God's Front Porch

By Gerald E. Stone

In tiny Blacksburg, Arkansas, church is the only show in town, and when young Preacher arrives, he becomes the star attraction because of his capacity for producing one entertaining disaster after... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0964051397
• ISBN13: 9780964051393
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Tattersall Pub
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

This book was a belly laugh full of artful wisdom.

God's Front Porch took me back to the country church of my East Alabama childhood. This Arkansas congregation is a sit-com of inner pew politics where the new preacher, fresh from a Texas seminary, is tested by a congregation more than ready to give him his walking papers for the slightest infraction -- such as daring to preach from anything other than the King James Version. While he tries to learn local custom and avoid the antics of the church's notorious twin youngsters, congregational old-timers "smoke him over" to see what he is made of. Can he preach without notes, for example? To find out, why not plaster his sermon to the ceiling with the strong suction of an attic fan. Can the Baptist preacher hold his own in a tango with the Church of Christer? Let the hot-headed heathen button-hole him in full view of the congregation and see if he loses his religion. Into this mine field of a congregation, whose members frequent the parsonage mostly for its indoor plumbing, walks a chap of a preacher who finds trouble the way a Scud missile finds its target. Prone to mishap, he unwittingly buys a "Hitler car" and drives the bug to the home of an ailing parishioner who lost a son in the war. He is run off at gunpoint. He baptises in a muddy creek only to be stuck fast, leaving his good shoes on the creek bottom. Church members take to following him around to see just what will happen next, and they don't hesitate to take advantage of his naivete. One volunteers a smoked ham for Preacher's table that turns out to be last year's sawdust variety. But Preacher soon catches on with the help of the book's narrator, a church deacon who takes a liking to the boy preacher and teaches him the finer points of ministry that can't be learned in seminary. With humor and patience he helps Preacher realize the old adage that "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." Convinced that the preacher cares, they might come to believe God does, too. And Preacher teaches the old-timer a thing or two about the power of true belief to convert even the most confirmed sinner. God's Front Porch is a delightful return to the old days of dinner on the grounds with the attendant care to avoid the boxed supper of the bad cook. It's a humorous, yet thoughtful look at the dance between preacher, congregation and community and how that dance often ends just when everyone's starting to get the hang of it.