Jesus taught with stories and Bert Montgomery imitates Him brilliantly in this book. Get prepared to laugh, cry and learn in a book that will make your day.

—Tony Campolo
Professor Emeritus, Eastern University

Bert writes about spiritual matters in worldly terms. If that seems like a contradiction, pull out your New Testament and read the parts in red ink.

—Randy Poe
Author, Skydog: The Duane Allman Story

Bert Montgomery is a person after my own heart. He loves the world that John’s Gospel tells us God loves—with all of its great music, interesting people, and delightful food, not the least of which are pancakes and pizza. In my church we celebrate the Still-Speaking God, the one whose revelation of love in a new key breaks into human experience through the beauty of the ordinary and the sacraments of common. Bert gets that. In the music of Johnny Cash and Elvis, Derek Trucks and Tom Waits, Bert sees life the way a good preacher worth her salt sees life, as a chance for God’s transcendent grace to invade the moment, for the story of God’s love for every person to be told again—even though some won’t want to hear it. Bert hears it in country songs, prayerful funeral dirges, and rowdy music to wake the dead; he sees it on the big and little screens and reads it in the tired eyes and sighs of his dinner companions. I hear it there, too, and here in these “psychic pancakes.” Can we get more syrup over here?

—Brian Quincy Newcomb
Music critic at www.ucc.org/news and Senior Pastor,
David’s United Church of Christ, Kettering, Ohio

Bert Montgomery does what Jesus did: grounds faith in the earthly, the real, the tactile. I wish they’d recorded some of Jesus’ funny, off-hand lines, but I’m grateful that we’ve got a bunch of Bert’s best to make faith life-giving and fun.

—Joseph Phelps
Highland Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky