nelson review

Nelson's Annual Preacher's Sourcebook vol 3 edited by O.S. Hawkins.  This is a guide for the year of Sunday sermons as well as holiday, funeral and marrage ceremonies.  This sourcebook contains quotes, outlines,and illustrations for numerous sermons throughout the year.  It also gives helps for difficult times such as weddings gone wrong as well as planning simple weddings to large weddings requiring coordinators. They work through premarital counseling in a discussed though not in much detail on the other had there is a complete ceremony for the wedding.  The various authors of the book help with getting through funerals with more than just the sermon but also pastor helps for advising and just being with the family listening to their stories and feelings both during the days leading up to the funeral as well as the days and weeks after.  This book recognizes that the leadership of a church is much more than giving a good sermon on Sunday morning.  This book assumes that the pastor will be preaching on the Word of God and not just having it be the starting point of the sermon.  This book has mostly outlines for the pastors use as ideas and beginning points but some ideas are more fleshed out and  complete giving more complex points that could be missed especially by an inexperienced pastor. 

 

I think that this book definately deserves a position on any Christian pastor's book shelf.  At 544 pages it certainly is not the only planner that a beginner pastor would need but it certainly would be a help in sermon planning for the year.  All sermons contain the personality of the pastor leading the congregation.  This book was written by 15 different writers and so has a variety of opinions for delivering a sermon.  I would buy it as a good resource for sermon writing and it would be money well spent.

This book was provided by Booksneeze for this review.

the loveladies

Miss Brenda and the Loveladies by Brenda Spauhn and Irene Zutell.  This is the story about Brenda Spahn who was well know in her society.  She ran a tax business which had many branches in her area and was well know as a hard worker who expected her workers to work hard also.  She was self made and proud of it living as she did in her big house on Hob Hill along with others who had made it big with a second house on the Gulf Shores.  She had grown up in that little trailor with her parents just knowing that one day she would be successful at something and she had--well until she had this little run in with the law.  She had been falsly accused of a crime she didn't commit.  That was when she made a bargain with God to do as He wanted her to do and He would get her out of this trouble she was had found herself and her family in.  Well she got out of the difficulty and now she needed to figure out what it was God wanted her to do.  She decided to become a minister first and then to work with women prisoners.  She had to buck the system fighting against the professionals in charge of the prison system to make a system that would actually rehabilitate the female prisoner with which she worked eventually bringing them into her own home to live together.  She founded the Lovelady Center which grew to serve 450 women and children providing them with the tools to live a law abiding life successfully outside the prison from which she took them.

 

This book is an interesting book telling what one woman could do with God's help and direction to help her community.  She didn't let the system tell her it couldn't be done.  This book just covers the first year of her plan working with the female incarcerated in her area.  I enjoyed reading it and feel that this should be a lesson on what anyone can do it they put their mind to it.  So much of the time we are given we waste when it could be put to good use for those less fortunate around us. I am so glad I was given the opportunity to read this book.  Now let us all get busy and figure out what it is that God wants of our time.

 

This book was provided by Waterbrook Press for this review.