BLOG 9/23/13. “YOU’VE WRITTEN BOOKS? … WOW!”

Because I’m an octogenarian and because I’ve been off the public stage for a long time, and was never famous in the first place, and that my introverted nature has intentionally kept something of a low profile, it comes as a surprise to many of my conversation partners at coffee shops or in the pub, or even in after-church conversations, that I am a writer. In recent months I’ve gotten a response something like this a number of times: “You’ve written books? Wow! Where can I get them?” Or when the find that I was a teaching-pastor in the church for many years: “I’d love to have heard you preach.”

Allow me, then, to be a bit self-promoting here.

There actually are about eighty of my sermons available on a web-site: www.sermongold.com. A good friend, Craig Chapman, who is both a musician and a music production manager living in Wisconsin (because he and his wife had been encouraged by my teaching, and the life in my congregation years ago) actually took the initiative to retrieve about 80 sermons from several different locations, clean them up, digitalize them, and then post them on this sermongold.com. website. There are also some other really good sermons by others on that site. Look at the right hand sidebar for Robert T. Henderson.

I also currently have five books in print (or reprint) by Wipf and Stock Publishers of Eugene, Oregon, and available also from Amazon.com. (a couple in digital form). The earliest of these is entitled: A Door of Hope: Spiritual Conflict in Pastoral Ministry, and is the only one of the five specifically written for pastors/clergy. The next in sequence is: Subversive Jesus Radical Grace: Relating Christ to a New Generation, and is something of the journey of a young, recent graduate in environmental engineering named Chip as he, out of curiosity and with no special Christian interests, wanders into an Episcopal Church, and so into a personal contact that ultimately leads him into an encounter with the Christian faith as he is embraced by a small group of sensitive Christian folk. This young man, Chip, is more composite than fictitious as he embodies numerous conversations I have had over many years. This has just recently been republished, and is a favorite of mine.

Then comes my most recent trilogy on the subject of the church, or the field of ecclesiology. More specifically I write in the field of missional ecclesiology having to do with the place of the church in the gospel of Jesus Christ (or the gospel of the Kingdom of God) and in the mission of God in the world. The first deals with the ‘what’ is the church: Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church.

That was followed by a second work in the trilogy on the ‘why?’ of the church: Refounding the Church From the Underside. Each of these books is written in dialogue with (again) a composite Millennial-age person whom I have named Alan (along with some of this friends). This becomes important because the Millennial generation is much more detached from traditional forms, and is asking really good questions about the purpose of the church, and about its form, and about one’s participation.

The most recent book in the trilogy is another in the dialogue with Alan, and has to do with the church’s proclivity to regress into a community that is more human religion (“religious Christianity” as Bonheoffer calls it), and why that is. This one is entitled: The Church and the Relentless Darkness. So this, again, is a work on spiritual conflict, but written for my younger and inquisitive and honest friends.

Now you know all there is to know about my writings and my sermons. If interested, you know where to look. I can hope they may enrich your understanding of the mission of God in the world.