There are a series of stories here which are crafted to demonstrate the CGA (Cosmological Grace Anchor) at its fullest. These books follow the life of Leon Scheffield, a preacher who has a very unique message to offer to churches which are on the brink of collapsing. This set of stories tells the inner workings of church dynamics and how those dynamics call place an entire congregation in the dangerous position of disbanding and causing harm to the spiritual vitality of a community. If you’re in the midst of such a community or are dealing with the mess of deconstruction then these might be just the thing you have been looking for to help navigate your journey.
The Forbidden Sermons
The one wanting change is forbidden to enact it. An expert is required to make the first cut.
Tim has reached a critical juncture in his ministry: Get out or change. His wife Lisa wants out because she has had it with the people in this community of believers. Tim is leaning that direction too, but there is someone who he once met that might have an answer for him on how to change things around.
Leon knows the difficulty of turning a body of believers wrapped up in their sin consciousness toward what is the truth of their identity in Christ. Tim’s story after all was his own many years prior. However, providence intervened for him and now it is his time to return the gesture with Tim.
Prepare to hear the message that the majority of pastors across the country aren’t able to preach to their congregations. Hear the truth of the gospel of God’s kingdom as it was preached in the first church. Learn how the identity of every person on this earth is being kept under wraps by a series of behaviour modification programs being administrated not by the enemy, but rather by the church itself.
The Letter
Eight years after The Forbidden Sermons, Leon Scheffield is sixty-eight years old and still driving between dying churches, still delivering the sermon that changes things, still carrying the letter his mentor left him about a table he hasn’t found yet.
Then a stranger writes to him using words from that letter.
Words he’s shown to no one.
The Letter follows Leon through one year and six traditions — Reformed, Pentecostal, Progressive, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist/Wesleyan — each one in a specific form of collapse, each one asking him something the sermon he already knows cannot reach. A dying man in Asheville whose hands are shaking. A worship leader in San Antonio who knows the difference between the real thing and the manufactured thing. A deacon in Memphis who is furious at God and done with being handled. A priest in Portland who has been sitting on the truth for six years.
And running alongside all of it: Marguerite Fontaine, a music teacher who has been through every tradition Leon is visiting and belongs to none of them, who appears in cities she wasn’t told about, who has been composing a piece of music for seven years that she cannot finish because the final movement is in a place she hasn’t been able to reach alone.
What Leon has been calling the prior grace is not the destination of the sermon. It is the ground the sermon was always happening inside of. That discovery requires a year, seven encounters, and a kitchen table in a small town in December.
How to Build on the Ground the Twelve Intended
The Forbidden Sermons sent Leon Scheffield into dying institutions to say what the institution couldn’t say to itself. The Letter sent him to wounded people inside dying traditions to find the ground underneath his own sermon.
How to Build on the Ground the Twelve Intended sends him somewhere he’s never been: into a room with twelve people who haven’t built anything yet.
Three days. A conference table. Twelve candidates for ministry, selected and prepared by Marguerite Fontaine, delivered to a round table where the only rule is that no topic is off limits and no promoter comes through the door.
What Leon delivers is not a curriculum. It is not a method. It is not the ministry philosophy the twelve expected from a man who has spent twelve years walking into rooms that were failing and leaving them changed.
What he delivers is the question underneath the question they’ve been answering. What your tradition got right before it built an institution around what it got right.
What your tradition failed to embody, and what it cost the people inside it. And then — the question nobody was prepared for: what are you going to do differently?
Not differently from what Leon tells them. Differently from every tradition that failed the people they’re trying to reach.
The prior grace was always the ground. Three books were always pointing at it. This is the one about building on it.
And if you’re looking for something a little more along these lines, you might try this one on for size:
The Pew Whisperer
When Tate Wyecomb’s truck dies outside a half-restored church in the middle of nowhere, he expects a few hours’ wait for a part. He gets five days he never saw coming.
Wes Conrad is the church’s only occupant — a defrocked minister who spends his mornings talking to an empty room and his nights reciting Alan Watts over bourbon he doesn’t bother hiding. Tate is a ranch hand raised on the belief that love has to be earned, confession before restoration, one honest reckoning at a time. Neither man is looking for what the other one turns out to have.
Over five days — two churches, a stranger’s headstone, and a lot more silence than either man is used to — the careful architecture each of them built to survive their own grief starts, quietly, to come apart. Wes is still trying to rebuild the one thing he actually lost. Tate is still carrying a debt to his brother that no apology will ever cover. And somewhere past the edge of town, a church Wes fled two years ago and never finished has, impossibly, come back to life without him.
The Pew Whisperer is a quiet, unflinching novel about the difference between the love you have to earn and the love that was already there before you did anything to deserve it — and what it costs a man to find out, too late or just in time, which one he’s been living inside of.
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