Over this past year I’ve been editing a book for Red Letter Christians UK on the topic of Jesus and Justice.

The journey began at a writers’ workshop in Birmingham at the start of the year where would-be contributors shared their ideas and I offered a framework for what the book could look like. Since then chapters have been coming in and I have been editing them with the help of a colleague, returning them to authors for approval and then tweaking as appropriate ready for the next stage.

It’s been exciting but has felt slightly unreal. Until last Thursday.

The editorial group convened for lunch and to chart the next stage. And there on Sally and Dave’s dining table, the book emerged. Each chapter was represented by a square of paper with the title and author’s name; and a different coloured square, indicating a ‘dialogue’ that would introduce each section of the book, separated the chapters into blocks.

It stretched along the table and revealed that we had 27 chapters in a pretty publishable form (one or two still need a bit of work) and five dialogues (yet to be recorded and written up). The book will be topped an tailed by a foreword and a concluding liturgy. And the finished item will be about 80,000 words.

What really excites me about this is that, apart from those contributing the dialogue pieces, most of the writers are people you won’t have heard of, people who are just getting on working with Jesus for justice in their localities, each of whom has a great story to tell about what’s happening in their neck of the woods. We have stories about economic justice and migration, housing and gender, children and poverty, told in a variety of styles from a variety of angles but each illustrating how Jesus and justice are joined at the hip.

All being well the finished book will be published in time for Lent next year. I will keep you posted on progress.

Next year is almost certainly an election year. The issue of justice will be front and centre – justice for the poor and marginalised, for those struggling to keep their heads above water, justice for excluded groups, justice for the displaced and strangers among us. My hope is that this book will help Jesus followers across the land to use the election campaign to raise issues of justice with their local candidates, to ask what difference a vote for them will make to the last, the lost and least.

In many of the conversations that I’m a part of there is a longing for things to change combined with a sense of helplessness about how broken things seem to be. Well, in the words of Dee Hock, founder of Visa and a leader in chaordic thinking, ‘it is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism. In times such as these, it is no failure to fall short of realising all that we might dream – the failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realise. We must try.’

So this book is offered to fire up our dreams, to see what can and has been achieved by Jesus followers who take his words seriously and work for his agenda in our communities.