The rapture is coming, but only to Kansas

I don't know what possessed me, but a few years ago I interned in the creative department at New Life Church—the über-evangelical congregation made renowned by Ted Haggard.

While there, I learned a lot of bad things about church, but I also learned a lot of good things about writing. At the time, internship director and my fiction-writing mentor, Rob Stennett, was working on a novel called The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher.

This story about a salesman–who wanted more money, so he set out to become pastor of a mega-church–was my first introduction to satire. With it, Stennett taught me about being a fearless, comedic writer.

So I was interested to read Stennett's new novel, The End is Now. It follows an average family living in Goodland, Kansas, who is facing the rapture—the event, some Christians believe, in which they will be taken into heaven before Armageddon begins.

This topic is serious to some Christians, and most know how scary a serious Christian can get. Still, Stennett stayed true to his humorous edge regarding faith and wrote a witty story out of something typically dramatic.

I caught up with Stennett so we could talk rapture.

The Hendersons are a really typical family. What do you think sets them apart from being just a normal, boring family?

They are a very typical family, but they're set around a situation: a typical family in a small town that thinks the end of the world is only coming to their small town.

I wanted the family to almost be archetypes: the father's a salesman, the mother's a housewife, the little boy reads comic books, the teenage daughter's fascinated with homecoming. But because they're having to deal with the apocalypse, that's not very typical.

It's not who they are, it's what they have to deal with that's extraordinary. Because of these circumstances they have to face, they're tested, and we learn a lot about them.

Any misconceptions about your book that you want to set straight?

I think that these books aren't just for Christians. If I saw someone from other religions writing satire [on their religion], I'd want to read that.

Satire makes a writer available to everyone. There are a lot of non-Christians who have responded to my book better than Christians. Any more than Grey's Anatomy is just a show for doctors, or Law and Order is just for lawyers, just because [my book] has Christians in it doesn't mean it's just for Christians.

Did you get any bad vibes from other Christians for writing a satire on the rapture?

A lot of people who just look at the back cover of the book are a little upset about the fact that I would satirize something like the end of the world, the rapture specifically. But once people have read the book, they're surprised by the reverence and respect that I give to both sides of the issue.

This is an issue that's debated among Christians and people all over the world. So I tried to give both sides equal opportunity and equal time to say the rapture really is coming or the rapture really isn't coming.

I was writing a book amongst so many books like Left Behind that were huge, and people just got turned off by them. So I aimed to write a type of story that brought the rapture to a different set of readers.

I think you did do a good job of representing both sides and not really pushing an agenda. To me, you made people aware that people think about the rapture and think it's real.

That's what I wanted to do, take the topic and explore it. I talked to a lot of different experts on eschatology who were very pro "this is how the world's going to end" and others who were "this is all a crock. This is a lie," so I'd have a well-rounded view point, so readers could make a lot of their own conclusions.

What are your inspirations for writing? How do you get story ideas?

For my story ideas I kind of just think about a topic that fascinates me. For my first one, I was kind of looking around at churches and thinking what would happen if someone ran a church who had no idea what they were doing?

For this one I was thinking that every single summer we have movies like District 9 and Transformers, all of these apocalyptic movies. Society is just fascinated with the end of the world.

Even if you've never stepped foot in a church, you're being inundated with stories about the end of the world. But why is that? Why is it that every movie we make has buildings falling, robots attacking, something destroyed? What does that say about ourselves? Since we are so fascinated with that, I wanted to write a novel about it.

Why would a disgruntled, disillusioned college student want to read your book?

I think disgruntled, disillusioned college students love satire. Like me, I love Family Guy. I love The Simpsons. In college, you don't want someone to tell you, "Hey, think about this like this." You want to make your own conclusions.

I think that's what this book does. It pokes fun at the rapture. It's funny. But also it's thought-provoking. I think those are the types of books that college students or people in a place of learning like.

Any advice for students who want to be writers?