“… every five hundred years or so, the church has an epic, theological, doctrinal, ecclesial, and spiritual rummage sale.” And Phyllis Tickle claims the next 'rummage sale' is happening now. Shifts are indeed afoot. As a renowned religion expert, editor, and speaker, Tickle reflects on our pivotal time in Church history and describes an exciting path for the future.

Enns is one of my favourite authors and podcasters (The Bible for Normal People). When faith has no room for the benefit of doubt, we are just left with religion, Enns offers a model of vibrant faith that views scepticism not as a loss of belief, but as an opportunity to deepen religious conviction with courage and confidence. This is not just an intellectual conviction, but a more profound kind of knowing that only true faith can provide.

Life throws us “curve balls”—from devastating personal losses to world tragedies. These events often leave us doubting God, the Bible, and our faith. But instead of pushing away our reservations, we should embrace them, Peter Enns argues. A leading biblical scholar and Christian mentor, Enns has never been afraid to question the Bible or Christian beliefs. Such thoughtful inquisitiveness, he argues, is part of God’s plan.

With all of this focus on "Deconstruction" there is apparently very little attention paid to the need for “Reconstruction”. It doesn't matter whether you question hell, penal substitution, or the end times. Perhaps you're troubled by how politics has invaded the pulpit, or you're uncomfortable with the way Christians treat people in the LGBTQ+ community; or you're just not convinced that the Bible is really inerrant, infallible, or inspired. It's worth your investment of time, head, and heart - and let's face it - soul.

The title says it all! Unfortunately, the Bible became a how-to manual filled with 'literal' truths and 'instructions' about belief and behaviour that must be strictly followed for too many of us. But the Bible isn't static, and it certainly was never meant to be stagnant. It doesn't hold easy answers to the perplexing questions and issues that confront us in our lived realities - it's not that kind of book. Instead, the Bible is dynamic and moving - offering an abundance of surprising insights - provoking and inviting us to find our own answers to spiritual questions - cultivating God's wisdom within us. But first, we probably need to Shift how we read and find meaning within it.

Jared Byas casts a new vision for the Christian life that's built not on certainty, but on the risk of love. A biblically-based Christian life is not grounded in having all the answers but in a living relationship. This ultimately shifts our focus from collecting the "right" answers to loving others deeply and authentically. With stories and insights drawn from his years as a pastor, professor, and podcast host, Jared Byas calls us back to the heart of the Bible: that truth is only true when it's lived out in love.

It’s hard to leave a faith that has raised us. Maybe it’s even harder to stay. But what can feel impossible is living in the tension. Living with a faith that evolves. Sarah Bessey is an expert at faithfully stumbling forward. As a New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of Evolving Faith,the foremost community for progressive Christians, she has been trusted by thousands of people to pursue a reconstruction of faith centered on compassion, truth, and inclusion. Bessey has found a deeply underserved and underestimated remnant in the wilderness of Christianity who are still devoted to Jesus, deeply rooted in the Gospel, fascinated with Scripture, and committed to reimagining their faith.

Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals--to her, it was beginning to feel like church culture was too far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing Evans back to church. Evans found herself wanting to better understand the church and find her place within it, so she set out on a new adventure.

Barbara Brown Taylor, once hailed as one of America’s most effective and beloved preachers, eloquently tells the moving and delightful story of her search to find an authentic way of being Christian—even when it meant giving up her pulpit. Leaving Church is a beautiful story of an honest and messy faith. Taylor helps us to find language in our experiences - permitting us to move forward and trust God, the process, and ourselves.

Taylor has become increasingly uncomfortable with our tendency to associate all that is good with lightness and all that is evil and dangerous with darkness. Doesn’t God work in the nighttime as well? In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Taylor asks us to put aside our fears and anxieties and to explore all that God has to teach us “in the dark.” She argues that we need to move away from our “solar spirituality” and ease our way into appreciating “lunar spirituality” (since, like the moon, our experience of the light waxes and wanes). Through darkness we find courage, we understand the world in new ways, and we feel God’s presence around us, guiding us through things seen and unseen. Often, it is while we are in the dark that we grow the most.

Faith Shift is filled with honest stories and practical insights that offer language to what many experience as their faith grows and evolves. Escobar offers an inviting blend of vulnerability and hope. Addressing the losses that come with spiritual shifts, she tangible practices for rebuilding a free and authentic faith as it shifts or even after it unravels. Faith Shift includes personal reflection and group discussion questions at the end of each chapter. This offers hope for spiritual refugees, church burnouts, and freedom seekers.

I love this woman! Sassy theologian, pastor and speaker Bolz-Weber is a truth-teller. She brings Scripture to life in simple and profound ways - inviting Holy and transformative encounters and new ways of experiencing God. Accidental Saints dem­onstrates what happens when ordinary people share bread and wine, struggle with Scripture together, and tell each other the truth about their real lives. Check out her interview with Peter Enns Episode 157: Nadia Bolz-Weber – Being a Christian in the Messiness

Rachel's book is for the doubter and the Shifter longing for a sense of spiritual wholeness and who can't seem to let go of the story of Jesus. 'Held Evans is widely recognised for her theologically astute, profoundly honest, and beautifully personal books, which have guided, instructed, edified, and shaped Christians as they seek to live out a just and loving faith. Through theological reflection and personal recollection, Rachel wrestles with God's grace and love, looks unsparingly at what the Church is and does, and explores universal human questions about becoming and belonging. An unforgettable, moving, and intimate book.

Need something visual to accompany your Shift? Hayward's cartoons and accompanying text tell his story from being a 'Closed' Christian, with fundamentalist views of the world, to the freedom of becoming an 'Open' Christian - with the courage to ask questions and wrestle with some of the more formidable challenges of faith. His Shift also challenged his relationship so check out Til Doubt Do Us Part, The Lasting Supper: Letters for Deconstruction, and The Liberation of Sophia.

'The Bible Tells Me So' chronicles Enns's spiritual odyssey, how he came to see beyond restrictive doctrine and learned to embrace God's Word as it is actually written. Yes, you will be challenged - but in the very best way. As he explores questions' Shifting' people of faith and readers of Scripture commonly face yet fear voicing, Enns reveals that they are the very questions God wants us to consider—the essence of our spiritual understanding - Holy wisdom - lived realities. You may find yourself sitting back like you've just had come sense slapped into you - and you might even find yourself saying thank you so very much!

Throughout Holy Envy, Taylor weaves together stories from the classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been complicated and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions—even those whose truths are quite different from hers. The one constant in her odyssey is the sense that God is the one calling her to disown her version of God—a change that ultimately enriches her faith in other human beings and in God.

Brilliant thinker and writer Diana Butler Bass is one of contemporary Christianity’s leading trend-spotters, exposes how the failings of the church today are giving rise to a new “spiritual but not religious” movement. Using evidence from the latest national polls and from her own cutting-edge research, Bass, the visionary author of A People’s History of Christianity, continues the conversation began in books like Brian D. McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, examining the connections—and the divisions—between theology, practice, and community that Christians experience today. Bass’s clearly worded, powerful, and probing Christianity After Religion is required reading for anyone invested in the future of Christianity.

A gentle companion, Kate Boyd walks alongside those who have questions but can’t ask them for fear of being labelled by or cast out of their communities. An Untidy Faith is a guidebook for those who want to be equipped with practices to rebuild their faith and shape their communities to look more like Jesus.

“From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.” So writes Cole Arthur Riley in her unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Arthur Riley reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father, and how they revealed to her an embodied, dignity-affirming spirituality, not only in what they believed but in the act of living itself. Writing memorably of her own childhood and coming to self, Arthur Riley boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith: How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit? How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest? In this indelible work of contemplative storytelling, Arthur Riley invites us to descend into our own stories, examine our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and find that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it. Also, check out her interview with Peter Enns

With the honesty of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and the spiritual depth of Anne Lamott (Grace, Eventually), Taylor shares how she learned to find God beyond the church walls by embracing the sacred as a natural part of everyday life. In An Altar in the World, Taylor shows us how to discover altars everywhere we go and in nearly everything we do as we learn to live with purpose, pay attention, slow down, and revere the world we live in.

Church reimagined for a new day Katie Hays, planter-pastor of Galileo Church, shares the story of departing from the traditional church for the frontier of the spiritual-but-not-religious and building community with Jesus-loving (or at least Jesus-curious) outsiders. Now well-established, Galileo Church “seeks and shelters spiritual refugees” in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas—especially young adults, LGBTQ+ people, and all the people who love them. Told in funny, poignant, and short vignettes, Galileo's story is not one of how to be cool for Christ. Like its founder, Galileo is deeply uncool and deeply devout, and always straining ahead to see what God will do next.

Bad views of God and harmful experiences lead many of us to deconstruct. But we’re right to run from the nonsense we’ve been taught and those who hurt us. Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller offer an open and relational vision of God. This vision makes sense; it fits our experience; it’s livable. The open and relational view aligns with our deep intuitions about love and freedom. It’s for people in the fire and those with scars. It is an adventure for lovers in tumultuous times!

How to heal religious trauma by releasing harmful beliefs Have you experienced #ChurchHurt? Are you frustrated by judgmental church people supporting oppressive systems? Do you have doubts about the faith tradition you were raised in but are afraid of losing your community? Angela J. Herrington has been there. And with over a decade of experience as a life coach, she can teach you how to begin healing religious trauma through deconstruction. Lively and empathetic, Angela will gently guide you through deconstructing your faith.

Gaslighted by God is not a book of easy answers--it's a companion for those mourning the loss of a belief system who need their pain recognized and legitimized. Tiffany Yecke Brooks shows--through stories from her own life, conversations with Christians from a variety of backgrounds, historical anecdotes, and messy episodes from Scripture--that there can be faith after disillusionment. But it will be a different faith--bruised, battered, nuanced, and real, rather than one wrapped in tissue-thin platitudes and three-point sermons.

In the process of gently helping us sort things out, Bessey teaches us how to be as comfortable with uncertainty as we are with solid answers. And as we learn to hold questions in one hand and answers in the other, we discover new depths of faith that will remain secure even through the storms of life.

This book offers everything you need to explore what a difference an honest, living, growing faith can make in our world today. It also puts tools in your hands to create a life-changing learning community in any home, restaurant, or other welcoming space. The fifty-two (plus a few) weekly readings can each be read aloud in 10 to 12 minutes and offer a simple curriculum of insightful reflections and transformative practices.

In our busy lives, we often sideline prayer and spiritual practice, or wrap the subject up in a tangle of guilt-driven showmanship and ‘self-motivation’. Stripping away the jargon that we can often get caught up in, NAKED SPIRITUALITY presents the core concepts of prayer in a fresh and accessible way. Using twelve words as a structure, he shows how we can connect with God in practical, doable and durable ways, and use that connection to serve others.

Told in funny, poignant, and short vignettes, Galileo's story is not one of how to be cool for Christ. Like its founder, Galileo is deeply uncool and deeply devout, and always straining ahead to see what God will do next. Hays says curiosity is her greatest virtue, and she recounts how her curiosity led her to share the good news with people who are half her age and intensely sceptical —especially young adults, LGBTQ+ people, and all the people who love them.

Disillusioned by narrow theologies, church dysfunction, and constricted readings of Scripture, people are leaving Christianity in droves. But Jesus describes the reign of God as a house with many rooms, writes author Debie Thomas, one of the most auspicious voices in religious writing today. In this sprawling spiritual and literary imagination work, Thomas claims that there is expansiveness and belonging wherever God dwells.

He was a disrupter and a peacemaker, a rebel and a rabbi. His friends were the riffraff, and his enemies the religious elite. He was the wounded man who healed the sick, the homeless man who fed the hungry, the convicted criminal who released the captives, and the dead man who conquered the grave. The stories he told were scandalous, and the stories he lived changed the world. To reflect on the Jesus of the Gospels is to reflect on paradox, mystery, wonder, and messiness.

Negative messages about sex come from all corners of society: from the church, from the media, from our own families. As a result, countless people have suffered pain, guilt, and judgment. In this instant bestseller, Nadia Bolz-Weber unleashes her critical eye and her vulnerable yet hopeful soul on the harmful conversations about sex that have fed our shame.

Recognizing that healing is a lifelong rather than a linear process, Dr. Anderson offers markers of healing for those coming out of painful religious experiences and hope for finding wholeness after religious trauma.