PROGRAMS
When you press a “buy now” button below, you will be able to purchase digital versions of our program materials using a credit or debit card through Paypal. The cost includes one copy of the Workbook, “Making God Real in Religious Settings” or “Making God Real in Non-Religious Settings” and a copy Of the Leader’s Guide.
Making God Real: Building Spiritual Life Teams in Religious Settings
This program will transform your religious community and make God “real” in your congregation. This well tested program is the basic course in becoming a Spiritual Life Team and is designed to help people recognize and connect their spiritual lives. This program ignites spiritual life in a unique series of steps and is available for people of all ages. The six part program includes an instructive workbook and a leader’s guide containing essential step-by-step instructions and information about spiritual life and spiritual growth.
Making God Real: Building Spiritual Life Teams in Non-Religious Settings
This program offers exciting and unique opportunities to build Spiritual Life Teams outside of a religious setting: in the family, the neighborhood, at work, and in the community. This entirely inclusive program is a powerful opportunity to “Make God Real” for everyone. It is focused on those who want to grow their spiritual lives in multiple settings. The six part program includes an instructive workbook and a leader’s guide containing essential step-by-step instructions and information about spiritual life and spiritual growth.
OUR BOOKS
The Man Who Sold Pianos and Other Stories About God
By Rev. Bobbie McKay Ph.D. March 4, 2021
This book is about God in the world – not hovering above the world in some celestial space – but God with you, the reader, as experienced in your life. All God experiences have one thing in common: They make God “real” in the lives of the people who have experienced them. God appears unexpectedly as a change agent empowering those who recognize God and are willing to follow these God prompts and redirect their lives.In reading my God experiences, I invite you, the reader, to consider when God became “real” in your life. How did you know it was God who arrived in your life space? What happened next? Did you share the reality of this unexpected “visitor” with anyone? What did you learn about God?”
Rev. Bobbie McKay, Ph.D
God, Women and Life
By Rev. Bobbie McKay Ph.D. September 4, 2020
“God, Women and Life” is a trilogy about my unexpected meeting with God. I was a young mother with three children and no long-range life plans except to get a job as a secretary when they went off to college. I was happy with my plans and my life. Enter God and everything changed! Part I, “The Call” is the story of my meeting with God and the power of discovering God everywhere in my life. I changed from a shy, quiet suburban wife and mother to a seminary student, one of two women on campus whose future in ministry was removed by the Methodist Bishop who ordained me and then assured me I would never get a job because I was a married woman with children and thoroughly unwanted by local congregations. The year was 1970. Part II, “The Girls From Glenview” is the amazing story of the women of the Glenview Community Church who were looking for a woman minister to provide ministry to them at precisely the same time as the Bishop was assuring me that I would never get a job. The story of how we met is the wonderful reality of God in the world. I spent the first seven years of my ministry being alternately hated and loved by the congregation as their first woman minister. But I learned about God in the trenches and discovered the gift and the power of a small group ministry, based on love and connections, which transformed the church and my life! Part III, “Letters to Rachel About Aging” is a collection of personal letters written for my daughter in law, Rachel, about my own experience of aging. Having not only survived in ministry, I earned a Ph.D. in Psychology, developed a group practice as a psychologist and initiated an experimental church which met for twenty five years. In my 70’s, Rachel raised the question about aging as information for her practice as a psychologist. I decided to send her a series of personal letters about my own experience of aging. These letters are not a treatise on the subject of aging. But they have allowed me to look deeply at my own aging process and discover how essential love is to the experience.
Rev. Bobbie McKay, Ph.D
By Rev. Bobbie McKay, Ph.D. October 23, 2013
Dr. Bobbie McKay takes us on a journey to discover God available everywhere for all people. Dancing with God is a book about the dance we call “life.” Dr. McKay helps us find God in our own lives by sharing stories from her life and from some of the four thousand people in her original research study of Spiritual Life in mainstream, interfaith congregations. Each chapter contains a unique God experience. Chapters can be read in any order. It is a powerful way to share God experiences in a group setting. Dr. McKay challenges us to follow a God directed pathway: to trust that Love does not abandon us and to know that Spirit linked to Spirit will change the world.
When God Becomes Real: Stories of Presence, Models of Church
By Rev. Bobbie McKay, Ph.D. June 24, 2008
In When God Becomes Real, Bobbie McKay introduces new approaches to ministry and community for the twenty-first century. She tells the stories of new models of church that she has helped create, in real places, among real people. Her own encounter with the God whose name is “Surprise!” has led her to ask thousands of other people about the God that they know. And, thousands have responded with stories of God’s healing and empowering presence. And these stories have brought many together—members of established churches as well as those who had left the church behind; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and many with no religious affiliation at all. Together, as they tell their stories, as they talk about their real lives, as they share time and share meals, this astonishing variety of people is becoming what McKay calls The New Spiritual Community. This book invites you, the reader, to know that God is Real and to add your story to the telling!
Taking A Chance on God: Exploring God’s Presence in our Lives
By Rev. Bobbie McKay, Ph.D. November 8, 2007
This book describes the results of our unusually large research study in spiritual life. It is an ideal vehicle for group exploration of Spiritual Life for people of any age and any spiritual interest. “It is exciting to reflect upon the potential that this imposing body of qualitative and quantitative research has for bringing about healing relationships among people at the deepest level. The authors have done the scientific and religious world a great service in probing beneath the surface of life to give us a new and fresh insight into the action and presence of God in human existence.”
George Gallup, Jr.
Healing the Spirit: Stories of Transformation
By Rev. Bobbie McKay, Ph.D. September 1, 2000
This is the first book to describe this amazing research study. In warm, anecdotal stories about life, you will find God becoming real on every page. “A heartwarming and tranformative book that hints at a theology that transcends denominational and cultural barriers joining the raw material of human experience to the capacity of the divine to transfigure and make new.” -Reverend Stephen Parsons, Reprinted from “De Numinae” The Journal of Religious Research Center, Oxford University, U.K.
SPIRITUAL LIFE TEAMS: A NEW SPIRITUAL PROGRAM FOR PEOPLE OF ALL AGES AND BACKGROUNDS
GROW YOUR SPIRIT! ADD A FRIEND! CREATE A SPIRITUAL LIFE TEAM! BEGIN A NEW LIFE!
- Based on solid research in spiritual life with Protestants, Catholics, Reform Jews & Muslims
- Beta tested for ten years! Combines real life spiritual experiences with action. THIS PROGRAM WORKS!
- Workbook and Leader’s Guide can be downloaded and reproduced for your group.
- Four optional text books available at Amazon.com.
RESOURCES FOR CLERGY AND BUSINESS LEADERS
People have experiences of God in life that are transforming to all parts of their lives: sacred and secular!
Spiritual Life Teams grow spirit in all denominational settings and interfaith groups. They are also a powerful vehicle for spiritual growth in any organization.
Any religious group can incorporate the spiritual life team program and create powerful connections to grow their congregations.
Any secular group can bring the energy, excitement and spirit of this program creating a new spirit and dedication to the growth and success of the organization.
A workbook and leader’s guide is available for both groups:
- Making God Real in Religious Settings: Building a Spiritual Life Team
- Making God Real in Non-Religious Settings: Building a Spiritual Life Team
SPIRIT BLOG
Click on any of the stories below to read the words from our founder and those who have shared their God gifts with others.
On Healing, Headaches, Feeling Better and Finding God
Our extensive research study on Spiritual life in mainstream interfaith congregations contained both quantitative and qualitative questions about spiritual life. The results of our analysis of the quantitative data revealed three critical findings:
Praying With Mind, Spirit and Body: It Will Change Your Life!
I have the privilege of being the grandparent of an incredible granddaughter, Shannon, who is deaf, and her husband, Brent, who is also incredible and deaf. And the richness of their lives and the deaf community we have met through them have changed our lives entirely.…
New Prayers, New Spirit
At most churches, prayer is a pretty standard experience. We have certain prayers we say at different times in the worship service. We generally pray before and sometimes after a meeting. We pray when someone is ill and needs our prayers. We pray when there is an emergency and we know that prayer is our most direct line to God’s Presence.
Men & God: A Beginning Inquiry into Male Spiritual Life in a Small Group Setting: Part I
Over the fifty years of my ministry, I’ve encountered questions about gender differences when talking about spiritual life, often including statements about men not being as spiritual as women. I’ve always thought that men and women had different spiritual lives, not defined as more or better.
Love is Where You Find It: The power of Love in Spiritual Life
Designing a research study to understand spiritual life in mainstream, interfaith congregations called for an approach that would reach a variety of people from different backgrounds, educational opportunities, interests and abilities who shared an interest in spiritual life.
DISCOVER GOD – SHARE THE GIFT – CHANGE YOUR LIFE – CHANGE THE WORLD
DISCOVER GOD:
Let God become REAL in your life – not an intellectual understanding or an emotional support but entirely real, experienced, known, a constant presence; available 24/7, a felt reality, never separated.
SHARE THE GIFT:
Talk about God to anyone… everyone… friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, strangers! (I talk to my Uber drivers all the time about God and they get it.)
CHANGE YOUR LIFE:
Let God become an essential/necessary part of your life. 24/7, never absent, available every second of every day, start and end the day with God as a presence with you and you will will find yourself becoming more loving, more attentive, more attentive to others, more open to learning more about God from other people and from your experiences.
People in my study said they became less angry, lived more in the present rather than the past or the future and most significantly, they “felt better”… undefined better but real.
CHANGE THE WORLD:
God is not a secret relationship. Find a way to talk about God first to people you think will be receptive, and then anywhere! When God is real for you, God will become real to anyone you come in contact with.
As your behavior changes – and it will, because you are now connected go God, people will see you differently. Look at your own experiences now shared when God became real to you. How have you changed? What’s different about you and your life? What’s different about your relationships with others?
That’s where we can help make God real for others because God has become more real to you.
God is the most powerful source for change in the world. (It beats psychology every time! Spoken by a licensed psychologist, Reverend Bobbie McKay, Phd.)