Coming to England June 2015 and a Speaking Invitation

For all my readers in the UK I wanted to let you know that, finally, I'll be coming to England!

Plus, I'd like to extend an invitation to your church, university or organization if you'd like to host an event involving me during the month we'll be in the UK, June 2015.

My trip is being built around the weekend of June 12-14 where I'll be with the City Gate Church in Brighton, England. But City Gate is looking for partners to help with the cost of bringing Jana and I over. We plan to spend the month of June in the UK.

So if you are a part of a church, group or organization that would like to book me for any sort of speaking engagement please contact Hannah Bywaters (hbywaters@yahoo.com) who is coordinating things for City Gate. While any dates during the month of June outside of the 12-14th are open, I expect the weekends of June would be good times for engagements with churches (e.g., guest sermons on Sundays). Those weekends in June are: June 5-7, June 19-20, and June 26-27.

As far as speaking engagements go I've done weekend church retreats, academic lectures, guest sermons, and coffee house discussions.

It seems that the most common thing that I'm asked to do for churches is talk about the psychological dynamics of hospitality and welcome, equipping churches to open up their hearts to others. These discussions are built around my book Unclean. I've done equipping sessions on this topic for Andy Stanley's church in Atlanta (the second largest church in the US), have spoken about hospitality at multiple universities, have done whole weekend retreats with churches on this subject (I have one coming up in two weeks in East Texas), and have given guest sermons at churches on a "hospitality Sunday."

Of course, I also have two other books and have spoken a lot about them as well. I've given lectures, delivered sermons and taught classes about doubt and the experiences of Summer and Winter Christians working from my book The Authenticity of Faith. (Incidentally, Walter Brueggemann used a lot of material from The Authenticity of Faith in his recent book Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks. You might want to check that out.)

I've also spoken about the dynamics of anxiety and love from the material in The Slavery of Death last year at Fuller Theological Seminary's Integration Lectures and soon at the upcoming Streaming conference at Rochester College (where I'm co-headlining with Greg Boyd).

Finally, this year at the Pepperdine Bible Lectures I'm doing a class entitled "Angelic Troublemakers: Spiritual Warfare for Progressives and Doubters." This is material from my Weakness and Warfare series (see the sidebar) articulating a vision of "spiritual warfare" for progressive and liberal Christians. I'm trying out this material to see if it might be the next book I write.

I can speak about all of that, to say nothing about all the other things I've written about on this blog.

All that to say, there are lots of things I can talk about if I were to speak or spend time with your church or organization. So if you'd like to explore having me in June of 2015 please email Hannah to explore this. At this point these are just inquires, but final choices will be made depending which invitations firm up and confirm most quickly and those that can provide at least some honorarium to help City Gate defray some of the cost of bringing Jana and I over.

I hope to see all my UK readers this June!