Fall 2023 – Most Anticipated Books for Christian Readers!

The second half of 2023 promises a ton of excellent new books! Here are 60 of our most anticipated books of Fall 2023 for Christian Readers…

These anticipated books of Fall 2023 (released in the second half of the year) wrestle with some of the deepest challenges of our day, and will guide us toward faithful living in the present and in years to come.

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[ TOP 10 – Part 1 ]   [ Top 10 – Part 2 ]
[ Theology ] [ NonFiction ] [ Church ]
[ Formation ] [ Memoirs / Bios ] [ Literature ]
[ Coming in 2024! ]

Page 1: TOP 10 – Part 1

(In Alphabetical Order by Author’s Last Name)

Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture

Laura Barringer / Scot McKnight

(Tyndale, Sept. 2023)

A practical guide to help you build a culture in your church or organization that resists abuse and cultivates goodness.

After the release of their groundbreaking book, A Church Called Tov, which recorded the stories of abuse and toxic church cultures at some of the most prominent churches in the United States, New Testament scholar and blogger for Christianity Today Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer heard from a flood of people who had experienced similar instances of abuse. After all they’ve seen and heard, they still believe it’s possible for church cultures to be transformed from toxic to tov―from oppressive to good.

In Pivot, Scot and Laura help churches to implement practices,establish priorities, and cultivate the Kingdom Gospel-centered qualities that form goodness cultures. Readers will find answers to the four most common questions people have about culture transformation:

1. How can I transform the culture in my church or organization to make it tov?
2. I believe my workplace has unhealthy values. How do I initiate change?
3. How do I unleash a culture of goodness in my ministry?
4. I’m not in a position of church leadership. What are some red flags that indicate a toxic culture, and what can I do if I see them?

Pivot also includes the following practical features:

• The “Tov tool,” a survey to help you discern your organization’s culture and to promote spiritual conversations
• A “getting to work” section at the end of each chapter with questions and next steps for application

Transformation is never easy. But for the sake of the next generation, we must do it.

Winter’s Gifts
(An Indigenous Celebration of Nature) 

Kaitlin Curtice /
Gloria Felix (Illustrator)

(Convergent Books, Oct. 2023)

A vibrantly illustrated children’s book about an Indigenous girl who finds awe in the resting and waiting that winter teaches us and shares with her friends how Creator’s gift of gratitude can transform the way we see the world.

Your thankfulness is your gift to Earth.

Winter’s Gifts is the tale of a young Potawatomi girl named Dani whose family celebrates the darkest season of the year by treasuring the slowness that winter brings. Dani’s schoolmates think it’s silly to think that Earth gives us presents, but on a magical snowy day, her family and Creator give Dani the courage to teach her friends about the gifts of winter—resting, remembrance, and gratitude. Can Dani help them receive winter’s gifts?

Winter’s Gifts is a joyful and tender family story of honoring creation, the power of storytelling, and how a new perspective can transform us.

The Book of (More) Delights: Essays

Ross Gay

(Algonquin, Sept. 2023)

Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite” (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative” (the New York Times Book Review), and “brilliant” (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “ubiquitous, nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren.

As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.

For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us “literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend” (the New York Review of Books). The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share.

Loving Disagreement: Fighting for Community through the Fruit of the Spirit

Kathy Khang and Matt Mikalatos

(NavPress, Oct. 2023)

What does it look like to love someone you disagree with?

Fighting, disagreements, hatred, dissension, and silence. These things seem common in the wider Christian community today. Politics, theology, and even personal preference create seemingly insurmountable rifts. It’s hard not to see ourselves as “at war” with each other.

We’re not doomed to be stuck here, though. There is a twofold path out of this destructive war, out of seeing our brothers and sisters as enemies—and into a spacious place of loving each other even as we disagree.

In Loving Disagreement, Kathy Khang and Matt Mikalatos bring unique insight into how the fruit of the Spirit informs our ability to engage in profound difference and conflict with love. As followers of Jesus are planted in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit grows and bears good things in our lives—and relationships and communities are changed.

How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

Esau McCaulley

(Convergent Books, Sept. 2023)

From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and award-winning author of Reading While Black, a riveting intergenerational account of his family’s search for home and hope

“A riveting book that invites you into the personal journey of one of the finest writers alive today.”—Beth Moore, New York Times bestselling author of All My Knotted-Up Life

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

But that narrative was called into question one night, when McCaulley answered the phone and learned that his father—whose absence defined his upbringing—died in a car crash. McCaulley was being asked to deliver his father’s eulogy, to make sense of his complicated legacy in a country that only accepts Black men on the condition that they are exceptional, hardworking, perfect.

The resulting effort sent McCaulley back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him. In these pages, we meet his great-grandmother Sophia, a tenant farmer born with the gift of prophecy who scraped together a life in Jim Crow Alabama; his mother, Laurie, who raised four kids alone in an era when single Black mothers were demonized as “welfare queens”; and a cast of family, friends, and neighbors who won small victories in a world built to swallow Black lives. With profound honesty and compassion, he raises questions that implicate us all: What does each person’s struggle to build a life teach us about what we owe each other? About what it means to be human?

How Far to the Promised Land is a thrilling and tender epic about being Black in America. It’s a book that questions our too-simple narratives about poverty and upward mobility; a book in which the people normally written out of the American Dream are given voice.

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