Helpful Resources
Below you’ll find a curated list of resources that we’ve found helpful for a deeper dive into the Scriptures and a variety of topics. Please note that, with the exception of the Bible, we don’t endorse all of the views expressed in these materials.
A Christian Political Commitment Pledge
Book Resources
The Party Crasher: How Jesus Disrupts Politics as Usual and Redeems Our Partisan Divide by Joshua Ryan Butler
In this insightful, nonpartisan roadmap toward faithful political engagement and ultimate allegiance to Jesus, pastor Joshua Ryan Butler diagnoses the roots of political conflict tearing apart the church and prescribes a practical and prophetic way forward.
Have you noticed a deeper level of political division in your community or church? If so, you’re not alone. This powerful, accessible book exposes the religious nature of modern political movements and how they compete with faithfulness to Christ.
Rather than retreat from the political realm, The Party Crasher will help you understand the politics of our age and equip you with the wisdom to faithfully navigate them. Key takeaways include:
• How to develop a Christian posture for political life and promote unity in the church.
• When to be bold.
• How to identify and repent from our political idols.
• How the way we worship can help us avoid division.
This is not a book about putting politics aside, it’s a book about putting politics in their place so that we might be better disciples of Jesus in whichever party or place we find ourselves.
The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics by Curtis Chang and Nancy French
For the exhausted, the hurting, and the faithful, The After Party helps reframe our political identity away from the what of political positions and toward the how being centered on Jesus.
This paradigm-shifting book complements The After Party Project—a six-part, video-based, highly interactive curriculum that provides churches, small groups, and individuals with an on-the-ground, biblically based approach to a very complex topic.
In today’s political environment, faithfulness to a biblical how of political engagement shines as a radical challenge to both the Right and the Left. If you worry about what politics is doing to your community, your family, and your own well-being, The After Party will transform your political imagination.
It’s time for us to go beyond party politics and—as Christians—believe in the true “party” yet to come.
Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies by N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird
An urgent call for Christians everywhere to explore the nature of the kingdom amid the political upheaval of our day.
Should Christians be politically withdrawn, avoiding participation in politics to maintain their prophetic voice and to keep from being used as political pawns? Or should Christians be actively involved, seeking to utilize political systems to control the levers of power?
In Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird call Christians everywhere to discern the nature of Christian witness in fractured political environments. In an age of ascending autocracies, in a time of fear and fragmentation, amid carnage and crises, Jesus is king, and Jesus’s kingdom remains the object of the church’s witness and work.
The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here by Kaitlyn Schiess
How do Bible passages written thousands of years ago apply to politics today? What can we learn from America’s history of using the Bible in politics? How can we converse with people whose views differ from our own?
In The Ballot and the Bible, Kaitlyn Schiess explores these questions and more. She unpacks examples of how Americans have connected the Bible to politics in the past, highlighting times it was applied well and times it was egregiously misused.
Schiess combines American political history and biblical interpretation to help readers faithfully read Scripture, talk with others about it, and apply it to contemporary political issues–and to their lives. Rather than prescribing what readers should think about specific hot-button issues, Schiess outlines core biblical themes around power, allegiance, national identity, and more.
Readers will be encouraged to pursue a biblical basis for their political engagement with compassion and confidence.
Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt by Arthur C. Brooks
Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against American, creating a “culture of contempt”—the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you’ll be left behind, right?
Wrong.
In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America’s top policy think tanks in a work that offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships.
Brooks’ prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn’t try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn’t be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act.
Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.
Video Resources
Sabbath Politics Video Series with Dr. Joel Lawrence
In preparation for this series on Politics, we held a series of saturday morning seminars this past sprint featuring our own Dr. Joel Lawrence. In these sessions, Lawrence encourages us to move beyond trying to live out our faith according to the political narrative of America and instead be renewed through the Biblical political narrative: Sabbath.
Sabbath tells a different political story, about God’s love and care for his creation, about the nature of God’s political ordering of the world, about how humans were created to live in rest and trust in God.
Session 1
The American church is conformed to the pattern of the age. Called to be a people who represent the Rule of God, we are instead formed by the political culture of our times. As a result, the church looks just like the culture around us: divided, polarized, seeking our own self-interest, unable to reflect the life of Christ in a culture of the self. How can we be freed from this capture? By looking with fresh eyes at the Biblical story of politics and finding new resources for understanding the church’s call to embody a unique political vision, the vision of Sabbath.
Session 2
In this session, we turn our attention to Genesis 3-4, where we see the story of human rebellion against Sabbath and the creation of politics East of Eden. Rather than a life of rest in which human political life is ordered under the rule of God, humanity determined to be our own gods, to trust in our own selves. This turn to autonomy, to self-rule, creates politics East of Eden, a world in which humanity must build our own political structures out of our own resources. This is a world of conflict, violence, and self-interest, a world in radical rebellion against the Sabbath reign of God.
Session 3
In the final session, we reflect on the church’s calling to be the Sabbath people of God. As a holy nation, as those whose citizenship is in heaven, the church has a unique political mission to be ambassadors of God’s Sabbath Nation among the East of Eden nations. What does this look like? To answer this, we turn to John 18-19, the scene of Jesus and Pilate. Here, we see the conflict of two political imaginations and see how Jesus lives out the Sabbath rule of God by not allowing East of Eden politics to set the terms of his engagement with the nations. As the church, we are called to be engaged with the world East of Eden, but we are to follow Jesus in refusing to allow East of Eden political structures to determine our presence in the world.
Engaging Locally: An Interview with David Johnson
David Johnson has always been an active voter but as this election approached, David wanted to know more about how politics worked locally and so he got involved in the local political process for this upcoming election. We sat down with David as he shared his experience and observations. Hear what he learned and what we can take away.
Online Resources
Articles, Videos, Websites, and other resources
- A Christian Political Commitment Statement
- For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility National Association of Evangelicals,
- Podcast: https://redeemingbabel.org/podcast/
- The After Party course from Redeeming Babel.org
- “How to Be Christian During the Election” PDF from the And: Campaign.
- Braverangels.org
- “The Danger of a Single Story” TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Center for Pastor Theologians’ interview with Kaitlyn Schiess (author of Ballots and Bibles)
Series Resources
Psalms
The deepest longings we have are to be known and loved. In a world where those longings are rarely met, countless people have found that the Book of Psalms speaks to them in a way that almost nothing else does.
Pathways
What we think—about ourselves, about God, about the world—matters! Our thought patterns have the potential to lead us down extremely helpful pathways or highly destructive ones. We invite you to join us as we journey into the Scriptures. The latest discoveries in science confirm what the Bible has said all along: If we change our thinking, we can change our lives!
I AM | HE IS
Have you ever felt like you’re not enough, your needs are too big, or there’s no hope for your situation? In the seven weeks leading up to Easter, we’re going to explore seven statements that Jesus made about Himself in the Book of John. Who Jesus is just might change who you are. Here are some resources we hope are helpful.
Sabbath
When you hear the word Sabbath, what comes to mind? You can find countless opinions, but how many of those ideas come directly from the Bible? As we begin the new year, we invite you to join us on a deep dive into what Scripture does and doesn’t say about one of the most misunderstood, ignored, necessary, and delightful commands ever given.
Bible Study Resources
- ESV Study Bible — About this book: The ESV Study Bible was designed to help you understand the Bible in a deeper way. Extensive study notes, charts, maps, and articles make this study Bible a valuable resource for serious readers, students, and teachers of God’s Word. Why we appreciate this resource: The ESV is a more literal translation of the Bible. It is great for digging deeper and has exceptional study notes
- NLT Study Bible — About this book: Explore the Scriptures with almost 50 of today’s top evangelical scholars. Every feature in the NLT Study Bible has been created to do more than just impart information. Ask questions, and the NLT Study Bible gives you both the words and the world of the Bible. Seek deeper understanding, and find the meaning and significance of Scripture, not just facts. Why we appreciate this resource: The NLT offers a more readable translation and also includes exceptional study notes.
- The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (IVP Bible Background Commentary Set) by John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews — About this book: Providing historical, social and cultural background for each Passage of the Old Testament from Genesis through Malachi, this single volume gathers and condenses an abundance of specialized knowledge from expert scholars—-making it available and accessible to ordinary readers of the Old Testament.
- The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (IVP Bible Background Commentary Set) by Craig S. Keener — About this book: This unique commentary provides, in verse-by-verse format, the crucial cultural background you need for responsible―and richer―Bible study. It includes a glossary of cultural terms and important historical figures, maps and charts, up-to-date bibliographies, and introductory essays about cultural background information for each book of the New Testament.
- The Bible Project
Questions About Faith
- The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God (Case for … Series) by Lee Strobel
- The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller
- Cold-Case Christianity (Updated & Expanded Edition): A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace
Parents and Families
- The Action Bible: God’s Redemptive Story (Action Bible Series) by Sergio Cariello
- The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name by Sally Lloyd-Jones, Jago
- Every Parent’s Guide to Navigating our Digital World, by Kara Powell, Art Bamford
- Gist: The Essence of Raising Life-Ready Kids, by Michael W. Anderson L.P., Timothy D. Johanson M.D.
- Phase Profile Summaries from Parent Cue
Outreach
Our Hope for you
We want to help you find resources that will help you grow in your faith. We hope these can be helpful to you.






















