BOOK CLUB
The COM Book Club happens annually. In Book Club, we read a book together on the topics of poverty, Christian community development, or theology. This is one of the ways we seek to form a community committed to loving our neighbors as ourselves. You can see the books we've studied together below.
Members of Compassion Collaborative, COM's monthly giving program, get free access to Book Club. (Membership begins at just $20 per month, and you can join with the button below.) Others interested in Book Club just pay a fee to cover the expense of the book.
I'm not a member of Compassion Collaborative:
CURRENT BOOK
FRIDAYS at Noon FROM March 21st-April 25th 2025
"Where the Cross Meets the Streets"
by Noel Castellanos
In Where the Cross Meets the Street Castellanos shows the strengths and limitations of a narrowly focused church and broadens our imaginations to embrace a gospel that proclaims Christ and forms disciples. This life-giving gospel also demonstrates compassion, confronts injustice and restores individuals and communities to wholeness. This is the whole work of the cross; this is the privilege of those who follow the Word made flesh.
(description from Amazon)
PAST BOOKS
Spring 2024
"Having Nothing, Possessing Everything"
by Michael Mather
Pastor Mike Mather arrived in Indianapolis thinking that he was going to serve the poor. But after his church’s community lost nine young men to violence in a few short months, Mather came to see that the poor didn’t need his help—he needed theirs.
This is the story of how one church found abundance in a com-munity of material poverty. Viewing people—not programs, finances, or service models—as their most valuable resource moved church members beyond their own walls and out into the streets, where they discovered folks rich in strength, talents, determination, and love.
Mather’s Having Nothing, Possessing Everything will inspire readers to seek justice in their own local communities and to find abundance and hope all around them.
(description from Amazon)
SPRING 2023
Under the Overpass by Mike Yankoski
Mike Yankoski did more than just wonder. By his own choice, Mike's life went from upper-middle class plush to scum-of-the-earth repulsive overnight. With only a backpack, a sleeping bag and a guitar, Mike and his traveling companion, Sam, set out to experience life on the streets in six different cities—from Washington D.C. to San Diego— and they put themselves to the test.
For more than five months the pair experienced firsthand the extreme pains of hunger, the constant uncertainty and danger of living on the streets, exhaustion, depression, and social rejection—and all of this by their own choice. They wanted to find out if their faith was real, if they could actually be the Christians they said they were apart from the comforts they’d always known…to discover first hand what it means to be homeless in America. What you encounter in these pages will radically alter how you see your world—and may even change your life.
(description from Amazon)
SUMMER 2022
Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It), by Robert Lupton
Veteran urban activist Robert Lupton reveals the shockingly toxic effects that modern charity has upon the very people meant to benefit from it. Toxic Charity provides proven new models for charitable groups who want to help—not sabotage—those whom they desire to serve. Lupton, the founder of FCS Urban Ministries (Focused Community Strategies) in Atlanta, the voice of the Urban Perspectives newsletter, and the author of Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life, has been at the forefront of urban ministry activism for forty years. Toxic Charity shows us how to start serving needy and impoverished members of our communities in a way that will lead to lasting, real-world change. (book description from Amazon.com)