About the Editor
About Jeremy Duff
Jeremy Duff is a vicar in Widnes with an established teaching and writing ministry, which has included posts at Liverpool Cathedral, for Liverpool Diocese and within Oxford University. His writings include Meeting Jesus: Human Responses to a Yearning God (SPCK, 2006) and The Elements of New Testament Greek (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
More information
How long have you been involved in editing Guidelines?
I've been editing Guidelines since 2002.
How did you come to be editing Guidelines?
I was working in Oxford University as a Tutor in New Testament which was great but meant that my writing output was very academic. A friend saw that Guidelines was looking for a new editor and suggested I look at it. When I did, it seemed a great opportunity to add to my more academic work a strand of writing directly for people 'on the ground' in the churches, helping connect scholarship with mission and ministry today. Fortunately BRF said yes, and editing and writing for Guidelines has become and important strand of my own ministry and service, and one which I really enjoy.
What is the most challenging part of your work?
Finding contributors. There are seven to ten different writers in each edition. There are some contributors whose material is so valued that we have them back fairly regularly, but Guidelines does not have a small team of writers as many notes do, because for each topic or book I want to search out the right person. So we are easily looking at 20 different writers a year.
Academics tend to be hard pushed nowadays to focus exclusively on scholarly writing, valued in the all important Research Assessment Exercise, and therefore writing for Guidelines is always an extra for them, as part of their Christian service. On the other hand most ministers, even those who have extremely thoughtful and important things to say, aren’t in the business of writing for publication. So identifying the right people, and then persuading them to write, can be a challenge.
What has been the most encouraging part of your work?
Two things. First, receiving feedback from readers which demonstrates that a particular contribution has really made a difference to them. Commissioning contributors, receiving their text, and writing my own, and the edition being put to bed and off for printing all tends to be done from a computer hundreds of miles from the BRF offices, and certainly without sight of any readers. It can feel a bit unreal, so it is really encouraging to find out from readers, often almost two years since a contribution was commissioned, that it actually helped people.
Second, commissioning some outstanding people who haven't written for publication before, and finding that they product excellent material, which receives great feedback, and which then opens doors for them to develop more of a writing ministry.