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Rodney F. Rafetto did not grow up planning to write about the apostle Paul. He was a dental technician, an Air Force veteran, and the owner of a busy dental laboratory when, at thirty-six, he wandered into a Sunday morning service and heard the gospel for the first time. The next day he bought a Bible. He has been reading it ever since.
A pastor named Jim DeGraw taught him how to study it. That friendship set the course of Rod’s life. He went on to earn a seminary degree in church planting and leadership development. For some forty years he has served in the local church, including twenty-two years as a ruling elder in a PCA church in the Philadelphia suburbs. He has taught adult Sunday school, led Bible studies, filled the pulpit, sat at hospital bedsides, and had God only knows how many parking-lot conversations.
The wood and the Word
The wood and the Word
“I spent the better part of two years building rocking chairs with Paul’s letters playing in my headphones… Good woodworking is not forcing your vision onto the material. It is listening to the material until its own best shape reveals itself. Paul’s letters are the same.”
Somewhere in those hours in the shop, a question Rod had carried through decades of ministry finally opened: how the God of Romans 8 and the God of John 3:16 could be the same God. The answer was in two words Paul used again and again: in Him.
Why he writes
Why he writes
To shift the church’s conversation away from the positions that divide it, and toward the Paul who unites it, in Him.
Rod and his wife, Anita, live in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, where they enjoy their two children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Retirement hasn’t slowed the work much. Rod is still serving and still in ministry, just less officially. About the only things that have changed are that he doesn’t make teeth anymore, and he makes a lot more sawdust.
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