I notice that seven months have elapsed since my last post. We've been through a lot of transition at my church since I ceased to function as an interim pastor myself on July 1, and this has taken a great deal of energy for me -- an appointed pastor who decided to take early retirement after three months here, another interim who wasn't me (but was a great guy), and now another new appointed pastor as of January 1. Nevertheless, I have recently completed a draft of "A Week in the Life of Ephesus" for InterVarsity Press, the seventh and probably last installment in their "Week in the Life of" series. The "week" I have chosen starts on September 23 in the year 89, one month before the inauguration of the great Temple of Domitian in Ephesus that won for the city its first imperial "neokorate," the honor of hosting a province-wide temple of the imperial cult. We follow the scenes and pressures largely upon two people -- an Ephesian elite who is also a Christian and host of a house church and an Ephesian merchant who is a Christian and host of a smaller house church -- so as to navigate the two world of cult and commerce, the pressures and temptations Christians face in both, all in the service of creating a plausible reconstruction of one "reading scenario" for Revelation. It was great fun thinking about the story and how to bring the archaeological, epigraphic, and literary witnesses to life in Roman Ephesus to life for a week. This week I've started in earnest filling in the gaps in my research on Revelation for the purpose of trying to bring about "Discovering Revelation: Content, Interpretation, and Reception" to draft form by the end of September for SPCK and Eerdmans. I think that the goal of the series is to provide an orientation to a particular book of the Bible suitable for an upper-level college course or a pastor preparing for a Bible study or preaching series. In the meanwhile, Lexham Press has been kind enough to accept from me a collection of the sermons I preached during my interim pastorate. Those sermons were about all I was able to write during that nine-month stint (which fortunately coincided with the church year from All Saints through Trinity!), and I'm grateful to have found a publisher for them. "In Season and Out: Sermons for the Church Year" is expected to be released in digital and print form in September. During this past Fall, I also gave attention to some resource more immediately appropriate for general use in the church -- a revised and updated version of Bruce Metzger's study of Revelation, "Breaking the Code," which should be released by Abingdon in May along with a DVD, and "Galatians" for the One Book: Daily/Weekly series published by Seedbed, the publishing arm of Asbury Theological Seminary, also with a DVD. Glad to have opportunities like that to leaven personal and group reflection on the Scriptures in our congregation!