Brighton author Justin Rossow believes that a person’s relationship with God should be delightful, not stressful.
After serving church congregations for 20 years, Rossow said he has seen the burden Christians carry while trying to follow the rules that have been laid in front of them.
“Religion can be seen as a list of things you’re supposed to do and things you’re not supposed to do,” Rossow said. “Even if you imagine a God of grace, you live life like you’re in trouble most of the time. I don’t think it’s supposed to be like that.
“God already loves you and thinks you’re pretty amazing. The pressure is off, you don’t have to make him like you.”
That is the message he conveyed in his book, “Delight! Discipleship as the Adventure of Loving and Being Loved,” which just received the 2020 Best Indie Book Award for best Christian book.
The Best Indie Book Awards is an international competition that judges the writing, cover art and illustrations of self-published and small press books.
“To have someone who didn’t know me say (my book) was good was an affirmation that I’m doing the right thing,” Rossow said.
Before working as a full-time writer, Rossow served congregations in Missouri, Texas and Ann Arbor. In 2019, Rossow stepped down from his job as senior pastor at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor to pursue writing full time.
“I could see he was happier writing and preaching than doing administrative stuff,” his 19-year-old daughter Naomi Rossow said. “I knew he was going to be a lot happier doing this.”
Since he began writing full time, Rossow has published seven pieces of writing, including hymn journals, a travel log and books with resources for individuals, congregations and church leaders.
When he began looking for publishers, Rossow read about self-publishing, which he thought would be a good way to get started as a writer. That’s why he founded Next Step Press – his own publishing house through Amazon.com.
“I want to create resources to help people take delight in taking steps toward Jesus,” he said.
Rossow has relied heavily on his friends in his writing. One of his friends, Conrad Gempf, a faculty member at the London School of Theology, often exchanges chapters with Rossow to read and critique. Gempf and Rossow met at a conference in Colorado five years ago and bonded over their mutual love of writing.
“We have a very similar understanding of things, but we’re still able to correct each other,” Gempf said.
This fall, Rossow published “Delight!,” which looks at how the Bible talks about our relationship with God as delightful.
“I think it’s a theme in religion and theology that gets almost no attention,” said Leopoldo Sanchez, a faculty member at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, where Rossow earned his Ph.D. “We lose the sense that service in God’s name is a joy and the spiritual life is a delight.”
Jeff Meyer, a pastor at a church in Madison, Wisconsin, distributed copies of “Delight!” to his church’s book club.
“We had 40 people on a Zoom call talking about chapter one,” Meyer said. “It was refreshing to talk about this topic of mutual delight.”
Rossow’s next project isn’t something he wrote. Next Step Press is set to publish a book this spring that Rossow’s daughters wrote with his friend Steve Wiechman’s daughters.
Rossow and Wiechman had come up with “The Emotional Devotional” for themselves to write, but thought the title sounded more like something for teenage girls. That’s when Naomi took the idea and ran with it.
Naomi, 19, teamed up with her sisters Liz, 17, and Kate, 14, as well as Wiechman’s daughters Gabby, 18, and Ellie, 13, to write “The Emotional Devotional,” a devotion book for teenage girls.
“It’s a devotion book you don’t have to do every day or every week,” Naomi said. “When you feel this emotion, you can reference the book. The goal is to bring Jesus into the emotion, not make it go away.”
To view more of Rossow’s projects, visit www.findmynextstep.org.
-Livingston Daily