Читать книгу Keeping Alive the Rumor of God - Martin Camroux - Страница 5

One of the few advantages of retirement, for someone who has loved being a minister, is that it gives you the chance to ask critical questions about the gospel you have spent years preaching. This has not been an easy experience for my wife Margaret and my wonderful children, Eleanor and Michael, who have had to put up with me as I’ve inflicted the text on them. I am hugely grateful to Margaret for checking the grammar and pointing out to me where she can’t understand what I was trying to say.

I am hugely grateful above all to David Peel, the United Reformed Church’s most distinguished living theologian, for reading and making detailed comments on all the chapters with extraordinary good humor and kindness. It cheers me we seem to have reached similar conclusions by different routes. I am grateful to others who have read some or all of the manuscript, especially David Cornick, Ian Bradley, Richard Jurd, David Lawrence, and John Bradbury. The fact that not all of them agreed with everything I’ve written was a stimulus to rethinking. I am particularly grateful to Ian Bradley for suggesting I try to make the text more personal which I have tried to do. Thank you also to Savanah N. Landerholm for her excellent typesetting.

I am grateful also to the congregations of Freemantle United Reformed Church Southampton, Trinity with Palm Grove URC/Methodist Church Birkenhead, Immanuel URC Swindon, and Trinity United Reformed and Methodist Church in Sutton. I was amazingly fortunate in the churches to which I ministered. You showed me how the faith could be lived when most people were looking the other way. I must add another church to that list. I was never a member of Riverside Church but two of its ministers, Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin, have been central to my faith journey, and the times I worshiped there helped to form my idea of what a church should be.