Q. How long have you been working on Night Shift?

A. Some of the material in Night Shift dates back to the 70s, stuff I’ve incorporated into sermons, teaching notes, and so on over the years.  Most of the material I’ve been refining and expanding through each stage of life and place of service since that time.  I’ve lived and worked in a wide variety of settings, experiences which have allowed me to explore these principles in quite diverse fields of operation, everything from university campuses to local churches to rural communities to urban, impoverished neighborhoods, from wide open societies to places really locked down.  And I’ve discovered through every stage how universal these principles really are.

A couple years ago, I started getting serious and wrote the first draft, roughly eighty thousand words over a three-month period.  It was a major undertaking, like writing a dissertation or learning Chinese, but it was exciting seeing it come together on paper – or at least on the computer screen.  Since then, I've been honing it and passing it through the rigorous test of peer reviewers, professional book editor, and proofers.