SSCS member Stuart Devenish’s book, Ordinary Saints, offers a definition of sainthood applicable to the people we encounter in our everyday lives who are deeply committed to living out the Gospel message. Here is the book’s abstract:
In the post-Christian age, after the death of institutional religion, is there any place left for holy people to live as lovers of God? Yes! God’s favorite way of making himself present in the world is through the righteous lives of his holy people. This is a book about saints (defined as activated disciples), who are alive now, and whose everyday goodness announces that God is at work in the world.
Saints are blood-bought, love-steeped, twice-born, re-made people who are Christianity’s living witnesses. Like Jesus, their Master, they are the message, the messenger, and the working model of the kingdom of God. In following Jesus, ordinary saints are invited to give away their lives and spend out of their resources to convey the substance of their faith to a waiting and watching world.
If ever there was a time when Saints need to live courageously for Christ in the world, it is now. But it will take conviction, credibility, and a great deal of audacity. Ordinary Saints explores what it means to be a saint in the 21st-century, by exploring the depth-dimension of saints’ lives, bodies, emotions, values, and relationships.
It offers the simple recipe that if God exists, if the Bible is true, if Jesus saves … What’s going to prove it are the lives of ordinary saints. Thinking of the great saints of the early era of Christian history, St Augustine asked himself, “If they, why not I? – If those men and women could become saints, why cannot I with the help of Him who is all-powerful?”
Stuart Devenish, Ph.D., is the Director of Postgraduate Studies at the School of Ministry, Theology, and Culture, Tabor College of Higher Education, Adelaide, Australia.
