Fully Alive: Tending to the soul in turbulent times by Elizabeth Oldfield (Hodder, £10.99 (£9.89); 978-1-399-81077-7). New in paperback

“Elizabeth Oldfield explores how we can build spiritual core strength for an unstable age. Drawing on the ancient wisdom of faith and stories from her own life, Oldfield writes about her quest to live a meaningful, fulfilling life, and the niggling questions that bother all of us below the surface”

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How marriage replaced ordination as a woman’s path to ministry by Beth Allison Barr (Brazos Press, £19.99 (£17.99); 978-1-58743-589-8).

“As a pastor’s wife for 25 years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be. In Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her academic expertise to trace the history of the role of the pastor's wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions.”

An Intercultural Worship Handbook: Routes, tools and guideposts for the journey by Ian Collinge (Canterbury Press, £19.99 (£15.99); 978-1-78622-659-4).

“This book aims to fill the gap between aspiration and actuality. It is a practical handbook rooted in decades of experience. It provides solid foundations from the Bible, theology and cross-cultural mission as well as tested principles from ethnodoxology. It gives advice from practitioners, examples from a host of contexts and a suite of tools for church leaders to use at different times, to guide their congregations to become intercultural in their worship not just multicultural in their numbers.”


Selected by Frank Nugent, of the Church House Bookshop, which operates the Church Times Bookshop.