That invitation came from a colleague in NAAL (North American Academy of Liturgy), fellow Lutheran, and fellow alum of Valparaiso University, Kent Burreson. Six years, two research grants, countless Zoom meetings, several presentations and workshops, and a book project later, it is time to update my personal website in anticipation of our book publication, Journey to Jesus. Having immersed myself in the marketing information provided by our publisher (Wipf & Stock), these items stick in my brain.

• From “The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing,” number 7: “Most book marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers.”
• From “Book Marketing on Social Media,” number 11: “You are your best marketing tool.” Details in this section say that marketing one’s own work “requires both hunger and humility.”

Declaring 2025 to be my year of shameless self-promotion demonstrates my “hunger,” even as my hunger pangs seem weak and are delayed by procrastination. I can’t but help recall how I felt filling out portions of my “annual review” during my years of full-time teaching—touting all my “accomplishments” struck me as self-serving and unseemly. Even as I update my CV in retirement, I hear in my head St. Paul’s words: “as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (1 Cor 2:31).

The “humility” side seems to come more easily, perhaps because of my vocational call as a deaconess (from the Greek work for servant). I am convinced that humility is a virtue to be cultivated as a Christian, especially in our current cultural climate. As a deaconess student in the 1970s, I loved the balance sought by this section of the LDA diaconal litany:

Holy Spirit, purifier of sinners, making us sharers in the holiness of God:

Bestow on us the mind of Christ that we neither think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, nor deprecate ourselves in unbelief, calling common what you have called clean.

And so, I seek that balance here, praying that the Spirit continues to bestow on me the mind of Christ, to see this current opportunity as a way to serve the church, as a way for the Holy Spirit, the Divine Influencer, if you will, to use the modest, forthcoming volume on adult faith formation to awaken in congregations, pastors, and lay leaders the zeal to be a winsome witness of Jesus Christ in their communities.