Author Seeks to Contextualize Gospel Through Fiction

CHICAGO, IL (March 25, 2004) - He grew up as a missionary kid, watching his parents try to learn all they could about a foreign culture in order to communicate the gospel message more effectively to non-Christians.

Christian author Ted Dekker believes his parents' methods for evangelizing and communicating God's love are no less important in his calling. Dekker recently signed books at Covenant Bookstore and discussed his newest work, Black, and two other books of a trilogy due for release later this year.

Dekker's trilogy – including Red and White - has been influenced by C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, although Christian authors and theologians like John Piper, Philip Yancey, Dallas Willard and Thomas Merton have most influenced Dekker's overall writing. Still, the ways of his parents keep Dekker focused on what he calls his most important goal: creating stories that communicate who God is in a context that can captivate readers - including non-Christians - for hundreds of pages at a time.

"My greatest influence in my writing would have to be my cultural background, growing up as a missionary kid in Indonesia amongst headhunters," he said. "There I was, a white boy among natives, watching my parents contextualize the gospel to bring the good news to a lost and dying world. I'm essentially doing the same thing now. I'm contextualizing God's character in the use of story. And I'm writing the kind of stories that connect with my culture. And that language is the language of story.

"I'm very deliberate in my writing," Dekker continued. "I'm out to tell a great story that connects with the culture to deliver truth - pure escapism with inescapable truth. Both are absolutely critical and in the context of the story, I'm going to challenge the way you think about God and human nature."

In Black, Dekker uses a number of characters - talking bats, pharmaceutical business moguls, three women and a young man who gains valuable knowledge through dreams - to create a story that involves two worlds. There's an Earth to which the contemporary society in the United States can relate, as well as a "Garden of Eden" about which readers of the biblical book of Genesis might fantasize.

There's good and evil throughout. One contingent has developed a highly contaminated and stable airborne virus that could destroy the Earth as we know it. Another is trying to find a way to stop it. And it might all be a dream, which makes the first book of the trilogy seem confusing for a time. Some 400 pages later, however, Dekker hopes that some loose ends are tied up and that the reader is assured that there is a lot more worth reading.

"My objective was to write a contemporary thriller that takes a reader into another reality through what the main character thinks are dreams - ultimately, as the story progresses, he becomes confused," says Dekker in explaining Black, which was released in February by WestBow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson Publishers. "It's about Thomas Hunter, a 24-year-old who is having vivid dreams, so vivid in fact that he doesn't know which is real and which is the dream. Every time he falls asleep in Chicago (using a geographic example), he wakes up in Bangkok . . . and vice versa. And to further complicate the matter, he falls in love with two different women, one in Chicago and one in Bangkok.

"Narnia is a good parallel - my wardrobe is the dream - but there are real stakes," Dekker continued. "In one world there is no evil and he unwittingly brings that into the world. And conversely, he takes a virus from one reality into another. It goes airborne, and within 45 days every human being will be dead unless he can stop it."

Dekker hasn't always been a professional writer, but he said that writing has always interested him. In discussing how he started writing for a living he said, "I was a successful businessman growing bored with my business and writing in the evenings in Colorado Springs. I wrote a couple of novels and my desire to write wouldn't go away. I felt called to do it and that calling grew in me so that, with agreement from my wife LeeAnn, I sold my business, moved to the mountains and wrote non-stop for three years. I made enough money off my business to live, but I got to the point where I was selling cars when a publisher bought my fifth novel."

In the past three years, Dekker's writing has attracted a wide audience. He has written six books and co-authored two others, selling a combined total of 750,000 copies. Amazingly, 25 percent of purchasers are under 20 years of age and another 25 percent are over 50, according to a recent statistical analysis of his audience.

"Older Christians recognize the truth of it," said Dekker about his audience. "But the younger generation eats up these kinds of books. Fiction is so powerful. God came to earth and he had three years to communicate his message to his people. And he used fiction to do it. Over half of his teachings were done through stories - parables. And there's a reason for that. Stories have a way of bringing truth alive in three dimensions. I think that's why (the recent movie) "The Passion of the Christ" has been successful. As Mel Gibson would say, he has put flesh on the story (of the death of Jesus). And suddenly, Christians who have known that story for decades see it in a new way. They're filling in the blanks."

Black is available at Covenant Bookstore for $14.95 and can also be ordered either online at www.covchurch.org (select the Covenant Bookstore link) or by calling 800-621-1290. The remaining two books in Dekker's trilogy are scheduled for release in August and September.

(Editor's note: to read a review of Dekker's newest book, see Dekker Book a 'Must-Read')

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