Walking the Stations

""Walking the Stations offers an innovative, but also a challenging way of delving more deeply into what it means to be a follower of Christ. While many study guides encourage applying Christ's life to our own, our contemporary culture too often focuses that effort on our private personal growth. For those of us who hope to make a difference in the world, this book's message should be one that we incorporate into our practice."" --Robert Wuthnow, professor emeritus of sociology, Princeton University ""Heinz invites us not only to read about but to create a meaning-filled, twenty-first-century-Christianity by encountering the surprising Jesus of the Gospels. Historical and contemporary, informed and informing, the book asks us to rethink ""our"" Jesus on a pilgrimage with scripture and tradition and in a grand company that includes Francis, Hildegard, Augustine, Luther, Wesley, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Anne Lamott. As the book and familiar song remind us--we want to be in that number."" --Eileen Elrod, professor of English, Santa Clara University ""So many are asking the question famously posed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ""Who is Christ, actually?"" In such times Spirit draws us to hear the testimony of the Gospels anew as it brings life and meaning to our contemporary lives. Donald Heinz offers us in Walking the Stations a practical and transformative way of entering the first century to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and contemplate the relevance of his life and ministry for our own."" --Conrad A. Braaten, former senior pastor, Church of the Reformation (ELCA), Washington, DC, and co-founder, The Forgotten Luther Project ""If Don Heinz's Mathew 25 Christianity was a rich appetizer, Walking the Stations is the four-star feast that follows. Heinz invites Christians (and seekers) to walk with the Gospel Jesus through fourteen ""stages"" of his life, listening, observing, following, and exemplifying the full incarnation of God in human experience. On this pilgrimage we, too, can hear God proclaim that we, like Jesus at his baptism, are ""sons and daughters in God's family, beloved, and well-pleasing."" We, too, see our own great life challenges in the three temptations of Christ. And so on through the whole adventure to the cross and empty tomb. Walking the Stations is an exhilarating and profoundly true account of Jesus' life that offers an authentic Christian faith from the center: Jesus himself. It is the powerful, and perhaps only, antidote to both anemic and toxic representations of Christianity in our culture--and in many of our churches as well."" --David W. Gill, professor of ethics, retired, author of Workplace Discipleship 101: A Primer and nine other books ""Many question whether following Jesus is possible, given current failures. So, Don Heinz invites us into communal participation in the life of Jesus by encountering him in the Gospels. He draws from Christian streams of sacramental, textual, experiential, social, and communal engagement, leading us to participation and formation that are neither passive nor activist, but follow Jesus to intimacy with God and engagement with the world God loves and sent Jesus--and us--into to restore. This book and this way are for anyone wanting a way to follow Jesus that is intimate, transformative, and hopeful."" --Fred Bailey, senior field ministry director, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, USA