Baseball legend Darryl Strawberry and his wife, ordained minister Tracy Strawberry, offer hope for troubled marriages in The Imperfect Marriage: Help for Those Who Think It’s Over ($24.99). The authors are forthcoming about their own mistakes, including addiction, adultery and financial woes, and shed light on how to make marriage work through impossible situations. Howard Books releases this hardcover Aug. 5.

In Simplify: Ten Practices to Unclutter Your Soul (Tyndale Momentum), best-selling author and Willow Creek Community Church Bill Hybels identifies the core issues that propel believers into frenetic living. Hybels admits his own battle with overcommitment and explains practical steps to eliminate the things that drain one’s spirit so that readers can enter into God’s plan for purpose, fulfillment and joyful productivity. Releasing Aug. 19, Simplify retails for $22.99 in hardcover.

Chip Ingram, best-selling author, pastor and radio personality, addresses controversial issues in Culture Shock: A Biblical Response to Today’s Most Divisive Issues ($19.99, hardcover). Topics include right and wrong, homosexuality and the environment. Ingram seeks to help readers understand the issues based on research, reason and biblical truth, and to equip believers to communicate biblical convictions with love and respect. Culture Shock releases from Baker Books this month.

Worthy of Her Trust: What You Need To Do to Rebuild Sexual Integrity and Win Her Back by Stephen Arterburn and Jason B. Martinkus is for men who want to restore their marriage following destruction caused by pornography or sex addiction. Available Aug. 19 ($17.99, softcover), this WaterBrook Press title shows men how to establish transparency and accountability, demonstrate honesty and integrity, and seek forgiveness. Arterburn is known for the “Every Man” series, and Martinkus leads Redemptive Living, a ministry helping men with sexual integrity.

Os Guinness makes an appeal for cultural transformation in Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times. The author, speaker and social critic is founder of the Trinity Forum, a nonprofit organization cultivating networks of leaders to help renew culture and promote human freedom and flourishing. In Renaissance, he shows how Christian faith remade cultures and civilizations in the past and argues that today’s church can be a renewing power in society when believers take up the opportunities before them. IVP Books, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, releases this softcover ($16) this month.

Through her own story and stories of others, Laurie Polich Short shows in Finding Faith in the Dark: When the Story of Your Life Takes a Turn You Didn’t Plan ($15.99, softcover) how God can transform the dark chapters of life into opportunities for grace. The author explores doubt and disappointment and highlights how God is present and working even if He seems absent. Short is a speaker, an author and associate pastor at Ocean Hills Covenant Church in Santa Barbara, California. Her new book is available to stores Aug. 5 from Zondervan.

Jamie George draws from his own experience as a once-reluctant pastor in a downward-spiraling marriage to offer biblically based encouragement. David C Cook releases George’s Love Well: Living Life Unrehearsed and Unstuck ($14.99, softcover) this month. The author shares how God helped him break the cycle of shame and regret to embrace a life of purpose, faith and meaningful relationships.

The faith stories of more than 125 athletes fill the pages of a new book by Pat Williams with Ken Hussar, Triumph! Powerful Stories of Athletes of Faith. Releasing from Barbour Publishing this month, Triumph! ($18.99, hardcover) features athletes from a variety of sports and the stories of stars such as Tony Dungy, Mickey Mantle and Kurt Warner. Williams is a motivational speaker, author of 70 books and senior vice president of the NBA’s Orlando Magic.

Latest project: The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity (9780781410359, $12.99, David C Cook).

You are a pastor’s kid (PK) as the son of best-selling author John Piper, yet The Pastor’s Kid is not a memoir. How would you describe this book? It is a blend of observations, conversations and my story. Over my lifetime, and especially in writing this book, I have connected with dozens of PKs. I have had the chance to observe their lives and struggles and talk with them about it. I also have my own life and challenges.

What are some of the unique challenges PKs face? Expectations. We are expected to be better behaved, but on the other hand, we are also expected to be screw-ups. We are expected to lead and set an example for our peers because we share a home with the leader of the church. The list goes on, but faultily high expectations are a big challenge.

Another significant challenge is connecting with Jesus in a real, personal way. Jesus is so commonplace for many PKs that He is little more than part of dad’s job. To connect with Him as a transcendent, powerful, gracious Savior is difficult. For some, the doctrinal distinctives and traditional depictions of Jesus are a hindrance to faith. Moving to a place of seeing Jesus clearly and meeting Him personally is both vitally important and not at all easy.

The last significant challenge is that of identity. It is tied to knowing Jesus in a real way because it’s only through Him that anyone can really find his or her identity. PKs are labeled so often as something or someone and have so many expectations placed on them and grow up in such a defined and high-pressure environment that getting to the place of truly being at peace with who God made them to be is difficult. It is hard to rise above the expectations and pressures and find confidence in the gifts and personhood God gave us.

What are also some of the blessings of being a PK? One big one is simply the amount of Scripture PKs absorb throughout their early lives. Whether they believe it straight away or come to a saving faith later, the blessing of knowing the Bible is huge.

A second blessing is the inner understanding of the church. So many people come to the church and its leaders with pie-in-the-sky hopes and expectations only to be disillusioned by their sin. PKs know all about the sin and dysfunction from an early age, but they also see the unique blessings of lives changed, people coming to faith, challenges overcome and more. PKs get the full picture of the church, bad and good, so when they mature, they can love it and serve it even better.

How can retailers help to get The Pastor’s Kid into the hands of readers? Connect with local pastors. They will likely be the ones who gravitate toward buying the book. Maybe even offer a deal if they buy one for themselves and their kids or other staff members.

To New York Times best-selling author and former psychotherapist Kevin Malarkey, total surrender to God is a “beautiful defeat,” and he wants others to find purpose and hope through the surrendered life.

Releasing this month, A Beautiful Defeat: Find True Freedom and Purpose in Total Surrender to God (9781400206391, $16.99, Thomas Nelson), explains that what Malarkey calls a “messy” journey starts with bold honesty about oneself.

It is not true that “good” Christians do not wrestle with sin, asserts Malarkey, and so he adds that the important question is: Will we struggle well?

To model the honesty that’s needed in this process, Malarkey confesses some of his own not-so-tidy sins. He humbles himself, hoping to encourage others to do the same.

“I’m going to stake everything on the belief that our path to God is through and with our struggles, not by sidestepping or hiding them,” he writes.

His appeal for authenticity is the first of two calls in A Beautiful Defeat. Understanding the three sources of sin is imperative, says Malarkey. The Bible refers to these as the flesh, the world and Satan. Malarkey describes them as: “you, where you live, and who runs the place.”

The second call is for surrender. The author tells readers that the life God intends can only be realized after relinquishing control. Using many anecdotes, he offers 10 steps to the surrendered life, which “makes sense of the mess and is filled with richness and purpose for today … and hope for tomorrow.”

These steps include defining one’s mission, wearing spiritual armor and being part of a team. The crux of surrender is dying to self daily, says Malarkey, citing Luke 9:23. He refers to it as both “the most challenging teaching in the entire Bible” and “the central teaching of the Christian life.”

Above all, he stresses that the surrendered life is about letting go and trusting God with our circumstances and the results.

To order, call 800-251-4000, or visit thomasnelson.com.

Ecclesia pastor Andrew Farley dissects theological ‘double-talk’ to reveal ‘new way of living’ out one’s faith

Andrew Farley says he became addicted to evangelism in college. He taught Bible studies on campus, witnessed at a halfway house and preached on the train. He used every assignment in speech class to lecture about salvation. He even burst into a seminar and pushed aside the speaker to share the gospel. If he went to bed feeling as though he hadn’t evangelized enough that day, he would leave his dorm at night and preach some more. But Farley was miserable.

In Relaxing With God: The Neglected Spiritual Discipline, which Baker Books (Baker Publishing Group) releases this month, Farley says in hindsight, he sees all of that feverish activity as focused wrongly—on himself. It perpetuated a cycle he describes as “commit, try hard, fail, feel horrible, then confess and recommit to try even harder, only to have your hopes of renewal shattered all over again.”

But that was 23 years ago. Since then, he writes: “God taught me some truths that literally saved my life. And what God taught me is in this book.”

Farley is now lead pastor of Ecclesia: Church Without Religion and best-selling author of several books, including  The Naked Gospel.

Farley asserts in his new book that many slip into performing for God, which only causes unrest, while Jesus, on the other hand, promised that His followers would find rest.

He aims to sort out what he calls “double-talk” and shows believers a new way to live—to “live from rest on a daily basis.”

Farley emphasizes new-covenant theology and the freedom that comes from enjoying Christ’s completed work.
“Christ is the end of the law for us,” he writes, reminding readers that no one can add to what the Savior has done.

Topics include God’s forgiveness, a believer’s new identity and the type of good works that issue from resting in God.

“It’s all about fixing your eyes on the finished work of Jesus Christ,” Farley writes. “In so doing, Jesus promises ‘rest for your soul’ (Matt. 11:29).”

Relaxing With God concludes with a five-week Bible study.

To order, call 800-877-2665 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Award-winning journalist and blogger Emily T. Wierenga tells her story of restoration in Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look (softcover, $14.99). The author, who battled anorexia, left her parents’ home at age 18 to escape their rigidity and to search the globe for God. When her mother was diagnosed with brain cancer, Wierenga returned home, where her heart and body were finally able to heal. Baker Books (Baker Publishing Group) releases this memoir July 3.

Leslie Ludy—best-selling author of 10 books, including the best-seller When God Writes Your Love Story—gives moms permission to abandon the pursuit of perfection and encourages them to rest in God, in Set-Apart Motherhood: Reflecting Joy and Beauty in Family Life. Ludy comes alongside readers as a mother with several young children and helps them keep Christ at the center of their parenting. The book includes questions for personal study and group discussion. NavPress releases the softcover book, which retails for $13.99, July 14, with Tyndale House Publishers distributing.

The Greek word for “grace” is the title of a David C Cook release July 1. Charis: God’s Scandalous Grace for Us (softcover, $14.99) is written by Preston Sprinkle, professor at Eternity Bible College, author of Fight: A Christian Case for Non-Violence and co-author with Francis Chan of the New York Times best-seller Erasing Hell. In Charis, Sprinkle shows how the Old Testament repeatedly reveals a gracious God who delights in redeeming the unredeemable.

Laying a biblical foundation for motherhood, Stephanie Shott, founder of The M.O.M. Initiative, has written to encourage moms in their journey and equip congregations to mentor mothers in the local church and in the community, including crisis pregnancy centers and homeless shelters. The Making of a Mom: Practical Help for Purposeful Parenting ($12.99, Revell/Baker Publishing Group) will be available in softcover July 14. Study questions in each chapter are suitable for individuals or small groups.

In Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith (softcover, $16), Jen Pollock Michel shares her story of fear and loss to guide readers into understanding human desire in light of the gospel. IVP Crescendo (InterVarsity Press) releases the book this month. Michel is a regular contributor to Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics webpage and Moody Bible Institute’s daily devotional Today in the Word.

Love. Period. When All Else Fails by Rudy Rasmus will be available in stores July 8. Rasmus leads the 9,000-member St. John’s United Methodist Church in Houston and co-founded Bread of Life, which distributes nine tons of food to the hungry each week. In this Worthy Publishing release, Rasmus calls believers to reject hate and apathy and to love one another as Jesus intended, regardless of class, race, gender, orientation—or past deeds. Love. Period. retails for $14.99 in softcover.

Erin Davis, author of several books, including The Bare Facts with Josh McDowell, addresses a disconnect in Connected: Curing the Pandemic of Everyone Feeling Alone Together ($14.99, B&H Books). Davis points out that even though technology allows people to be increasingly connected, people are struggling with loneliness, and she outlines the remedy for this hidden ailment. Connected is available this month in softcover.

At the end of the month, Let’s All Be Brave: Living Life With Everything You Have by Annie F. Downs will be in stores. In this Zondervan title (softcover, $15.99), Downs, an author, blogger and speaker, encourages readers to grasp the courage they possess deep inside and live with boldness the life they long to live. This collection of essays includes questions, advice and scripture to help readers resist fear and step forward.

Latest project: Can You Be Gay and Christian? Responding With Love and Truth to Questions About Homosexuality (9781621365938, $16.99, FrontLine/Charisma House).

Latest project: Can You Be Gay and Christian? Responding With Love and Truth to Questions About Homosexuality (9781621365938, $16.99, FrontLine/Charisma House).

For what audience did you write Can You Be Gay and Christian?
The book is for everyone who is same-sex attracted and wants to follow the Lord—or who once wanted to follow the Lord, but could not reconcile their sexual desires and romantic attractions with the Scriptures and so walked away from the faith. The book is also for all believers who have a heart to minister to the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered] community, as well as pastors and leaders who want to be faithful to God as they stand up for what is right while reaching out with compassion—in short, as they seek to minister with grace and truth.

What compelled you to write this book?
The title of this [book] represents a question of great importance to the church today. Is it possible for someone to practice homosexuality and follow Jesus at the same time? Just a few years ago, such a question would have seemed absolutely absurd, but with more and more gays and lesbians talking about their love for the Lord and their commitment to Him—including same-sex couples—this is a question that we cannot avoid.
The first issue that confronted me was that of gay activism, beginning in 2004 in Charlotte, N.C. As the Lord began to burden me with a sense of calling to confront the activist agenda, I felt it important to do my best to understand those I was differing with, to see the world through their eyes, to hear and read their stories, especially those [who] claimed to be gay Christians.
The more I read and listened, the more my heart broke, but as a biblical scholar, I had to test the “gay Christian” arguments. This book is the fruit of a broken heart for those who identify as LGBT, combined with a love for the Lord and His Word.

What do you hope your work on this book will accomplish?
I really hope that Can You Be Gay and Christian? will accomplish a number of things, including: helping believers in general develop a greater understanding of the unique challenges experienced by those who seek to combine their Christian faith and their homosexuality; setting the record straight on what the Scriptures really say about these issues, using sound scholarship, but writing in a way that everyone can understand; dealing with difficult objections to the traditional understanding of key texts that are being raised by gay theologians (sadly, most Christians, including Christian leaders, are poorly equipped to answer these objections); and pointing the way forward for those who truly want to obey and know the Lord.

What are some of the many questions you explore in the book?
We tackle questions like: Are we using the Bible to sanction anti-homosexual prejudice, just as the church in the past used the Bible to sanction slavery and segregation and the oppression of women? What does the Hebrew word abomination really mean? What did Jesus and Paul have to say about homosexuality? What did Jesus mean when He told us not to judge others? And, of course, can you be gay and Christian?

More than 500 endnotes provide documentation of your research for this book. How much time and research went into the project?
On the one hand, I’ve been studying the Word for the last 42 years, also earning a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and writing Bible commentaries and scholarly theological articles over the years. So, the book is based on decades of careful study and prayerful reflection.

Also, beginning in 2004, I started reading whatever I could on homosexuality, ranging from articles and books on the gay liberation movement to stories from gay pastors (with book titles like Holy Homosexuals), along with theological works on all sides of the issue and sociological, psychological and historical books, amassing quite a library in the process.

My book A Queer Thing Happened to America, which came out in 2011 and is 700 pages long with 1,500 endnotes, reflects my research on the issues of gay activism. Can You Be Gay and Christian?, written with a focus on practical and gracious ministry throughout, reflects years of study with the emphasis on reaching out.

What are some things Christians can do to extend God’s love to those who identify as gay?
Read this book, for one! Aside from that, the key thing is sensitivity and understanding. They should ask God for His heart for those who identify as LGBT; they should read their stories and get to know them (the book is full of relevant stories in this regard); they should separate gay activism from gay-identified individuals; and they should get to know them as fellow human beings for whom Jesus died, building loving and redemptive relationships wherever possible.

Is there anything else Christian retailers should know about this book?
I truly believe this book will fill a unique need in the body [the church] today. On a constant basis, people write to me or call my radio show with questions about homosexuality, either pertaining to their own lives or to the lives of a loved one, and this book provides the answers to their questions.

Interestingly—and providentially, it appears—my book is being released the very same time that another book on the subject is coming out, but that book is written by a young, gay activist who has launched a campaign to try to “reeducate” the church on “gay Christianity.” So, at the very moment his book comes out—I’m sure it will be celebrated by the secular media and liberal church as well—the answer to that book will be out as well.