A Special God on Tap with Jesse James DeConto and The Pinkerton Raid
Pastor Keith's friend, Jesse James DeConto, recently published a book called This Littler Light: Some Thoughts on Not Changing the World. It's a spiritual memoir about finding God's grace amidst life's brokenness. Here's a short description:
Like other evangelical kids, Jesse James DeConto felt called to shine the light of truth into the world. His job as a journalist and his young marriage, though, would radically change him. First, he learned that Christians have no corner on truth: Working out in the world, trying to be the “Roaring Lamb” he’d been trained to be, he met atheists and agnostics who seemed to do better at embodying Christian love than many Christians did. Confessing the church’s failures was one thing, but the author had to face his own weakness the hard way, when the cheap threads that held his marriage intact finally snapped.
Jesse found himself at the end of his 20s with a broken bank account, a broken body, and a broken family. In the midst of that pain, he discovered his brokenness better equipped him to share God’s grace than his striving ever had. He learned to say with theologian Karl Barth that “his importance may consist in his poverty, in his hopes and fears, in his waiting and hurrying, in the direction of his whole being toward what lies beyond his horizon and beyond his power.”
From 8:00 to 9:30 Jesse will read selections from his book and he and his band, The Pinkerton Raid (he and his brother and sister), will play songs that couple with those stories. This will be a departure from our regular conversational format, but it will be a great and memorable night of story and song. Forest and Main has been kind enough to host and put us in the main dining room on the first floor, so we have more room.
We are going to take a collection to help out Jesse and the band with their travels. Please be generous!
To give you a sense of Jesse's story, music, and style, here are some YouTube videos. Look forward to seeing you there!