Kingdom Come: A Gospel Heritage for a Legacy of Safe Love

By Dena Rosko

The Kingdom Come Trilogy arrives in time to support a vision for the gospel as a shared heritage of the family of God. This book, the second of the Trilogy, is a must-read for ministers, community leaders, seminary learners, educators, care providers, and people of faith who desire to unite and care as a church during dynamic times.

The Trilogy climaxes with Book II, which stories a heritage model at tension with systems that ostracize people from safe love. This book advocates for carers and the bookend generations that span the story of our lives. The Trilogy promotes unifying language that interprets the gospel with a heritage lens and a vision towards kingdom come. This book reminds us of the need for a united neighborly heritage as the work of the church today: solidarity of caregiving and whole systems justice with the promise of life and love of generations together from now to eternity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dogwood Group
• Release date: Aug 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781792349751

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to first, upmost, and foremost thank Jesus as my Savior and Lord, Brother and Best friend, future Redeemer and King, for whispering the word, Kingdom, on my heart and mind October 2016, and for sending his Word to heal and support me with a gospel heritage postpartum, and, now a theology of heritage and practice as a foundation to serve.

I want to thank my son for his joy and support of this work with sleeping well during naps and at night so that I could draft and finish it, and for endless walks and hikes to de-stress and enjoy our time in nature together. I cherish you, I love you, and I'm grateful for your creative, wise, diligent, passionate, neighborly, kind, and joyful self!

I want to thank my parents for their support, deck visits, plant shopping, and prayers, my cousins Claudia and Mike for their prayers, calls, and generosity, and my sister Nicole for encouraging me with my word choice in Book II and coaching.

I want to thank my niece, Uriah, for inspiring me to coach as a prelude to birthing my son, and to this written foundation for coaching others with heritage development.

With respect to Great Grandmas Marie, Dora, and Grandmas Adeline and Katherine (Kitty) for wild resilience, humor, determination, and faith in hardship to nudge the next generation one step closer to a healthy heritage.

I want to thank my foreword writers, Rev. Colleen and Rev. Drs. Linda and Scott, ministers and community contributors, for your generosity of word, time, conscientious feedback, and support of my ministry of nuance to bridge apparent ideological gaps with a dialogue of heritage.

I want to thank Pastor Keith and Debi and Pastor Martin and Thelma, for your pastoral care and advice, and for your friendship and unofficially adopting our family, over the years. I want to thank Pastor and Thelma for love and hospitality to modeling how to care-give for a gospel heritage by how you cared for us. We love you!

I want to thank early adopters of this work for support of the soft launch and for their review and enthusiasm for the launch parties, heritage circles, and special events.

I want to thank Laura, E.J., Anna, Sydney, and neighbor Grandma for walking postpartum and ministry with me.

I want to thank Colleen M., Sandy, Maria, Amy, Kelli, Brooke C., Courtney, Corianne, Babette, Ed, Julie, Nicole, and Emily for your prayers for healing, ministry, and writing.

I want to thank Martha for your daily emails with encouragement and prayers for family.

I want to thank all of my aunts for inspiring and challenging me, for valuing leadership of a woman in the home, city, and church.

To my cousins, thank you for keeping it real.

I want to thank my neighbors for your hospitality to greet us every day, and for teaching us the outside-in of home.

Thank you Wendy, Ivy, Molly, and Bethany for your generosity with our gifting and sharing community.

I want to thank the civic leaders who have engaged my coaching influence in my city.

I want to thank the bestest friend a girl could ever have, Sara Anne, for loving me unconditionally with your time, letters, and company.

I want to thank your mom, Shay, for your heartfelt and hard-won wisdom and many kindnesses to me and G.

I want to thank ministry friends for your inspiration and commitment, Annie and Nathan, J. and S., J. and A., Nicole, Eric and Maureen, Debby, the late Kim J., and many others.

I want to thank Monique B. for your partnership with creative social justice projects as a sister-in-Christ, and for your leadership as a creative in ministry.

Justice for Jashawna.

Any names, affiliations, or organizations besides my own in this book are not responsible in any way for its content.

To each a home, to all a heritage, for the love of God and each other with hope for kingdom come.

Until that Day,

Dena Michele Rosko, Ph.D., M.A., C.L.C.M.

Renton, Wash.

January 24, 2023

FOREWORD

In the Fishlake National Forest, on the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, there is a colony of Quaking Aspen that is an estimated 80,000 years old. Were you walking in the midst of it right now you wouldn't know it. There is no tree in the grove that is anywhere near that age. Cut one down, and you might count 80 rings, or 80 seasons of growth.

Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are 80,000, a 100,000 years-old if they are a day. This may be a huge undercount as the forest has been around for eons. Every tree here has sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia.

Pando, or I spread in Latin, the Quaking Giant is a single clonal creature that looks like a forest. Each tree is genetically identical to the next, rising from a single organism operating on an entirely different timescale than any other organic being. As you are walking through this forest, all around you spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than 100 acres.

This single organism has been alive for all of recorded human history, although its survival amidst changing climate patterns is less certain. It journeyed through the land before humans left Africa. Aspens are everywhere here, but not one has grown from a seed. They won't germinate in the current climate. But they propagate by root, shoots spring up from a single root system. They spread. They are on the move, these motionless trees--stands of aspen retreating before two-mile-thick glaciers now moving north again.

Humans share a full 25% of our genetic DNA with the trees. We all come from a common ancestor. We have been formed out of the same red earth, from the dust, and from the stars. We parted ways, but we are connected. A symphony of connection, of meaning, is gathered underground mostly hidden from our eyes. A mystery to us. What we don't know about what roots beneath our feet, and about what is alive in the overstory above our heads, is far more expansive than what we understand.

We do know this: When the lateral roots of two Douglas Firs run into each other underground, they fuse, or technically, they pleach. And through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one.

This repeats with more trees, and, even more importantly for survival, with other forest life. The mutualisms that exist between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, for example, go back long before our modern world. They feed and heal each other. They keep their young and their sick alive. They pool their resources and metabolites into community chests. There are no individuals. There are no separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.

Mending a Heritage of Faith

It takes only a single conversation, maybe two, with Dr. Rosko to realize you've encountered someone who knows deeply that we are connected, and who has found a way to draw out and amplify the stories of these connections.

She is as passionate and tireless an advocate for community well-being as she is a joyful and attentive one. I think I have some sense of why--of the vigorous root system that feeds this passion.

Dena and I share similarities in our religious heritages. I suspect that we have both moved in our understandings, even as we both cherish the communities from which we've come. We seek understanding and the reconciliation of what has been uprooted--to mend what has been rent. We see the passing on of sustainable well-being from one generation to the next as blessing. Caregiving is a community act, and the validation of patterns of mutual support.

I was raised within a religious system that served me well in many ways. I lost my father to cancer as a high school student, and our church community demonstrated a tremendous generosity of spirit throughout the experience.

Perhaps the singular transformative moment for me unfolded around his hospital bed as he took his last labored breaths. There was a crystalline moment of realization as I looked around the room at those who were there holding vigil with us. They were among those closest to each of our family members. And they were from our church.

Each of them. Friends, pastors, and mentors.

That moment planted something deep within me. I came to understand the power of the church institution as a community chest of support, rooted by a covenantal pleaching of interests, of empathy, and of good will, a clonal sprouting of the Way of Jesus for the sake of the world.

As the years progressed, education, life experiences, and primary and secondary relationships sprouted new shoots of understanding and perception. I came to appreciate that the forest of mutuality was much more expansive than was evidenced in the parochial practices of the faith of my formative years. Yet, as I found myself migrating toward a more progressive ideology within mainline Christianity, I have remained absolutely convinced of a rhizomic connection to the church and the rich spirituality of my youth. I never lost that sense that my life is an offshoot from the same DNA, of the potential of a covenanted, intentional Christian community for local social well-being, nor my appreciation for the church as a symbiotic whole as a portent of that ideal.

I am drawn to Dena's vocational trajectory and her writing because she exhibits an abiding commitment to the cultivation and fertilization of these deep connections. You will find her language deeply and widely rooted in the Scriptures shared by the Judeo-Christian tradition, and shaped intentionally and generously with an ear for nuance that moves beyond the hair-trigger rhetoric that so frequently divides us into warring camps. You will hear in her comprehensive examination of the biblical corpus a maternal and beckoning love for all of Rachel's children.

You will perceive an incisive and prophetic critique framed in rhetoric that re-focuses our attention on matters that have been dissembled to the point of distraction so that we have lost their meaning: Poverty is the choice of budgets that prioritize other things, Dr. Rosko reminds us, for example, snapping our attention back to the heart and soul of the matter, of the gospel. Ostracize rather than exclude or marginalize as a primary descriptor of human behavior to alert us to targeted exclusions of scale from systems of support with the threat of violence.

Dr. Rosko's work in her writing and as a consultant is appreciative, constructive, curative, and clever--in a Canaanite woman kind of way. Her voice is anything but acrimonious; indeed, it is generative, making a case for the largeness of welcome at Christ's table. But it is no less incisive than Jesus' Canaanite teacher, raising her voice on behalf of the disenfranchised, and no less dogged in its affirmation that privilege exacts a tremendous price on all of us.

Here we come to perhaps the greatest gift of this second volume of Dr. Rosko's offering in this pivotal historical moment. Dena's deep-seeded conviction that we are of the same rootstock, a part of a heritage of promise not just as a church, but as a people, as a human community, adds a clarion quality to her insights concerning systems anti-the-Christ, and, from where I stand, white privilege.

As a white male pastor who has practiced this craft for a generation in predominately white congregations, I am grateful for Dena's work. I have felt compelled by this same gospel to reckon with the false history of whiteness in American Christianity that disguises most of what we are up to. This is some of our most important work in this historical moment. Systems anti-the-Christ, such as white supremacy, are a hidden poison that has been injected into the soil of our politics, our education system, our infrastructure, and our religion for four hundred years.

Racially discriminatory housing, employment, and public health policies are all part of the coded system of white systems anti-the-Christ that have existed from the founding of this country, and of much of the American church. It is a lie that does not deliver on what it promises, and is perhaps the original American sin that prevents our communities from being systems of safe love.

Those of us who think we benefit from it, end up being ruled by fear as we consider what we will lose as we learn to live without the levers of control to which we have been so accustomed. There is good work to do though. Laying down our privilege, investing it in others who have not been afforded it by the circumstances of birth, sitting at the feet of our black and brown siblings and learning from them, and being guided by them creates the potential for newness.

And to keep the commandments of the One we profess to love, to advocate as God advocates means to look deeply and tenderly into the eyes of these who suffer and hear the stories that they have to tell, and to learn from them how to reshape our world in ways that sustain all of life, and not just some. It means to look deeply and tenderly within our own hearts, into our own stories, and at our own systems to dismantle and rebuild.

Dena's vocational contribution, both in her writing here in this book, and in her work in communities, turns on the promise that the Scriptures and the religious traditions that have sprouted from them are of the same family--a story of unity, a we story for all.

As that story unfolds here, it rests in the good news that as the arc of that story is made plain, it will not fail to draw us together in safe love toward kingdom come.

Rev. Scott Anderson, DMin.

St. Andrew Presbyterian Church

Renton, Wash.

October 2020

PREFACE

As a little girl I adhered a rainbow sticker on my room light switch that said, God always keeps his promises (see Deut. 7:9; Heb. 10:23). This book paints an arc of rainbow in-between advent to kingdom come from a perspective of heritage as a core promise in the gospel.

This trilogy offers a framework and language for heritage formation as a spiritual discipline and renewal.

The gospel speaks to heritage, especially in Jesus' admonition to, Welcome the little children for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these (Mk. 9:35). That's the destination in-between the arc of the rainbow.

Beginnings and Motivations

I wrote this trilogy amid motherhood to connect stories and themes in Scripture as a gospel heritage towards a vision of kingdom come. This trilogy frames the gospel as a heritage theology and practice towards a vision for kingdom come. This kingdom opposite the schemes of the violent [who] take it by force because a gospel heritage values faith, hope, and love as responses and solutions to suffering to continue generations to kingdom come (see Matt. 5, 11:12, 23-25).

I began to write this trilogy in April 2017 when I systematically studied the Scriptures that mentioned kingdom with attention to heritage and family. During that time, I piloted a group study around the content. Some of my first listens happened on a tatami mat in the nursery. We encountered realities postpartum that gave me a heart for integrating heritage into my vocational work and ministry.

I read through the Holy Bible four times for kingdom passages and heritage themes during drafting and editing. I read through a fifth time during proofread and revisions. Both phases I emphasized the plight of women and children at tension with leadership, in need of heritage, with a vision as hope for kingdom come. This vision shares a more complete story of the gospel to invite people to embrace.

Meanwhile, I received high-quality, accessible, and scholarship funded ministry and biblical training to support this heritage ecuministry. I am certified as a life coach minister seeking ordination from an international ecumenical Institute. These efforts encouraged my progress, and challenged me to include essentials to ensure a Christian core to this treatment of heritage theology and formation. Community, seminary, and pastoral leaders and a pilot group aided the credibility, accountability, and practice.

I story systems for loving solutions. I've integrated writing, photography, ministry, research, and entrepreneurship since I was 12 years old. I became a person of faith at six years old when I answered a pulpit message about God's love for us and heaven (Jn. 3:16). Our pastor at the time and his family unofficially adopted mine. My parents raised me in a small church where people cared for each other. These early experiences imprinted me with a love for the family of God.

This trilogy draws on my research of carers in the beginnings and end of life, and my background in organizational anthropology, organizational systems, communication, leadership, development and well-being, cultural anthropology, and writing to paint a visual of a circle of concentric rings that encircle the most valuable tucked in at the center: the advent and coda of the most vulnerable person who needs our attention and care.

Mostly, I wrote this book for my son to know what his mama believes realizing that my son inspired and taught me this gospel, to ground meaning of a heritage of faith, hope, and love, to heal carers including myself, and to unpack the implications of a gospel of the kingdom for supporting the healing and solidarity of others for heritage and church. Children are indeed a heritage from the LORD and a joy indeed (see Gen. 22:1-22; Psa. 126-127:3).

I hope that my written works bless my children, and shine a glimmer of hope for future generations.

Heritage Theology and Practice

Heritage formation as gospel care tends to the person in relation to God and people in the context of systems that support or thwart the continuing of generations towards kingdom come. Heritage theology with the practice of formation reminds us that God calls us to peace and goodwill as family of God and loving neighbors of each other (see 1 Cor. 13; Eph. 1, 3; Jms. 2:8; Lam. 3:22-23; Lk. 1, 10:25-28; Mk. 12:28-34; Matt. 22:34-40; Rev. 22; Zech. 8).

A family tree after shades of gray by ash grit gain visage for green oasis. We do well to design sectors to bridge transitions to children and elder. For nearly 20 years I've researched, written, and practiced lifespan integration by nurturing lifecycle integration in tandem with people I love, church family, for congregations, and for neighbors.

Jesus said that he knows his children when they do for the least of these (Matt. 25:31-40). I researched and wrote the Heritage Chronicles, a culmination of nine books in different genres about heritage, from 2000 to 2020, or for 20 years with most content from 2016 to present.

Heritage theology provides a framework and a model for ministry leaders and laypersons to dialogue and unite over the gospel with a future vision for kingdom come. I wrote the Kingdom Come trilogy with a contemplative writing style for unifying language and a timely theology for heritage.

This trilogy approaches heritage as a family and community style caregiving that integrates the generations and supports carers into our daily lives as we move forward towards kingdom come.

I wrote an accompanying devotional and prayer book to this trilogy to dovetail into coaching and facilitation so that people and groups can gather or read without being lost in the larger interpretation here. I consult, coach, and advocate for better practices of heritage in spiritual, community, and civic organizations. I build heritage practices by storied systems design. This work can help carers to engage their transitions, and us to better care for them.

We can practice heritage with tenderness to the cycles of life, the bookend generations, and those who cherish them. This Trilogy interprets the gospel as the message of God's salvation for love and life of his children through his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit who indwells and empowers us to remain a family of God until kingdom come.

A We Story for All

Each book shares the me (I), we (II), future (III) story of a gospel heritage with a vision for kingdom come.

A gospel heritage invites all to receive the peace, goodwill, and favor of God as his family (see Lk. 1). The fringe of the cloak of Jesus heals (see Matt. 14:36); whereas, the fringe of anti-the-Christ violence harms even those who defend it. The gospel reduces this violence by reminding us to turn towards God who gives us life and love, and to live to love each other in solidarity forward to kingdom come.

Extremism of our world has left us bereft of a We story for all. We sorely need an identity and vision of heritage. Human history highlights painful eras of men and groups of people who magnified themselves above another at great harm that scaled to many, especially future generations.

We become our neighbor's elders and children.

The heart of a gospel heritage: We can reclaim our We story by revisiting what the gospel promises about heritage for us as a family of God. We witness heritage in the natural world as transition to family. God in wisdom knew this profound reality of our need for companionship as he sets the lonely in families (Psa. 48:13; 68:56).

God sent his Son as a baby, and not an abusive giant who demanded compliance or slavery (see 1 Sam. 17). God sent salvation in soft ways as evidenced in the advent of Jesus, in the teachings of Jesus in the Beatitudes and parables, and his compassionate gaze towards crowds who hounded him for healing and help (see Lk. 1-2; Matt. 1, 5-25).

We need more love and neighborliness, and systems hospitable to heritage, in our daily lives. The leadership of Jesus' day, as today, mistreated people to justify phobic hoarding resources to maintain profits of systems anti-the-Christ at the expense of healing when they should have celebrated saved lives, and hoped for a risen Savior (see Isa. 61:1-11; Lk. 11:42; Matt. 8:33-34, 23:23; Psa. 127:3). A gospel heritage counters such fear with love (1 Jn. 3-4).

We strategize around faith, hope, and love. We write a vision and make it plain (Hab. 2:2). I desire that this trilogy bridge cultures of faith that have long argued with each other over ideological zeal and economics to the detriment of serving neighbors and being united in Christ.

The task of a gospel heritage continues us as we stand in the gap for each other from now until kingdom come. The larger work will happen around support conversations and deeds done in love long after I publish these books.

Fellowship of Integration

We fellowship when we integrate each other into our daily lives. I encourage people to support a heritage of continuing for bookend generations and those in-between this arc of caring for the babies and elders in our lives.

This trilogy offers a heritage vision of the gospel, and rebukes the heresy of hyper-headship to restore fellowship. We become wary of wolves in sheep clothing that confuse faith with ideology, phobia, and finance at the expense of living, loving, and healing heritage (see Matt. 7:15). For instance, Hyper-headship a heresy, a lie, that worships false gods instead of Jesus, and uses violence to magnify a person instead of the empathy of Jesus (see 1 Cor. 10:7; Exod. 20:3-6; Gal. 4:8; Isa. 44:9-20, 45:20; Jdgs. 10:14; Lev. 19:4; Lk. 4:8; Matt. 4:10; Phil. 2; Psa. 16:4, 135:15-18; Rev. 9:20).

Hyper-headship a heretic blasphemy when people call it gospel, and spiritual abuse when religious leaders enforce it as gospel in their congregations and to survivors. Hyper-headship is heresy that reduces church to religion. When religion enforces it that's spiritual abuse that enslaves people to a false god (see Gal. 4:8, 5:19-21; Psa. 135:15-18).

Let not zeal consume. Death and life are in the power of the tongue (Prov. 18:2), especially when it comes to gossip, slander, and abuse; whereas, the integrity of treating others to align with the way of God who delights in love, justice, and righteousness in the earth to give and receive blessing by mercy, to do good by everyone, especially the household of faith," as we redeem lives and generations to kingdom come (see 1 Peter 3:7; Gal. 6:10; Jer. 9:24; Lk. 6:35; Matt. 5:7, 7:12; Prov. 15, 18:8, 26:20; Rom. 11:22; Ruth 1-4).

We repent from to turn towards each other safely in fellowship. Turn from harm to turn towards safety, love, liberty, and life, or a hope and a future (see Jer. 29:11; Jn. 10:10, 14). We, God's dear children, flee from idolatry (see 1 Cor. 10:14; 1 Jn. 5:21; Col. 3:5). We turn towards God's love for us (see Jon. 2:8). We only compete to outdo one another in showing honor and love one another with sibling affection (see Rom. 12:10, 13:8). We practice hospitality (Heb. 13:2). We discern who to align with and whom to come out of and be separate, and if a person departs in spite, let him depart, and turn away wrath with gentle response (see 1 Cor. 7:15; 2 Cor. 6:14-18; Prov. 15). We share our faith with gentleness and respect and prepare to give reason for the hope, not hate or fear, within you (1 Peter 3:15).

We don't misconstrue or equivocate structural ostracism with reasonable and healthy boundaries against abuse, especially when those boundaries protect our well-being and those in our care. Integration doesn't mean we let wolves into the sheep pen. We've responsibility to safeguard and care for the least of these (Matt. 25:40-45).

We discern and rebuke and exhort with all authority all systems anti-the-Christ, including the abuse that hyper-headship justifies and suffers the least of these (see Titus 2:15). People can influence us for God, for good, for love, for health and safety, and people can influence us against those. In matters of heritage, Jesus gently leads those with young with his empathetic priesthood (see Heb. 4:15; Isa. 40:11).

Jesus earned his priesthood through his empathy, and won the crowds with his compassionate and miraculous responses as we gaze on his wounds that heal us, the empathetic high priest whose gaze of compassion found us (Heb. 4:14-16; Isa. 53:5; Matt. 9:36; Numb. 21:9). Integration to fellowship needs the empathetic and gentle leadership, and the powerful return of Christ kingdom come.

As a person thinks in the heart, and with truth, honor, justice, purity, loveliness, excellence, worth praise, or not, so the person is, and so we are (see Phil. 4:7-13; Prov. 23:7). I've condensed what I hope, under the pressures of our times, a compelling and coherent narrative a gospel heritage towards a vision of the kingdom of heaven. Not a quick-grab to save one soul for idyllic ease, but a reach to scale a message of faith, hope, and love to many. We return to a collective empathy and future vision for a whole gospel.

Solidarity as Unity of the Church

This perspective offers to unify the church with language of contemplative, nuanced, and precise terms and examples from Scripture so that we cling to a salvation for heritage as children of God instead of the violent methods of sin, such as systems anti-the-Christ, instead of the tendency to blame a person or group. Instead, we create generative questions and solutions of churches in partnership for the gospel, which as a ripple effect can bless and redeem systems for heritage (see Jer. 29:9-11; Matt. 5:14, 25; Phil. 1:5-7).

This trilogy highlights heritage because of the gospel themes of a God off love making a way for the family of God, covenants with the people of God, the stories and language about nurturing this family in birth and care giving terms, and the family tree of God in Scriptures. For instance, the gospel arose from a context of childism and slavery throughout history. A people God promised will birth a large family that will bless the nations (Gen. 12:1-3, 17-22).

This trilogy sketches this scale of the kingdom of the children of God. The gospel refers to the coming kingdom and defeat of evil as the final wallop to the woes of this world. With that, this trilogy elevates a perspective of the gospel that differs than a consumerist individualistic salvation. There exists few literature or books supporting all matters peripartum, and heritage as an advent to family from both a systems and faith-based perspective.

The effort to dialogue instead of debate faith dials down the fear and fight to give us tools to better learn how to unite as a family of God. The gospel of the kingdom of Jesus calls us to do the work now of building that kingdom now with its methods of love, peace, comfort, and life.

Put to our times, the call to the church needs to include dismantling the systems anti-the-Christ, or that magnify oneself above the image of God to oppress and ostracize people from their basic needs, safe love.

We as the church may benefit from a shared language, a theology, around restorative justice, and hospitable evangelism to unify the split between ideologies that have made pews cold, and tarnished our witness.

I hope that a gospel heritage imprints a unifying message with which to organize faith in trying times. We better serve a gospel heritage as a family of faith.

I desire that this trilogy and its accompanying devotional and prayer book unite the church around a theology of heritage with a whole gospel that merges individual and kingdom salvations as Jesus will redeem and make all new (see 1 Thess. 4:9-18; 2 Cor. 5; Gal. 2:20; Rev. 20-22).

Validate to Encourage the Oppressed

The trilogy elevates the gospel to help us to live by love in our vulnerable seasons, and to scale our resources and currencies to bridge the gap from where we fall short now to the whole, and a kingdom that lasts and treats people well.

I intend to validate and encourage the oppressed (Isa. 1:17) of systems anti-the-Christ that distort church to religious ideological systems as the original sin of scale to the nations. Systems anti-the-Christ as population control hurt heritage, and limit its carers. God wants no one sold as slaves or to perish (see 2 Peter 3:1-9; Exod. 1-10, 21; Gen. 29, 37-50; Jdgs. 19-21; Lev. 25:1-10); Jesus paid it all to free us from yoke of slavery (1 Jn. 2:2, 4:10; 1 Sam. 17; 1 Tim. 6:1-2; Cor. 5:18-19; Col. 1:20-22, 3:22-24; Eph. 6:5-8; Gal. 5:1; Heb. 9:5, 11; Jn. 8:36; Rev. 18:13; Rom. 3:25, 5:1-11; Titus 2:9-10).

Heritage teaches us to integrate the bookend generations into our lives. This book frames narratives in Scripture about women and children whose faith seemed too scandalous to survive, but survive it did, and thrive it will.

I hope that this trilogy validates what carers go through. Transitions of joy can become a milieu in a world of suffering. This book offers a wider lens that names ostracism as Satan's system from the sin of elitism, and integrates gospel solutions into heritage work, and what we do as researchers, practitioners, and a society for the generations to continue.

A gospel heritage for kingdom come invites a futurist and spiritual systems perspective that validates the realities with a vision of heritage. Validation sets the crux of how you begin to empathize with someone else's suffering, and the compassionate action to alleviate it.

Healing becomes a validating and just response in a world inhospitable to children, or that prefers dominance and ideology over a neighborly kind.

Unique Offerings

I wrote this trilogy to scale a message of what seems lacking, a theology of heritage meets commentary plus prose, for a whole gospel, and carried this labor of love (see 2 Cor. 4:10; Col. 1:24-29; Gal. 6:17). A time and season bids me release the work as coherent and compelling as I can so that by sharing the many others complete it (see Col. 1-4; Eccl. 3).

Over six years, I developed and organized content on-the-go and in-office. I wrote and revised the trilogy as I listened through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation four times searching for content about the kingdom, and with tender sensitivity to the plight and joys of women and children. I read through the Scriptures a fifth time for an additional year while proofreading the trilogy, listening for heritage and kingdom themes, to match these passages with the sections.

I bookended this effort with accountability of training, feedback from a few selected seminary leaders, formal and informal mentorship, contractual and pro-bono coaching engagements with ministry leaders and communities.

I underwent ministry and postdoctoral training for life coach certification, writing for ministry, and ordination for writing, coaching, women's, kingdom, and heritage ministry. I reached out to folks doing the work of ministry, community, and education for feedback on the offerings here. This work since 2001 has been developed in communities, writing, and education for faith-inspired organizations.

The writing of a scroll, again, with the hopes to hear and heed the heart of God for his heritage as a guide through dynamic times to remind us to stay united in our love for God, each other, and those precious ones who will inherit the kingdom (see 1 Jn. 3-4, 5:2; Eph. 1:5, 3:20; Gal. 3:23-4:31; Jer. 36:1-32; Jn. 17; Mk.; Matt. 18:1-6; Rev. 19-22). We need not push Scriptures through a cheese grater to defend the pile of shreds as if no substance remained. We hear the whole story.

We can gaze unflinchingly, yet moved, and rest assured that the promises of God, in all its reality and glory, illumine our way (see 1 Cor. 6:13; Dan. 2:32; Ezek. 3:3; Hab. 3:16; Isa. 46:3; Jer. 1:5; Job 40:16; Jn. 7:38; Jon. 1:17, 2:1-2; Lk. 15:11-32; Mk. 7:19; Matt. 12:40, 15:17; Phil. 3:19; Prov. 20:27-30; Psa. 17:14, 22:10, 31:9, 44:25, 119:105; Rev. 10:9-10; Rom. 16:18; Songs 5:14, 7:2). These books are not canon, but a secondary source at best to amplify the invitation to a we story growing towards the vision of kingdom come.

Perhaps if we're engaged in this work, then we're less prone to being artifacts of culture, or persisting the noise of the times. Perhaps we testify by our love for one another as a way to know Christ and make him known (see Eph. 1:17; Jn. 13:5, 17:3; Phil. 2-3:10). This Christ who is our life appears in us, and through the story of his love and call on our lives together now to kingdom come (see 1 Tim. 4:14-16; Col. 3:4; Jer. 1:5; Psa. 94:14, 139).     This highly interpretive trilogy offers a heritage interpretation of the gospel, validates the contexts and systems of caregiving, and provides a model for a way forward with visioning kingdom come.

I interpret heritage themes in the gospel, and paint a vision for kingdom come to motivate a faith with love that can heal a world. Advent, heritage, and continuing become essential to design systems for every sector, such as health, public policy, education, safe streets, safe homes, economics, community, and worship to reduce the harm of systemic and individual sin of systems anti-the-Christ in the world.

This trilogy and its accompanying devotional work and prayer book ask generative questions around the positive frame of heritage. This approach can rekey conversations towards dialogue that gives people opportunities to develop solutions that rewind the vision of kingdom come to support the themes for basic needs, safe love, and continuing as a spiritual discipline of caregiving for heritage.

Contentiously, the tone of extreme times has lost the we story of the gospel. This trilogy seeks to restore a more complete understanding from Scripture for the gospel as heritage of a new identity and vocational work in the service of God until kingdom come. The nuanced language rejects labels, and invites curiosity, compels imagination, a basis of empathy and compassionate action, with the generative frame of heritage, and a propels coherent narrative of the church that fields the concerns and tensions that ideology and strife of our times have exacerbated.

Perhaps this long effort with group and individual work will restore some decency to conversations about faith, hope, and love in all systems and sectors of life. Most of all, hopefully this trilogy inspires us to better care for each other, especially the bookend generations of our lives.

This trilogy bridges a gap in literature. I have not encountered much from a woman's perspective that connects the gospel, kingdom of Christ, perinatal to peripartum, and childcare or eldercare in a way that avoids distortions, spiritual abuse, or political or ideological rules to silence faith from dissent of systems anti-the-Christ. For instance, generalized pregnancy books seem to focus on the body and learning about labor, or idealize or reduce people to behavior children or mothers. Few if any speak to life cycle as heritage from a gospel perspective, and none, to my knowledge to date, address the context of ostracism of childism and ageism with a heritage theology for formation of families and kingdom come for the nations.

A gospel heritage can inspire an ideal for continuing at the local level that won't succumb to militant systems anti-the-Christ. Kingdom come invites a cohesive vision in a language that respects a gospel heritage, illumines the resistance that carers face, dignifies the humanity of babies, respects elders, and integrates each into daily communal life.

Layout of Books

I released the content as a trilogy to manage the volume. I sectioned the book into three parts: Realities of Basic Needs, Legacy of Safe Love, and Continuing for the Future. These parts include topics and subheadings for each chapter relevant to transitioning through childcare and eldercare.

Book I begins with the Advent of Jesus, and Book III concludes with the kingdom of Heaven. Book I addresses advent, slow, shelter, water, food, rest, and outside.

Book II explains connections from Scripture with physical, mental, emotional, social, cultural, institutional, and political systems as the daily contexts in which people care for heritage, and what a gospel heritage offers these imperfect, yet necessary, sectors of society. Book II emphasizes the liminal disparity in-between ostracism and connection that workers of heritage face, and a call to do better.

Book III describes a heritage of faith, hope, and love for kingdom come. Book III weaves in the teachings of Jesus and the themes in the gospel about heritage as kith and kin of each other with God for a future kingdom. Book III contemplates spiritual, community, compassion, validation, healing, and kingdom of Christ as the aim of a gospel heritage. Book III marks these as ideal and practical solutions to the disparities and realities described in Books I and II.

The essence of Book III circles around the need for a gospel connection instead of ostracism to lead the way for us to respond to basic needs with safe love, and to smooth the cycles of life on a spectrum in transition to kingdom come. The solutions in Book III suggest we need an intentional gospel to respond differently than the norms allow to better care for children, elders, and their carers.

Book III counter-culturally argues for a collective vision of the faith instead of a partial narrative that consumes spiritual and tangible resources for oneself to individually, and only, save oneself or one's group by expensing others.

Each book ends with Questions and Prayers related to the content. Generative questions flip script from critique to solutions, and can invite dialogue instead of strife. Each chapter covers realities, contexts, and ideals that care-givers of elders and children can face, and then emphasizes themes of heritage and a vision of kingdom come from Scripture.

The accompanying devotional and prayer book will allow groups and people to share stories, learn from each other, to listen in solidarity with other carers, children, and elders, and to contemplate on what a gospel heritage can mean to us.

Limitations and Disclaimers

The size of this project increased the risk, and yet with risk we find opportunity. It's a task to steward a spiritual message, and to interpret a gospel tradition long held by people. As a disclaimer, I am not a medical doctor or licensed therapist, nor do I provide medical advice.

I wrote this Trilogy after an in-depth study of Scriptures for the word kingdom and for themes of heritage. As an ecuminister, writer and organizational anthropologist, I am trained to research and write a systems approach to connect and repair partnerships with ideals and strategies through their stories. The format is not medical, psychological, or to tell parents how to conceive, birth, or raise their children, or adult children how to care for their parents.

The trilogy paints a rainbow of heritage as an arc in-between where people of faith do the work of vision. I recognize that the word-choice of heritage may draw tension. I choose to not misuse or culturally appropriate heritage from cultures or peoples who have better or longer than me or we cherished heritage as a way of life. For me, heritage as a gospel message points us to rediscover a vision of togetherness kingdom come.

A reminder and common ground to share identity of a we story for all instead of the identity vacuums and megaphones of our times that render chaos, anxiety, confusion, and strife. A reminder that a family-style interpretation of the gospel can carry us from the covenants of fore-families to those of kith and kin for a coming, lasting, and loving kingdom (e.g., Gen. 17; Rev. 19-22; Rom. 12-14).

My interpretation frames of the gospel as topical (heritage), contextual (systems), and visionary (kingdom future). The thesis lays out contexts that touch heritage, or basic needs (Book I), safe love (Book II), and kingdom come (Book III). The thesis benefits by one focus of the gospel, and a compelling message that the gospel invites us towards.

The voice for the adult sounds too dominant with the emphasis of the transition for childhood