The Day He Did Not Leave
What if the day Jesus left was actually the day He didn't leave at all?
There's a strange gap in how most of us think about Jesus. We talk about His birth, His death, His resurrection — and then, somewhere around the Ascension, the story seems to trail off, as if Jesus simply went away and we've been waiting for Him to come back ever since. The Day He Did Not Leave argues that this is exactly backwards, and that getting it backwards has quietly distorted the way many Christians live out their faith.
The book's central claim is straightforward but, once you sit with it, genuinely reorienting: the Ascension is not the story of Christ's departure. It is the story of His enthronement. When Jesus ascended, He didn't retreat from the world — He was raised to the place of all authority, seated at the right hand of the Father, reigning now, present to His people by the Spirit. The day He ascended is, paradoxically, the day He did not leave.
Working through this, the book identifies three quiet distortions that follow from misunderstanding the Ascension as absence. The first is grief — treating Jesus as someone who is simply gone, which leaves faith feeling like a relationship with someone perpetually unavailable. The second is passivity — waiting around for a King who is supposedly somewhere else, instead of recognizing His present, active reign. The third is escapism — longing to leave a world that, in fact, the King has already claimed as His own, rather than living as someone sent into it. Each of these distortions, the book argues, has shaped real patterns of Christian life, and each one dissolves once the Ascension is understood rightly.
In place of these distortions, the book offers the New Testament's actual picture: Christ enthroned, reigning now, present to His people through the Spirit, and summoning His church to active participation in a Kingdom that has already begun rather than one we're still waiting for. Drawing on the inaugurated eschatology associated with N.T. Wright — the conviction that God's future has already broken into the present, even while it isn't yet fully realized — the book traces the doctrine of the Ascension through Scripture, the historic creeds, and the lived experience of ordinary faith.
This is a short, focused book, written for readers who want serious theology without academic density. It draws on classic Christian conviction — the Apostles' Creed line about Christ seated at the right hand of the Father is a recurring touchpoint — while staying squarely focused on what difference all of this makes for someone trying to live faithfully today. If you've ever felt like your faith was waiting on a King who's somewhere else, this book is an invitation to discover that He's actually here, reigning now, and that changes everything about how you live between now and the day He returns visibly to finish what He's already begun.
The Good Story of All of Us
The Bible was never meant to be read as a pile of disconnected lessons. It's one story — and you're already in it.
Most of us were handed the Bible in pieces. A verse for comfort here, a moral lesson there, a famous story pulled out of its context and turned into a tidy life principle. It's understandable — the Bible is long, and strange, and full of names and places that don't mean much on their own. But The Good Story of All of Us makes the case that reading Scripture this way, piece by piece, misses something essential: underneath all those individual stories is one continuous story, and it's the story we're all already living inside of, whether we realize it or not.
The book walks through that single, sweeping narrative — creation, covenant, the long story of Israel, the arrival of Jesus, the formation of the church, and the promise of a renewed creation still to come — not as a theology textbook, but as an invitation. The argument isn't simply that the Bible has a plot. It's that human beings find their bearings, their sense of who they are and why they matter, not by collecting isolated truths but by locating themselves inside a larger story that actually makes sense of their lives.
This approach draws on what's sometimes called a "whole-Bible-as-story" reading, associated with scholars like N.T. Wright, and it shapes the book's tone throughout: warm, accessible, and aimed at general readers rather than academics. There's no requirement that you already know your way around Scripture. The book assumes you might be encountering some of this for the first time, or returning to it after years away, or simply tired of faith that feels like a collection of rules rather than a story you actually want to be part of.
What makes the book distinctive is its insistence that this isn't just an interesting way to read an old book — it's an invitation into a story still being written. The "good story of all of us" isn't a metaphor. It's the claim that creation, covenant, Christ, church, and new creation aren't background information about God's past activity; they're the architecture of a story you are personally inside of right now, with your own chapter still unfolding. For many readers, that reframing — from "a book of lessons" to "a story I'm part of" — has been the thing that finally made the Bible feel like it was actually about them.
This was Leuschner's first book, written in both English and Afrikaans, and it set the pattern for everything he's written since: theology that doesn't flatten into either academic jargon or shallow inspiration, written for people who want to take their faith seriously without needing a seminary degree to follow along.
Why Christian‽
What if the most honest conversation about faith isn't an argument to win, but a question worth sitting with?
Why Christian‽ isn't an academic argument. It's a conversation — the kind you'd have with an old friend over coffee, or at a braai, about the questions that actually keep you up at night.
Wilhelm Leuschner is an actuary turned pastor. He thinks in patterns, probabilities, and evidence — and for years that mindset sat uneasily next to a faith he'd inherited more than chosen. This book is the record of what happened when he stopped separating the two.
Across fifteen chapters, the book walks through the questions every honest believer and honest skeptic eventually asks: Can a thinking person reasonably believe the universe had a Creator? What does the evidence for Jesus's life, death, and resurrection actually look like? Why does grace change people who couldn't change themselves? And how do you talk about faith with people who don't share it — without preaching, without flinching, and without losing the relationship?
The book moves in five parts — Why God? / Why Christian? / Why Christian! / The Art of Conversations / What Now‽ — from the case for God's existence, through the historical case for Jesus, into the personal and communal experience of grace, and finally into the practical art of conversation itself. Every chapter ends with a "braai" scene: a realistic, sometimes uncomfortable conversation that shows what these ideas sound like outside a classroom.
Leuschner writes as himself throughout — including his own experience on the autism spectrum, which shaped how he processes faith, evidence, and uncertainty. The result is a book that respects the reader's intelligence without ever losing its warmth.
Includes a glossary, a reading list for further study, and a discussion guide for small groups.
Why Christian‽ is for the person who still believes — and wants to know why. For the person who's stopped believing — and isn't sure that's the end of the story. And for anyone who's ever sat at a table, mid-conversation, wishing they knew how to say what they actually think.
Coming soon
The Table
What if church was never meant to happen at a meal, but as one?
Most churches treat the Lord's Supper as an element inside a service — a brief, solemn interlude between the sermon and the closing song. Table Theology makes the opposite case: the meal is not a moment within church. The meal is the container everything else happens inside.
Drawing on nearly two decades of pastoral ministry — including years within the Dutch Reformed Church before founding the table-centered Interrobang.Church in 2018 — Leuschner traces one continuous architecture running from Eden to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Genesis opens with God spreading a table before there is law, temple, or priesthood. Covenants are sealed at tables, not with signatures. The earliest church gathered, by its own account, to break bread — not to attend a service built around one. The table, the book argues, has always been closer to the center of what God's people do together than the stage has ever managed to be.
The book unfolds in three parts. Part One traces the table through Scripture, from the garden to the upper room to the early church. Part Two builds the theological case — eschatological, Trinitarian, and liturgical — for why the table belongs at the center rather than the edge. Part Three is the most exposed section: an honest account of what happened when a small congregation in Pretoria actually tried to build a church this way, including the mistakes and the things that, years later, remain unresolved.
This is at once a biblical theology, an argument in ecclesiology, a missional model grounded in a specific practice rather than a slogan, and — in places — a confession. Written for pastors, church planters, seminary-trained readers, and skeptics alike, it includes a closing sermon series and group study guide for communities who want to work through the same questions together.
The Table is close to publication, expected July 2027.