I was away a few days and came back to discover the Faith*in*Fiction discussion of "edgy" had run into three pages! It's worth checking into here.
With that in mind, I want to relate a story I heard Friday. A delightful lady, Edna Blake, spoke at the church conference meeting I attended. She makes her points clearly, with humor and love. She told about a woman she's been having Bible studies with for the last year or so. Susan is a new Christian and has been inviting her friends to study with Edna. Recently Susan invited a lot of people to her home to hear Edna and 57 women showed up. These are women who have no clue who Jesus is. Afterwards Susan invited everyone downstairs for wine coolers, or they could stay upstairs and talk to Edna. The audience of church ladies laughed along with Edna when she told this story, but she made sure to point out that this new Christian was bringing her world to Christ. Her methods might not look like what we do in church, but she was having an influence on people who knew her. Her friends knew Susan had changed and they wanted to know more about it.
What does this have to do with whether or not Christians should write "edgy" fiction? God uses all kinds of people and works in all kinds of ways to bring people to salvation. We serve an "edgy" God. We can show that in what we write. We can also accept that God can use different kinds of books to reach people. Some people will be put off by a horror novel, but they might be deeply moved by a prairie romance. Others will find the prairie romance positively sick-making, but long for a Christian writer who can send chills down their spines. (have at it derFielden)
A moment of epiphany came many years ago while I was a student in Bible college. I looked at some of my fellow students who seemed hopelessly weird and socially inept and wondered what they were doing there. God brought it home to me that he can use all kinds of people. God sees our hearts, while man looks at what's on the outside only. God sees our hearts when we write and if he wants what we write to be an instrument of his grace, then he will use it, edgy or not.
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Believe it or don't, but I have a prairie story in my idea box. Well, a story that takes place on the prairie. Well, not so much the prairie as the Badlands. But there's a Conestoga wagon. Well, not so much a Conestoga wagon, as what left St. Louis as a Conestoga wagon; now it's more of a husk of a Conestoga wagon, just as the family riding in it is the husk of a family.
And then things go horribly, horribly wrong.
--Chris (dFm)
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