Once upon a time, when I was serving as pastor of a small, mission-oriented church in West Texas — and when people were still accessing email and very rudimentary Internet through dial-up phone connections — I thought it would be a good idea to send out a weekly devotion via email to church members and other interested persons.  I called my weekly email transmission The Electric Gospel.  [Like the claim that Al Gore invented the Internet, I like to think that I was one of the first persons to send out a weekly email devotion.  Admittedly, I can’t prove that claim.]

At any rate, in those heydays of the late 1990s, as I sent out my email devotions to friends and acquaintances, they would forward them to further friends and acquaintances, etc.  It so happened that my emails started reaching some assistant editors at a Christian magazine.  Linda, one of those assistant editors, contacted me to say, “We’d like to publish this particular devotion you wrote about Tinky Winky in our magazine.  May we do so?”

Thus it was that the fledgling Electric Gospel email series became my first foray into article writing as a published author.  That religious magazine used at least one other of my Electric Gospel items as a feature article and also began asking me to write other material specifically for them.

Several years ago, when I was teaching at a ministry-training college, I resurrected the Electric Gospel name to create a blog site for sharing spiritual writings by students in my courses.  More recently, I re-purposed the original Electric Gospel site as a place to publish my own spiritual writing. 

Now, thanks to the encouragement and efforts of one of my daughters, The Electric Gospel has been reimagined once again. In the archives section of this website, we’ve carried over some of the writings from the previous blog. And I’ll be continuing my own ventures in devotional writing here. 

I’d also like to invite other individuals with open hearts and creative energies to become part of a community of spiritual contemplation. If you have writing of your own that you’d like to share, send it my way. Having served as an editor and having taught courses on devotional writing, perhaps I can offer useful feedback. And I may find what you’ve written is something I’d like to share with others through this site. And in the process, we can spur one another on in faith, hope and love.

David Sellnow