MASTER OF BIBLE STUDIES, BETH MOORE PENS FIRST NOVEL
New Orleans-based mystery is vivid, gritty
Beth Moore has been churning out Bible studies for more than 20 years — tight, concise books of study material designed for private reflection or group discussion. They have a formula, a structure and an unambiguous message: “Believing God,” “Breaking Free,” “Praying God’s Word.”
But now the founder of Houston-based Living Proof Ministries has taken her pen in a new direction: She’s written a novel. “The Undoing of Saint Silvanus,” a mystery set in New Orleans, was released last week by Tyndale House Publishers.
“This is my first try at fiction,” said Moore, 59, who has spent more than 30 years in Christian ministry. Her sprawling book — nearly 500 pages — tells the story of a young woman named Jillian, who receives word of her father’s death and heads to New Orleans for his burial, even though she hadn’t seen him for 20 years.
She reluctantly reunites with her estranged grandmother and gets entangled in the lives of the people who live in the apartment house her
grandmother owns, an old converted church known as Saint Sans. As the police begin to investigate the death of Jillian’s father, unexplained things begin to happen at Saint Sans, and everyone gets involved in untangling the mystery.
If the phrase “Christian fiction” brings something niche and narrow to mind, Moore’s book breaks that mold. It’s a little gritty, and it’s far more mystery than sermon. The descriptions of New Orleans are vivid and rich, from the French Quarter (where Jillian takes a job at Café Beignet) to the majestic old homes and live oaks that line St. Charles Avenue.
And Moore has a gift for turning a phrase: apartment house manager Adella follows someone “with the enthusiasm of a woman walking off a diving board into a drained pool,” and when Jillian encounters a mysterious box, “curiosity stirred up her soul like a fork scrambling eggs.” Flair for writing
But Moore always has had a flair for writing.
At evangelical churches around the world, women sign up for Beth Moore Bible studies, using her curriculum as a guide. And that material has generally been structured as a dose of hardcore Biblical study blended seamlessly with disarmingly candid personal tales from Moore’s own life.
Writing stories is “the way I process,” she said.
Her dad ran movie theaters and her mom was an avid reader. “From the time I was a little bitty kid, I scribbled and scribbled on a Big Chief tablet,” she said. “I’ve always been a compulsive writer.”
She started her ministry as a young mother in the 1980s, speaking at church events and teaching Christian aerobics classes. Eventually, Moore agreed to teach Sunday School at First Baptist Church in Houston. She was a natural, and her weekly class quickly grew from 200 to 2,000 women.
A few years later, she started publishing Bible studies and other books through Lifeway Christian Resources, and now Moore travels around the country for “Living Proof Live” conferences, arena-size Bible studies that attract thousands of women.
And her ministry has become a family affair: Moore now attends Bayou City Fellowship, a church founded five years ago by her son-in-law and daughter. Both of Moore’s adult daughters are involved in her ministry.
A couple of years ago, as she celebrated her three decades years of ministry, Moore gave some long, hard thought to where she wanted to take her work. Was it time to slow her pace and ease into retirement — “or was I going to ramp up?”
She decided to ramp up. And that, she says, is when “God started moving from every direction.”
“Every sermon I would hear, everything I’d read, every way I would turn, I felt like he was saying something to me,” she said. “I felt like he was telling me again: I will use you for the rest of your days to sow into new fields.” A seat in ‘War Room’
So Moore started saying yes to invitations. She played a small role in the film “War Room,” which became a grass roots hit last year largely because of its Christian themes. She spoke at a luncheon for Texas judges. “The more offroad it seemed to be from what I usually did, the more it was a ‘Yes,’ ” she said. And that’s when she decided to try to publish her book.
“I would not have expected the feeling of vulnerability,” she said. “It was the hardest manuscript, bar none, for me to let someone read. … Being so new, I was afraid it was terrible.”
But writing a novel gave her freedom to let herself go, after decades of writing curriculum with strict parameters. “I have an exact number of words I can use for a day and a week” with the Bible studies, she said. “It looks a certain way; it has to fall out a certain way on the page.”
She started working on “The Undoing” several years ago, pulling it out every time she could find a few free minutes. “It was a way that I was set loose,” she said. “I didn’t know if it would ever be published or even if I’d need for it to be.”
“The Undoing” has an initial print run of 100,000 copies — no small number, especially for a Christian publishing house.
Moore said she hopes the book will bring joy and entertainment to the women who follow her Bible studies already. But she also hopes “The Undoing of Saint Silvanus” will be discovered by readers who have no relationship with God, or those who have distanced themselves from church and feel unplugged and disconnected from their faith.
Fiction is a different way of saying it, Moore said, but her novel has the same message she always has worked to share: “God is not for just what we consider the holy people and the holy places. He is for the gritty and the dirty and the forgotten and the rejected and the rebuked and the scorned. There’s no way to be so far gone that you can’t be found by God.”
That push for “real living” is her trademark.
In “The Undoing of Saint Silvanus,” characters find and rekindle their faith by the story’s end. But Moore didn’t want her book to have a tidy ending, where a character finds faith and is “fixed completely.”
“That has not been my experience,” she said. “I still, every day, battle my own selfishness. … I don’t know anyone who doesn’t.” A push for transparency
She argues for more “transparency in the church” — leaders and ministers who will discuss openly the ways they are unfinished works, the ways they still struggle. So many Christians feel “they need to portray that they have no broken side,” Moore said. “I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t buy it, and I don’t think it does any favors to people around us.”
So with her characters, she wanted to portray that life isn’t perfect, but a relationship with God can bring a sense of belonging and purpose.
“I cannot say to anyone, ‘Listen, a life of faith in Christ will make you happy,’ ” Moore said. “I can’t make those kinds of promises. But what I can say is we can all live a life of meaning.”
“I felt like he was telling me again: I will use you for the rest of your days to sow into new fields.” Beth Moore