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Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey Through a Country Church - Hardcover

Lischer, Richard

 
9780385502177: Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey Through a Country Church

Synopsis

The author describes the joys and challenges of taking on his first parish as a young Lutheran pastor in the early 1970s, describing the clash of cultures that occurred when a young, liberal, educated suburbanite came to a rural, farming community in Illinois, a conservative, tightly knit community plagued by poverty and other problems. 20,000 first printing.

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About the Author

Richard Lischer has served as pastor of Lutheran congregations in Illinois and Virginia, and for the past twenty years has taught at the Duke University divinity school. His most recent book is The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Word That Moved America. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

From the Inside Flap

ecrets is Richard Lischer's story of his early career as a Lutheran minister. Fresh out of divinity school and full of enthusiasm, Lischer found himself assigned to a small conservative church in an economically depressed town in southern Illinois. This was far from what this overly enthusiastic and optimistic young man expected. The town was bleak, poor, and clearly not a step on his path to a brilliant career.

It's an awkward marriage at best, a young man with a Ph.D. in theology, full of ideas and ambitions, determined to improve his parish and bring them into the twenty-first century, and a community that is "as tightly sealed as a jar of home-canned pickles." In their own way, they welcome him and his family, even though they think he's "got bigger fish to fry." Thus begins Richard Lischer's first year as a pastor: bringing communion to the sick (but forgetting to bring the wafers); marrying two unlikely couples--a pregnant teenager and her

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