My friend, Steve Sjogren, has a new book out and it should be great!
Steve and I became friends nearly two decades ago. He had started a congregation, Vineyard Community Church in the tricounty area of metropolitan Cincinnati and had started Friendship Lutheran Church in Clermont County, in Cincinnati's eastern suburbs, a few years later.
Even before we met, I got fired up with the possibilities for real, no-strings-attached evangelistic outreach through acts of kindness which Steve had explained in Conspiracy of Kindness, a book that still exercises a profound effect on my thinking and living as a Christian and on my leadership as a pastor.
You can imagine then, how shocked I was when out of the blue one night, I found an email from Steve, suggesting that we get together over lunch. He wanted to help me and our fledgling congregation. And he did.
I was with Steve during some of the horrors he endured after nearly losing his life on a hospital operating table for what was supposed to be a routine gall bladder surgery. Months and years of recuperation followed, although it should be said that even a substantially debilitated Steve Sjogren found more new ways to serve God and spread the gospel than most pastors without such limitations could ever do.
Some of the horrors went through back then are described in Heaven's Lessons and I'm looking forward to the learning from the lessons my friend learned at that time.
You won't find a finer people of God or ones more committed to Christ than are Steve Sjogren and his wife, Janie. I am proud to call them friends! And I find that I am always learning more about what it means to follow Jesus from them. They are blessings!
Here's a preview of Heaven's Lessons:
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