James C. Howell - Birth: The Mystery of Being Born

One of the great privileges of being a pastor is that people seek out your presence in some of lifes most jarring transitions. They want to give thanks. Or cry out for help. They seek wisdom and think you may know where to find some. Above all, they long for God, even if they wouldnt know to put it that way. I remember phone calls that came in a rush of excitement, terror, and hope. We had our baby! It looks like she is going to die. I think Im going to retire. Hes turning sixteen! We got our diagnosis. Sometimes the caller didnt know why they were calling their pastor. They just knew it was a good thing to do. They were right. I will always treasure the privilege of being in the room for some of lifes most intense moments.

And, of course, we dont pastor only during intense times. No one can live at that decibel level all the time. We pastor in the ordinary, the mundane, the beautiful (or depressing!) day-by-day most of the time. Yet it is striking how often during those everyday moments our talk turns to the transitions of birth, death, illness, and the beginning and end of vocation. Pastors sometimes joke, or lament, that we are only ever called when people want to be hatched, matched, or dispatchedborn or baptized, married, or eulogized. But those are moments we share with all humanity, and they are good moments in which to do gospel work. As an American, it feels perfectly natural to ask a couple how they met. But a South African friend told me he feels this is exceedingly intrusive! What I am really asking is how someone met God as they met the person to whom they have made lifelong promises. I am asking about transition and encounterthe tender places where the God of cross and resurrection meets us. And I am thinking about how to bear witness amid the transitions that are our lives. Pastors are the ones who get phone calls at these moments and have the joy, burden, or just plain old workaday job of showing up with oil for anointing, with prayers, to be a sign of the Holy Spirits overshadowing goodness in all of our lives.

I am so proud of this series of books. The authors are remarkable, the scholarship first-rate, the prose readableeven elegantthe claims made ambitious and then well defended. I am especially pleased because so often in the church we play small ball. We argue with one another over intramural matters while the world around us struggles, burns, ignores, or otherwise proceeds on its way. The problem is that the gospel of Jesus Christ isnt just for the renewal of the church. Its for the renewal of the cosmoseverything God bothered to create in the first place. Gods gifts are not for Gods people. They are through Gods people, for everybody else. These authors write with wisdom, precision, insight, grace, and good humor. I so love the books that have resulted. May God use them to bring glory to Gods name, grace to Gods children, renewal to the church, and blessings to the world that God so loves and is dying to save.

Jason Byassee