I am the Rev. Dr. Carl R. Gillett. I was ordained as pastor and teacher in the United Church of Christ (UCC) in 1962. I hold these degrees: M. Div. from Chicago Theological Seminary, M.A. in counseling from Central Michigan University and D. Min. from Western Theological Seminary. I have had a long-standing interest in the study and practice of hypnosis. My doctoral dissertation focused on the relationship between hypnotic practices and spiritual direction. I have provided my professional services in a variety of contexts over the years. I have accumulated 22 years’ experience as a church pastor, 25 years’ experience as a counselor and psychotherapist.

The sermons in this collection represent about 60 years of creating sermons. I have learned a lot in the process of creating these and that has contributed to the evolution of my own thinking. Readers will find an abundance of masculine pronouns and references in the first portion of the sermons and eventually those got replaced with more general and/or less particular gender focus. Early on in my professional life I set myself the responsibility for weekly church services: I wanted each service to offer the experience that I was intent on afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. I have always believed that people who intend to keep their faith and/or develop their faith need to think a lot about spiritual matters and I have worked to stimulate people’s thinking. Paul Tillich helped us to understand that God is the ground of all being and I find that that insight, whether spoken or unspoken, has been part of the foundation on which my own thinking has been built.

When I was in seminary, one of my mentors said he had been advised to write out his sermons and after he did a few that way, he decided he should continue and he was still doing them 40 years later. This collection of sermons exists because I decided to follow his example. Many of the sermons within the archive were written on a manual typewriter because computers were not yet available. Readers will discover handwritten corrections and other abundance of strikeouts. More recently computer technology has made it much easier to edit and correct sermons, which means the reader will find fewer corrections in the text. However, that does not mean there were not many corrections made between my original thinking and final written sermon. One day a week throughout my ministry was sermon day and nothing else was on the calendar that day. If an emergency interfered with the day, I ended up working later than usual.

Many factors have influenced my thinking: I was a philosophy major in college, a biblical major in seminary, got a master’s degree in counseling, and concentrated on Ericksonian hypnotherapy for my doctoral degree. Moreover, for 15 of those 60 years I was a volunteer firefighter and encountered more death and destruction than I had ever expected to experience.

Some of the sermons, more than others, reflect social and cultural events of the time. For example, in the archive is a sermon called “Witnessing in the Rain.” I preached that sermon on September 16, 2001, less than a week after the devastation of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. I think that if I had been preaching at the outbreak of the 2026 war with Iran, I would have reflected a view like that which I had about 25 years ago.

Attempting to offer a contemporary message to help stimulate people’s thinking over those 60 years certainly has nurtured my own theological growth. Currently I am finding a lot of correspondence between my own theological thinking and quantum physics. A few years back, a scientist involved in NASA’s work suggested that eventually there would be a convergence of scientific endeavor with theological acumen. I don’t recall who made that observation, but it made a lot of sense to me. I hope that my work has contributed to that convergence.