Here are 82 books that The Abundant Community fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve seen the benefit of investing in awareness about how you can improve in leadership. I am a military veteran with two decades of experience in leading teams in high-stress environments. I’ve seen military leadership at its strongest and at its weakest. I’ve since led multi-million dollar projects and seen the value of investing in leadership and developing a culture of high-performance. For over 100 weeks, I researched and wrote a series of blog articles titled Leadership Sparks. The goal was to be able to create a spark with my words in someone else's mind. To pass the small ignition point of leadership growth to them.
I’ve never had the words to describe why I knew culture was important to success or why I thought the best way to succeed in the long term was to help others succeed.
This book helped me have the words, examples, and stories to be able to communicate that. One of my most recommended books.
'A marvel of insight and practicality' Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit ____________________________
How do you build and sustain a great team?
The Culture Code reveals the secrets of some of the best teams in the world - from Pixar to Google to US Navy SEALs - explaining the three skills such groups have mastered in order to generate trust and a willingness to collaborate. Combining cutting-edge science, on-the-ground insight and practical ideas for action, it offers a roadmap for creating an environment where innovation flourishes, problems get solved, and expectations are exceeded.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Making disciples is the hardest, most rewarding ministry I’ve ever experienced! For the past ten years, I’ve been helping pastors and church leaders make disciples and build a disciple-making culture in their churches. I know the challenges each of these things brings, and I’ve read books that teach others how to do them. However, most of these books focus on the big picture and never get into the weeds about how to do it. My goal with this list is to give you books to help you learn how to make disciples and build a disciple-making culture.
This book is a great overview of how a disciple-making culture looks and feels. Brandon Guindon does an excellent job making principles clear while also offering practical content on practice. Over and over again, Guindon reminds the reader that the secret isn’t in the program or the curriculum. It’s in a lifestyle that emulates Jesus.
Disciple-making culture flows out of who we are, not what we know. There’s so much to like about this book! It’s Biblical, practical, and aspirational. There’s plenty here for a young disciple-maker and an experienced builder of disciple-making culture.
What it lacks in sequencing (where do I start?!), it makes up for in clarity. I’m already using it to further flesh out the principles of disciple-making culture with pastors and churches to which I’m connected.
A Practical Guide to Help You Cultivate Healthy Church Culture
Church leaders who focus on programs, strategy, and curriculum can easily miss what ties them all together: culture. Cultivating culture is the difference between churches who flourish and those who flounder at disciple-making. Leaders must cultivate a healthy disciple-making culture. But how?
Author Brandon Guindon’s book Disciple-Making Culture provides a how-to guide for cultivating a healthy disciple-making culture throughout your church. He walks readers through key components of healthy culture, which he has uncovered over the course of his more than twenty years of disciple-making in various contexts. Using time-tested…
Making disciples is the hardest, most rewarding ministry I’ve ever experienced! For the past ten years, I’ve been helping pastors and church leaders make disciples and build a disciple-making culture in their churches. I know the challenges each of these things brings, and I’ve read books that teach others how to do them. However, most of these books focus on the big picture and never get into the weeds about how to do it. My goal with this list is to give you books to help you learn how to make disciples and build a disciple-making culture.
Changing the culture of any organization is a huge challenge. Black is an expert in culture change who teaches others how to do it in the business and non-profit world. This book is full of insights born from Black’s experience.
From the start, he explains how change works, why we often get it wrong, and what’s required to make real change and make it last. The book is organized around the main barriers to change and the solutions to those barriers. This book is focused, clearly written, and full of illustrations and tools.
It’s an easy 10 out of 10 for me because it helped me develop an internal framework of how change works and how to lead others through the change process.
-Stephen R. Covey, Author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
"For any executive, this is an excellent roadmap for leading strategic change!"
-Bill Marriott, Chairman and CEO, Marriott International, Inc.
"Finally a book that gets it right. Organizations don't change. People change. It Starts with One gives extremely practical tools to make real change happen."
-Jack Zenger, Author of The Extraordinary Leader and CEO and Co-founder of Zenger|Folkman
"All successful businesses accept the need for change. It Starts with One steers the reader through the complexities of modern leadership and delivers a…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Making disciples is the hardest, most rewarding ministry I’ve ever experienced! For the past ten years, I’ve been helping pastors and church leaders make disciples and build a disciple-making culture in their churches. I know the challenges each of these things brings, and I’ve read books that teach others how to do them. However, most of these books focus on the big picture and never get into the weeds about how to do it. My goal with this list is to give you books to help you learn how to make disciples and build a disciple-making culture.
One of the biggest challenges to building a disciple-making culture is making disciple-makers. This short book is hyper-focused on the biggest obstacles that keep people from the disciple-making game.
In short, the obstacle is fear, not just two-faced fear. However, fear is rarely the obstacle people name. Most people say they don’t make disciples because they don’t know how. This clear and compelling book takes on obstacles (lack of know-how and fear) and challenges the reader to get started.
So many people love this book because it pulls away excuses in a fun way and focuses the reader on the truth that the win is in the attempt. Don’t miss this one!
The Bicycle Illustration will empower you to become a disciple maker. Inside you will discover the essential elements of disciple making, common challenges that hinder progress, and practical steps to overcome them. Best of all you can use it to help others become disciple makers as well!
I write and illustrate picture books. Before I was a father I just thought of the picture book as my chosen art form. When I became a dad, I saw first-hand how important picture books are in the lives of young children and the people who read to them. They become family friends. For the youngest kids, bedtime and nap-time are rituals performed many times a day, which means those books get read over and over. In doing so, I found some favorites that I still enjoy reading today, even if I am reading to myself!
A good goodnight book slows things down, quiets down the room and the people in it. This book does just that. When nap-time and bedtime were frequent and important in our home we really loved this book. You go for a walk and when you are back home you are ready for bed. Decrescendo.
Acclaimed author-illustrator Elisha Cooper paints the quiet magic of a good-night walk as the neighborhood settles into itself at the end of the day.
As a child and parent walk down the block to the bay and turn to walk back home, evening falls upon the neighborhood. As the walk begins, the squirrels are in the yards, the boys are mowing lawns, a neighbor is baking a pie, and someone is mailing a letter. When the child and parent turn to walk back home, the apple pie is down from the windowsill, the leaves are raked up, and the postman…
When I was pregnant for the first time, I knew exactly the sort of mother I was going to be. I had read all the articles, bookmarked all the tastefully filtered Instagram posts. But then I had my son, and I realized almost immediately how little I knew. It turns out that while those tender Instagram moments do happen (and they truly are magic), there are just as many moments that can only be described as: WTF? My novel, The Perfect Ones, goes deep behind the screens of two Instagram influencers and their messy, conflicting, and fundamentally human feelings on motherhood. Here are five more books about the parts that don’t make the Instagram grid.
The Husbands is not marketed as a “mom book,” but as a mother of young children, I saw so much of my own life on the pages.
The story follows Nora Spangler, an overworked attorney who is pregnant with her second child, as she digs into a wrongful-death lawsuit centered on a fatal house fire. The story teems with drama between the mystery of the fire and the motives for its potential coverup, but my favorite part of the book is how Baker gives voice to the things we as mothers “aren’t supposed” to say.
'A howl of feminist rage, but also one that is pure fun' Stylist
The wives here are different. They are living proof that women can have it all: successful careers, loving families, beautiful homes. Their husbands are different too. They are living proof that men can do just as much as women. They can remember the kids' schedules, use an iron and notice when the house needs dusting. Nora thinks she's found the perfect new home for her family. But when she agrees to get involved in a wrongful death case in the neighbourhood, Nora becomes convinced that there's a…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I was raised in a loving but strict Catholic family in the 1970s, when girls like me were still expected to grow up to become traditional wives and mothers, rather than go to college and pursue a career. In a Pre-Cana class intended to prepare me and my fiancé for marriage (it didn’t work so well, as evidenced by our rancorous divorce twelve years later), I learned the concept of “family of origin,” and the profound impact a person’s upbringing has on them as an adult. I became fascinated by the psychic baggage each of us carries around, and how it affects our personal relationships and life choices.
I once lived in a close-knit neighborhood similar to the one in which this novel is set, and I was entranced by the interplay between the variety of characters in this tale of domestic suspense. The story isn’t so much about the woman who disappears one night as it is about the perplexed bunch of girlfriends who are left behind. I relished the voyeuristic peek into the hidden dramas of the various neighbors’ personal and family lives—it made me feel like I was riding a silent drone through the ’burbs, swooping unseen through kitchens, bedrooms, and backyards, uncovering people’s secrets!
"Full of slow-burning intrigue, Strawser's second novel will appeal to fans of Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies and Jennifer Kitses' Small Hours." —Booklist
*Book of the Month Club Selection
An innocent night of fun takes a shocking turn in Not That I Could Tell, the next page-turner from Jessica Strawser, author of Almost Missed You.
When a group of neighborhood women gathers, wine in hand, around a fire pit where their backyards meet one Saturday night, most of them are just ecstatic to have discovered that their baby monitors reach that far. It’s a rare kid-free night, and they’re giddy…
I’ve always been interested in how people change, and how trauma and difficulties hasten change. After all, if we have to grow and gain new skills to stay alive, we find a way. Originally, personal transformation was a priority because I was terribly unhappy, scared, and had shielded myself from direct contact with the world around me in an effort to stay “safe.” Don’t do this. It doesn’t work. So I asked myself, as an author, how would murders, deception, and sanity-threatening events affect a depressed therapist? Murder For Liar is the product of exploring this.
I found this book deeply disturbing, despite the seemingly normal content of the story.
Like the protagonist, I could never tell what was real, what was paranoia, and what the hell might happen next. We’re inside the head of a confused, scared man dealing with disturbed characters who hide in plain sight as mere neighbors. I relate to this, as does the protagonist in my book.
Decades ago, I was seduced by a guru to become the first disciple of a small, relatively benign cult. Serving as an assistant guru of sorts—manning a branch office of our organization, so to speak, I experienced both sides of the coin—being manipulated by someone with confounding abilities, as well as manipulating others myself.
NEIGHBORS is a black comedy about Earl Keese, a regular suburbanite whose world is overturned when Harry and Ramona move into the house next door. Harry and Ramona instantly unsettle the staid Earl with their abrupt mannerisms, their disturbing wolfhound and their dangerous schemes. Earl's suspicions about the couple's lack of stability and normalcy are ignored by his wife, Enid, and his daughter, Elaine, even while he is concerned that they are all being negatively affected by their relationships with the neighbours. Ramona is by turns seductive and manipulative with Earl while Harry is threatening and confrontational, upending Earl's carefully…
A native of New York’s Long Island, I’ve always been obsessed with the shoreline. My best early memories are of traveling with my family to the eastern edge of Long Island for our two-week summer vacation. My parents didn’t earn a lot of money, and we didn’t vacation often, so those two weeks in August were heavenly. As an adult, I gravitate to coastlines and islands. I’ve always been a fan of books with a strong sense of place, especially when that place is the shore. And I loved setting my current book on an island in the Mediterranean, delving into the qualities and characteristics that make a coastline so evocative and so appealing.
Full disclosure—I’m a former New Yorker who adores the Big Apple.
So how could I not include a book set on the vibrant, unpredictable island of Manhattan? Anna Quindlen has long been one of my go-to writers, and this is my favorite of her novels – sophisticated, subtle, and thought-provoking.
It revolves around a series of characters—some earnest, some quirky, but all flawed—who live in an apartment building rocked by a disturbing act of violence. I love this book because of all the questions it raises about family, loyalty, and community—and I love the way the building becomes a kind of island itself.
To me, Quindlen is a top-notch chronicler of contemporary motherhood, marriage, and family—and with this story, she is at her best.
For fans of Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler comes a brilliantly provocative novel from the Richard and Judy Book Club and Number One bestselling author Anna Quindlen.
'Mesmerizing. Quindlen makes her characters so richly alive, so believable, that it's impossible not to feel every doubt and dream they harbour . . . Overwhelmingly moving' New York Times
Anna Quindlen follows her highly-praised novel Miller's Valley - 'reads like a companion to Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge', Elisabeth Egan - with a captivating novel about money, class and self-discovery set in the heart of New York where the tensions in a…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I write to spread joy and truth. As a proud Black mother living in a country with school districts that see Black stories as threats worth banning, amplifying these stories is crucial to the fight to help humanize us and retain the privilege of celebration and joy. When I wrote The Juneteenth Story, it was rooted in a conscious effort to balance my own joyous summertime memories of celebrating the holiday with the hard truths that established and evolved this holiday. This list includes a small sample of books about some of the many ways Black folks celebrate - enjoy.
You can’t read this book and not smile! This fun, rhythmic read by the lyrical Tameka Fryer Brown celebrates the bonds of a diverse urban community on Neighbors’ Day, and reminds us of the big and small ways neighbors show up for each other. Charlotte Riley-Webb‘s paintings swirl with energy to give a new dimension to Brown’s words.
A little girl celebrates "Neighbors Day" by taking a tour of her urban/Carribbean neighborhood--kids play double-dutch and run after the ice cream man, men debate at the barbershop and play chess, Aunties cook up oxtail stew and other ethnic delicacies, boys play basketball, and jazz floats through the streets. A charming, rhythmic picture book with multi-cultural appeal by a first-time author.
