Good News!

Good news! The history book has a publisher. Wipf & Stock has accepted our manuscript, and we’re finally looking at some light at the end of this long tunnel.

A tunnel is probably not the best metaphor for this seven-year project, though much of it has been underground: mining the past in the archives of nine different universities, yearly meetings, mission headquarters, and museums; sifting through a lot of debris; bringing the good stuff up to the top; discovering a few gold nuggets.

And then came figuring out how to organize, analyze, and understand it all, at least enough to begin writing. I have thousands of database items and scanned documents, all backed up and filed away.

But a lot of the research was carried out above ground. The field work required hundreds of interviews with the leaders of the church and, especially, with the children and grandchildren of past leaders. This is where our Bolivian team members were so helpful.

I must confess how joyful most of this work has been. I’m one of those strange people who love to research and write. Although much of this has been drudge work, I’ve been excited to make the discoveries, to begin to see the patterns, to come to understand how God and God’s missionary agents (both expatriate and national) co-labored to plant and develop a community of some 200 Quaker congregations scattered about the Bolivian highlands and tropical valleys.

And now I’m excited to be able to share the story with others.

Our working title has us climbing a mountain—A Long Walk, A Gradual Ascent: The Story of the Bolivian Friends Church in its Context of Conflict. I like the mountain metaphor better than the tunnel. It’s more accurate.

I still have to do my final editing, including cutting down the size of the book. I hope to have the final manuscript to the publisher by early April. Actual publication may take up to year from that date.

Rejoice with us!