top of page
This site was designed with the
.com
website builder. Create your website today.Start Now
Paperbacks available from Amazon.  Click on image to go to Amazon.
Psalm 23: An Everyday Psalm. John Zehring books.
Seven Mantras to Shape Your Day. John Zehring books.
“Lent Discussions for Curious Christians” stimulates engaging conversations for study groups during the six weeks of Lent, which is why there are six chapters. Each chapter begins with discussion starters to stimulate the conversation. Then reflections and background information is provided followed by scripture texts connected to the questions. Conversation with other questioners contains the potential to strengthen current belief, to grow one’s faith, to love God with our minds as well as our hearts and to consider which parts of belief are most important. As curious Christians, we are well-served to work our way through Lent so that we are more fully prepared to celebrate the Day of Resurrection.
Treasures from James takes the Book of James and mines from it twelve GEMS that apply to your daily life today. Inspires you and guides your growth as a person of faith.
Clergy Guide to Making Visits. John Zehring books.
If you are called upon to offer a eulogy, introduce a speaker or make any special occasion speech, this book will guide you with tips and valuable direction. Sections on content and delivery in public speaking show how to connect well with your listeners. Includes 24 readings, stories and scriptures for use with eulogies.
Jesus was master of the parable. His stories made people think for themselves. That is a hallmark of the parable: it is not so much for another to tell you what it means but for you to discover its meaning to you. A dozen of the most beloved parables from Jesus of Nazareth are presented for study and inspiration to help you apply the bible to your life today. Favorite Parables from Jesus of Nazareth also lends itself well to adult study groups.
Button
Anxious? Anxiety? Worry? Bible verses for when you feel anxious.
The One Minute Beatitude. John Zehring books.
Treasures from Galatia takes Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians and mines from it twelve gems that apply to your daily life today as they did to the Galatians. It is not quite the same as a bible study, nor is it a sketch about Paul or the church he founded. Rather, it is a devotional springboard for you to enrich your faith, deepen your relationships with others, discover new heights to your faith and leap further into your closer walk with God. Your life will be enriched by these gems.
Visiting on Behalf of Your Church. A Guide for Deacons, Care Teams and Those Who Visit. John Zehring books.
“Clergy Guide to Sermon Preparation” is designed for seasoned clergy who are always on the lookout for new ideas. Included are tips for preparing sermons, a special section on “How to Keep Weeks Ahead… and why you should” and forty sermon ideas and outlines, rich with illustrations, stories, and quotations to help apply the bible’s teachings to the everyday lives and needs of your listeners.
Get You Church Ready to Grow: A Guide to Building Attendance and Participation
Beyond Stewardship: A Church Guide to Generous Giving Campaigns. John Zehring books.
Treasures from Philippi. GEMS for You from the Epistle to the Philippians. John Zehring books.
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. John Zehring books.
Clergy Public Speaking Guide. Improve What You Already Do Well. John Zehring books.
Clergy Negotiating Guide: Don't Sell Yourself Short. John Zehring books.
Mount Up with Wings: Renew Your Strength. John Zehring books.
“Discussions for Curious Christians about Jesus’ Miracles” is designed as a six-week adult small group conversation or class, although anyone curious about Jesus’ miracles will find it enlightening. Each chapter includes conversation starters, reflections, and related scriptures. Key question: what is the message behind the miracle?
Public Speaking for Executives, Leaders and Managers. John Zehring books.
For Progressive People of Faith. John Zehring books.
A resource for people who find themselves in emotional or physically abusive relationships. Provides resources where women may find help, recognizes faith challenges which can result from abuse and offers compassionate Christian understanding.
Hard sayings of Jesus are those he spoke which are hard to understand. How can curious Christians wrestle with their meaning to understand them? This book stimulates engaging conversations for a six-week group study of Jesus’ hard sayings.
This booklet practices what it preaches: it is concise, to the point, and encourages effectiveness over efficiency. The goal: to give you tools that are quick to comprehend, easy to implement and will multiply what you can accomplish. In short, it will help you to work smarter, not harder. It will also aid you to avoid missing what your paycheck providers value most. Effective time management can make or break a pastor. Learn effective tools to help you make the most of your time and have time left over for yourself and your family and interests.
“Pastoral Leadership and Church Administration” guides you to learn skills to become a highly effective pastor. Build vision, provide hope, tend leaders, build a staff team, manage time, plan strategically, craft policies, solve problems and learn to negotiate for yourself. Top priorities of a pastor: Worship preparation and delivery, being among your people and making sure things run well. How to tend to those priorities without getting nibbled to death by ducks.
This booklet guides clergy to tend to your leaders and to build a team with your staff. Teamwork is more important than any single individual’s contribution. Also included are tips on staff evaluations as well as the pastor’s annual evaluation.
“Treasures from Rome” takes Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and mines from it thirty sparkling gems that apply to your daily life today as they did to the Romans.
“Asking for Campaign Support” guides church volunteers to visit members to ask them to support their church’s capital campaign. Also included are sections to guide visitors in role playing case studies as well as a treasury of scriptures and quotations about giving.
This book views Jesus’ woodshop and the profound messages that he drew from his years at the craft of carpentry in Nazareth. It is part fact, part conjecture. Take a peek inside his workshop to see the products he crafted and the lessons he would draw from them as illustrations of eternal truths.
“The Great I AM” examines the I AM statements of Jesus individually and as a whole to see if the pattern might also suggest a mysterious meaning.
Treasures from Proverbs.paperback.2.jpg
“Majestic is Thy Name” contains 150 uplifting meditations and prayers, one for each Psalm. The book mines gems from the Psalms to pilot the reader into an encounter with the Divine. The reflection for each Psalm provides language, lyrics, illustrations and quotations to lead us into a relationship with God with heighten praise.
Treasures from Mark lifts up gems from each chapter of Mark’s gospel to inspire you, center your spirituality, strengthen your faith, challenge your thinking, and lead you to some of the highest goals to which a human can aspire.
Be Still My Soul
They Can Conquer.paperback
“Persuade them” is a guide to public speaking to persuade. Included are tips on how to persuade others and how to craft and deliver a presentation to convince. Learn how to size up an audience, write for the ear, build credibility, grab listeners’ attention, master techniques of delivery, make a compelling case, and drive home a conclusion which influences attitudes and motivates action.
A Simple Faith
“Clergy Guide to Confirmation Verses” offers a wide selection of verses to present individually to each Confirmand on Confirmation Sunday. Each verse includes a recommendation for the person it might fit well, background information to draw from when talking with the Confirmand about the verse, and suggestions for how to make it personal.
“Reasons to Believe in the Institutional Church” offers positive reasons to believe in the institutional church.
“Music of the Spheres” contains twenty meditations and stories of hymns about loving and tending the earth. The hymns we sing about God’s creation inspire singers to love the earth, care for the earth, advocate for the earth’s health and future, and give of themselves in service to God who entrusts to us the stewardship of our environment.
With the corona-virus pandemic, the survival of our churches is at stake. As church leaders try to figure out how to triage the church’s declining income, this book provides guidance for how to fund the church’s mission and ministry during a global pandemic of unknown length. The focus is on how to lead the Annual Giving Campaign under these high-risk circumstances.
Each chapter of “Hymns of Peace” reviews the lyrics to hymns about peace, information about the author, and reflections about the love of God and the way of Jesus. The word peace in hymns as well as in the Bible is used in a number of different ways. First, there is the peace of world peace. Second, there is the peace of relationships, of getting along with people and resolving conflict with others. Third, there is the peace of inner peace, which comes by the gift of God. Because there are at least three different kinds of peace referred to in our hymns and scriptures, all of them are included in this book, “Hymns of Peace.”
Each chapter of “Hymns of Christian Commitment” celebrates the lyrics to hymns about a person’s commitment to God, provides information about the author, and offers reflections about what it means to put God first. These hymns constitute the music of those who would invite God into the heart and treat God as an honored guest.
The second volume of “Essays on Justice, Goodness and Faith” inspires you to grow in your doing of justice, wanting to be a good person, and deepening your faithfulness to God. The essays are reprinted with permission from articles by John Zehring in The Christian Citizen, a social justice publication of the American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
Hymns Their Stories and Their Messages
As a clergyman and an educator, John Zehring recognizes the powerful need to think critically about our patriotism. His goal as a writer is to encourage readers to weigh information evaluatively about the data they receive, whether from the podium, the pulpit, the internet, social media, the TV, family or friends.
When you feel worn down, this book leads you to springs of spiritual refreshment. “Worn Down?” is a compendium of John Zehring’s writings, drawn from the bible and from hymns, and gathered into bite-sized chapters to inspire, lift, comfort, strengthen, and encourage hope.
Connect with Your Audience.paperback
“Hymns of Christmas - Their Stories and Their Messages” reveals the background story of how the Christmas carols came to us and adds insightful reflections on their meaning and inspiration for 21st Christians today. If you love the Christmas carols, this book of Christmas hymn stories will enrich your affection for their words and tunes.
“Hymns of Gratitude” reveals the background story of how hymns of gratitude to God came to us and adds insightful reflections on their meaning and inspiration for 21st Christians today.
“Hymns of the Spirit” reveals the background story of how hymns about the Spirit came to us, and adds insightful reflections on their meaning and inspiration for 21st Christians today. “God is spirit,” Jesus revealed to the Samaritan woman at the well. And so, hymns with the word “spirit” in them are included in this book and tell about their authors, composers, and their message.
“Geography of Hymn Writers” takes the stories of hymn writers and organizes them according to the geography of the authors – where they were born, where they served, or where they found a creative spark to produce their hymns. Like a travelogue, it is designed as a useful guide to provide you an index of geographic locations of the hymn writers, so that in your journeys, you can look up the authors of classic hymns and the locations from where their hymns were born.
“Spiritual But Not Religious: One Minute Meditations” is written for those who recognize some form of the Divine or something larger than themselves, but reject organized religion.
If you are going to be interviewed for a new position as a pastor, you want this book because… who gets the job is not necessarily who can do the job best, but who knows best how to get the job. Take the Call: Clergy Job Interview Guide empowers clergy in their job interviews for new positions.
If you have been asked or if you would like to volunteer to conduct a funeral or a celebration of the person’s life, this guide is for you and will help you prepare to meet with the family and prepare and coordinate a service which is warm, deeply personal, responsive to the family’s desires, and fitting to the one being remembered and celebrated.
Rabbouni
“Social Justice and Christian Faith: Essays by Rev. John Zehring” inspires you to grow in your doing of justice, in wanting to be a good person, and in deepening your faithfulness to God. To do justice is to open our eyes to those in need, especially those on the margins of society, and to be led to stand with and to speak for those who are oppressed.
This book grapples with one of the oldest of human curiosities: Where do you go when you die? Intended as a six-week group study of life after death, it is also enlightening for anyone who is curious about life eternal. It is designed for curious Christians who recognize that asking tough questions does not weaken their faith.
Jesus revealed to the Samaritan woman at the well that “God is spirit.” If God is spirit, what is the need for another kind of Spirit? This book is designed as an eight-week adult study group to stimulate engaging conversations in understanding the Holy Spirit. Each chapter begins with discussion starters to kindle the conversation. Then, reflections are provided as background information.
For you, if you have lost someone dear and are hurting in your sorrow. Or, to gift to a friend or family member who has lost someone they loved and stand in need of comfort, peace, and hope. For the person experiencing loss, the book’s brief meditations help with grief and mourning as they lift up, inspire, strengthen, and encourage the reader who is experiencing sorrow.
This book is like a first-aid kit for congregations in decline. It provides strategies and ideas to reach out and bring back those who have left or who are considering leaving. This is no quick fix. But there are numerous small actions that can be effective to decrease the loss, perhaps even hold membership steady, and maybe even lead to enthusiasm about building for growth in participation and attendance.
If Top Ten lists compel your curiosity, this book covers an engaging list of lists from the bible, including top ten parables, miracles, Jesus’ teachings, Paul’s teachings, Psalms, Proverbs, Prophets, hard sayings, women of the Bible, verses about animals, verses for comfort, verses for anxiety, and many others. It would be hard to review these fascinating lists and not come away informed about the Bible’s most important teachings. If you want to know more about the Bible and enjoy reading Top Ten lists, you will want this book.
Advent Calendar Messages for 30 Days of Awaiting is like an Advent Calendar in book form. Each of the thirty days provides a bible or hymn verse, a brief inspiring message about the coming of Jesus’ birth, and a prayer which you can adopt as your own prayer for the day. When you embrace Advent and prepare yourself spiritually in this way, you are most ready to greet Christmas morn with joy, gladness, and celebration.
This is a first aid kit for your soul. It is for urgent situations, personal crises, emergencies, high-stress experiences, worries, or big problems when your spirit needs first aid. The kit contains bible verses, meditations, poems, hymns, and prayers for when you need comfort and strength most and fast. At the end of the book is a Quick Summary to turn to quickly for first aid for your soul.
bottom of page