Eleanor Shepherd’s / More Questions than Answers
ISBN 13: 978-1-60899-361-1 | List Price $ | Format: Soft Cover | Pages: 184
Why does it feel like most of the world today considers irrelevant the gospel we cherish and so faithfully proclaim in our churches? Why do our Christian responses fail to satisfy the heart quests of our neighbors? Does the shallowness of our neatly packaged answers alienate us from them and from each other?
More Questions Than Answers offers the hope of reconciliation through exploring how we can develop listening relationships. Walking together in what becomes a spiritual accompaniment, we learn to attune ourselves to one another and to the Spirit within us. Then we dare to reach across the chasm that separates us and discover an authentic faith emerges.
The book has several endorsements including those by Carol Kent, Jane Rubietta and Bob Hostetler. In 2011 the book was winner of The Word Guild Award in the Christian Leadership category. I also received an award for an article that was published in the book Hot Apple Cider.
Eleanor Shepherd spent thirty years in ministry after ordination as an officer of The Salvation Army. Along with her engagement in pastoral ministry and administration, she contributed over 85 articles, mainly to Salvation Army publications. These were distributed in a variety of periodicals in Canada, the USA, France, Germany and New Zealand.
Her degree in Psychology equipped her for learning the listening skills that she uses in spiritual accompaniment relationships. A venue where she has been able to apply them is in the leadership of College and Careers Bile study groups. She undertook this leadership in Montreal and Toronto along with Glen, her husband of forty years, who was also a Salvation Army officer. One of these experiences led to the conversion of a young Moslem and Eleanor published his story in Power
for Living, the Scripture Press adult take home paper. Their College and Careers group field-tested the Bible study book created by the Shepherds, Why Families?
Prayer has played an important part in Eleanor’s life. For fifteen years, she has been a member of the Intercessors, an international prayer ministry begun by Catherine Marshall. She has done workshops and seminars on prayer and created a personal prayer support network for the ministry of her husband and herself. This network proved particularly valuable to the Shepherds when their 30-year-old son, John broke his neck in a car accident six years ago and became a quadriplegic. John was a student at Harvard Business School at the time and the Shepherds were serving with The Salvation Army in France.
Prayer and writing are intertwined for Eleanor in that she is a member of the prayer support team of The Word Guild, a professional writers’ association to which she belongs. In addition, she was for many years a prayer partner for Lin Johnson, the organizer of The Write-to-Publish conference in Wheaton. As well as writing, Eleanor along with her husband has spoken at many conferences, particularly for clergy in Canada, the USA, France, Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa, Haiti and Jamaica.
