Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
Author(s): Rachel Held Evans
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Price: $3.99 (Oct 7 only)

Are you struggling to connect with your church community? Do you find yourself questioning the core beliefs that you once held dear? Searching for Sunday, from New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans is a heartfelt ode to the past and a hopeful gaze into the future of what it means to be a part of the modern church.

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. Within the pages of Searching for Sunday, Evans catalogs her journey as she loves, leaves, and finds the church once again.

Evans tells the story of her faith through the lens of seven sacraments of the Catholic church–baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, the anointing of the sick, and marriage–to teach us the essential truths about what she’s learned along the way, including:

Faith isn’t just meant to be believed, it’s meant to be lived and shared in community
Christianity isn’t a kingdom for the worthy–it’s a kingdom for the hungry, the broken, and the imperfect
The countless and beautiful ways that God shows up in the ordinary parts of our daily lives
Searching for Sunday will help you unpack the messiness of community, teaching us that by overcoming our cynicism, we can all find hope, grace, love, and, somewhere in between, church.

Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear
Author(s): Jinger Vuolo
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Price: $3.99 (Oct 7 only)

When Jinger Duggar Vuolo was growing up, she was convinced that obeying the rules was the key to success and God’s favor. She zealously promoted the Basic Life Principles of Bill Gothard,

fastidiously obeying the modesty guidelines (no shorts or jeans, only dresses),
eagerly submitting to the umbrella of authority (any disobedience of parents would place her outside God’s protection),
promoting the relationship standard of courtship, and
avoiding any music with a worldly beat, among others.
Jinger, along with three of her sisters, wrote a New York Times bestseller about their religious convictions. She believed this level of commitment would guarantee God’s blessing, even though in private she felt constant fear that she wasn’t measuring up to the high standards demanded of her.

(more…)