A PEBBLE IN MY SHOE:
The Life & Times of John Shelby Spong

A Review by Bishop Spong

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It was a strange experience to approach the downtown Los Angeles Theatre Center on a Sunday evening early in October. Why? Because the billboards advertising the play at the Tom Bradley Theatre had large prints of my face on them. On the inside cover [of the playbill] Will & Company stated its purpose: "We will strive for egalitarianism and unity in our artistic adventure. We look to present works that examine and challenge stereotypes of color, creed, ability and gender. We want to promote discussion, evoke emotion, incite action, encourage change through entertainment in which the audience cries, feels, laughs, thinks and is made sufficiently angry to take action."

    My wife and I took our seats and settled down for what was to be the most unusual and unanticipated night of my life.  Almost four hundred people were present for this premier, about twice the number expected. When the final curtain fell, the audience rose as one to give the play and its actors a standing ovation. Personally, however, I was not prepared for the roller coaster of emotions that I would experience.How did this play come about? In the year 2000 Harper Collins published my autobiography that they entitled, Here I Stand, a deliberate attempt on their part to link me with Martin Luther and Reformation.

   My qualifications for writing this story lay in the fact that as a child raised in an evangelical church in the Bible Belt of the South, I had grown up being taught that segregation, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia were not only the will of God, but were supported by appeals to the sacred Scriptures. Yet in the course of my life I had become one who was once named "Public Enemy #1 of the Ku Klux Klan in Edgecombe County, N.C.;" a radical champion of equality for women in both church and society; a partner with a rabbi in a dialogue that deeply challenged the anti-Semitism of the city of Richmond; and the bishop who ordained the first open, honest and publicly partnered gay man to the priesthood of my church, provoking a debate that was destined to break the back of my church's homophobia. My journey just might be a way for other people's journeys to be understood, was my publisher's thinking.