Publishing is funny, especially when you’re on two entirely different paths at the same time. This week I had two books come out! Please don’t mistake that for some herculean work ethic, though. Both books are the effort of multiple years and the gears of publishing, my own slowness and others’ quickness, and the review periods of Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and others all contributed to this fun coincidence.
Also amusing, both of these books are non-fiction and collaborations rather than solo fiction projects, which is my ultimate goal with my writing life! But both these projects are wonderful and were joys to work on with some wonderful collaborators. Here’s an introduction and an excerpt to each one …
Seek the Well-Being of the City: Pastoral Leadership in Community
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The Lily Endowment is a foundation that funds much of Mainline Protestant religious life, scholarship, and professional development in the United States. Lily brought together seven of us for a Book Sprint, which is where a collaborative of professionals work together over the course of one week to produce a manuscript on a given topic. Seek the Well-Being of the City is not a book with chapters by multiple people, but one manuscript worked on by seven people putting forward one voice. It was a fascinating project.
The book is about what it means to be a pastoral leader (i.e., clergy) in community with other pastors but also in their community as a whole beyond the confines of their congregation. From the publisher:
No one lives in a community that couldn’t be better. But no one wakes up one day and magically knows exactly how to make the improvement happen. Congregational leaders have unique challenges and opportunities to strengthen and make more vibrant the places that they live. Engaging with the local context, rather than simply with one’s congregation, enlarges pastoral imagination and can graft new life into the roots of moribund churches. This book is a guide for congregational leaders – including, (but not only) parish pastors — who want to know how to learn about, engage, lead, and respond to their communities. There are countless ways to think up new programs for social engagement, or interventions to call attention to social problems. But this book helps leaders identify where their lever to move an obstacle is longest, where the most beauty and verdancy can be brought about to places that need it.
Some of my favorite chapters to work on covered “The Pastor as Political Leader,” which probably gives off a different vibe given the recent IRS shenanigans than we originally intended. Rather than understanding churches as endorsers of politicians, the book aims to characterize it this way: “Politics is not simply the bickering on cable news or the partisan mudslinging everyone seems to do but no one claims to like. Instead, politics is ultimately about how we live together and how we make decisions together” (35). We wanted to reclaim the word “political” as descriptive of a pastor’s call—to
seek peace, to work for the good of the whole community, and to use power in life-giving ways. That’s the point of another chapter I loved, which is deeply informed by my experience with community organizing: “Reflecting on Your Power.” From that chapter:
At a fundamental level, power is radically simple, neutral, and obvious. It is simple because it is the capacity to effect change. It is neutral because it can manifest in great, good, mediocre, bad, and evil ways. Power itself is simple, but our relationship with power is incredibly complex. That relationship is neither simple, neutral, nor obvious. (101)
The same power that forges a sword can forge a sickle, what matters is the
purpose and spirit behind the use of power. The spirit behind the sword is domination and the spirit of the sickle is harvest and provision. Yet both require power. (108)
While the book is explicitly targeted at religious leaders, any community leader can benefit from how we lay out different strategies for listening, organizing, and acting for the benefit of local communities. It’s specificity to the local context and how it privileges proximity is one of the reasons I love the final text. I hope you’ll consider picking it up. It’s available wherever you buy your books and many places where you buy your ebooks.
The Abolition Lectionary
For many years this blog series was on my list of published works, but now it’s a book! I worked alongside Hannah Bowman and Guillermo Arboleda to edit together the blog into a hefty book. The idea was a lectionary commentary (essays on the different passages of Scripture read in Christian churches each year) that privileged an abolitionist imagination, particularly with regard to the prison industrial complex. From the published description:
What does the Bible say about prisons and justice? The Abolition Lectionary is a devotional and preaching aid that presents the many resonances between Christian theology and prison abolition. Following the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, each essay addresses one text for each Sunday. The variety of texts present a breadth of interpretive perspectives that show the connections between the biblical narrative of liberation and the modern-day prison-abolition movement. The movement of the lectionary across the seasons of the church year grounds the promise of liberation in the everyday practices of Christian life.
The Abolition Lectionary grew out of a blog series of the same name on the website of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons that ran from 2020—2023. With contributors from many different Christian traditions, it offers an ecumenical, scriptural, liturgical, ethical, radical, and accessible entry point to learning about abolition. For Christians interested in personal devotional reading or for preachers and clergy looking to bring urgent concerns about prisons, policing, and restorative and transformative justice into their lectionary preaching. The Abolition Lectionary finds abolitionist perspectives across the scope of the biblical story.
More than a dozen people over years contributed to this volume and it’s a deeply imaginative, loving, and prophetic text. I’ve loved contributing to it, reading others’ essays, and editing the volume together with Hannah and Guillermo. It’s not a text designed to be read straight through, but when Hannah did she had a great experience. From her afterword:
Reading this book in July 2025 was a joy and a comfort. A joy: to see how many colleagues and collaborators, within the Christian tradition, are working together to bring about liberation. It is good to know I am not alone. Many Christians are finding strength from the abolitionist promises of scriptural texts. A comfort: to immerse myself, in the midst of the “changes and chances of this life” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 133) and the terrifying drip of news stories about mass deportations and rising authoritarianism, in the flow of sacred scripture and the rhythm of the liturgical year.
Reading these essays all at once—after reading them one week at a time over years—also gave me heart as to the centrality of abolition and liberation in the biblical witness. What the contributors to this project have done is looked with eyes aimed at abolition to see the manifold aspects of it visible in the biblical story. What emerges is a narrative of profound comfort: God’s desire that all be free, that all be cared for, that all be restored, that the reign of God in perfect love be made present among us now.
I hope you’ll consider engaging with this one (which is free or next to it in ebook format and just costs what it takes to print in hard copy) whether you’re committed to the idea of prison and police abolition or not. It’s a great exercise in expanding the imagination when engaging faith and religious texts.
Wesley Spears-Newsome 