a revolution that continues through the Holy Spirit and through God’s people today.
This reframing has helped me see the crucifixion as an invitation into God’s ongoing work right in the midst of my daily life. I see the cross as the beginning of God’s renewal of the entire world - which carries with it an invitation to take part. Every conversation, every task, every ordinary moment becomes a chance to be shaped by God and to join his transforming work happening all around me.
“Because of the cross, we are invited not simply to be forgiven people but renewed people - called to reflect God’s love, justice, and healing into his world.”
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Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation
by Lanta Davis
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Submitted by Cameron Lucas
This year God has been teaching me about the role of imagination in our spiritual journey and how many of our problems in discipleship don’t come from a lack of knowledge, but a malformed imagination. “Becoming by Beholding” is a fascinating journey that starts with an insightful exploration of how our current culture is capturing our imagination and forming us into people that don’t quite look like Jesus. It ends weaving movements in church history, historical art and architecture, and Scripture together to discover how faithful followers of Jesus over the last 2,000 years have dealt with this imagination problem.
“Ironically, in largely ignoring the powerful role the imagination plays in spiritual formation, contemporary Christians are more vulnerable than ever to alternative imaginative influences contrary to the spirit of the gospel…By forgetting to train the imaginative eye, we have largely lost sight of who we are and who we were called to become.”
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Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
by Father Greg Boyle
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Submitted by Cameron Lucas
I’m not much of a crier, but I teared up during every single chapter of this book. Tattoos on the Heart is a beautiful picture of what the Kingdom of God can look like when someone is willing to go all in and show the radical love of Jesus. In the book Father Greg Boyle recounts his journey of working with gang members in LA, however this isn’t a dry biography or a clinical discussion about gang issues.
It’s a moving, deep, personal, funny, heartbreaking, and hope-filled look at the vast beauty of the Kingdom of God. I didn’t just walk away from this book in awe of how God could love gang members in LA, I walked away in awe of God’s great love for me.
“I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what he finds there. Delights in it, in fact. Maybe, He makes a beeline to the outcasts and chooses, in them, to go where love has not yet arrived. His ways aren’t our ways, but they sure could be.”
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Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects for All of Life
by W. David O. Taylor
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Submitted by Cameron Lucas
I’ve really come to appreciate written prayers in my time with God. When the best I can bring to God is a tired or scattered self, written prayers help me focus. When I don’t know how to pray, or my prayer feels really dry and lifeless, written prayers can give voice to desires and feelings I didn’t even realize I had. This is a book about prayer, but mostly it’s just a bunch of short, written prayers for different occasions.
Prayers for the Pilgrimage is a great resource to keep nearby for when you need a little extra help in prayer. It’s helped me pray through big things with language I didn’t know I needed (Prayer After a Mass Shooting), it’s helped me pray about and prepare my heart for really mundane things that I normally wouldn’t even think to pray about (Prayer for Administrative Work), and it’s helped me approach prayer with humor and joy (Prayer for Sanity on Christmas Eve for Frazzled Parents).
“Prayer for Being Virtuous on Social Media
O Lord, you who warn us that the tongue is a fire, make me quick to listen, I pray, slow to post, and even slower to post in anger, so that my tongue might not become a restless evil, full of deadly poison. I pray this in the name of the God to whom I shall have to give an account on the day of judgment for every careless word that I have uttered on social media. Amen.”
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The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt
Buy on Amazon →
Submitted by Cameron Lucas
Any parent who is taking seriously the call to disciple their children in 2025 should be wrestling with what to do with technology. The Anxious Generation isn’t a Christian book (and goes into some weird pseudo-spiritual things at times) but does a great job tracing the shift from a play-based childhood of past generations to a phone-based childhood of today and explaining how technological advances without regulation or boundaries are one of the primary reasons why there’s a mental health crisis in young people today.
As someone who cares deeply about who my kids are becoming, it gave me some empowering data and research based recommendations in order to prayerfully and wisely discern how to best disciple my kids in a world that is very foreign from the world I grew up in.
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The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves
by Curt Thompson
Buy on Amazon →
Submitted by Josiah Shirek
In The Soul of Shame, author Curt Thompson breaks down the force that is shame and its role in shaping our identity beyond who we are as God’s children. He proposes that sin isn’t simply trying to get us to make mistakes, its goal is to make us believe we are something that we are not. Using real-life stories from past clients along with neurological research, Thompson paints a picture of the sinister nature of shame and its ability to tell us a story about who we are and what we’re worth.
This book is deep and thought-provoking in a way that will inspire you and your walk with Jesus!
