I started blogging oh so many years ago to reflect and share my way through some of the books I’ve been reading. I haven’t kept up so well of late, but there are a few I read in the first quarter of this year that are worth sharing. Here’s a shotgun spray summary of several books I read this winter that are worth a look:

Endurance, by Alfred Lansing
Endurance was written 50 years about a true story that happened a hundred years ago, but it is as engaging as any of the best picture nominees from last year.… Read more▹

By my accounting, there are five kinds of books in this world:

1. Those you do, in fact, judge by the cover and dismiss as books you would never read.
2. Those you start but never finish, even though you have some kind of nagging voice telling you it’s not okay to stop reading in the middle.

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Before we get into it:

• This isn’t a list of books published this year, but a selection of my favorite books read this year. I didn’t read all that many books published this year; I’m still working through piles accumulated in previous years.
• There is one criteria for inclusion: which books stand out to me the most as I review the list what I read this year.

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I spend a fair amount of energy thinking about reshaping and forming church communities, and Austin Mustard Seed in particular, for our ever changing culture. I also read a fair amount of books. But of late, that hasn’t meant I read a fair amount of books about reshaping and forming church communities for our ever changing culture.… Read more▹

I guess the theme of the month was shades of turquoise.… Read more▹

For almost ten years now, I have been engaged in conversations around structuring and shaping the North American church for the next century. (This past week marked the 8th anniversary of this blog…my own attempt to jump into the conversation.) That phrase — structuring and shaping the church for the next century — seems the best way to label this dialogue that might otherwise be called the missional / incarnational / contextual church conversation.… Read more▹

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Earlier this year, I wrote about my return to audiobooks, listening to them for the 20-30 minutes I usually spend in my car each driving between here and there. It certainly makes time spent in the car feel like time well spent, though it can be exhausting. A few months ago, I arrived at my favorite coffee shop at the start of the day already worn and haggard from listening to descriptions of repeated shark attacks on the open sea in Unbroken.… Read more▹

Something new this month — I’ve listed them not in the order I read them, but in the order of how helpful or engaging they were to my own thinking.… Read more▹