Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets »

UCC minister Craig Rennebohm, recipient of the Tipper Gore Award from the National Health Care for the Homeless Council and numerous other recognitions, consults with organizations nationwide in establishing mental health ministries. David Paul has authored or coauthored six books and has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and a Fulbright-Hays fellow. Both Rennebohm and Paul live in Seattle.

Since 1987, Craig Rennebohm has ministered to people on the streets of Seattle who are homeless and struggling with mental illness. In Souls in the Hands of a Tender God he tells the evocative stories of those who desperately need psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual support, like Mary, who surrounds herself with huge trash bags, and Jerry, barred from every shelter and meal program in Seattle. With gentleness and grace, solid knowledge and wisdom, Rennebohm reaches out to each of them, and their stories become parables that explore mental illness and the spiritual heart of care and recovery.

Publishers Weekly

For decades Rennebohm, a Protestant pastor, has walked the streets of Seattle, making contact with mentally ill homeless people and slowly drawing them into "circles of care" so they can find safe housing, receive medical and psychological help and rejoin the human community.In this collaboration with Paul, Rennebohm interweaves themes of the Spirit working in desperate lives, the unshakable dignity of human souls and the necessity of companionship for healing as he vividly portrays the lost people he encounters.Always recognizing that medical treatment of mental illness is an essential part of the movement toward spiritual wholeness, Rennebohm is also sensitive to the vulnerability of the mentally ill to disordered religious ideas.The book's title, a response to Jonathan Edwards's famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," reflects Rennebohm's approach of gentle compassion toward people others reject.His call to find a better path leads him to Europe to study community-based approaches to treating mental illness and to initiate these in Seattle.As well as a guide to how others can help be healing presences to the mentally ill, this hopeful book is a meditation on faith in a broken world. (May)

Preface IX

A Note on Scriptures XIII

Prologue XV

Part I The Movement of the Spirit 1

1 At the Doorway 3

2 Jerry's Song 19

3 The Potter's Field 29

Part II The Life of the Soul 45

4 Approaching Mary 47

5 Companioning Breezy 65

6 Creating Karl's Circle of Care 87

7 Grace 105

Part III A Community of Tenderness 127

8 Do You Know the Legend? 129

9 Home, Healing, and Wholeness 143

10 Caring for the Soul of the World 165

11 Words Are Medicine, Too 177

Epilogue 193

Acknowledgments 195

Appendix A A Call to Healing Ministry 201

Appendix B Books 205

Appendix C Organizations 207