Incorporation [Hardcover]

Hope Church--its clergy and its people--are quite a congregation, an unforgettable cast of saints and sinners. While serving a heavenly realm, they also have their feet plainly planted in the muck and mire of the real world. Here is an Easter story of ordinary folk caught in the gracious grasp of an extraordinary God. In this rollicking, hilarious, sometimes pathetic, fast-paced, and always entertaining journey through a month of Sundays at Hope Church, we meet a wild cast of characters in church people surprised to be the body of Christ. Sex, violence, greed, grunge, lust, and lies--all in church! Saints and sinners all, caught within the embrace of a God who refuses to make proper distinctions. In Incorporation Will Willimon offers a fascinating fictional expose of the underside of the American mega-church. Seasoned ministers in this corporate church world are opportunists intent on crowd-pleasing performances that advance their careers. When inevitable missteps expose their manipulative ways, like their counterparts in the corporate world of business, protecting the corporation becomes their prime concern. But reckless ambition leads to compromises that bring about a final tragic accounting. There is still God after all. --Douglas Alan Walrath author of Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction Imagine a contemporary variation on Trollope's Barchester Towers, set in a small American town with a big church called Hope, where both clergy and parishioners are energetically engaged in those all too human emotions--ambition, greed, lust, jealousy, pride--and ungodly shenanigans--drunkenness, adultery, criminal malfeasance--that make the lives of sinners so often more entertaining than the lives of saints. Imagine a touch of madness and mystery and the chance for grace. Imagine the narrator of this novel has a keen sense of irony and humorous insight into his cast of characters. You don't have to imagine the result. Just read Will Willl#A