About the Electric Gospel

Once upon a time, when I was serving as pastor of a small, mission-oriented church in West Texas -- and when people were still accessing email and very rudimentary Internet through dial-up phone connections -- I thought it would be a good idea to send out a weekly devotion via email to church members and other interested persons.  I called my weekly email transmission "The Electric Gospel."  [Like the claim that Al Gore invented the Internet, I'd like to make the claim that I was one of the first pastors ever to do a weekly email devotion.  But I really can't prove that!]

At any rate, in those heydays of the late 1990s, it turned out that as I sent out my email devotions to friends and acquaintances they would forward them to further friends and acquaintances, etc.  It so happened that my emails started reaching some assistant editors at Forward in Christ magazine (which actually had a different magazine name back then, but I won't bother you with that).  Linda, one of those assistant editors, contacted me to say, "We'd like to publish this particular devotion you wrote about Tinky Winky in our magazine.  May we do so?"

Thus it was that the fledgling "Electric Gospel" email series became my first foray into article writing as a published author.  Forward in Christ used at least one other of my "Electric Gospel" items as a feature article and also began asking me to write other material specifically for them.

A few years ago, when I began teaching an online course through Martin Luther College on Devotional Writing, I resurrected the "Electric Gospel" name to create a blogsite where students in the course would post their finished devotions. 

For a while I repurposed the "Electic Gospel" as a place to field-test devotions for a book I'm scheduled to write.    

Now I've repurposed this site yet again.  Rather than just my writing, I'd like to feature the writing of various Christian friends who have written items of strong spiritual impact.  If you have something you'd like me to consider for the site, send it my way.

David Sellnow

Professor of religion, philosophy and history