Souls in the Hands of a Tender God
Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A compassionate chronicle of a Protestant pastor who for decades has ministered to Seattle’s homeless and most vulnerable communities
Craig Rennebohm shares the evocative stories of those he has encountered on the street who desperately need psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual support. We meet people who, abandoned and marginalized by their community, need care and treatment to find their way back to a life of stability and meaning. Their stories become parables that explore mental illness and the spiritual heart of care and recovery, helping us understand what it means to be human, on a pilgrimage together toward wholeness.
Rennebohm’s powerful experiences, drawn from his own life and the lives of those he has aided in their struggles, show us a God of kindness and compassion. He offers a clear understanding of Spirit, faith, soul, and religion that will prove invaluable to individual conversations and to dialogue among congregations about how we can best welcome and include “the least among us”—our most fragile and troubled neighbors.
With gentleness and grace, solid knowledge and wisdom, Rennebohm helps those who are seeking a path of healing and the way of companionship so they may build healing communities of caring that in which all may have a home, safely rest, and be well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For decades Rennebohm, a Protestant pastor, has walked the streets of Seattle, making contact with mentally ill homeless people and slowly drawing them into "circles of care" so they can find safe housing, receive medical and psychological help and rejoin the human community.In this collaboration with Paul, Rennebohm interweaves themes of the Spirit working in desperate lives, the unshakable dignity of human souls and the necessity of companionship for healing as he vividly portrays the lost people he encounters.Always recognizing that medical treatment of mental illness is an essential part of the movement toward spiritual wholeness, Rennebohm is also sensitive to the vulnerability of the mentally ill to disordered religious ideas.The book's title, a response to Jonathan Edwards's famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," reflects Rennebohm's approach of gentle compassion toward people others reject.His call to find a better path leads him to Europe to study community-based approaches to treating mental illness and to initiate these in Seattle.As well as a guide to how others can help be healing presences to the mentally ill, this hopeful book is a meditation on faith in a broken world.
