BLOG 5/16/13: A BIT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

BLOG 5/16/13. A BIT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

I hope that my readers will forgive me for a bit of self-promotion. It is prompted by the email advertisement of Wipf and Stock Publishers this week, promoting their new publications in theology. Wipf and Stock has done the church and the Christian world a real service in both publishing works by prominent theologians, as well as by some of us of more modest reputation. They have also done a service by republishing many significant out-of-print works.

I was delighted and thankful to see in this advertisement my own recent publication: The Church and the Relentless Darkness with its cover image and a brief description there, along with several other recent releases.

Wipf and Stock has now published or republished five of my books, which I am so thankful to have available, though I am not a well-known figure. My sojourn and my writings on the nature of the Christian faith and the Christian church I consider to be the word of my testimony (to paraphrase Revelation 12:11).

The five books are: 1) A Door of Hope (reprint), 2) Subversive Jesus, Radical Grace (reprint).  But it is my trilogy, my recent engagement with the essence and mission of the church, that this recent publication completes: 3) Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church, 4) Refounding the Church From the Underside, and 5) The Church and the Relentless Darkness.

All of these books are written out of actual dialogue with young adult friends, and out of the emerging generation who struggle with these issues. I have put together a composite of these several young adult friends, so that the dialogue is not fictitious but composite. They grow out of a dearth of honest dealing with the field of ecclesiology (the church’s teaching about itself, or about the doctrine of the church).

Enchanted Community engages the question of: what is the church? Refounding the Church From the Underside grapples with the why? of the church. How does the church fit into God’s design for New Creation? How is it to be formed? What is its purpose? What are the dynamics, which make it spontaneous and authentic as the incarnation of the God’s New Creation people?

From those questions came the really unique one, from my young friends: Where does the resistance to such an awesome divine purpose come from? How can the church devolve into a religious institution, a community of (what Bonhoeffer termed) religious Christianity that, while perhaps commendable in many ways, seems to have little to do with the thrilling mission of God? And no one seems to notice? To answer this I had to engage in a realistic approach to the theme of spiritual warfare, which is replete in scripture from Genesis 3 to Revelation 21.

These are also available from Amazon, and some of them on Kindle. So now I’ve said it and done my self-promotion. I commend these writings to you. Writing them has been a thrilling discipline for me.

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About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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