Latest project: Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line, co-authored with Cindy Lambert (Focus on the Family/SaltRiver/Tyndale House Publishers).

Resides in: Bryan, Texas.

What changed you from pro-choice to pro-life? There were a couple things. One was I started to see how the organization was really driven by money. ... The last year I was there we were struggling financially and so I was there to help the women and to help serve them, but I started to see really they were just dollar signs to this organization. What really was the turning point was actually seeing an ultrasound-guided abortion procedure on the ultrasound screen and seeing a child fighting for its life in the womb and ultimately losing that battle.

And you were participating in that abortion? That’s right. I was holding the ultrasound probe on the women’s abdomen during the actual abortion procedure. 

But that’s not something you normally did? No, actually using ultrasound guidance during an abortion procedure was not something we normally did in our facility.

You were the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic. How did you start working there? I started out as a volunteer. I was in college and didn’t know much about Planned Parenthood, kind of got roped in to the mission. They told me they were there to help women, help under-served women, help women who didn’t have insurance and healthcare on their own and that they were really there to help provide preventative care to women and to help reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies and therefore reduce the number of abortions. … I was raised pro-life and knew that being pro-life meant that my family was against abortion. The way it was described to me made sense and as someone who hasn’t really discussed the ins and outs of abortion with my family in detail, I was pretty easy to hook.

You now volunteer with Coalition for Life. What is that like? I go and pray outside the clinic where I used to work regularly. I do work with 40 Days for Life campaign.

How would you advise retailers in selling this book? This is really a book that shows the power of God’s redemption. As someone who has not only been party to thousands of abortions as an abortion clinic director, but who has also had two abortions herself, this is a book that can really relate to people who have struggled with these issues

Compassion International employee Dan Woolley made a near-fatal move when he switched hotels in Haiti last January. With Jennifer Schuchmann, Woolley tells the story of his rescue after being trapped for 65 hours when the earth shook Jan. 12, 2010, in Unshaken: Rising From the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana (978-0-310-33097-4, $22.99, Zondervan).

It was only Woolley’s second day in the country, which he was visiting with a colleague to record stories of Compassion’s work, when 230,000 people were killed in the 7.0 earthquake. He had planned to stay in a different hotel, but was forced to move when his hotel reservation was switched. The relief agency worker suffered serious head and leg injuries when the quake struck—and suffered the loss of a colleague, who was killed instantly. 

With two young boys at home—and wife Christy prone to depression—Woolley did everything he could to survive, treating his injuries with the help of a first-aid iPhone app and employing survival techniques he had learned from watching Bear Grylls’ Man vs. Wild.

Best-selling author and pastor considers the ’70 times seven’ question

TITLE: Unconditional?

AUTHOR: Brian Zahnd

PUBLISHER: Charisma House (Strang Book Group)

ISBN: 978-1-616-38025-0

PRICE: $19.99

RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4

QUOTABLE: "Forgiveness is not justifying what has happened. It is not necessarily even forgetting...but forgiveness is simply saying I am going to abandon the cycle of revenge." -Zahnd

Starting with the horror of the Holocaust, best-selling author and pastor Brian Zahnd’s·Unconditional? The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness·explores the meaning and scope of forgiveness in a troubled world.

“If Christianity isn’t about forgiveness, it’s about nothing at all,” writes Zahnd, founder and senior pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Mo.

Author Mark Labberton calls readers to get their hearts right in order to actively respond to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" in The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus (978-0-830-83840-0, $20, hardcover), releasing this month from IVP Books/InterVarsity Press.

Following his 2007 The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice, Labberton's most recent "dangerous" installment challenges readers to reflect on why the heart can become complacent about the world and its needs. 

Labberton—formerly a Presbyterian minister and now a senior fellow of the International Justice Mission, Lloyd John Ogilvie chair for preaching and director of the Lloyd John Ogilvie Institute for Preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary—encourages readers to first see rightly, the beginning of how our hearts are changed.

Considering how to follow Christ in 'the mundane, concrete and routine'

Best-selling author Scot McKnight, professor of religious studies at Chicago's North Park University, issues a discipleship challenge, aiming to reveal what it means to truly follow Jesus, in One.Life: Jesus Calls. We Follow. 

Raised in a Christian home, McKnight accepted Christ at age 6, but in his teen years he began to grapple in a deeper way with what it actually meant to be a believer.

"I moved from understanding a Christian as someone who accepts Christ into their heart to someone who surrenders themselves to Christ in trust and obedience, so that a Christian, for me, is not someone simply who has accepted Christ but someone who, as the result of accepting Christ, follows Christ," he said.

"That transformed my life when I was 17 years old and through my seminary-study days, when I realized that being a Christian was a revolutionary decision and lifestyle that would impact everything I did."

McKnight, who addressed the topic of love in The Jesus Creed, goes on to examine what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a multitude of ways, offering up topics from justice to sex to vocation to eternity. 

Latest project: Health Care You Can Live With (Barbour Publishing).

Tell us about the Church Health Center you started in Memphis. "We began in 1987. We provide health care for people who work in low-wage jobs who don't have health insurance. We take care of the people who work to make our lives comfortable. They shine your shoes, cook your food and one day dig your grave, and they don't complain, yet when they get sick, their options are very few. We currently care for over 70,000 people. We're not a federally funded anything. We are totally supported by people of faith. The reason why we do what we do is that the call to discipleship is to do three things: to preach, to teach and to heal. In our churches, we got the preach and the teach down, but what does it mean to have a healing ministry? That's what the Church Health Center is all about, and we do it in three ways: medically, which is a traditional clinic which cares for people from the cradle to the grave; wellness, (which is) all about keeping people healthy, and finally outreach, which is engaging churches to help churches understand in today's world what a healing ministry looks like."