Bruce McNab

When I graduated from college in 1967 and went off to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in medieval history, I assumed I would spend my life as a college teacher. If I were ever to publish anything, I figured it would be something like "Military Arrays of the Clergy in England, 1369-1418," an essay which was the first thing I ever published. That essay is found in a volume published in honor of the late Joseph R. Strayer, entitled Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages (Princeton U.P., 1976), which I had the honor of co-editing with two grad school colleagues, William Chester Jordan and Teofilo Ruiz, both of whom went on to become eminent scholars and authors.

I continued to think that I, too, would end up as a professor—even after I interrupted grad school to attend seminary. Everything began to change, however, when at the most solemn moment of my ordination as an Episcopal priest a Voice spoke within me, saying, “’Til now you have done what you wanted to do. Hereafter, you shall do what I would have you do.”

Nothing like that had happened to me before. I had never heard God speak. In fact, prior to that experience I would have said that people who "heard God” probably had mental problems. But after it my life path began to diverge from the one I had expected to follow. For the first time I began to be serious about asking God for direction rather than assuming I knew best about what to do next. I still went back to grad school and spent the next couple of years trying to stick as closely as possible to my pre-ordination life agenda, but by mid-1974 it was clear that God had something different for me to do. He wanted me to be a parish priest and pastor.

From 1974 to 2011 I served six parishes, where my ministry focused primarily on preaching, teaching, spiritual formation, and raising money for building projects. Beyond my own congregations I was active as a teacher, guest speaker, workshop leader and consultant. My first marriage ended in 1989, and I remarried in 1992. Since that year I have had a team ministry with my wife, Joan, a vocational deacon and pastoral care specialist. We have a blended family of seven children and twelve grandchildren, whom we love and enjoy very much. We retired from full-time parish work in 2011 and moved to Bozeman, Montana. Right now I am the permanent part-time priest at Christ Church in the small town of Sheridan, Montana, ninety-five miles west of us in the beautiful Ruby Valley. Serving a small, rural parish is a new experience--and a gift. I also lead retreats and fill speaking engagements from time to time.

As I approached retirement, friends urged me to publish a book of my sermons, which I did at the end of 2010. That book is Let Your Light Shine (Xlibris, 2010). It was a farewell gift to my last parish, Christ Church in Aspen, Colorado. Ministry with a wonderful community of younger adults in Aspen inspired me to write another book, and so I devoted the first year of retirement to writing Finding the Way: Restarting Your Journey with Jesus (Wipf & Stock, 2013), a book intended to offer help to those who are seeking a way of returning to the practice of Christian faith after a long time away from the church as well as to those wanting to make a new start, walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

Now that my second religious book has been published, I'm not sure what will come next. If you read Let Your Light Shine or Finding the Way, perhaps you will have a suggestion for me. Thank you for your interest in my books. They are my testament of faith, and I pray they are of some help to those who read them.