How Contributions to Two Recent Books Mark a Beginning and an Ending in My Writing

Two recent books have ended my writing career in one field and launched my contributions in another

Photo by Arif Riyanto on Unsplash

Over the past year, three chapters that I authored have been published in academic books. These chapters in Navigating Student Ministry and Rich in Good Deeds have provided “bookends” of a sort for my academic research and writing.

One of these two books includes my last words in one field.

The other book provides a foretaste of writings that are yet to come in another field.

Navigating Student Ministry: A Final Word about Family Ministry

My last thoughts about family ministry can be found in a chapter and appendix in Navigating Student Ministry: Charting Your Course for the Journey, edited by Tim McKnight.

The chapter on student ministry and the family in Navigating Student Ministry represents the culmination of a little more than a decade of writing about family ministry. The appendix in Navigating Student Ministry on the origins of youth ministry, which I also wrote, is a bit of research in the field of family ministry that hadn’t been previously published. This appendix provides the full evidence for an argument I’d been developing for years in my family ministry lectures, that age-organized ministries as they developed in the modern era emerged in part from sixteenth-century catechetical classes in the Reformed churches of Geneva. This research began in response to the historical arguments against age-organized ministries from such proponents of family integration as Voddie Baucham and Scott Brown.

With the publication of these bits of research, all I have been called to say about family ministry and leadership has now been written and published. There’s no point in me writing further in these fields because—in the words of Forrest Gump—“that’s all I have to say about that.”

Rich in Good Deeds: A Foretaste of What’s Yet to Come in Apologetics

I’ve researched the apologetic implications of the words of the church fathers for a couple of decades, and I’ve published a book or two that drew from this well of research.

Most of this research remains unseen, however, and is scattered through many hundreds of pages of unfinished articles and unpublished lectures that I’ve recorded in more than a dozen notebooks. With the end of my publications in the fields of leadership and family ministry, it’s time for me to write two major books on the apologetics of early Christianity that have been percolating in my course lectures for years. One of the primary apologists on whom I will be focusing is a second-century Christian writer named Aristides of Athens. I’ll specifically be articulating the implications of his “ecclesial apologetics” for contemporary defenses of the Christian faith. You can find some early hints of this research in a chapter entitled “Something Divine Mingled Among Them” that I authored for the book Rich in Good Deeds: A Biblical Response to Poverty by the Church and by Society, edited by Rob “Daily Dose of Greek” Plummer.

The focus of my chapter in Rich in Good Deeds has to do with the ways in which the church’s care for the poor functioned as an apologetic in the second century, which is one tiny slice of writings that are—God willing—yet to come. If you’ve been a student in my apologetics classes at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, you’ve gotten some of this content already, but few other people have seen it or heard it.

If you want yet another foretaste of this research that’s yet to come, you might also be interested in my forthcoming book with Jamaal Williams, In Church as It Is in Heaven: Cultivating a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture. Although the primary aim of this work has to do with multiethnic reconciliation in the church, you’ll find hints throughout the book of an ecclesial apologetic grounded in the words of the church fathers that characterizes two books that are currently in development.