Last Call
From Serving Drinks to Serving Jesus
Herships shows a positive, innovative, and just a little bit rebellious path back to faith and community for those who have been disillusioned.
Last Call: From Serving Drinks to Serving Jesus, by Jerry Herships, is a memoir of faith and how broken dreams become new callings.
Herships grew up Catholic. As a child, he wanted to grow up to be a priest, and he even tried to start a Priest Club in third grade. But life intervened, and he became a comedian and bartender, hoping to make it big in Hollywood. It just didn’t work out—that’s a familiar story. But what’s much less expected is the turn Hership’s life took after that supposed failure. He never expected, decades after the Priest Club, to be entering the ministry, and he certainly never expected his ministry to look like it does: AfterHours, a faith community that meets in bars and helps care for people who are homeless.
What’s most inspiring for people of faith is that God didn’t just throw out Herships’s non-churchy life experience—God used it in reviving a dream and a vision for Herships’s life. Hership learned to bring joy as a comedian and to listen deeply as a bartender. Both have become marks of the AfterHours community.
AfterHours is an open, honest, outward-looking community of faith in a growing, vibrant landscape of real, refreshing faith communities. As a result, Herships’s voice is welcome and needed. He boldly echoes God’s call to help the poor and challenges complacency in the church and in the lives of people who say they follow Jesus.
Herships’s commitment to God is unwavering, and his comments are unvarnished. The writing is clear and fast paced, direct but not confrontational. His voice will appeal to believers who are wearied by failed dreams and fed up with show-up-on-Sunday Christianity.
Last Call will challenge anyone who agrees with his statement “I don’t understand church people who only hang around other church people,” along with those who’ve been disillusioned by life and faith, to fling the doors open on their lives and their churches.
Reviewed by
Melissa Wuske
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
