Some of you know this already and more of you don’t, but it’s now official:
In September of 2017, Abingdon Press will release my book Crash Test Dummies: Surprising Lessons From The Book Of Judges.
Here’s the cover art:
Crash Test Dummies will accompany Head Scratchers, The Storm Before The Calm, The Shadow Of A Doubt, and Solve as sermon series transformed into chapter books & small group bible studies.
What’s interesting about Crash Test Dummies is how close it came to not being a series at all.
In the spring of 2016, I had the title and I knew that I wanted to address the reality that people keep doing the same self-destructive things over and over again.
And I thought I could base this summer series on the Old Testament book of Judges, as I knew it told Jewish history from about 1400-1100 BC in a cyclical pattern in which the children of Israel repeat the same sins and mistakes ad infinitum.
But when I opened the book of Judges and started to study it, I began to lose heart. I simply could not figure out how in the world I could turn such obscure history into compelling (or even average!) sermons.
The more I read, the more I jotted, the more I consulted, the more hopeless I became. “This book just won’t preach,” I thought. “Let me go back to Proverbs!”
And then it hit me: in trying to preach Crash Test Dummies, I had become a crash test dummy. Why did I keep banging my head against a wall by trying to preach a book that simply refused to be preached?
Well, to answer that . . . come back to this space tomorrow. But here’s a hint: it never hurts to be an English major.