Acknowledgments
Most journalists are clippers and savers. I confess I'm no exception, especially when I'm hot on the trail of good material for a series of articles or a book.
So I had a little help — a lot, actually — from my "friends." In writing Racing Toward 2001 I've quoted liberally from books, magazines, newspapers, tapes, news services, and assorted reports. These sources are acknowledged in the endnotes and often in the text itself. My thanks to all whose shoulders I'm standing upon, even though many of you have no idea you're "contributing" writers and editors.
I also want to thank the seventy-five plus individuals who graciously gave me personal and telephone interviews. About forty of you were contacted in 1989 when I prepared a series for The Los Angeles Times on "Churches and the '90s." This book is an outgrowth of those articles.
The next step was when David Lambert, a Zondervan editor, heard my keynote speech on "The Churches and the '90s" at the Mount Hermon Christian Writers' Conference in April 1990. Thanks, Dave, for seeing the possibilities. Luckily, your colleagues John Sloan and Scott Bolinder at Zondervan agreed that the talk could become a book.
Without you and your constant encouragement, help, and a little prodding, John and Scott, Racing Toward 2001 wouldn't be up and running. Thanks, guys! And my appreciation also extends to the many other fine Zondervan people who assisted in the project.
When I learned that Judith Markham and Blue Water Ink in Grand Rapids
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would do the editing. I knew it would be clear sailing. You did such a good job on our maiden voyage, editing my book Understanding the New Age. Thanks for smoothing out the choppy sentences and troubled transitions this time, too. You kept the wind in my sails without letting me become too long-winded.
Along the course I've made some new friends: George Barna, whose work in church consulting and trend forecasting has blazed a trail to the edge of the next millennium that many of us are following: Tom Sine, author and futurist, who generously let me read and quote from an early draft of his visionary Wild Hope; Steve Lavaggi, the Christian artist whose fresh creativity is perceived as he imagines and images what other eyes now see; and Robert Ellwood, religion professor at the University of Southern California, a brilliant sensor of the religious future. Thank you for granting permission to use the title of your book, Alternative Altars, as one of my own chapter titles.
Then I'm grateful to The Times and Metropolitan Editor Craig Turner for allowing me another leave of absence — where did those six months go so fast, Craig? To my immediate boss, Don Hunt, a big thank-you for finding different keystrokes and other folks to do my work while I was gone. I also thank Times editorial library researcher Janet Lundblad. You cheerfully dug out needed materials and located the obscure, often on short notice. And I thankfully acknowledge being able to quote from my articles previously published in The Times.
Whenever I got writer's block, I turned to my partner, wife, and writing companion, Marjorie Lee Chandler. Thank you, my dear, for your unwavering confidence, always sound advice, and sharp editing skills. You'll find some of your own words, even whole sentences, in this book. (But I'm not letting you read this page until now.) And thank you for all the great meals that stoked the inner journalist between long sessions at the computer keyboard.
Oh, yes: Mom, I love you! I could never start — much less finish — the race toward 2001 without you. Once again, my deepest affection and gratitude.
