Love Letters to God (Devon Spencer and Katherine Willis Pershey) - Review

 LOVE LETTERS TO GOD. By Devon Spencer and Katherine Willis Pershey. Foreword by Winn Collier. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2025. Xiii + 182 pages.

        As a historian, one of the most important resources available to us is letters. For example, the letters that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote to each other in their closing years tell us a lot about these two men and the way they viewed the nation they helped to found. The way we communicate has changed over the years, and as a result, we don't write letters the way we once did. Emails and texts tend to be brief and don’t communicate as much contextual material. We also tend to delete them rather quickly. Nevertheless, letters can be revealing of one's personality, interests, concerns, joys, and disappointments in life. For Christians, one of the most important theological resources we have come in the form of letters, especially those written by or attributed to Paul. Of course, sometimes we only have one side of the conversation, but in some cases, as with Jefferson and Adams or Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann, we have both sides of the conversation. So, when both sides of a conversation are available, we gain even deeper insight into the lives of the people involved.  

In Love Letters to God, the reader is presented with an intimate look into a deep friendship between a pastor and a spiritual seeker. The letters that form this book were written by Katherine Willis Pershey and Devon Spencer. Katherine Pershey is a pastor ordained as a Disciple but serving a United Church of Christ congregation. I’ve known her for many years, since we were both colleagues serving Disciples congregations in Southern California before both of us ended up in different parts of the Midwest.  Her dialogue partner, Devon Spencer, is by profession a therapist and a spiritual seeker. The two met and became friends after Spencer was directed to Pershey because she was seeking someone to discuss her faith questions. The two women connected right away and built a deep friendship, which, like all friendships, is tested along the way. That is true for these two women. is a friend and colleague, Katherine Willis Pershey. Her dialogue partner is Devon Spencer, a woman who was directed to Katherine because she was seeking to better understand the things of faith. When they met, they connected right away, building a deep friendship, which, like all friendships, gets tested along the way.

We, the readers of Love Letters to God, have been invited to peer into their relationship, which reveals a great deal about their sense of personhood and their faith. The letters that form the book were written over the course of a year that ran from May 22, 2022, to April 24, 2023. The letters that form the book appear to have been written in the form of emails, though there are a couple of places where they share text messages. Therefore, what we have is somewhat different from the kinds of letters that were written in earlier years on paper and then mailed. One might wonder why the two women would decide to share what are often intimate messages with a wider audience. The answer is that the letters were written and collected as part of Pershey’s D.Min project, a degree program undertaken at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. The specific program is connected to the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination. Winn Collier, who directs the Peterson Center and the D.Min program connected with it, provided the Foreword to the book.

It is difficult to review a book like this because it is so personal. Yet, that is what makes for a good collection of letters. As Collier points out in his Foreword, “the best letters are those that pass between genuine friends. When friends converse, the conversation can quickly move past the pleasantries and into the meat. The questions, the disagreements, become clearer. The passion and the hope—and sometimes the wounds—are out in the open. When friends write, we hear what’s emerging from the soul” (p. vii). There is truth to what Collier writes, especially regarding this collection of letters that reveal the intimate details of the lives of these two women. We see revealed here the highs and lows, the joys and concerns about life. Since they share things about their lives, they involve the lives of others, especially family members. For this to work, these people would have to be on board with the project.

As we read the letters, it is essential to remember that, although one of the letter writers is a pastor and the other is a spiritual seeker, there is more at stake than simply a theological conversation. What we discover as we read these letters is that these two women care deeply about each other and about matters of faith. However, as we read the letters, we discover that while both are Christian women who love Jesus, they are not always on the same page theologically. Even though Katherine is the pastor of a UCC congregation (she was ordained as a Disciples of Christ minister), she shares with us that where once she was very progressive in her theology, over time she has moved theologically to the center. As for her dialogue partner, Devon, she seems to have moved further to the right theologically. Thus, as Pershey notes in her introduction, “Through our correspondence and through the providential friendship that continued over tacos and lattes, Devon and I helped one another have faith. Devon and I helped one another encounter God. The trajectory of my life includes more toward Christ because of this” (p. xiii).  At times, this becomes a point of tension as the two share their thoughts on theological matters and seem to misinterpret or misunderstand each other’s positions or viewpoints. But, as Pershey shares, the conversation helped both women deepen their faith, even if at times the tension between them could easily have driven them apart. Nevertheless, the depth of friendship helped keep them together.

So, why did I choose to read and review this collection of letters? In large part, the reason I did this was because Katherine and I are ministerial colleagues who have served alongside each other, even if quite a few years back. I have also read and reviewed her two previous books:  Any Day a Beautiful Change: A Story of Faith and Family (Chalice Press, 2012) and Very Married: Field Notes on Love and Fidelity (Herald Press, 2016). So, I knew that she was an excellent writer who was willing to share deep things related to both faith and life itself. This book is a bit different than the other two, but as with those two books, we see both Katherine’s ability to write well and to be open and honest about faith and life. While I didn’t know of Devon Spencer before reading this book, she also demonstrates her ability as a writer and as one who is willing to open up herself spiritually and personally. She also demonstrated an ability and willingness to push Katherine spiritually. In other words, while one is, as Katherine notes, “a cradle Christian in a mainline Protestant tradition,” the other (Devon) is cultivating a fervent faith “as a new member of a theologically orthodox Presbyterian congregation” (p. xiii).  It is worth noting that Devon is part of a congregation and denomination that denies women the right to serve as ordained ministers, but that has not stopped her from affirming Katherine’s calling, even if that does create a bit of dissonance in her faith expression.

Now, I will admit that this is an odd format for a D.Min project, but what makes for an appropriate D.Min project is another topic for another day. As for Letters to God, the letters found here provide readers with an intriguing book. Katherine and Devon titled this collection Letters to God because they envision this correspondence to be undertaken as letters sent to God as prayers, but revealing their own spiritual and life journeys. So, as Devon writes in her Afterword, "the book has no ending," because "much like life, which Christians know as eternal, this book continues beyond its final page, because the book is our relationship, and creation is as inherently relational as the triune God, the ultimate artist" (p. 177). Therefore, Letters to God should prove enlightening for those who are on this journey of faith that is filled with ups and downs.