• Redeeming Church Conflicts

    Destructive Church Conflict — The Antithesis to Our Faith

    Dave hit it out of the park again with his most recent post over at RedeemingChurchConflicts.com: Destructive Church Conflicts — The Antithesis to Our Faith In it, he lists a number of evidences of this antithesis. Consider just a few: – The temporal is of greater concern than the eternal. – Self-interest supersedes the interests of others. – Angry venting feels more productive than controlling the tongue. – Being a victim is more satisfying than being an overcomer.  – Anxiety over possible outcomes takes priority over trusting God. And then he wraps up the post with a sentence so well crafted I WISH we had included it in our actual…

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    So You Want to be a Published Author

    Whenever anyone asks for my advice on how to get published, I always send them to this page of Michael Hyatt’s blog: Advice to First Time Authors I also encourage them to purchase and follow EVERY STEP in his e-books: Writing a Winning Book Proposal Even though Peacemaking Women has been selling well for six years now (and is available in Korean and Spanish), I still followed his advice line-for-line when I drafted Dave’s and my book proposal for Redeeming Church Conflicts. It’s just that good.   So here comes the fun part: Because I recently endorsed his e-books, I get to give ONE copy of each away to a…

  • Sin & Repentance

    Authors Are Real People

    Tim Challies’ post today is a must-read, especially if you are a blogger or avid Facebook user: A Holy Moment As a real person who also has some level of a public persona life because of my book, video series, blog, and speaking events, I was particularly struck by this excerpt: “In that moment I felt a strange flush of shame and conviction. In that moment I realized that this author was a real person. I guess I should have known that, but somehow it hadn’t really occurred to me. It was so easy for me to read a book and post a review on the Internet without thinking of…

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    Relaxing and Enjoying My (Now Complete) LibraryThing.com

    Years ago, I read an article by Tim Challies entitled How to Organize a Personal Library. I loved this article on many levels, but especially because it hit two of my favorite things in life: 1) Organizing; and 2) Books. I just love to make order out of chaos! And I really REALLY love books. I started trying to work through our home library last summer, but only got up to our 795th book. This weekend, our entire family was a little under the weather, so we all just relaxed on Saturday and Sunday (after church). Some of us watched videos or read quietly. But I got to spend the…

  • Redeeming Church Conflicts

    Church – A Community of Grace? Or a Community of Convenience?

    Earlier this week, I was re-reading an article from 2009 and was struck again at the clear insights the author gives us re: whether our churches are communities of convenience or communities of grace. Please click through and view his (brief) chart: Defective Church – A Community of Convenience And then I pray that we will all remember that “the Church is not a community of conveniences. It does not exist for you to get served. The church is a community of grace that exists to serve one another, to bear with one another, to forgive one another, to love one another! The church is not a perfect product or…

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    Jerram Barrs on Harry Potter

    I’ll never forget the dinner conversation at our home wherein some of the most intelligent, literate, and godly people I know effusively talked about the “genius” of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. I was aware, of course, that some Christians disdain ed them as evil. I, personally, had seen a few of the movies and thought they were fine—but I’m not a huge fan of the genre, so I was never motivated to read them. But when these friends went on and ON about them, I became more interested. To date, I’ve read the first two books to screen them for Sophia, but haven’t read beyond that. This video by…

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    AmazingGrace360 — Whole Gospel. Whole Life. Whole World.

    The registration deadline is coming up FAST for the AmazingGrace360 Conference. I hope that you are registered already! And that you’ll stop by the Peacemaker Ministries / Tara Barthel booth to say hello to my best bud, Samara, and to me too! 🙂 We will be giving away OVER $600 in FREE PEACEMAKING MATERIALS, so it’ll definitely be worth your time to pop by. I’m still hoping to get to LiveBlog the plenary sessions (like I’ve done for other PCA and CCEF events. (I LOVE to LiveBlog events!) But we’ll have to see what my teaching schedule allows. Last thing to mention—one of the AG360 main speakers, Nancy Guthrie, is…

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    Being Still Whate’er He Doth

    Grateful to Ligon Duncan for this quote: “Whate’er my God ordains is right: His holy will abideth; I will be still whate’er He doth; And follow where He guideth; He is my God; though dark my road, He holds me that I shall not fall: Wherefore to Him I leave it all.” (Samuel Rodigast, 1676, translated by Catherine Winkworth, 1863) And trying hard to be still and leave it all to God on this painful Friday … Hope your weekend is a happy, blessed one!   Your friend, Tara B.