So it occurred to me the other day that I’m a writer. I’ve been a professional writer, published nationally and in Europe and Asia, for nearly 29 years now. I’ve written four novels, hundreds of comic books, various articles and a couple of screenplays. But fiction writing was the one creative gift God had given me that I had yet to offer back to Him.

I believe our gifts and talents find their purest expression when we offer them back to God. Which is not to suggest that a singer must only sing Gospel songs—quite the opposite. Gospel music has its place and purpose, but I believe real Gospel music is music that offers the Gospel to the lost, rather than simply entertains the saved. In that context, I would tend to consider India.Arie’s music to be more effective than Dorothy Norwood’s.

I’m not at all familiar with Christian fiction. I have, frankly, never been interested in it. The whole apocalyptic wave of Left Behind novels and their imitators leave me rather cold because, first hit, they make God out to be either some Boogeyman threatening us with doom and destruction, or they make God out be some galactically weak entity struggling to keep evil at bay. God is neither. God does not struggle with Satan, nor is Satan in any way God’s equal or counterbalance. I don’t believe God wants us to scare people into believing in Him, and I don’t like biblical prophecy being distorted into a science fiction plotline. In many ways, the Left Behind stuff opened the door for the much more commercially successful Da Vinci Code, the latter being a brilliant work of fiction that church folk reviled as heretical and offensive. It was *fiction,* folks. It was never intended to be taken literally and the work never claimed to be factual.

But the Left Behind-type apocalyptic stuff does, however, claim to be based on fact. I think it both ironic and ridiculous that many evangelicals cannot seem to grasp that the commercial exploitation of the Gospel—for this mega-selling Left Behind stuff—is what made the Da Vinci Code and its ilk so commercially viable in the first place. Most people cannot divine much difference between entertainment sources. Once you start making biblical precepts into entertainment sources, to the consumer, it’s all the same. It’s all God as the Boogeyman (or, in the case of Da Vinci, God as the fraud).

Feeling led to tithe this gift back to God, I knew I didn’t want to write anything even remotely apocalyptic because, again, just my hit on it, the fantastic elements of The Great Tribulation, the Apocalypse, The Rapture and so forth make the story a bit larger than life. I wanted to write a story that spoke about the life we actually live. About the community God has ordained me to speak to. And to not overshadow any of that with elements—biblically-based or otherwise—that lead us to God under threat.

Zion is an allegorical urban fable which incorporates many of the themes and concerns expressed in essays posted here on the PraiseNet. It takes hard look at the urban culture of the African American church, questioning our purpose and our culture, while challenging us to more closely align both with the message and the personal example of Jesus Christ. A complex urban murder mystery, Zion follows an arson investigator whose convenient Sunday morning Christianity is shaken and challenged by the deepening mystery of a church’s destruction, and the ensuing efforts by the local black church community to impede her investigation.

As with music, I preferred to not write a “Christian” work so much as a work that speaks about Christ. To that end, Zion is hardly a book that would please most evangelicals. While certainly written to the Body of Christ, most especially to the African American church, Zion is not written in a Christian voice or set in a Christian context. It is, therefore, freer to speak a more universal truth, a truth in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ is revealed and contrasted against the political practice of the institutionalized church. By not handcuffing the work to phony rules of unrealistic, antiseptic behavior and language, Zion is designed to speak more credibly because it speaks the language actually spoken. Because its characters behave more like real people. Because the work isn’t cleaned up and sanitized to protect our delicate ears.

This is not, by any stretch, intended to be entertainment for Christians. In many ways, I think censoring ourselves as artists (writing being an art form) does God a great disservice by presenting Him as some intergalactic prude and limiting His dominion to areas of safe conduct. Moreover, the more honest we are with ourselves, with the shortcomings of our own flawed humanity, we’d realize much of the behaviors exhibited in this work are going on—if not in our own lives, certainly within a few feet of us. We will, undoubtedly, receive complaints about the cussing—which I really struggled with:

Matthew Chapter 5: But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: 35 Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. 36 Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

I don’t like cussing, I don’t like going to most movies because of the harsh language. I don’t like hanging around people who cuss like sailors. But, bottom line, if Zion is set in the real world, strong language—even moderated as it is, here—is rather unavoidable. Much as it may grieve some who visit this ministry to read profanity on these pages, the truth is most if not all of us have used profanity at one point in our lives, and many of us continue to use it, if even only in rare spikes of anger. Sadly, many church folk use it as a matter of course (I’ve even heard pastors use it in the pulpit by accident—the consequence of using profanity in your daily life). As much as I respect everyone’s view on the matter, it’s fairly disingenuous to point accusing fingers when we know Zion merely reflects what is actually going on around us (and is, in fact, cleaned up quite a bit as compared to the amount of swearing we hear—and some of us actually do—on a daily basis).

Additionally, Zion deals to a great many adult topics and situations. While not being appropriate for pre-teens (who I’d doubt would read this stuff anyway), I believe most teens and certainly young adults would find the raising of these issues meaningful, as these are issues they are either confronting or are about to confront, and many teens and young adult have about the same level of Christian commitment the novel’s main character does as she begins her journey.

I’m more or less giving Zion away instead of shopping it to publishers because I want the work to speak evangelically. Waiting to have the book published and in stores delays the project by at least two years and, frankly, given my schedule, I’d probably never get the book finished if it wasn’t a go-thing now. This work is intended for this audience, for our PraiseNet family. I don’t want it sitting on a shelf somewhere while my agent fields offers. Interested parties can, however, discuss publishing options by contacting me.

At the end of the day, it is my prayer this work will speak to both the saved and unsaved, challenging the saved to reexamine their motives and practices while challenging the unsaved to re-think their dismissal of the value of spirituality and the truth of the Gospel. As Michael Zoë Dallas, our protagonist, makes her journey from Sunday morning Christian to effective and invested believer, it is my prayer that she will bring many of us—saved and unsaved—along with her.