Encounters on the Edge: A Short Intermission

This booklet (online as pdf here) by George Lings (see also) is a practical, example-rich, missionally-minded consideration of how churches can engage with the arts better in a variety of ways, be that to reach new people, develop relations or deepen faith journeys among older ones, or whatever - it takes a much broader tack than just Messy Church, and for anyone in church leadership who'd like to think of ways of bringing creativity into your ecclesial life (which, trust me, is worth doing but bloody difficult oftentimes) I'd recommend checking out this as it's a fab little primer.

Seven Sacred Spaces

This booklet by George Lings is one of the more famous publications by Church Army (my current employer). It explores seven commonly-recurring features of buildings designed to house monastic or faith communities (the cell, chapter, chapel, cloister, refectory, garden and scriptorium), and meditates on what it means that such features recur as they do - drawing their practical everyday functions into a picture of various aspects of how healthy spiritual rhythms can be cultivated and maintained in such communities. George walks us through established Rules in various monastic traditions with regards to each of these spaces, but also draws practical and poignant connections with aspects of these spaces' functions present (or absent) in current spaces or practices in contemporary Christian life; as such this book yields a surprising amount of insight into how shaping the context of shared life together can have considerable positive (or not) effects on how the people living in that context are able to cultivate and maintain healthy spiritual rhythms to their shared life as a Christian community. I'll admit I read it mostly out of curiousity as it's a resource that gets mentioned a lot and seems to be widely-known among Church Army people, but I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone who'd be open to some refreshingly practical and historically-grounded exploration of how faith communities can use structure in simple ways to encourage harmony.