Willimon writes with passion about the dynamics and implications of preaching to a congregation, to those who, having been called, are either baptized or yet to be baptized. The preacher, says Willimon, needs to address the people in a congregation with "peculiar speech," letting the biblical text call them to live a transformed life in keeping with their baptism. Within the book appear three powerful baptismal sermons- "The Invitation," "Divine divestment," and "The New Family."

Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized

Arts & Photography

Willimon, Will

Music

Wm. B. Eerdmans-Lightning Source

The Intrusive Word follows William H. Willimon's widely acclaimed Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the Baptized. Whereas the latter pondered the implications of speaking week after week to the believer, this volume considers what it means to preach to those who have not yet heard the gospel in its life-changing, disruptive fullness.

The Intrusive Word: Preaching to the Unbaptized

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

The lively, inspiring memoir of an eminent Christian preacher and leader
In this book one of today’s best-known Christian leaders recounts—with his signature wit and humor—memorable moments from his rich and full preaching life. A personal and vocational memoir, Will Willimon’s Accidental Preacher portrays the adventure of a life caught up in the purposes of a God who calls unlikely people to engage in work greater than themselves. 
Beginning with his childhood in a segregated South and moving through his student years, Willimon gives candid, inspiring, and humorous testimony to his experiences as a seminary professor, rural pastor, globe-trotting preacher, bishop, and popular theologian and writer. Above all, he shows how God has constantly had a call on his life. 
By turns poignant, hilarious, and thought-provoking—but always irresistibly engaging—Accidental Preacher is sure to join the well-remembered, classic memoir of our time.

Accidental Preacher: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Eerdmans

The gospel teaches that every human is sacred. Refugee children and Islamist terrorists. Police officers and young African Americans. Unborn babies, always, and also abortionists. Orange-haired casino owners, former First Ladies, progressive hipsters, prosperity-gospel televangelists, members of Congress, Confederate-flag-waving white nationalists? Sacred. This absurd claim is at the heart of the gospel. Each person is created in the image and likeness of God. Each is someone for whom Jesus died. And if this is true, we have much work to do. The writers in this issue may not agree on the best ways and means, but each challenges us to consider the implications of this gospel of life that makes no exceptions. Also in this issue: -- A former asylum seeker returns to Iraq to stand with Christians on the run from ISIS. -- Shane Claiborne tells us why abolishing the death penalty is the church’s business. -- Joel Salatin, America’s most famous farmer, reveals what pigs can teach us about the glory of God. -- John Dear reports on the Vatican’s historic turn toward nonviolence. -- Erna Albertz tells Richard Dawkins how her sister with Down syndrome can help him. -- Gun owners respond to gun violence with a fresh take on “swords into plowshares.” -- Ron Sider looks at the consistently pro-life witness of the early church. -- A hospice nurse reflects on euthanasia and the value of being a burden. -- Jason Landsel asks what made MohammadMuhammad Ali great. Then there’s new poetry, book reviews, a children’s story, insights from Pope Francis and George MacDonald, and art by Pawel Kuczynski, Xenia Hausner, William H. Johnson, Käthe Kollwitz, and Deidre Scherer. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

Plough Quarterly No. 11 - Alien Citizens: The Politics of the Kingdom of God (Plough Quarterly, 11)

Dreher, Rod

Nauerth, Thomas

Simms, Luma

MOORE, Charles

Murphy, Tamara

Peters, Nathaniel

Lyle, Eddie

Plough Publishing House

Your job is not your vocation. Everyone hungers for work that has meaning and purpose. But what gives work meaning? Vocation, or “calling,” is the answer Protestant Christianity offers: each person is called by God to serve the common good in a particular line of work. Your vocation, evidently, might be almost anything: as a nurse, a wilderness guide, a calligrapher, a missionary, an activist, a venture capitalist, a politician, an executioner… Yet, as Will Willimon writes in this issue, the New Testament knows only one form of vocation: discipleship. And discipleship is far more likely to mean leaving father and mother, houses and land, than it is to mean embracing one’s identity as a fisherman or tax collector. This issue of Plough focuses on people who lived their lives with that sense of vocation. Such a life demands self-sacrifice and a willingness to recognize one’s own supposed strengths as weaknesses, as it did for the Canadian philosopher Jean Vanier. It involves a lifelong commitment to a flesh-and-blood church, as Coptic Archbishop Angaelos describes. It may even require a readiness to give up one’s life, as it did for Annalena Tonelli, an Italian humanitarian who pioneered the treatment of tuberculosis in the Horn of Africa. But as these stories also testify, it brings a gladness deeper than any self-chosen path. Also in this issue: - Scott Beauchamp on mercenaries - Nathan Schneider on cryptocurrencies - Stephanie Saldaña on Syrian refugee art - Peter Biles on loneliness at college - Phil Christman on Bible translation - Michael Brendan Dougherty on fatherhood - Insights on vocation from C. S. Lewis, Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa, Eberhard Arnold, Dorothy Sayers, Jean Vanier, and Gerard Manley Hopkins - poetry by Devon Balwit and Carl Sandburg - reviews of books by Robert Alter, Edwidge Danticat, Matthew D. Hockenos, Amy Waldman, and Jeremy Courtney - art and photography by Pola Rader, Dean Mitchell, Mark Freear, Timothy Jones, Paweł Filipczak, Mary Pal, Harley Manifold, Sami Lalu Jahola, Marc Chagall, and Russell Bain. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

Plough Quarterly No. 22 - Vocation: Why We Work (Plough Quarterly, 22)

Business & Money

Saldaña, Stephanie

Rowe, Mike

Schneider, Nathan

Christman, Phil

Jones, Rachel Pieh

Beauchamp, Scott

Constant, Anne-Sophie

Dougherty, Michael Brendan

Peters, Julian

Angaelos

Job Hunting & Careers

Preachers around the globe have come to rely on Will Willimon for insight and advice on the craft of preaching. For over a decade, Willimon has published his reflections in the "Five-Minute Preaching Workshop," a quarterly column he writes as editor of Pulpit Resource. Here the best selections from that column have been brought together into a single volume for the first time. Drawing on years of experience, study, and careful observation of the current state of preaching, Willimon offers candid thoughts on a wide range of homiletical issues-from theological to pastoral, cultural, and stylistic. Readers will find challenge and inspiration from a few hours spent in the studio of this master preacher.

Preaching Master Class (Art for Faith's Sake)

Wipf and Stock

Incorporation

Literature & Fiction

Hope Church-its clergy and its people-are quite a congregation, an unforgettable cast of saints and sinners. While serving a heavenly realm, they also have their feet plainly planted in the muck and mire of the real world. Here is an Easter story of ordinary folk caught in the gracious grasp of an extraordinary God. In this rollicking, hilarious, sometimes pathetic, fast-paced, and always entertaining journey through a month of Sundays at Hope Church, we meet a wild cast of characters in church people surprised to be the body of Christ. Sex, violence, greed, grunge, lust, and lies-all in church! Saints and sinners all, caught within the embrace of a God who refuses to make proper distinctions.

Cascade Books

With I'm Not from Here, popular writer Will Willimon returns to fiction with a story of spiritual discovery set in a Southern town. Will takes us on a Don Quixote-like journey during which young Felix Goforth Luckie learns a great deal about the world, about other people, and about a God who shows up in the oddest places, in the strangest times, and among the unlikeliest people. On a quest to discover himself, Felix is discovered by the grace of God. In homage to Dostoevsky, Cervantes, and the Bible, Willimon creates a world that is thoroughly believable, realistic, and ordinary, yet at the same time fantastic, strange, and funny. In Galilee, Georgia, young Felix finds that things are not as they first appear, people are wonderfully mysterious, and God is unavoidable. At times odd, frequently very funny, both satirical and poignant, I'm Not from Here is a rollicking tale, a light-hearted parable with serious intent. Willimon's first novel, Incorporation, was widely acclaimed for its satire, honesty, and theological depth. While this his second novel differs considerably, I'm Not from Here is equally surprising and entertaining, showing Willimon's gifts as a masterful storyteller. Even as the parables of Jesus reveal things to us that could not be seen except through fiction, so this novel is not only engaging but also revealing.

I'm Not from Here: A Parable

History & Criticism

Secure, content, competent, reasonably happy and fulfilled, such persons of strength go their own way without any apparent discomfort at having missed the benefits of the Christian faith. . . . What do you say to the person who says, through his or her neglect of the faith, "Thanks, but I don't need it"?&nbsp;--from the book Bishop William Willimon brings the Gospel of Jesus Christ to life for the person who has everything - happy, fulfilled human beings, who don't feel the same level of need expressed by the downcast, the outcast, the brokenhearted, and the miserable. Willimon says that the church's message to the wretched and sad must not exclude the strong and the joyous. In nine concise, inspired chapters, he discusses these ideas: * Must one be sad, depressed, wallowing in sin and degradation, immature, and childishly dependent in order truly to hear the Good News? (See chapters 1 and 2.) * "What do we say to the strong?" (See chapters 3 and 4.) * Speaking to the strong and to the people who are weak and want to be stronger: a particular kind of evangelistic message. They have their sins, but these sins are not the sins of the weak (chapter 5). * Worship which takes God's strong love seriously (chapter 6) * Ethics which arise out of our response to that love (chapter 7) * Church as a place of continual growth and widening responsibility (chapters 8 and 9) &nbsp;

The Gospel for the Person Who Has Everything

Paraclete Press

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