C.S. Lewis made a breakthrough, and today his influence is greater than at the time of his death in 1963. God is looking for a younger Lewis who has a willingness to master written expression, someone who (to rewrite Kipling) can walk with commoners, nor lose the kingly touch; someone who can do with arts and letters what Billy Graham does with the spoken word—shock the world with truth.” ~ Sherwood Eliot Wirt, The Making of a Writer

In rereading The Making of a Writer, this nearly 20-year old book issues a challenge that proves as remarkable today as the day it was published: “The time is ripe for moving into positions of spiritual, intellectual, and cultural leadership in the world, where we become chaplains to the reading public.” Wirt says if we’re to communicate, we have to do better. We have to know our culture. We have to realize that our education is never completed. He suggests that writers who haven’t delved into the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Pascal, Browning (and others) are impoverished. Pardon me while I brush the dust off my copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

The publishing industry today still needs writers who are committed to the “majesty of truth.” Not easy since we’re up against an alien culture. As a Christ-follower, my writing mandate seems loaded with responsibility. But I love how Sherwood Wirt describes us as “stewards of the mysteries of grace.” If readers become what they read, then writing merely to entertain, to express myself earnestly, or to fill blank pages with beauty and style, will never suffice. Either I write out of vainglory, or I write to evoke something in my reader.

Martin Luther said, “Oh, it is a living, creative, active, mighty thing, this faith!” Author Sherwood Wirt says this is exactly how we ought to think about Christian writing. We have entered the land of literature, the literature of power and grace.