Study Guides
Faith & Theology
Explore the foundational questions of Christian faith through guided study of the most influential theological works. These guides help groups wrestle with doctrine, apologetics, and what it means to believe.
Forgotten God
by Francis Chan
Francis Chan's Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit (2009) begins with a disarmingly honest question: if the Holy Spirit were completely removed from your church, would anyone notice? Chan argues that most Western Christianity has domesticated, ignored, or quietly sidelined the third person of the Trinity — and that this neglect is not a minor omission but a catastrophic loss. The book is a passionate, pastoral call to recover a living, dangerous, transforming relationship with the Spirit of God — not as a theological concept, but as a personal, powerful divine presence who was promised to believers and who makes the Christian life actually possible.
View Discussion GuideThe Ragamuffin Gospel
by Brennan Manning
Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel is a passionate, unflinching meditation on the grace of God — a grace so extravagant, so unconditional, and so scandalous that most of us spend our lives half-believing it. Manning's central thesis is simple but revolutionary: God's love for us is not earned, managed, or maintained by our performance. It is freely given to the bedraggled, the beat-up, and the burnt-out — to ragamuffins. The book is both a theological argument and a personal confession, drawing on Manning's own struggle with alcoholism, self-contempt, and the long journey toward receiving rather than just preaching grace. It challenges the comfortable Christianity of the respectable and invites broken people to sit down at the table they feared they'd been excluded from.
View Discussion GuideDesiring God
by John Piper
John Piper's Desiring God opens with a thesis that many Christians find simultaneously liberating and unsettling: the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever. Piper calls this "Christian Hedonism" — the conviction that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Drawing on hundreds of Scripture passages, and standing on the shoulders of Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, and C. S. Lewis, Piper argues that the pursuit of joy is not a distraction from worship but the very heart of it. To seek your deepest pleasure in God is not selfishness — it is the one pursuit that simultaneously honors God supremely and satisfies your soul completely.
View Discussion GuideThe Pursuit of God
by A.W. Tozer
A. W. Tozer wrote The Pursuit of God in a single sitting on a train, and the urgency of that moment pulses through every page. The book's central argument is deceptively simple: God is not merely a doctrine to be affirmed but a living Person to be known, pursued, and experienced. Tozer believed that the greatest crisis of the modern church was not theological error but spiritual dryness — an orthodoxy full of correct opinion yet empty of conscious communion with God. Against that dryness he set the testimony of the great saints across the centuries, and the invitation of Scripture itself: taste and see, draw near, seek His face. This study guide follows Tozer's ten chapters, plus his Preface, across twelve weeks, ending with a final week of review and reflection.
View Discussion GuideOrthodoxy
by G.K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908) is one of the most unusual and delightful works of Christian apologetics ever written. Rather than arguing for Christianity from the outside, Chesterton traces the personal, almost accidental journey by which he came to discover that the philosophy he had been slowly constructing for himself — out of fairy tales, a sense of wonder, disgust at modern pessimism, and a love for paradox — turned out to be nothing other than orthodox Christianity. As he puts it with characteristic wit, "I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before." The book is not a systematic theology; it is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a series of vivid mental pictures that together make a cumulative case that Christian orthodoxy is the one creed large enough, strange enough, and paradoxical enough to fit the actual shape of human life.
View Discussion GuideThe Reason for God
by Timothy Keller
Timothy Keller's The Reason for God is both a dismantling of the most common objections to Christian faith and a positive case for why belief in the God of the Bible is not only intellectually respectable but compelling. Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, spent years listening to the doubts of educated, thoughtful skeptics in one of the most secular cities in America. The result is a book structured in two halves: the first six chapters engage the strongest objections to Christianity head-on — suffering, exclusivity, hell, the reliability of the Bible, the problem of a "repressive" church, and the apparent incompatibility of science and faith. The second half then builds a constructive case for the Christian faith, arguing that the human hunger for meaning, morality, justice, and beauty all point toward a God who is really there.
View Discussion GuideKnowing God
by J.I. Packer
J. I. Packer's Knowing God (1973) is one of the most beloved works of Christian theology written in the twentieth century. Its central thesis is deceptively simple: there is an enormous difference between knowing about God and knowing God personally — and that difference makes all the difference in the world. Drawing on the great Reformed tradition, Packer moves through the attributes and acts of God — His majesty, wisdom, love, wrath, grace, and more — not as dry doctrinal categories but as living realities meant to transform the believer's heart. The book famously opens with the claim that "the most important thing about a Christian is not what they do, but what they think of God," and every chapter is a sustained invitation to upgrade our vision of who God is and how He deals with His people.
View Discussion GuideThe Problem of Pain
by C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940 at the request of Ashley Sampson, who wanted a layman's defense of Christian faith in the face of suffering. Lewis — who had once been an atheist and cited pain as his chief argument against God — brings remarkable intellectual honesty to his task. The book's central thesis is that a world without pain would not be a world of unchallenged comfort, but a world incapable of producing genuine virtue, love, or knowledge of God. Far from being evidence against God's goodness, suffering is reframed as the instrument through which an omnipotent and loving God pursues our deepest good — our surrender, our humility, and ultimately our joy in Him. Lewis does not offer cheap comfort; he offers a rigorous and compassionate argument that invites the reader to reconsider what "good" and "love" really mean when predicated of God.
View Discussion GuideThe Screwtape Letters
by C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is one of the most original and penetrating works of Christian apologetics ever written. Cast as a series of letters from the senior demon Screwtape to his bumbling nephew Wormwood, the book turns the usual perspective on temptation inside out: we see humanity not through the eyes of a saint or a pastor, but through the eyes of hell. The result is both darkly comic and deeply convicting. Lewis's central argument is that the Enemy (God, from hell's perspective) is relentlessly pursuing the love and free will of every human soul, while the demons work not through dramatic supernatural horror but through the quiet, corrosive power of distraction, self-deception, and spiritual complacency. Written against the backdrop of World War II, the letters expose how ordinary life — marriage, friendship, politics, pleasure, and even church attendance — becomes the battlefield for the soul.
View Discussion GuideGentle and Lowly
by Dane Ortlund
Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane C. Ortlund is a book with one simple, stunning thesis: the deepest impulse of Jesus Christ's heart is not frustration, disappointment, or reluctant tolerance — it is tender, zealous, and inexhaustible love for sinners. Drawing on Matthew 11:29, where Jesus describes himself as "gentle and lowly in heart," Ortlund mines the Old and New Testaments and draws heavily on the Puritan writers — Thomas Goodwin, Richard Sibbes, John Bunyan, John Owen, and others — to show that the gospel does not merely change what God does for us; it reveals who God is toward us. The book is not primarily about what we must do but about what kind of Savior we actually have.
View Discussion GuideMere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity began as a series of BBC radio talks delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, when the nation desperately needed a clear, confident articulation of the Christian faith. Lewis — a former atheist and Oxford don — was uniquely suited for the task. His goal was not to argue for any particular denomination, but to lay out the common hall of Christian belief that all major traditions share: the "mere Christianity" of his title. The book moves in four parts, from the universal moral law as evidence for God, to the nature of God and humanity's problem, to the person and work of Christ, and finally to the practical challenge of becoming the kind of person God designed you to be.
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