BLOG 10/20/17. ENGAGING MY READERS

Once in a while, you, my readers, deserve to be filled in on me, on my purpose for writing these blogs, and to be thanked for even reading them. For these past several years I have been preoccupied in writing several books and so, perhaps, have not given due attention to replying to the comments which some of you have thoughtfully offered (and which I have appreciated). Now, I am at that moment in my life when I am standing at the threshold of a new passage, after the submission of my latest book for publication. It has given me time to look back over several years of comments and to reflect on the whole blogging dimension of my life.

A couple of things need to be said. First, I was encouraged/provoked into writing these blogs by family members, who insisted that I needed to keep writing here in the octogenarian years of my life. And, secondly, because somehow I have, from the beginning of my six decades of engagement as a teacher and disciple-maker, found myself in challenging contexts that demanded that I challenge many cultural idols and traditions. I am, by nature, a person with something of an inferiority complex, and an introvert, so that to consider myself a prophet seemed unimaginable—though I have always, for some reason, embraced Jeremiah’s calling to have God’s word provoking me to “break down, root up, overthrow, and destroy, and to build and to plant.”

Having cut my teeth in the years when the civil rights movement was emerging into inescapable prominence, that calling had me challenging racism, segregation, and all the ugly ramifications of that. Then came the Viet Nam war, and national military policies that I simply could not square with what I was reading and teaching in scripture. It was in that pilgrimage that I was first made aware that others looked to me as a prophetic voice, . . . such persons as the late Pete Hammond of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Bill Pannell of Fuller Seminary, and John Perkins, civil rights champion and community developer, were instrumental in that awareness.

That said, I do not want these blogs to clutter cyber-space with platitudes or personal agendas. I intend them to suspend the boundaries of our thinking, to challenge or defy existential culture, and to be useful in forming God’s new creation in the thinking and behavior of God’s people. That being so, I do cherish from my readers, several things:

• Your prayers for my own clarity of mind, and formation by the Word of God, and for the fruitfulness of these blog.
• Your feedback in sending along comments that may assist in sharpening this vision.
• Your commending this blog to your friends to subscribe if you find them helpful.

These blogs, along with my several books reflect my own formation into an understanding of God’s new creation in Christ, and how the church is to be the radical and communal expression / incarnation (kingdom of God) of that. This emerges in the book Subversive Jesus, Radical Grace, then in my trilogy: Enchanted Community, then Refounding the Church from the Underside, and The Church and the Relentless Darkness. More recently, my attempt to explain the church to those who have no contact with it: What on Earth Is the Church? The latest, and now in process is: Homebrew Churches: Re-conceiving the Church for Tomorrow’s Children. All these published and sold by Wipf and Stock (as well as Amazon) under my full name: Robert Thornton Henderson.

Again, thank you for joining with me in this blogging sojourn. I know from the sites status that there are many subscribers, and many more who read them from across the country and from other nations. Isn’t it an amazing tool? Whatever glory goes to the Lamb of God.