In our frenzied culture, the possibility of living in balanced rhythms of work and rest often feels elusive. This rings especially true for pastors and leaders who carry the weight of nonstop responsibility. Most know they need rest but might be surprised to find within themselves a deep resistance to letting go and resting in God one day a week, let alone for longer seasons of sabbatical.

In this audiobook, Transforming Center founder and seasoned spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton gently and eloquently leads us into an exploration of retreat as a key practice that opens us to God. Based on her own practice and her experience leading hundreds of retreats for others, she will guide you in a very personal exploration of seven specific invitations contained within the general invitation to retreat. You will discover how to say "Yes" to God's winsome invitation to greater freedom and surrender.

"I'm tired of helping others enjoy God―I just want to enjoy God for myself." With this painful admission, Ruth Haley Barton invites us to an honest exploration of what happens when spiritual leaders lose track of their souls. Each chapter includes a spiritual practice to ensure your soul gets the nourishment it needs. Forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God is the best choice you can make for yourself and for those you lead.

As you journey deeper in the Christian pilgrimage, you come to realize that the Christian life is more than merely replicating particular spiritual disciplines or practices. You begin to understand that at the core of Christian faith is the transformation of your very identity. M. Robert Mulholland Jr. exposes the false selves that you may be tempted to hide behind and helps you to instead discover the true self that comes from being hidden with Christ in God.

We live in a culture that wants it all. More is seen as better. For those chasing this way of life, “narrow” seems negative. Who wants to narrow their options . . . or be seen as narrow-minded? Which is why the most well-known talk in the history of the world—the Sermon on the Mount—is also the most paradoxical one. In it, Jesus holds up the narrow path as the most spacious . . . and the broader path as the more confining one. Rich Villodas, bestselling author of The Deeply Formed Life, explores what today’s broad and narrow paths look like so you can discern which one you’re on.

Ruth Haley Barton describes how she has discovered the real presence of God, the God who is present through the practice of solitude and silence. Her audiobook invites you to meet God deeply and fully outside the demands and noise of daily life. It is a call to the adventure of spiritual transformation, an adventure that will lead you to freedom and authenticity, allowing you to become the person God created you to be.

Logos Book of the Year. Meetings can sap our energy, rupture community and thoroughly demoralize us. They can go on forever with no resolution. Or they can rush along without consensus just to "get through the agenda." What if there was another way? Church boards and other Christian leadership teams have long relied on models adapted from the business world. Ruth Haley Barton, president of the Transforming Center, helps teams transition to a much more suitable model—the spiritual community that discerns God's will together.

Being close to God means communicating with him—telling him what is on our hearts in prayer and hearing, and understanding what he is saying to us. But how do we hear God's voice? How can we be sure that what we think we hear is not our own subconscious? What role does the Bible play? What if what God says to us is not clear? The key, says bestselling author Dallas Willard, is to focus not so much on individual actions and decisions as on building our personal relationship with our Creator.

Masterminded by Michael Christensen, PhD, and Rebecca Laird, MA, DMin, The Nouwen Trilogy compiles Nouwen’s unpublished homilies, interviews, classes, and speeches, as well as excerpts from his published writings. Available as an audiobook for the first time ever, Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit is part of this trilogy. These convenient audio sessions move you through the five classical stages of spiritual development: Awakening, Purgation, Illumination, Dark Night, and Unification.

In Self to Lose, Self to Find, Marilyn Vancil unpacks our human dilemma, sets the scriptural foundation, explores the nine Enneagram personalities, and shows us practical ways to have a more meaningful life and healthier relationships. At its best, the Enneagram doesn't merely describe who we are, but shows us why we do what we do. It invites us to see the innate gifts and inclinations of our original design-the person we were before trials and traumas began to shape us. It also reveals the strategies and false narratives that keep us from becoming who we're truly meant to be.

If the past few years have taught us anything, it's that by and large the church has failed women. From sexual abuse scandals involving high-profile pastors, to decades-long systemic cover-ups of sexual harassment and mistreatment, to harmful theology that has driven women to leave the church and find community elsewhere, it's clear that something is broken. If we want to fix it, it's time we start listening.

The last command Jesus gave the church before he ascended to heaven was the Great Commission, the call for Christians to "make disciples of all the nations.

"But Christians have responded by making "Christians", not "disciples". This, according to brilliant scholar and renowned Christian thinker Dallas Willard, has been the church's Great Omission.

The Critical Journey, at its core, is a description of the spiritual journey: our response to our faith in God with the resulting changes that follow. In this book, authors Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich address the following issues: the struggle to find meaning and wholeness, the crisis of values and identity at mid-life, the quest for self-actualization, the healing of early religious experiences, and questions about the spiritual journey. Their goal is to help us understand where we are on our individual faith journeys and also appreciate where others are in theirs.

When Christians share their faith, they often appeal to reason, logic, and the truth of doctrine. But these tactics often are not effective. A better approach to spread Christ's word, Dallas Willard suggests, is to use the example of our own lives. To demonstrate Jesus's message, we must be transformed people living out a life reflective of Jesus himself, a life of love, humility, and gentleness.

As a pastor's wife for 25 years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be. In Becoming the Pastor's Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her expertise as a historian to trace the history of the role of the pastor's wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While they gained an important leadership role, it came at a deep cost: losing independent church leadership opportunities that existed throughout most of church history and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.

Ruth Haley Barton describes how she has discovered the real presence of God, the God who is present through the practice of solitude and silence. Her audiobook invites you to meet God deeply and fully outside the demands and noise of daily life. It is a call to the adventure of spiritual transformation, an adventure that will lead you to freedom and authenticity, allowing you to become the person God created you to be.

In our frenzied culture, the possibility of living in balanced rhythms of work and rest often feels elusive. This rings especially true for pastors and leaders who carry the weight of nonstop responsibility. Most know they need rest but might be surprised to find within themselves a deep resistance to letting go and resting in God one day a week, let alone for longer seasons of sabbatical.

In this audiobook, Transforming Center founder and seasoned spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton gently and eloquently leads us into an exploration of retreat as a key practice that opens us to God. Based on her own practice and her experience leading hundreds of retreats for others, she will guide you in a very personal exploration of seven specific invitations contained within the general invitation to retreat. You will discover how to say "Yes" to God's winsome invitation to greater freedom and surrender.

"I'm tired of helping others enjoy God―I just want to enjoy God for myself." With this painful admission, Ruth Haley Barton invites us to an honest exploration of what happens when spiritual leaders lose track of their souls. Each chapter includes a spiritual practice to ensure your soul gets the nourishment it needs. Forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God is the best choice you can make for yourself and for those you lead.

As you journey deeper in the Christian pilgrimage, you come to realize that the Christian life is more than merely replicating particular spiritual disciplines or practices. You begin to understand that at the core of Christian faith is the transformation of your very identity. M. Robert Mulholland Jr. exposes the false selves that you may be tempted to hide behind and helps you to instead discover the true self that comes from being hidden with Christ in God.

Being close to God means communicating with him—telling him what is on our hearts in prayer and hearing, and understanding what he is saying to us. But how do we hear God's voice? How can we be sure that what we think we hear is not our own subconscious? What role does the Bible play? What if what God says to us is not clear? The key, says bestselling author Dallas Willard, is to focus not so much on individual actions and decisions as on building our personal relationship with our Creator.

Dallas Willard, one of today's most brilliant Christian thinkers and the author of The Divine Conspiracy ( Christianity Today's 1999 Book of the Year), presents a way of living that enables ordinary men and women to enjoy the fruit of the Christian life.

M. Robert Mulholland Jr. defines spiritual formation as "the process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others." Compact and solid, this definition encompasses the dynamics of a vital Christian life and counters our culture's tendency to make spirituality a trivial matter or reduce it to a private affair between "me and Jesus." In Invitation to a Journey, Mulholland helps Christians new and old understand that we become like Christ gradually, not instantly.

Hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality, Celebration of Discipline has helped more than one million seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God.

Much is said in Christian circles about knowing God. But Christians throughout the ages have agreed that there cannot be deep knowledge of God without deep knowledge of the self. Discerning your true self is inextricably related to discerning God's purposes for you. Paradoxically, the more you become like Christ, the more you become authentically yourself. In this profound exploration of Christian identity, psychologist and spiritual director David G. Benner illuminates the spirituality of self-discovery.

Trauma therapist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker Adam Young helps you explore your personal story so you can understand how your experiences have shaped your brain—which, in turn, allows you to understand why your present day-to-day life looks and feels the way it does. He shows you how to confront and process the story of your family of origin, your sexual story, the story your body is telling you, your cultural story, your story with God, and more with kindness rather than judgment so that you can experience healing, self-acceptance, and release.

In Get Your Life Back, New York Times best-selling author John Eldredge provides a practical, simple, and refreshing guide to taking your life back. By practicing a few wonder­fully simple practices - or what John calls “graces” - you can begin to recover your soul, disentangle from the tragedies of this broken world, and discover the restorative power of beauty.

We are constantly being formed by the world around us. To be formed by Jesus will require us to become his apprentice. To live by what the first Christian disciples called a Rule of Life—a set of practices and relational rhythms that slow us down and open up space in our daily lives for God to do what only God can do—transforms the deepest parts of us to become like him.

In this updated classic, originally published as In Search of Guidance, the author provides a rich, spiritual insight into how we can hear God's voice clearly and develop an intimate partnership with Him in the work of His kingdom.

Christians today are hungry for authentic spiritual experiences, yet all too often they don't have the knowledge of or relationship with the Holy Spirit that is the key to a fully alive spirituality. In The Familiar Stranger, pastor and author Tyler Staton draws on Scripture, tradition, and spiritual practices to help you step into a genuine relationship with the Holy Spirit.