After school I did my homework at the Dunn Brothers down the road, and every single time I ordered a hot chocolate.

I had no interest in coffee.

Then AP Physics started handing me the worst grades of my life and I needed a real kick in the rear. So I asked Dorris, one of the owners, whether she had anything that might help. Dorris ran that shop the way a grandmother runs a kitchen and she already knew what I drank without asking. She could have poured me a black drip and let me learn the hard way. Instead she made me a mocha and slid it across the counter.

I was hooked, though it would be years before I could honestly say I liked coffee. Fifteen years later that drink is still the reason I do this for a living.

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Palates get built in order

I train hundreds of people a year on growing regions, processing, extraction, and home brewing, and I have never met one person whose first cup was a light roast Kenyan on a pourover.

Everybody came in through something sweet.

Second wave coffee gets treated like the villain in specialty circles, and it should not be. Starbucks and the thousands of shops that followed its lead taught an entire country that coffee didn’t have to suck and it didn’t have to take forever. Without that there is no third wave, because nobody walks through the door to have their palate trained.

What I have done for fifteen years is unlearn and relearn, then unlearn again, and every stage required the one before it.

Taste is built in order.

You cannot lecture a person into a palate they have not developed, and shame works even worse. The people who make specialty coffee insufferable are usually the ones who arrived three months ago and are already embarrassed about where they started.

Where I stop defending them

That appreciation has limits, and I want to be honest about mine before I make the case.

I have real problems with how Starbucks operates. Their scale puts pricing pressure on producers with almost no leverage, their labor practices are not something I would run my own bar by, and their cafes are built for throughput, so the sitting and staying that made the second wave relevant has been designed back out.

My list for megachurches looks about the same. Accountability structures that cannot say no to the one person they exist to hold accountable. Teaching sized for volume instead of depth. Leaders with so much gravity that nobody nearby can be honest with them. Eugene Peterson saw it coming in 1987 when he wrote that American pastors had become “a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches.”

APEST helps me hold both halves at once. Most celebrity preachers are functioning as evangelists and most are good at it. Then we hand that voice the full pastoral and teaching load and act surprised when the seams split.

An on-ramp was never meant to be a discipleship system.

We keep asking one gift to do the work of five and then blaming the person.

God has never been shy about a crowd

And still I keep landing in the same place. Most of the criticism assumes platform ministry is modern, a byproduct of microphones and streaming budgets. Then you open the Bible and find crowds on nearly every page.

Elijah did not take on the prophets of Baal in a small group. He staged it on a mountain in front of a nation. John the Baptist pulled the Judean countryside into the desert to hear a man in camel hair. Peter preached once at Pentecost and three thousand were added in a day. Paul got famous enough that the Corinthians formed factions over which preacher they liked best, and his answer was to move the credit rather than shut Apollos down.

One planted, another watered, God gave the growth.

Church history keeps it going, from Chrysostom to Spurgeon to Billy Graham. George Whitefield, who the historian Harry Stout calls “Anglo-America’s first modern celebrity,” preached to tens of thousands without amplification. Benjamin Franklin came to one of those sermons in 1739 having already decided to give nothing to the Georgia orphanage Whitefield was raising money for, then walked out having “emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.” He never actually converted and he wrote it down anyway.

God keeps raising up voices that say the thing the rest of us have been circling for years without landing on it. Much of our objection to them is really about taste, and taste has a way of dressing itself up as conviction.

The direction of the arrow

John the Baptist told people plainly that he was not the light. He was there to point at it, and he said he had to decrease so somebody else could increase. That is the whole job description, and crowd size has nothing to do with it. The question is which direction the arrow points: does the platform aim past itself, or does everything terminate in the person holding it?

That question does not stop with them. There is a kind of criticism that carries the same disease it diagnoses, where the critic ends up at the center of the story just as surely as the celebrity does. One gathers the crowd. The other stands outside it with folded arms.

The question is about the orientation of the heart and the direction of the arrow being pointed.

What I would do with this

Name your Dorris. Somebody handed you a drink you would never order today and you are still here because of it. Say their name out loud this week and let them know about it.

Ask about the arrow before you criticize the size. Of them, and of yourself.

Take your criticism into a room where it could do some good. A concern that only ever gets aired in a group text, gossip circle, or a Substack post will more than likely harm more than help.

Build the next on-ramp instead of guarding the gate. If megachurch discipleship strikes you as thin, six people around your table on a Tuesday will do more about it than another well-argued thread.

Dorris never discipled me into specialty coffee. She handed a tired seventeen-year-old a drink he could actually swallow and was kind to him while he drank it. That was enough to start something that has taken fifteen years and is not finished. I would rather be that for somebody than be right about Starbucks.

Yours truly,

Someone who trains coffee-snobs for a living.

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Ask a thoughtful Baptist friend where women may serve in the church today and you will likely hear a generous answer: nearly everywhere. Women may teach children and other women, lead worship, direct ministries, serve as deacons in many congregations, write curriculum, and even, in some circles, preach on a Sunday morning under the “authority” of male elders. The single door that remains closed is the office itself: elder, pastor, the seat of teaching authority over men. This position, usually called soft complementarianism, is not a caricature; it is the stated conviction of the Southern Baptist Convention and of much of the non-denominational evangelical world, and it rests on a serious reading of a serious text, 1 Timothy 2:12, understood as a creation ordinance rather than a cultural instruction.

The Wesleyan-holiness tradition (The Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodists, the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army, and their cousins) walked through that final door more than a century before mainline Protestantism did, and did so not as a concession to modern culture but as a conclusion drawn from Scripture, from the recovered witness of the earliest church, from a Spirit-theology of gifting, and from the observable fruit of women’s ministry. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection ordained Antoinette Brown in 1853. The Salvation Army commissioned women officers from 1870. The Church of the Nazarene ordained women from its founding in 1908, half a century before the Methodist Church (USA) granted women full clergy rights in 1956 and more than a century before the question became a culture-war flashpoint.

This essay attempts three things. First, it traces the historical genealogy of the conviction, from John Wesley’s Epworth childhood through the abolitionist-holiness ferment of the nineteenth century, because the reasons our forebears gave still constitute the strongest form of the argument. Second, it examines two frequently made empirical claims (that the earliest Christians ordained women, and that the persecuted church today is substantially led by women) and sorts what the evidence actually supports from what it does not. Third, it takes up the exegetical crux honestly “How does one reconcile the Paul of Galatians 3:28 with the Paul of 1 Timothy 2:12 without doing violence to either text?” Throughout, the strongest complementarian counterarguments are stated in their strongest form, because a defense that cannot survive its best objection is not a defense.

The method of this essay is itself Wesleyan. Scripture is primary, but it is rightly read alongside tradition, reason, and experience, the so-called quadrilateral. All four strands carry weight in what follows, because all four carried weight for the men and women who first made these arguments.

A word to readers who stand outside the Wesleyan and holiness orbit, which is most of the church: this essay tells the story through one tradition because it arrived first, left the fullest paper trail, and it is my personal tradition. But the arguments themselves belong to no denomination. The early church evidence in Part III, the witness of the persecuted church in Part IV, and the exegesis in Part V stand or fall on their own merits, and a Baptist, Presbyterian, or non-denominational reader who wants only the case may begin at Part III without loss. The history in Parts I and II is offered not as an in-house genealogy but as proof of a claim the contemporary debate badly needs: that the biblical case for women in leadership predates modern feminism by more than a century, and was made first by people whose credentials on biblical authority no one questions.

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Part I: The Kitchen and the Letter That Sparked Wesley

Correcting the premise

It is commonly said that John Wesley “ordained women.” He did not and that is worth noting. Wesley authorized, endorsed, and defended women as preachers, a scandalous position in eighteenth-century England, but he stopped short of ordination and remained careful about the distinction his whole life, drawing a fine line between “testifying” and formal preaching. The ordination of women came from his spiritual descendants in the nineteenth-century holiness movement. The accurate statement is that Wesley planted a seed he never fully harvested, and that the holiness churches, the tradition that ordains women as elders today, are the harvest. Understanding both the planting and the harvesting is essential, because the two involve different arguments.

The deep root: Susanna at Epworth

The biographical root of Wesley’s openness is not in dispute among his historians. In the winter of 1711–12, while the Rev. Samuel Wesley was away in London at Convocation, his wife Susanna judged the substitute curate’s sermons inadequate and began holding Sunday evening services in the Epworth rectory kitchen for her children and servants. Word spread. Attendance grew to roughly two hundred people, larger than the parish’s morning congregations. When the curate complained and Samuel wrote urging her to stop, Susanna refused unless he commanded it, and closed her reply with a sentence that has survived three centuries:

“…send me your positive command, in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment, for neglecting this opportunity of doing good, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Susanna Wesley to Samuel Wesley, 1712

John was eight or nine years old, watching. Decades later he would write that his mother had been, in her measure and degree, “a preacher of righteousness.” Scholars of early Methodism consistently trace to that kitchen a principle from which Wesley seldom wavered: no one, a woman included, ought to be prohibited from doing God’s work in obedience to the inward call of conscience. The structure of the later Methodist movement itself bears Susanna’s fingerprints: lay-led societies, classes, and bands, many of them led by women, patterned on gatherings a woman had led in defiance of clerical complaint.

The spark: Mary Bosanquet’s letter of 1771

The hinge moment came sixty years later. Mary Bosanquet, a wealthy convert who had given up her inheritance to run an orphanage and school, first at Leytonstone and then at Cross Hall in Yorkshire, had been leading meetings and preaching alongside Sarah Crosby to growing crowds and growing criticism. In the summer of 1771 she wrote Wesley a long, closely argued letter that historians regard as the first full defense of women’s preaching in Methodism. Her central move was the doctrine of the extraordinary call:

“I do not believe every woman is called to speak publicly, no more than every man to be a Methodist preacher, yet some have an extraordinary call to it, and woe be to them if they obey it not.”

Mary Bosanquet to John Wesley, June 1771

Bosanquet never once dodged the hard texts. She argued that the Pauline silencing passages were directed at specific disciplinary situations rather than issuing a universal prohibition (noting that Scripture elsewhere assumes women praying and prophesying publicly), and she pressed the logical instability of the “only under a peculiar impulse” concession her critics allowed: if God may call a woman to speak twice in her life, who is to say He may not call her twice in a week?

Wesley’s response was full endorsement. His reply, dated 13 June 1771, conceded the whole argument in three sentences:

“I think the strength of the cause rests there, on your having an extraordinary call. So I am persuaded has every one of our lay preachers; otherwise I could not countenance his preaching at all.”

John Wesley to Mary Bosanquet, 13 June 1771

Note what Wesley did in that reply: he placed the women preachers on the identical footing as his male lay preachers, who were also unordained and also justified by the extraordinary call. That same month he explicitly recognized Sarah Crosby as a lay preacher under that language, and he gave his approval to Bosanquet as well. The Methodist conference thereafter issued letters of endorsement, signed by Wesley, and roughly forty-one women eventually served as lay preachers in his connection.

Bosanquet went on to marry John Fletcher, Wesley’s intended successor, forming Methodism’s first “clergy couple” at Madeley; after his death she led the society and preached, five services a week into her seventies, until her death in 1815.

The theology beneath the endorsement

Three threads made Wesley persuadable.

First, a situational hermeneutic. Bosanquet’s reading of 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 as locally bound instructions, checked against 1 Corinthians 11:5, where Paul regulates rather than forbids women’s public praying and prophesying, became the standard interpretive move of the entire tradition, and it remains the exegetical heart of the question (Part V below).

Second, empirical fruit. Wesley was relentlessly evidence-driven. Conversions were, to him, the Spirit’s signature on a ministry. The crowds and conversions under Bosanquet and Crosby functioned as data. One deflationary reading should be noted: the historian Thomas Morrow has argued that Wesley permitted women’s preaching chiefly because it worked, as expansion strategy rather than principle. The truth is probably both conviction and pragmatism at once; Wesley was capable of holding each without embarrassment. But even the cynical reading concedes the tradition’s most distinctive premise: that observable fruit counts as evidence of divine calling.

Third, a democratizing pneumatology. If the Spirit gifts believers directly and distributes those gifts “to each one individually as he wills” (1 Cor 12:11), then a gender bar on the exercise of manifest gifts sits uneasily with the Spirit’s own behavior. Wesley held this instinct in tension his whole life, cautiously, hedged, never quite reaching ordination, and after his death the 1803 Methodist Conference moved to shut women’s preaching down, resolving that women should address only other women. The seed survived that winter elsewhere.

Part II: The Harvest: Abolition, Holiness, and the Ordination of Women (1843–1908)

The abolitionist hermeneutic: the tradition’s deepest root

The churches that first ordained women were, without exception in the American holiness stream, abolitionist churches. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection was founded in 1843 by Methodists who left the Methodist Episcopal Church over slavery; the Free Methodist Church was founded in 1860 on the twin ideals of abolition and free pews for the poor. Nor is it incidental that the first Women’s Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls in July 1848, met in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. These were the same people.

The connection is hermeneutical and it is the single most important thing to understand about why this tradition ordains women. The abolitionists had fought a Scripture war over slavery, and they had lost the proof-text battle. The pro-slavery side held the surface texts: “slaves, obey your earthly masters” (Eph 6:5), the household codes, Philemon returned to his owner. The abolitionists therefore learned to argue from the trajectory and center of the gospel (the image of God in every person, the one blood of all nations, redemption as the unmaking of worldly hierarchy) and to read the accommodation texts as regulations of a fallen institution rather than endorsements of a created one.

Once that hermeneutic is in hand, its application to women is not a leap. The charter text of abolition and the charter text of women’s ministry are the same sentence:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, KJV)

A church that has already concluded, at the cost of schism, that “neither bond nor free” carries social force (that it is not merely a statement about who may be justified but a statement about what the redeemed community must become) has forfeited the option of reading “neither male nor female” as soteriology only. This is why the holiness bodies experienced the two questions as one question, and why their critics, then and now, have accused them of the same error twice.

1853: Luther Lee and the first ordination

On September 15, 1853, at South Butler, New York, the Congregationalist Antoinette Brown was ordained to pastoral ministry, the first woman ordained by a recognized denomination in the modern era. The preacher invited to deliver the ordination sermon was a Wesleyan Methodist: the abolitionist minister Luther Lee. Lee understood exactly what was happening, and said so from the pulpit:

“The ordination of a female, or the setting apart of a female to the work of the Christian ministry, is, to say the least, a novel transaction, in this land and age. It cannot fail to call forth many remarks, and will, no doubt, provoke many censures.”

Luther Lee, “Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel,” 1853

His text was Galatians 3:28, and his thesis was stated as a bare proposition he then spent the sermon defending: “Females have a God-given right to preach the Gospel.” Two features of the sermon deserve close reading. First, Lee anchored the authority question, and not merely the speech question, in the Old Testament precedents of Deborah, who “judged Israel,” exercising direct governing authority over men (Judges 4:4), and Huldah, to whom King Josiah’s own priests were sent to inquire of the LORD (2 Kings 22). These are women exercising precisely the authoritative, word-bearing office that the complementarian position reserves to male elders. Second, Lee argued that whatever Galatians 3:28 means, its application is specifically Christian (”it is in Christ Jesus” that the distinction falls), which forecloses the reading that the verse describes only a heavenly future rather than the present community of the redeemed.

The Wesleyan Methodist Connection ordained its own first female elder that same year, 1853, and the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Connection dates its practice to the same moment. The tradition’s practice of ordaining women is therefore not a twentieth-century accommodation (it is older than the Southern Baptist Convention’s seminaries).

1859: Phoebe Palmer and the Pentecost argument

If the abolitionist hermeneutic reclassified the hierarchy texts, it was Phoebe Palmer, the Methodist laywoman rightly called the mother of the holiness movement, who supplied the positive engine. Her 421-page Promise of the Father (1859) is the theological powerhouse of the entire tradition, and its argument is built directly on the holiness distinctive itself. Palmer identified entire sanctification with the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and read Pentecost as the church’s constitutional moment. Peter’s Pentecost sermon quotes Joel:

“And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy… And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.” (Acts 2:17–18, quoting Joel 2:28–29)

Palmer’s syllogism was simple and has never been adequately answered on its own terms. The dispensation of the Spirit is the present dispensation; the promise of the Father falls alike on sons and daughters; prophesying, which she established verse by verse as Spirit-empowered proclamation for “edification, exhortation, and comfort” (1 Cor 14:3), is therefore the duty, and not merely the right, of the daughters on whom the Spirit falls. She attributed the church’s long silencing of women to two causes: bad exegesis of two disputed passages, and an un-Christian view of women inherited from the surrounding culture rather than from Christ. Her image for the result has never been improved upon:

“The church in many places is a sort of potter’s field, where the gifts of woman, as so many strangers, are buried.”

Phoebe Palmer, “The Promise of the Father,” 1859

The crucial move in Palmer, the one that dissolves the modern “everything but elder” compromise, is the fusion of gift and office. Soft complementarianism survives by holding the two apart. It can affirm that a woman is manifestly gifted to teach while barring her from the office of teaching authority. Palmer’s pneumatology makes that separation unstable. If the Spirit has gifted, empowered, and evidently blessed a woman’s proclamation, then the Spirit has ordained her; the church’s ordination is merely the community’s recognition of a commission already issued from a higher office. To affirm the gift while refusing the office is, on this account, to refuse the Spirit’s own appointment. The earliest holiness leaders said this explicitly: ordination was understood as the faithful community’s response to God’s own ordination, in which, as the Nazarene historian Paul Bassett puts it, gender was incidental.

Palmer herself, it should be noted, never sought ordination or licensure and did not campaign under the banner of women’s rights; she regarded public testimony as simple obedience. The tradition eventually took her argument further than she took it herself.

Palmer was not writing alone. The same year, Catherine Booth, co-founder of the Salvation Army, published Female Ministry and drew the conclusion without hedging:

“If she have the necessary gifts, and feels herself called by the Spirit to preach, there is not a single word in the whole book of God to restrain her, but many, very many, to urge and encourage her.”

Catherine Booth, “Female Ministry,” 1859

And a generation before either of them, the African Methodist Episcopal preacher Jarena Lee, the first woman authorized to preach by Richard Allen, had already reduced the question to a sentence no one has answered:

“If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one?”

Jarena Lee, “Religious Experience and Journal,” 1836

1891: B. T. Roberts and the explicit analogy

Benjamin Titus Roberts, founder of the Free Methodist Church, made the abolition analogy explicit in his 1891 book Ordaining Women, which remains the tradition’s most complete single statement.

Roberts treated the exclusion of women from ordination as structurally analogous to the church’s former defense of slavery. It is one more of the fallen world’s damaged social arrangements that the gospel unmasks and Christ repairs. He rejected even the softened household hierarchy that earlier advocates like Lee had preserved, arguing that “the greatest domestic happiness always exists where husband and wife live together on terms of equality.” And he pressed a historical observation that anticipates Part III of this essay by more than a century:

“Women, it seems, could be ministers of the church at this early age, while it was poor and persecuted, but afterwards, when it was rich and popular, they were set aside.”

B. T. Roberts, “Ordaining Women,” 1891

The honest complication: reversals, drift, and recovery

The line from 1853 to the present is not straight, and intellectual honesty requires drawing it crooked. Roberts lost his fight: the 1890 Free Methodist General Conference ruled against ordaining women, and his book the following year failed to overturn the ruling. The Free Methodist Church did not extend full elder’s ordination to women until 1974. The broader Methodist Episcopal Church moved backward in the late nineteenth century under the Victorian cult of domesticity: in 1880 its General Conference not only refused Anna Oliver’s ordination but revoked the preaching licenses of the women who held them, and the Methodist Church did not grant women full clergy rights until 1956. In the 1920s and after, the fundamentalist movement, with its rigid hermeneutic and its subordinationist reading of the household texts, washed through the holiness churches and eroded a conviction their founders had considered settled.

The historian Susie Stanley and others have documented the result. Denominations that had ordained women from their inception grew ambiguous about their own history, and the percentage of women pastors in bodies like the Church of the Nazarene declined sharply after 1940.

Two conclusions follow. First, the tradition’s current position is not an unbroken inheritance but the resolution of a century-long internal argument; a particular wing kept winning, in Discipline and Manual revisions, against recurring internal resistance. Second, the direction of causation matters for the contemporary debate: it was not secular feminism that gave the holiness churches women elders (they got there seven decades before second-wave feminism), and it was a specific, datable theological import, fundamentalism carrying dispensationalist freight, that nearly took them away.

The Nazarene witness

The Church of the Nazarene, the largest of the holiness bodies, is institutionally perhaps the most committed of them all. It has ordained women since its organizing General Assembly at Pilot Point, Texas, in 1908, and several of its predecessor bodies ordained women before the merger.

Founding General Superintendent Phineas Bresee was fond of citing Acts 2:17–18 as the standing authority for women’s preaching, and when resistance surfaced in 1930, General Superintendent J. B. Chapman recalled that Bresee’s support at Pilot Point had carried no defensiveness at all; the matter was regarded as settled Wesleyan-holiness practice, won before the denomination was born. The current Nazarene Manual does not merely permit women’s ordination; it affirms the right of women to be elected and appointed to places of leadership including the offices of both elder and deacon, and frames the expectation positively. God calls women, and the church recognizes the call.

In 2017 the denomination elected Carla Sunberg as General Superintendent, its highest office. Nazarene position papers state the hermeneutical principle plainly: the church reads Paul’s restrictions as appropriate responses to the pagan cultural situation of specific first-century communities, not as norms for all times. Nazarene educators such as Ed Robinson have argued pointedly that where hesitance about women pastors persists in the pews, its sources are cultural rather than biblical or theological.

Part III: The Witness of the Early Church

It is frequently claimed that “the first Christians ordained women.” Like most slogans, this one compresses a complicated evidentiary picture into a sentence that is easy to overstate and easier to dismiss. The scholarly baseline for this question is Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek’s Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Johns Hopkins, 2005), which collects, in translation, every known literary, epigraphical, and canonical reference to women in early church office through the sixth century. What that evidence supports is best sorted into three tiers of confidence.

Tier one: women deacons (effectively settled)

Paul commends “Phoebe, our sister, who is a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae” (Rom 16:1), using the same noun he applies to himself, to Apollos, and to Timothy, and adds that she has been a prostatis (”patron,” “protector,” in later usage “overseer” or “presider”) of many, including Paul himself. Patristic commentators took the office seriously. Origen wrote that the text teaches, with apostolic authority, that women were appointed to the church’s ministry, and Clement of Alexandria read 1 Timothy 3:11 as referring to women deacons. Beyond the texts, the material record is abundant: papyri, inscriptions, tomb monuments, and, decisively, surviving ordination rites. Women deacons in the East were ordained by the laying on of hands, by the bishop, at the altar; the Byzantine rite for a woman deacon is structurally parallel to the rite for a man. Church canons regulated the office (setting minimum ages of sixty, later forty, per 1 Timothy 5:9), which is itself evidence of an established, institutional reality. On deacons, the claim “the early church ordained women” is simply true.

Tier two: a woman among the apostles (probable, and the later erasure is itself evidence)

In Romans 16:7 Paul greets Andronicus and Junia, “my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.” Junia is a common Roman woman’s name. For the first millennium her identity as a woman was essentially unquestioned. John Chrysostom, the fourth century’s greatest preacher and no one’s idea of a feminist, paused over the verse in open admiration:

“Oh! how great is the devotion of this woman, that she should be even counted worthy of the appellation of apostle!”

John Chrysostom, Homily 31 on Romans, late fourth century

Beginning in the medieval period and accelerating in modern translations, her name was silently masculinized to “Junias,” a male name for which there is no attestation anywhere in antiquity. The male “Junias” is, on the evidence, a fabrication generated by the assumption that an apostle could not be a woman. One may debate what “apostle” denotes in Romans 16, since the term ranges from the Twelve to commissioned missionaries, but the philological verdict on the name itself is no longer seriously contested. It is a documented case of the tradition editing its memory to match a later conviction about women.

Tier three: women presbyters (contested, minority, but real)

This is the tier that bears on the eldership question.

The evidence: inscriptions in both East and West naming women with the title presbytera or its cognates (the Cretan inscription for Sophia of Gortyn styles her elder and ruler of her community); literary references to “presbyteresses” seated with honor in the assembly; a papal letter of Gelasius I (494) complaining that women were being encouraged to serve at the altar in southern Italy, which Madigan and Osiek judge to be strong evidence that some women in dioceses in communion with Rome were functioning as fully fledged presbyters with their bishops’ knowledge; and, most tellingly, conciliar prohibition. Canon 11 of the Council of Laodicea (c. 360) forbade the appointment of the female elders known as presbytides. Prohibition is itself a form of documentation. Councils do not legislate against practices that are not occurring. A tenth-century bishop, Atto of Vercelli, looking back, stated matter-of-factly that the early church had employed women priests and deacons “because of their great usefulness” in the era of conversion, when laborers were scarce.

Several caveats are necessary here, and the popular version of the claim tends to omit them. No church Father unambiguously endorses women presbyters; the surviving patristic voices on the question are mostly hostile. The titles presbytera and episcopa were also used, in some times and places, for the wives of presbyters and bishops, so each inscription must be weighed individually, which is precisely what Madigan and Osiek do, concluding that at least some refer to women exercising the office. And the Council of Nicaea (325) declined to count deaconesses among the ordained. The defensible summary is therefore not “women elders were normal” but something more precise and, for the present debate, arguably more damning: women were demonstrably ordained as deacons; a woman was almost certainly numbered among the apostles and was later edited into a man; and women presbyters existed in enough places, for long enough, that councils and popes repeatedly legislated against them. After that, the offices were closed and the memory obscured.

One further observation from the patristic record deserves to be stated. The Fathers who opposed women’s ordination did not argue the modern complementarian position of “equal in essence, different in function.” They argued from women’s asserted inferiority, guilt, and impurity. The contemporary complementarian must therefore hold a position for which his strongest historical allies gave reasons he himself repudiates - a tradition of conclusion without a tradition of rationale. B. T. Roberts’s 1891 epigram (ministers while the church was poor and persecuted, set aside when it became rich and popular) turns out to be a fair one-sentence compression of the documentary record.

Part IV: The Witness of the Persecuted Church

The second empirical claim, that the underground church in China and elsewhere is substantially led by women, is substantially true, with one qualification at the top makes it theologically interesting.

First, the historical layer. Protestant Christianity in China was built to a remarkable degree by the so-called Bible women: thousands of Chinese women evangelists, teachers, and church planters from the 1860s through 1949, self-propagating and often self-supporting, who founded prayer meetings, Bible classes, missions, and congregations. Five Chinese women were ordained as local preachers in the Methodist conferences of Fuzhou and Jiangxi as early as 1924. The mid-century interruption is precisely documented and directly relevant to this essay’s genealogy. The male revivalist generation of the 1930s was shaped by Western fundamentalism (Watchman Nee in particular by the writings of John Nelson Darby, the father of dispensationalism), and Nee persuaded his female co-workers to curtail their public ministry. After 1930, most prominent Chinese church leaders were men. Darby’s name matters in this instance. Dispensationalism is the same nineteenth-century system that underlies the doctrinal statements of much of the American Bible-church world today. The theology that restricted Chinese women in 1930 and the theology that restricts American women in 2026 is, in significant part, the same imported system, traceable to the same man.

Then came persecution, and the pattern of the first century reasserted itself. Under the pressures of the Cultural Revolution and after, male leadership was disproportionately imprisoned, tortured, and killed, and women planned, organized, and led the home fellowships.

From the explosive house-church growth of the 1980s onward, the majority of the Protestant church in China has been women, and, in the words of Christianity Today’s historical survey, the proliferation of female pastors and evangelists became the norm, largely without debate. Firsthand accounts describe provinces where the largest house-church networks were built by women in their teens and twenties; registered urban churches where women serve as senior pastors of congregations numbering thousands; one woman overseeing more than ten churches and some twenty thousand believers.

A Western mission leader who asked a Chinese network leader how the house churches handle the “women in leadership” question reported the answer that in the overwhelming majority of house churches women function in the same roles as men, that most house churches are planted and led by women, and that the question itself struck the Chinese leader as strange. The same pattern is reported from Iran, where a large share of the underground church’s leaders are women.

The qualification concerns the very apex. Among the largest named networks, the great Henan federations and their peers, the founders and topmost leaders have been men, with women such as Sister Ding Hei of the Fangcheng network serving as prominent preachers, teachers, and builders just beneath that level. And some observers note a countercurrent. As educated urban men enter the movement, some bring Western complementarian literature with them, and female leadership has declined in some sectors in recent decades. Stated precisely, the claim is this: the church that most resembles the church of Acts (poor, persecuted, illegal, and explosively growing) has been planted, pastored, and led at the congregational level substantially by women. And it did not arrive at that practice by reading Western egalitarian theology. It arrived there by the Spirit’s gifting under fire.

For a tradition that has always treated fruit as evidence (Wesley reading Bosanquet’s conversions, Palmer reading the revivals), this is pure data. If the complementarian reading of 1 Timothy 2:12 is correct as a creation ordinance, then the most vital and fastest-growing church in the modern world has been built, at scale, on continuous disobedience to a creation ordinance, and the Spirit has anointed the disobedience with a century of Pentecost. At minimum, that should send the exegete back to the text asking whether the ordinance reading is actually what the text requires. To which question we now turn.

Part V: Paul Against Paul? Reconciling Galatians 3:28 with 1 Timothy 2:12

Everything above is prologue to the exegetical crux, because for churches that confess Scripture’s final authority, as the Wesleyan tradition does, no amount of history or fruit can override a clear biblical command. The question is whether 1 Timothy 2:12 is one.

The two texts, side by side:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” (1 Timothy 2:11–14)

The apparent contradiction dissolves under one governing insight: it exists only if both texts are read as timeless universal rules. The moment one is allowed to be a gospel principle and the other a situational correction, Paul stops fighting himself. The interpretive question is therefore not “which verse wins?” but “which text is programmatic and which is occasional?” On that question the evidence runs heavily in one direction.

The controlling argument: Paul’s own practice

The strongest argument is a behavioral one. If 1 Timothy 2:12 states a blanket, transcultural prohibition on women teaching or exercising authority over men, then Paul violates it. Repeatedly, in writing, by name.

He commends Phoebe as diakonos and prostatis, entrusting her (on the consensus reading) with carrying, and therefore explaining, the letter to the Romans, the most theologically consequential teaching document in Christian history, to a congregation of men and women. He greets Junia as outstanding among the apostles. He names Priscilla, listed against all convention before her husband in four of six New Testament occurrences, who together with Aquila took Apollos aside and “expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly” (Acts 18:26): a woman doctrinally instructing a man who became one of the early church’s premier teachers. He identifies Euodia and Syntyche as women who “labored with me in the gospel” (Phil 4:3), his standard vocabulary for ministry colleagues. And in 1 Corinthians 11:5 he issues instructions for how women are to pray and prophesy in the assembly (regulating a practice is not how one forbids it), three chapters before the “let the women keep silence” passage in the same letter, which therefore cannot mean absolute silence without making Paul incoherent within a single epistle.

This is the decisive methodological point. The flat, transcultural reading of 1 Timothy 2:12 forces Paul into contradiction with his own conduct and his own prior instructions. The situational reading makes him consistent everywhere. When one interpretation renders an author incoherent and a rival interpretation renders him coherent, sound exegesis chooses coherence. This is the ordinary rule for reading any author.

The text itself: four observations

First, the verb. Paul writes ouk epitrepō, “I am not permitting”: a first-person present indicative, not an imperative, and not his formula for commands of the Lord (contrast 1 Cor 7:10). Many exegetes hear in the present tense a current, situational ruling: I am not, in this situation, permitting. In fairness, complementarian scholars are right that tense alone settles nothing, since Greek present indicatives can state standing policy. The observation is suggestive, not decisive; it belongs in the cumulative case, not at its foundation.

Second, the unusual word. The term rendered “usurp authority” or “exercise authority” is authentein, a word that appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, here. It is not Paul’s normal vocabulary for legitimate authority (exousia, which he uses freely, including of the woman’s own authority in 1 Cor 11:10). Studies of authentein across ancient literature find that it frequently carries a coercive or negative charge: to domineer, to master, to usurp. If Paul had wished to prohibit women from the ordinary exercise of church authority, the ordinary word lay ready to hand; he reached past it for a rare and loaded one. The plausible rendering, “I am not permitting a woman to teach in a way that domineers over a man,” prohibits an abuse, not an office. This reading is contested, and the complementarian counter (that authentein here is neutral, paired with “teach” as two legitimate activities) is scholarly and serious; but the burden sits awkwardly on those who must explain why a universal creation ordinance was issued in a hapax legomenon.

Third, the occasion of the letter. 1 Timothy announces its purpose in its opening sentences: Timothy is stationed in Ephesus to command certain persons “that they teach no other doctrine” (1:3). The letter is a sustained countermeasure against false teaching that had found particular traction among women (5:13–15; cf. 2 Tim 3:6–7), in a city dominated by the Artemis cult, a female-priesthood religion whose mythology inverted the Genesis order, and whose wealthy female converts carried social expectations of religious precedence. In that setting, Paul’s remedy is often overlooked because it was revolutionary: “Let the woman learn” (2:11). It is an imperative, and it is the only actual command in the passage. Women deceived by false teaching are to be taught, not permanently silenced. On this reading, the women of Ephesus are restricted not because they are women but because they are, at that moment, untrained and deceived, which is the same reason Paul silences specific men elsewhere in the same letter (1:20).

Fourth, the creation appeal, which is the strongest counterargument and must be stated at full strength. The complementarian case does not rest on verse 12 but on verses 13–14: Paul grounds the instruction in the created order (”Adam was first formed, then Eve”) and the fall (”the woman being deceived”). Creation, the argument runs, precedes culture. What is rooted in Genesis 2 cannot be dismissed as Ephesian circumstance. This is, in my view, the load-bearing wall of the entire complementarian structure, and it deserves plenty of attention.

There are three responses, and they are cumulative rather than independent.

(1) Paul routinely deploys Genesis analogically, fitting the appeal to the pastoral problem at hand: in 2 Corinthians 11:3 he applies Eve’s deception to the whole Corinthian church, men included, and no one concludes from that text that men are barred from office as the deceivable sex. An appeal to Genesis establishes that Paul is illustrating from Scripture; it does not by itself establish that he is legislating a permanent hierarchy. This fits within Ephesians exactly. As Eve was deceived for lack of the command’s firsthand instruction, so the untaught women of Ephesus were being deceived; therefore, let them learn.

(2) If Eve’s deception grounds a permanent disqualification of women from teaching office, Paul’s own theology of the fall becomes incoherent. In Romans 5:12–19 it is through Adam, named alone, five times, that sin entered the world. Paul assigns the representative guilt of the fall to the man; the complementarian reading of 1 Timothy 2:14 requires the woman’s deception to carry a permanent penalty that the man’s transgression somehow does not.

(3) The “creation order” principle proves too much. If “Adam was first formed” establishes male precedence in church office, then priority of formation is a governing principle; but the animals were formed before Adam. Order of creation, by itself, encodes no hierarchy in Genesis; the text must be read into it. And the parallel complementarian appeal to Jesus’ choice of twelve male apostles proves far too much by the same logic: the Twelve were also all circumcised Jews, and no one argues that eldership is therefore restricted to circumcised Jews. Every tradition already treats some features of the apostolic band as historically particular; the question is only whether maleness is one of them, and that question cannot be settled by pointing at the band.

The category confusion: husbands and wives are not men and women

One more argument deserves a place here, because it exposes a category confusion running beneath the entire complementarian structure. The Pauline texts that establish male headship are marriage texts. Ephesians 5 declares the husband head of the wife, not man the head of woman; Colossians 3 and 1 Peter 3 likewise address husbands and wives within the household. Paul never once grounds the office of elder in the headship of husbands. The complementarian position quietly transfers a marital relationship onto an ecclesial office, so that every man is treated as functionally the head of every woman in the congregation, an arrangement Paul nowhere teaches and which turns each male congregant into a kind of honorary husband to women he has never met.

New Testament Greek has no separate words for “man” and “husband” or for “woman” and “wife”: anēr means both man and husband, gynē both woman and wife, and only context decides. In 1 Timothy 2:11–15 the context leans domestic. The passage moves through adornment, submission, Adam and Eve (Scripture’s archetypal married couple), and childbearing. A substantial line of interpreters has therefore read the instruction as addressing wives and husbands, a reading some translations preserve in their margins. If that is right, even the restrictive reading of the passage restricts a wife with respect to her own husband, which is exactly the shape of the parallel instruction in 1 Corinthians 14:35 (”let them ask their own husbands at home”). It says nothing about a woman exercising the office of elder over a congregation.

And the bridal typology, so often invoked to defend male leadership, actually cuts the other way. If the husband-wife relation is the church’s governing image, then note who plays the bride: the whole church does, men included. Christ is the head; every believer, male and female, stands in the bride’s position before Him. Men occupy a typologically feminine role in the church’s central metaphor without anyone suggesting this disqualifies them from anything. Typological gender simply does not map onto church office, and the complementarian appeal to it proves the opposite of what it intends: if all of us are the bride, then no member of the bride outranks another by sex, and headship over the church belongs to the Bridegroom alone. The elder does not stand in Christ’s place as husband to the congregation; the elder is part of the bride, serving under the only Head the church has.

A final textual detail belongs with this argument. The elder qualification “husband of one wife” (1 Tim 3:2) is sometimes read as encoding maleness into the office. But the phrase is a Greek fidelity idiom, “a one-woman man,” and Paul uses its exact mirror image of women in the same letter: the enrolled widow must be “wife of one husband,” a one-man woman (1 Tim 5:9). Nobody concludes from that verse that widows must be women rather than faithful; the idiom describes marital faithfulness, not sex. Read consistently, both phrases require fidelity of whoever holds the role. Read the complementarian way, the qualification would also bar unmarried men, including Paul himself, and Jesus, from the eldership, a conclusion no complementarian accepts, which tells you the literalist reading is not being applied consistently even by its defenders.

One further note concerns verse 15, “she shall be saved in childbearing,” the line every reader eventually trips over. Whatever this famously difficult verse means (preservation through childbirth, salvation through the Childbearing, i.e., the Messiah, or the refutation of an Ephesian asceticism that forbade marriage, cf. 4:3), its notorious obscurity is itself evidence that the paragraph is engaging local teaching we can only partially reconstruct. Universal ordinances are not usually delivered in sentences no two centuries of interpreters have agreed on.

The hermeneutical principle: let the programmatic govern the occasional

Taken together, these considerations yield not a compromise but a method, and it is the same method every Christian already uses on the slavery texts. Galatians 3:28 is programmatic: a summary declaration of what the new creation is, in a letter whose entire argument is that the categories of the old order do not structure the community of the justified. And Paul demonstrably intends the verse to carry social force, since he spends Galatians 2 publicly rebuking Peter for letting “neither Jew nor Greek” remain a merely spiritual truth while the seating chart said otherwise.

1 Timothy 2:11–15 is occasional: a pastoral directive, in a letter explicitly occasioned by false teaching in one city, using a verb found nowhere else in the New Testament, plausibly addressing wives and husbands rather than women and men, grounded in a Genesis analogy Paul elsewhere applies to men, and capped by a sentence nobody can securely translate. Sound interpretation reads the occasional in light of the programmatic, the disputed by the clear, and not the reverse. The complementarian method inverts this. It enthrones the obscure occasional text as the timeless rule and then shrinks the programmatic text to soteriology alone. The church tried exactly that inversion once before, with “slaves, obey your masters” enthroned over “neither bond nor free.” The Wesleyan tradition’s ancestors bled for the correct ordering, and the whole church now concedes they were right. The tradition declines to make the same methodological error a second time merely because the noun has changed.

Taken as a whole, the case is quadrilateral in structure, which is why it has always felt native to Wesleyans. Scripture: the programmatic charter of Galatians 3:28, Pentecost’s “sons and daughters,” Deborah and Huldah, Phoebe, Junia, Priscilla, and a situationally coherent 1 Timothy 2. Tradition: women deacons ordained at the altar, a woman apostle edited into a man, women presbyters legislated out of existence, and a tradition of exclusion. Reason: the lexical evidence of authentein, the husband-wife category analysis, the incoherence tests, the proves-too-much analyses. Experience: Bosanquet’s crowds, Palmer’s revivals, the Bible women of Fuzhou, the house churches of Henan, and a century and a half of Pentecost falling, observably, on the daughters. The four strands were gathered independently, across three centuries, and they converge on one conclusion.

Conclusion: The Seed and the Harvest

The argument of this essay can be stated in a single paragraph. John Wesley, formed in a kitchen where his mother preached to two hundred and answered her critics with the tribunal of Christ, recognized in 1771 that God issues extraordinary calls without consulting the categories of the age. His abolitionist heirs, having learned at cost that the gospel’s charter outranks the proof-texts of a fallen order, applied the lesson to the other half of Galatians 3:28 and ordained Antoinette Brown in 1853. Phoebe Palmer was the engine (the Spirit of Pentecost, poured on daughters as on sons, whose gifting is the call), and B. T. Roberts named the historical pattern of women ministering while the church was poor and persecuted, and were set aside when it grew rich and popular. The documentary record of the early church vindicates Roberts in uncomfortable detail, and the persecuted church of the present age has re-run the experiment before our eyes and gotten the apostolic result. Against this stands, finally, one paragraph in one epistle, a paragraph whose verb is unique, whose occasion is explicit, whose Genesis appeal Paul elsewhere applies to men, and whose final sentence no one can securely translate, asked to bear the weight of overruling Paul’s own colleagues, Pentecost’s own promise, and the Spirit’s observable practice. It cannot bear that weight. Galatians tells the church what is true in Christ; 1 Timothy tells a young pastor how to handle a crisis in Ephesus; and the God who poured out His Spirit on His sons and His daughters did not revoke the gift two letters later.

A closing word about posture is in order, because the subject is, as noted at the outset, one of the live dividing lines in the church today. The complementarian brothers and sisters who disagree are not misogynists by virtue of the disagreement; most hold their position at real social cost, out of genuine submission to what they believe Scripture requires, and the exegetical questions in Part V are genuinely contested by serious scholars on both sides. The Wesleyan claim is not that the other side has no argument. It is that when the arguments are weighed, text against text, method against method, history against history, and fruit against fruit, the church that ordains its daughters is not the church that capitulated to the culture. It is the church that kept faith with a promise older than the culture: your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. That promise was made to the whole household of God, and the whole household is invited to keep it. The task now, as our Nazarene cousins have said of themselves, is for our culture to live up to our convictions.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (public domain): Mary Bosanquet, letter to John Wesley, June 1771, in Paul Wesley Chilcote, John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism (Scarecrow, 1991). John Wesley, letter to Mary Bosanquet, 13 June 1771. Luther Lee, Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel: A Sermon Preached at the Ordination of the Rev. Miss Antoinette L. Brown (Syracuse, 1853; full text at the Library of Congress). Phoebe Palmer, The Promise of the Father; or, A Neglected Specialty of the Last Days (Boston, 1859). Catherine Booth, Female Ministry (1859). B. T. Roberts, Ordaining Women (Rochester, 1891; annotated edition ed. Benjamin D. Wayman, Cascade, 2015). Jarena Lee, Religious Experience and Journal (1836).

Scholarship: Paul Wesley Chilcote, She Offered Them Christ: The Legacy of Women Preachers in Early Methodism (Abingdon, 1993). Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, eds., Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Johns Hopkins, 2005). Susie C. Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (Univ. of Tennessee, 2002). Rebecca Laird, Ordained Women in the Church of the Nazarene: The First Generation (Nazarene Publishing House, 1993). Paul M. Bassett, “The Ordination of Women to Ministry in the Church of the Nazarene” (Wesleyan Holiness Digital Library). Charles Edward White, The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as Theologian, Revivalist, Feminist, and Humanitarian (Zondervan, 1986). Diane Leclerc, “A Woman’s Place Is Where?” Holiness Today (2006). Ed Robinson, “Women in Ministry: Conviction or Culture,” Holiness Today. On China: Daniel Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Christianity Today, “The Remarkable Story of China’s ‘Bible Women’” (2018); ChinaSource, “Women in Ministry in China.”

On the exegesis of 1 Timothy 2 (both sides): Egalitarian: Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ (Zondervan, 2009); Ben Witherington III on the Ephesian context; Craig S. Keener, Paul, Women and Wives (Hendrickson, 1992); Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender (Baker Academic, 2016). Complementarian: Andreas Köstenberger and Thomas Schreiner, eds., Women in the Church: An Interpretation and Application of 1 Timothy 2:9–15 (Crossway, 3rd ed. 2016). Reading the strongest version of both positions is the only honest way to enter the question.

Written from within the Wesleyan tradition, with gratitude for the women (Susanna, Mary, Phoebe, Antoinette, and the unnamed thousands from Epworth to Henan) on whom the promise of the Father visibly fell.

He owns the gym two doors down Omen Athletics, started a run club that pulls more than two hundred people through on a weekend, hosts classes, and utilizes cold plunge tanks and a sauna as spaces to connect with people deeper (which he just recently used to baptize people in!) Realtors host workshops for first-time buyers through the terror of a home-buying process. Upstairs there is a wide, open space the owner clears out for prayer and worship, a rooftop work area with a view of downtown St. Louis, and a real ecosystem for better living for the community.

None of it happens on a church campus. There is no sign announcing a ministry, no service times, no bulletin by the door, just a man making exceptional coffee Monday through Saturday who decided on purpose that the few blocks around him would be better for his being there. The hospitality isn’t a funnel or some sort of strategy for ministry.

It’s simply who he is trying to be.

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An Older Rhythm

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house...

— Acts 2:46 (KJV)

The early church met daily. Acts tells us they were together house to house, breaking bread and sharing their actual lives at a frequency most of us would now find exhausting, and somewhere across the centuries we took all of that and compressed it into sixty to ninety minutes on a Sunday, inside a building the average person now enters once a week - if they enter it at all.

The daily proximity we set down did not simply evaporate once we let it go. It got picked up by the gym and the bar and the corner coffee shop, the places people return to on their own without being asked.

People never stopped gathering daily. They just stopped doing it with us.

What the cafe owner in St. Louis has done, without ever reaching for the language, is notice that empty space and move into it. I don’t think he’s innovating as much as he’s just remembering.

What I Do to Businesses

What unsettles me about all of this is that I make my living doing close to the opposite. I’m an operator and a metrics guy, the one you bring in when a coffee business has lost the thread and needs someone to put a number on everything that moves, and I can give you labor as a percent of sales, drinks per labor hour, speed to bar, and the cost of a latte down to the penny. I love that work, because measurement is how you keep a business honest and how you keep it alive long enough to matter to anyone.

But I have learned something that has come to scare me, which is how easy it is to walk into a place that is full of life and measure that life right out the door. You optimize the schedule and lose the regular who has been coming for years because of his relationship with one or two certain baristas. You tighten the bar times and watch the conversations thin out. The dashboard turns green while the room goes quiet.

Not everything that counts can be counted.

— William Bruce Cameron

The church did a version of this to itself. We became metric-heavy in our own way, counting attendance and giving and decisions made at the front of the room, reporting conversions up the chain as though faithfulness were a number you posted at the end of a quarter. None of that is evil, and I would rather a church count than fly blind, but the moment the number becomes the point you start running people through a process instead of walking beside them, and a process built for throughput is a fine way to sell software and a poor way to love a neighbor.

I’m not knocking the church here. This is grief, not a complaint. I’m a pastor who has given his life to this thing. And I’m hungry for a revival that sustains.

An Invitation, Not a Close

The part I keep admiring about the owner is what he refuses to do. He isn’t moving anyone toward a decision, and he isn’t using good coffee as bait to soften people up for a pitch about the afterlife once their guard is down. There is no close waiting in the back of the room.

What he extends instead is an invitation into a better life, now, the kind of thing Jesus actually announced when he spoke less about a transaction to secure heaven later and more about a kingdom you could step into today. A decision is something you extract from a person, while an invitation is something you hand over and then leave them free to refuse, and anyone who has been on the receiving end of both knows exactly how different they feel. He simply got proximate with people for no reason beyond wanting to bless them.

Nearness is the soil that formation is grown in.

House to house. Daily.

There is an old way of mapping the gifts of the church, the fivefold list in Ephesians, and for a couple of generations now we have leaned almost entirely on two of them, the evangelist and the shepherd, the gifts that tend to reach crowds and take care of them. The ones we allowed to go quiet are the sent gifts, the apostolic and prophetic instinct to head out and establish the presence of God somewhere it isn’t yet. The man with the espresso machine is operating apostolically and would probably never use the word. He’s simply reading his Bible and trying to be faithful.

Where That Leaves the Rest of Us

What you do with any of this depends a great deal on where you happen to be sitting.

If you lead a church, the question was never how to get a coffee bar into your lobby, since the infrastructure is the easy part and the least important part by a wide margin. The real question is whether you are willing to be present in your actual neighborhood, day after day, with nothing attached to it, trusting that nearness will do the slow work of the Holy Spirit.

(If you do run a church and you are interested in starting something simple in your lobby, let me know and I’d love to help)

If you run a business, you may already be holding the very thing churches keep straining to manufacture, a place people choose to come back to on their own, often, without being recruited or guilted into it. That is sacred ground whether or not you ever say the word out loud, and the only question worth asking is what you intend to do with it.

And if you are a metrics person like me, the challenge was never to stop measuring. It is to remember that the numbers exist to protect the life and was never meant to stand in for it.

Measure carefully enough that the beautiful thing survives the pressure that would otherwise crush it, but never so well that you forget what you were trying to keep alive in the first place.

That owner is not a rare exception. He’s simply taking what he reads about in the Bible seriously by creating a place for the community.

And I think he’s inviting all of us to do the same.

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I see it constantly at my kids’ games. The whistle blows, a timeout starts, the ref gathers the ball, and you can feel the crowd drift; people stand up, stretch, and then almost automatically hands reach for phones. Not always to do anything important, not always even to respond to a notification—sometimes it’s just the reflex to go somewhere else for a second, like we’re uncomfortable being fully present in the in-between. Teenagers do it like breathing, and adults do it like we’re trying not to feel stillness.

What really got my attention wasn’t just the scrolling; it was my heart. I started noticing the way I can feel a flash of irritation when someone interrupts me while I’m in that portal—when one of my kids asks a question, when my wife says my name, when a friend tries to talk.

And then I catch myself, because half the time what I’m doing isn’t anything that deserves that kind of defensive response. I’m not writing something urgent. I’m not solving a problem. I’m just switching apps, skimming headlines, checking messages that aren’t even asking for anything.

That irritation is a clue. Lean into it.

The hidden tax on our attention

There’s research that puts language to what many of us feel but don’t know how to name. In an information-rich world, attention becomes the scarce resource, and that scarcity creates pressure inside of us—even when we don’t realize it.

Herbert Simon said it plainly:

“What information consumes is the attention of its recipients…A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Y’all that’s a modern day proverb. When your phone is nearby, a portion of your mind stays on standby, like a background program you didn’t realize was running. Even when the screen is dark, part of you is “on call”—ready for the possibility of something happening, someone messaging, something needing attention, something being missed. So we carry an invisible tax into spaces that were meant to be restorative: the bleachers, the dinner table, the living room, the car ride, the quiet morning.

And we wonder why it’s hard to feel peace.

The interruption machine

Layered on top of that “attention tax” is something else that makes the whole thing feel heavier: we are neurologically being trained for interruption. We should stop seeing the modern digital environment as not just another place we visit; it’s a training ground for constant task-switching, and that switching comes with a cognitive cost.

Gloria Mark, who has spent decades studying digital distraction, describes a culture of constant toggling—what she calls “attention fragmentation.”

And the thing about fragmentation is that it doesn’t only make you less productive, it also makes you more brittle. You start living like interruption is normal and presence is optional, and over time real life begins to feel like a disruption. People feel like interruptions. Your kids feel like interruptions. Your spouse feels like an interruption. Even the quiet invitation of God can feel like an interruption—not because any of them are actually in the way, but because we’ve been conditioned to treat the portal as the “main” world and the embodied world as the “secondary” one.

Nicholas Carr once put words to the bargain:

“We accept the fragmentation of our attention in return for diverting information.”

That line hits me particularly hard because it names what I often refuse to admit: I am trading wholeness for stimulation without ever consciously choosing to.

Shalom and the split soul

This is where the biblical vision of peace has been speaking to me with unusual clarity, because Scripture doesn’t describe peace as merely the absence of conflict or the presence of calm feelings. The Hebrew vision of peace—shalom—is wholeness, integration, the gathered life, the soul that is not scattered across competing pulls. Peace, in that sense, is not “nothing bad is happening”; peace is “I am not divided.”

And if that’s true, then it makes sense that anxiety rises when we’re constantly living with a foot in two worlds, because we can feel it in our bodies: the twitch to check, the itch to scroll, the restless sense that the moment we’re in isn’t enough, the low-grade agitation when we’re pulled out of the portal and back into the room.

William James from Psychology Today said something that feels strangely prophetic:

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

If attention shapes experience, then fragmentation doesn’t just steal focus—it shapes the soul. We often try to treat anxiety like it’s only a thought problem (“think better thoughts”), but sometimes anxiety is also a formation problem, a training problem, a nervous system problem, and yes, a spiritual problem.

Not because phones are inherently sinful, and not because technology is automatically evil, but because fragmentation steals wholeness, and wholeness is where peace lives.

A gentle experiment toward wholeness

I don’t want this to be shameful or performative, and I’m not interested in phone-policing. I’m interested in freedom, and freedom usually starts with honest naming and small practices that retrain the heart. So here are a few things I’m trying, not as rules to perform but as a gentle experiment toward wholeness:

1) Change proximity.
At games, meals, and conversations, I’m practicing putting my phone out of sight—bag, glovebox, zipped pocket—not because the device is evil, but because my mind relaxes when the portal isn’t constantly “right there.”

2) Sanctify the in-between.
Halftime, timeout, waiting in line, sitting in the car before walking into the house—these little gaps used to be where we simply existed, and now they’re where we disappear. Instead of reflex-scrolling, I’m practicing breathing, looking around, noticing one detail, and offering one silent blessing.

3) Pick windows, not constant access.
I’m experimenting with two or three intentional times a day to check messages, rather than living in ambient grazing all day long. The goal isn’t to become unreachable; it’s to stop being emotionally and spiritually available to everything.

4) Name the irritation without obeying it.
When someone pulls me out of the portal and I feel that flash, I’m trying not to justify it or spiritualize it, but simply to name it: “I’m being tugged.” Naming breaks the spell and turns a reflex into a choice.

5) Make a small vow of presence.
“I will not miss my life because my attention is elsewhere.”

I believe God is not only interested in what we believe, but in what we’re becoming, and part of what we’re becoming right now—often without noticing—is divided. The invitation of shalom is not dramatic; it’s a quiet return, again and again, to the world in front of us, to our bodies, to our people, to the presence of God that is always here and never frantic. And maybe that’s the hope for the anxious life in a split-attention age: not that we throw our phones away, but that we come home, and that we learn, slowly, to live whole again.

Something has happened in Minnesota that is bigger than Minnesota.

In the span of a few weeks, Operation Metro Surge brought thousands of federal immigration-enforcement personnel into the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. Then came shootings involving federal agents—most notably the killing of Renée Nicole Good and the killing of Alex Pretti on. Protests followed, public trust frayed further, and even a federal judge stepped in, ordering acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to appear in court.

And now the air feels absolutely electric.

Progressives are furious at Trump and everyone who still supports him. Some Trump supporters have gone quiet, either because they feel misunderstood, or because they don’t want to defend what they won’t fully endorse. And now social media is a storm of back and forth posts, yelling at one another over the digital chasm. We see this same narrative every few months.

But the people of God are not called to be an echo of the loudest room.

I’ve been quietly praying this month. With each news event, I’ve secretly been asking this question:

What would a faithful, prophetic, non-anxious response look like right now?

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1) The prophetic stance starts with reality

It’s important to note here that prophets are not fortune-tellers — they are truth-tellers.

When public officials speak too quickly, when early narratives harden into talking points, when video and testimony complicate the story, a Christian cannot afford lazy certainty. We don’t get to outsource our conscience to whichever outlet flatters a certain tribe.

Recent reporting describes serious disputes about what occurred in the Alex Pretti shooting: what was claimed, what video may show, and whether force was used appropriately. The point here isn’t to pretend we already know everything. The point is that human life is not a prop for political theater. And that truth matters.

Truth requires a pause.

False witness corrodes a society from the inside, because it trains people to stop seeing their neighbor as a person and start seeing them as a symbol.

2) The prophetic stance makes room for lament

Some Christians confuse calmness with holiness. But this couldn’t be further from the truth!

The prophets weep. The psalmists rage and grieve. Jesus stands at a tomb and cries.

A Wesleyan theology understands that God is not only interested in the forgiveness of sins, but in the healing of people—and by extension, the healing of communities.

Wesley said there is “no holiness but social holiness.”

That means when a city is convulsing—fear, anger, force, protests, counter-protests—Christians should not rush to “move on.” We should lament.

Lament says:

• a life is a life, it’s not a headline

• authority is real and necessary, but so is restraint

• law matters, and so does due process

• the image of God is present in the immigrant, the agent, the protester, the president, the frightened neighbor, and the cynical commentator

Lament is what keeps justice from turning into vengeance. It breaks the cycle when it first breaks our heart.

If you’re angry today, but not broken, then you’re part of the problem.

3) The prophetic stance refuses idolatry (especially political idolatry)

Here’s the truth I learned from years as a teacher and discipleship movement pioneer: American politics is discipling people more aggressively than most churches are.

It teaches liturgies of outrage. It rewards cruelty and justifies “for the sake of *insert virtue here”. It’s textbook tribalism when Scripture is clear: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus"

Christians cannot drink that water and stay clean.

Yes, Scripture calls us to honor governing authorities (Romans 13). And yes, Scripture also shows faithful resistance when authority becomes unjust or abusive (Acts 5:29). The Bible does not hand you a party platform. It hands you a crucified Messiah who refuses both empire’s arrogance and rebellion’s hatred.

If your politics makes it easier to despise people, it is not producing the fruit of the Spirit.

4) The prophetic stance is “social holiness”

So what does social holiness look like this week in the Twin Cities (and far beyond them)?

I’ve prayed deeply about what this practically looks like and I’m convinced it looks like both compassion and clarity:

• Insist on accountable power. When lethal force is used, truth and investigation are not optional. They are necessities.

• Refuse collective blame. Not every Trump voter is cheering for brutality. Not every progressive is excusing chaos. Please stop lying about each other.

• Reject the romance of violence. If your heart thrills at “they got what they deserved,” you are not thinking with the mind of Christ.

• Practice costly neighbor-love. The immigrant family terrified by enforcement, the agent doing a job in a volatile environment, the business owner watching windows shake, the activist whose anger is masking grief—these are not enemies to win against — they are neighbors to love.

And love is not some soft, cozy blanket that makes everyone feel good. Love tells the truth. Love protects the vulnerable. Love refuses to dehumanize. Love does not flinch at complexity.

Where is God in the middle of this?

He is where He always is: with the brokenhearted, against oppression, near to the humble, opposed to the proud, calling sinners—all of us—to repentance, and building a kingdom that does not rise or fall with American elections.

God is not pacing in heaven.

God is judging what is evil and He is summoning His church to be a people who can hold grief and hope at the same time.

If Minnesota is a mirror, it’s showing us something we desperately need to see: we are becoming the kind of nation that cannot tell the truth about itself without tearing itself apart.

The church must be different.

Not quieter, not louder. Different.

A people so formed by Jesus that we can say, with steady voices and clear eyes: we will not be discipled by rage, we will not be numbed by fear, and we will not be bought by tribal belonging.

We will love God. We will love our neighbor. We will tell the truth. We will lament. We will pursue justice with clean hands. And we will keep our nerve—because the Spirit of God is in us.

I remember my time at Realtor.com like a dashboard that never slept.

Every second of the day was some sort of a data point: How many calls did you make? How long were you on the phone? How “efficient” were each of your calls today? What percentage of transfers turned into commission?

And the phrase you heard over and over again from managers, like it was wisdom, was this:

“It’s a numbers game.”

Do it often enough, long enough, outwork the other guy, and eventually you’ll get the check you want.

To their credit, they knew how to make it feel electric. The whole thing was gamified—rankings, leaderboards, constant comparison. Weekly one-on-ones weren’t about your life; they were about your efficiency. Tighten the process. Maximize the output. Shave off seconds like that’s what success is.

It was cool! … for about six months.

Then I started noticing what the system actually worships. It celebrates the competitive and quietly pushes out the ones who can’t keep up. The metrics aren’t a mirror anymore: they’re god. If you disagree, you don’t last long.

After a year, I knew exactly how to succeed. I could tell you all of my tendencies. I could tell you which levers to pull for which results. I could even tell you what would move the numbers if I changed my inflection just-so.

But I still had to ask a question no KPI can answer:

Is it really worth it?

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Unfortunately, my story isn’t unique.

• Gallup reported that U.S. employee engagement fell to a 10-year low in 2024—only 31% engaged. And in Gallup’s global report, engagement fell to 21% in 2024, with disengagement costing an estimated $438B in lost productivity.

• In the church, Barna reported that 42% of pastors (as of March 2022) had considered quitting full-time ministry in the prior year—and that number later fell to 33% in late 2023.

• And McKinsey found something leaders should sit with: only about 20–21% of employees with no development conversations felt motivated by their company’s performance management—compared with 77% among those receiving ongoing feedback.

We are surrounded by measurement. And yet people are depleted—at work, in ministry, in leadership itself.

So no—the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough dashboards.
The problem is that our dashboards are becoming our discipleship.

The swap we don’t notice

Let me be very clear on this one thing: We need measurements! If you’re responsible for payroll, quality, safety, stewardship, outcomes—you don’t get to be vague.

But also, metrics are never neutral.

They tell a narrative. And this narrative we tell as leaders is critical because it’s the culture-builder for our organizations. Metrics train our attention and they tell us what to care about while we’re at work. And they can quietly offer a trade that looks responsible on paper — but it’s secretly fear creeping it’s way in.

Most of us would never take that deal out loud though. Again, it creeps and it crawls through the cracks of our humanity.

Because if I can quantify it, I can manage it.
And if I can manage it, maybe I can keep pain away.

My friends, that’s not leadership — that’s anxiety with better vocabulary.

When the metric replaces the mission

Harvard Business Review has a name for one of the most dangerous dynamics in modern leadership: surrogation—when people mentally replace the real objective with the metric meant to represent it.

You don’t wake up and say, “Today we will abandon the mission.”
It’s a mental shift where you just keep reporting. Keep comparing data. Keep tightening and tweaking. Keep rewarding what can be actually be counted or quantified.

And then the surrogate becomes the thing:

Attendance becomes “church health.”
Speed becomes “hospitality.”
Units shipped becomes “value.”
Compliance becomes “discipleship.”

I’ve heard it said:

When the number becomes the goal, the work loses its soul.

And once that happens, the first things to die are the things that make a place human: slow training, honest feedback, a hard conversation that protects someone’s future, care that can’t be captured in a weekly scorecard.

Which is why McKinsey’s point matters so much: workplace motivation isn’t mainly about clever gamified systems—it rises with real development conversations and managers who can actually shepherd people.

Numbers can reveal but they cannot pastor.

(Oh how I hate that sentence and love it at the same time.)

Two practices—and two bonus—if you want metrics in their place

None of these are “tips.” They cost something. That’s why they work.

1) Put a faithfulness layer back in the room where decisions are made

Pick the meeting that shapes the organization—weekly ops, monthly review, quarterly planning—and make it structurally impossible for numbers to be the whole story.

Bring names into the room, not just headcount.
Bring narrative into the room, and don’t spin it.
Bring judgment into the room—tradeoffs you can’t optimize, only choose.

And say out loud what can’t be proven but must be protected.

If meaning can’t be spoken where decisions are made, it isn’t meaning—it’s décor.

2) Practice Sabbath as organizational resistance, not personal self-care

Sabbath isn’t a recovery hack. It’s a declaration: we are not Pharaoh.

Build restraint into the system: limits on reporting burdens, protected time for real coaching, a refusal to turn every human moment into a measurable transaction. Turn off the need to be available.

Sabbath trains leaders to release control and that is not a soft skill.

3) Create “unmeasured space” on purpose—because trust can’t grow under constant exposure

HBR warned years ago that hyper-transparency and constant real-time data can leave people feeling exposed and vulnerable, changing how they behave—often toward concealment, not growth.

So build privacy back in where it’s needed: space to experiment, to learn, to fail without being publicly ranked for it. Give your people room to become competent without feeling watched every second.

Become more intentional in your feedback and stop giving it if it doesn’t actually build people up.

4) Re-center success around formation, not just throughput

This is huge! Keep the KPIs. But refuse to let them be the loudest voice.

Start asking questions that don’t resolve into a chart:

• Who is making things more simple for the rest of the team?

• Who is becoming more honest?

• Who is creating systems that make the team feel more at ease?

• Where is trust rising—or leaking?

And then act on those answers even when the move doesn’t “pencil” in the short term.

What it looks like when metrics are in their place

It’s not an organization without standards — it’s an organization with a backbone.

Numbers are used as instruments but never as idols. Leaders don’t hide from metrics, but they also don’t flinch under them. People are coached like humans, not tuned like machines. The scoreboard exists, but it doesn’t get to define the meaning of the game.

There’s clarity without constant surveillance and questioning. There is accountability without public humiliation. We can have excellence without extraction of life.

And most of all, there’s a strange kind of steadiness or peace in the air. Because when people aren’t being ranked every day and they start knowing they are trusted to do the job they were given to do, they stop living like their worth is fragile.

They live in the light that God has called them to: and now it’s up to them to decide if they want to be faithful with it or to choose fear.

Here’s the question I can’t get away from—and I don’t think we’re supposed to answer it quickly:

What would change in your leadership if you stopped asking, “How do we prove we’re winning?” and started asking, “What kind of people is this work making us?”

Most of my writing is on cultural trends, over-looked passages of Scripture, and anything that reconnects people with the heart of God. Today, I want to do a slight pivot — but not a complete pivot — from my normal because I live in the business space most of my week as a COO and I’m becoming more convinced that the secular and the church spaces are actually one in the same.

Whether you’re operating a business, a church, a non-profit, or even your own family team, one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated topics is trust. In this cultural moment, this is critical. And unfortunately, most organizations don’t realize they’re operating in a trust deficit until it’s too late.

I would argue that trust may be the most expensive currency in today’s world.

• According to Gallup, only about one in five employees strongly trust their organization’s leadership.

• Edelman’s global trust research shows that a majority of people now assume leaders will mislead them.

• Psychological safety studies consistently report that most employees withhold ideas, concerns, or dissent, not because they’re apathetic, but because it doesn’t feel safe.

These are operational realities that have financial and relationship consequences attached to them.

Low trust slows everything down, it increases costs, it quietly burns people out, and teams spend more energy protecting themselves than building anything meaningful. And when trust erodes long enough, people don’t usually revolt.

They disengage.

We are not facing a leadership crisis. We are facing a trust crisis — and it’s eroding from both sides.

Why hire employees or make investments into their development if they have the freedom to leave tomorrow without any consequences? Why would I trust a human to do a job when technology is more affordable AND trustworthy? (Seriously…I can train robot baristas to make some bomb latte art if I wanted to)

On the flip side, why work for a company that may let you go for any reason at any time? Why speak up about frustrations when every time you do, it goes unheard or unresolved? These are critical questions.

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Why it hurts so much to be let down

Trust is a willingness to be vulnerable to someone else because you expect they won’t use that vulnerability against you.

That word: vulnerable really matters.

Trust is a transfer. I give you access. I give you responsibility. I hand you my timeline, my reputation, my money, my emotional bandwidth—sometimes even my yes before you’ve earned it.

So when trust breaks, the pain isn’t only about what happened. It’s about what the relationship meant, and what it cost you to risk.

Psychology has language for this: betrayal trauma. It describes what happens when the person or institution you depend on violates your trust or well-being. Do I believe that every disappointment rises to that level? Probably not. But the framework explains why some letdowns feel disproportionate.

Your nervous system reacts because dependency was involved.

Inside organizations, the fallout shows up fast:

• Hypervigilance: Every email, every meeting, every “quick chat” gets scanned for subtext. Your body is trying to make sure you don’t get hit twice.

• Rumination: The moment replays over and over. The tone. The timing. As if thinking harder could make the future safer.

• Withdrawal: People stop speaking up, stop offering ideas, and stop naming problems early.

• Cynicism: The story quietly shifts from they messed up to people can’t be trusted.

That last shift is the most dangerous.

Because once cynicism starts to feel like wisdom, you can call it “discernment” while it slowly dries up the very thing your community depends on: shared vulnerability.

Cynicism feels like protection, but it eventually becomes a tax everyone pays.

The two essentials of building trust

Researchers often describe trustworthiness using three factors: ability, benevolence, and integrity. Can you do the work? Do you care about me? Will you do what’s right?

It’s a helpful framework. But if I had to reduce trust to two essentials—two pillars you can actually build a life and an organization on—it would be this:

Character and competence.

Character: I can trust your heart.

Character is integrity + intent. It’s whether you tell the truth when it costs you. Whether you name reality early instead of polishing the story later. Whether people feel used or loved in your presence is a direct reflection of your character.

In practice, character looks like this:

• You own reality quickly. There’s no time spent hiding.

• You apologize without bargaining. (“I’m sorry you feel that way” isn’t an apology.)

• You repair the damage—not just the optics.

And repair matters.

Trust doesn’t return because someone wrote the right paragraph. It comes back when the pattern changes. When behavior shifts. When people can stop bracing.

Trust is rebuilt through changed patterns, not improved explanations.

Competence: I can trust your hands.

Competence is capability + follow-through. It’s the quiet holiness of doing what you said you’d do.

A surprising number of trust breaks aren’t dramatic events. They’re simple operational balls getting dropped.

Missed deadlines.
Vague expectations.
Repeated “I forgot.”
Chronic disorganization that forces everyone else to absorb the cost.

Competence builds trust because it lowers the tax of uncertainty. It reduces monitoring. It increases speed. And it communicates respect.

“I was prepared” is a form of love.

And when competence fails, even a well-meaning person can become unsafe. Not malicious, just unreliable. In business, unreliability is expensive. In ministry, it’s even worse than that.

It’s disillusioning.

Good intentions don’t offset the cost of unreliability. Someone always pays the price.

A future actually worth building

Imagine a community, a company, church, a friend group, family where trust isn’t a slogan, a false promise, or something we put on paper somewhere titled “Core Values” but then forgotten about. It’s a shared practice where there’s real accountability being taken (personally and corporately) to make sure it’s actually being built.

Imagine a culture where honesty is normal. People don’t have to guess what you mean. The culture is low on “I just assumed” and high on clarity.

Promises are treated as sacred. Not because everyone is perfect, but because everyone understands the cost of someone else’s vulnerability and we value their word.

Mistakes are handled in the light. The culture is strong enough for people to admit failure early—when it’s still fixable.

Repair is a rhythm. When harm happens, the instinct isn’t to defend, shame, or guilt-trip. It’s to restore a bridge that was just cracked.

Leadership is trustworthy and not performative. People aren’t asked to “just trust us.” Trust is earned through transparency, consistency, and actual responsibility.

That kind of future would change everything!

And for those of us trying to fuse business and ministry without selling our souls to either—this is the work.

Because trust isn’t the icing on the cake. Trust is the oven. If it’s broken, nothing rises the way it’s supposed to.

So here’s the question I’m sitting with right now—and maybe it’s worth sitting with yourself:

Where do the people around me have to brace themselves?

And what would it look like to become the kind of person—in character and in competence—who helps them exhale again?

In the mid-19th century, a little-known painter living in Jerusalem completed an unusual work he called The New Jerusalem Descending. But it wasn’t the kind of religious art people expected. Instead of clouds, choirs, and a glowing city suspended far above the earth, he painted a crowded street scene — merchants arguing over prices, children darting between stalls, women drawing water from a stone well. Above this ordinary chaos, the city of God appeared, lowering itself toward the dust. Light spilled from its gates onto the marketplace until the scene below seemed to shimmer with possibility.

Viewers didn’t know what to make of it. Heaven, in their imagination, was supposed to replace the world, not embrace it. But the painter insisted he was being faithful to the Scriptures: Revelation ends not with human souls escaping upward, but with God descending to dwell among people, renewing the earth rather than discarding it.

I believe we’ve inherited an American Christianity that trains us to live with our faces turned away from this world. Heaven becomes the prize, the escape hatch — the place we suppose everything will finally make sense. Somewhere along the way we grew so fixated on getting out that we lost sight of where God actually put us: this neighborhood, this time, this fragile arrangement of human lives.

It’s strikingly odd. Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Your kingdom come; your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Yet much of modern Western piety prays the opposite: “Lord, get us out of here.” We talk about heaven as though it is God’s permanent address and earth a rundown motel He’s trying to move us out of.

Some call the American fixation on the afterlife “holy escapism.” It floats above real human suffering, sings with hands raised, and turns its face from the oppressed. It produces churches full of saved souls and empty of transformed lives.

The past few months I’ve been doing a deep dive through the prophetic books of the Bible. And when I read the prophets, I hear a God who will have none of that.

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1. The Prophets Saw Heaven in the Ordinary

Spend time with Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos — and a pattern emerges: God is not angry at worship; God is grieved at disconnection. Worship that ignores injustice is incomplete.

“I will not accept your offerings… Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
— Amos 5:22–24

An important point to make here is that the prophets did not condemn Israel for failing to ponder eternity. They condemned a people who rehearsed devotion while ignoring their neighbor’s wounds. Salvation, for them, was never a ticket out. It was the healing of earth itself.

Jeremiah weeps in the ruins; Isaiah points to a Messiah who brings good news to the poor; Ezekiel imagines a river flowing from the temple into the streets, watering the land. The prophets’ tragedy is ours: we have forgotten that God’s heart aims here!

2. Jesus Embodied Heaven on Earth

Jesus does not show up as a spiritual GPS for getting to heaven later. He announces a kingdom — not distant, not deferred — but near.

“The kingdom of heaven has come near.” — Matthew 4:17

Near enough to touch lepers, break bread with sinners, restore dignity to outcasts, and overturn the tables that impoverish the poor. He doesn’t tell his followers to chant, “Hold on until heaven.” He invites them into a life in which heaven begins to invade earth through their mercy, courage, and presence.

You are not a spectator waiting for heaven to begin.

You are the way heaven begins.

3. A Broken Imagination: What Western Christianity Got Wrong

At various points in history, especially amid colonial expansion, the gospel was reframed as an afterlife contract: convert or be lost. Conversion became about fear, not transformation.

Willie James Jennings calls this a diseased imagination: salvation severed from land, body, community, and the lived experience of people. The result: a church that proclaims eternity while reinforcing earthly chains.

We became experts in heaven and illiterate in compassion.

That does not mean eternity is unimportant. It means eternity must not become an escape hatch that excuses our refusal to act. If heaven is only a distant reward, we have traded the gospel for spiritual insurance. And in doing so, we stop being the people Jesus said would inherit the earth.

4. The Prophetic Call: A Salvation That Actually Saves

True salvation changes the world. When Jesus heals, forgives, or confronts injustice, the future breaks into the present.

Esau McCaulley argues that Christian hope is not passive but demanding: a hope that insists on participation. It refuses to wait while neighbors suffer. It insists the resurrection is both promise and present power.

This is the salvation the prophets longed for, the salvation Jesus embodied, the kind the early church practiced. God is not trying to rescue us from creation.

God is trying to rescue creation through us.

5. Where Heaven Touches Today

So what does this mean for us — for Christians who live in real neighborhoods with real wounds? Especially in this season of Advent, as we look to the coming of Jesus, this question becomes critical.

It means we stop using heaven as an excuse to disengage from real pain.
It means we stop confusing spiritual maturity with spiritual fatalism.
It means we stop praying to be removed from the world Jesus died to redeem.

I think we need to ask different questions. Not “How do I get to heaven?” but “How do I live so heaven becomes visible here?”

If your salvation never touches your neighbor, you have misunderstood salvation. If your hope never interrupts injustice, you have misunderstood hope. If your faith never heals anything around you, you are not following Jesus — you are following a fantasy.

We are not waiting on heaven. Heaven is waiting on us: for our courage, our compassion, our willingness to carry God’s presence into ordinary spaces and fractured systems.

When Jesus ascended, he did not remove heaven from the world; he unleashed it. If the prophets taught us anything, it’s that God is not apathetic about human suffering. If Jesus taught us anything, it’s that heaven is already breaking in. And if the Spirit teaches us anything, it’s that we have been entrusted with a mission far more beautiful than we could ever imagine.

We are here not to flee but to plant. Not to hover above suffering but to enter it with hope. Not to long for another world, but to bear witness that this world is still the one God loves.

Heaven is not somewhere else.

Heaven is the life God is trying to unleash in us — right here, right now.

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

We ran into each other at Coffee Fest like a family reunion. I’d left Medici nine months earlier and was there representing DOXA — a project shaped around beauty, excellence, and the language of glory. Michael, who built Medici into a city-wide institution and now shepherds the business from a different vantage, came by the booth. He isn’t behind the bar much anymore; he invested himself in a handful of people, they invested in others, and Medici’s influence has rippled across half of Austin’s coffee community.

In the middle of our catch-up we got to talking about the beauty of hard work and blessing that it is. He started scrolling through his phone while we talked before revealing his screen with this quote from Theodore Roosevelt. And then, with a quiet seriousness that surprised me, he said, “I may never check out. The day I check out, I’ll stop contributing — and that’s when I’ll die.” Those weren’t his exact words, but the point landed like a benediction: for Michael, work is not merely a paycheck or an identity placeholder; it is life-giving, communal, and redemptive. He had built a business that could run without him, and still he leaned in — not from compulsion, but from affection for the work itself.

That moment reframed everything I wanted to say about labor: the gift of it, the theology behind it, the cultural mistake of equating retirement with the end of meaningful contribution. If we are going to talk about work afresh, we need that kind of witness — someone who has the right to check out, but chooses to remain because work is where life is found.

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Work as partnership, not punishment

Too often the story we tell about work begins at the wrong chapter. We open at the sweat, the thorns, the exit strategy called retirement; and because we begin with the brokenness, we assume labor is essentially a penalty. But the biblical imagination gives us a different beginning. From the start, humanity is given a task: to tend, to name, to cultivate. The Hebrew word “avodah” appears across Scripture with a range of meanings — work, worship, service — and that layered meaning matters. To till a garden is not merely to labor; it is to participate in God’s creative, ordering, flourishing work.

This is not a gloss to sentimentalize every job. It is a theological claim with practical teeth: our labor participates in the revealing of God’s goodness. To repair a roof, to teach a child to read, to pull espresso with exacting care — all are small acts of making the invisible goodness of God visible in the world.

The Fall did not invent work; it distorted it. The thorns and futility are real consequences of a world bent in on itself. Redemption, therefore, is not an invitation to flee labor but an invitation to enter it rightly — to heal, to reorder, to restore purpose.

The modern malaise

And yet, for many of us, work feels hollow. We are paradoxically busier than any generation yet emptier of meaning. We mistake productivity for purpose and metrics for meaning. Our workplaces fracture us: we enter them with roles to perform and leave with pieces of ourselves missing.

Part of this is structural — exploitative systems, unjust economies, and cultures that prize output over formation. Part of it is spiritual: we have compartmentalized our souls. We treat faith as a private compartment and work as a secular zone. But the biblical and Jewish imaginations don’t make that separation. The daily rhythms of labor were never meant to be outside the life of God; they were meant to be a stage on which God’s glory is shown.

It’s a very important point to make here that recovering a theology of work does not remove the real pains of labor — burnout, boredom, injustice — but it does offer a reorientation. It changes the question from “How can I escape?” to “How can I participate in making this good?”

The gift hidden in the grind

There is a tenderness to the ordinary when we start to see it rightly. The ancient rabbis and many Jewish reflections insist that the sacred is often disguised as the mundane. Their rhythm did not despise making; it sanctified it. Work, when done with attention and love, becomes a kind of prayer.

Jesus’ life points us to this truth. He lived decades as a carpenter before ministry — a reminder that the kingdom is cultivated in wood shops and kitchens as much as it is in sanctuaries. The point is not that every job is glamorous; the point is that faithful work is Kingdom work when it is oriented toward flourishing.

Paul gives us a practical ethic: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” (Colossians 3:23) That verse does not sanctify overwork; it sanctifies orientation. To do our tasks “as for the Lord” is to offer them as worship, to let them be a means of participation in God’s renewing love for creation.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as for the Lord, not for human masters.”
— Colossians 3:23 (ESV)

Rethinking retirement

Culture has sold us a vision of the “good life” that treats retirement as an end goal — some long reward of leisure after decades of drudgery. There’s a seductive simplicity to that vision: rest without responsibility. But the evidence — the ethnographies, the pastoral visits, the countless stories — suggests something more complicated. For many, premature withdrawal from meaningful engagement leads not to flourishing but to diminishment. People disappear into chairs and screens; their gifts fall dormant; communities lose memory and craft.

Scripture, Jewish wisdom, and healthy cultural practices all model a different posture for elderhood. Elders are wells of experience, teachers of trade, keepers of tradition, and mentors who pass on practical wisdom. The gray-haired among us are not meant to retire into irrelevance; they are meant to anchor communities with their presence and to pour out what they have learned in ways that shape the next generation.

Michael models that. He could have stepped back entirely; instead he built systems, trained people, and then stayed — not to seize control but to bless those he trained. His work becomes a multiplying movement. That’s the posture we need to recover: not clinging to power, but refusing to exit the economy of meaning.

Work as witness and mission

There is a missional dimension to diligent, excellent work. The early Christians were known in part because of the way they lived and labored — honesty, craft, generosity — and their reputational witness opened doors for the gospel. Work done well attracts attention; it raises questions. If we care about people coming to see something of God, our daily excellence becomes a way of showing the world an alternative logic: that we serve something bigger than profit or prestige.

This does not mean every job will be evangelistically fruitful on its face. It does mean that the way we do ordinary things — with integrity, skill, patience, and love — can testify to a different Kingdom ordering.

Practices for re-entering meaning

Practical rhythms help translate theology into habit. Here are a few practices that I implement within my work week to help form a life where work is worship

1. Mentorship and apprenticeship. Teach what you know. Invite younger hands into your shop, kitchen, or office and give them real responsibility. Legacy transfers through proximity and practice.

2. Micro-liturgies at work. Begin the day or a shift with a small ritual: a prayer for those you’ll serve, a moment of gratitude for the craft, a short reading that reorients your purpose.

3. Restorative boundaries. Resist metrics and rhythms that dehumanize. Push for systems that honor formation — predictable days off, reasonable expectations, and spaces for communal care.

4. Sabbath as formation, not just escape. Sabbath frames work; it honors labor by setting limits. Sabbath teaches that our worth does not equal our output.

It must be said that these are not fixes for structural injustice — those require policy and communal courage — but these are practices that shape hearts to stay engaged and to make work a place of flourishing rather than depletion.

The legacy of love

When I watch Michael at a conference or see the people who trace their craft back to him, what I see is not just business success but transmitted vocation. He has multiplied himself not by refusing to let go but by refusing to check out of life’s work. He is present in speech and story; his influence is carried in the hands of those he trained. That is legacy.

Perhaps the prize Roosevelt named is not simply the joy of hard work in itself, but the way work, rightly understood, becomes the vehicle by which we grow into fuller humanity. We are designed to make, to steward, to serve — and in doing so we reveal God’s goodness to the world.

When the Noise Finally Stops

It was a gray Oregon afternoon. Ironically, the sun was shining bright — but I was running on fumes: juggling two jobs, new baby on the way, questioning my calling, trying to pretend I was fine, but I wasn’t. I remember sitting on the back porch that day, elbows on my knees, face buried in my hands, whispering what I’d been afraid to say out loud.
I ready to quit.

That sentence had been playing in my head for weeks like background noise. I didn’t know what “quit” meant exactly — quit my job, my calling, maybe even my faith — I just knew I was done pretending. And then, in that small surrender, the wind slowly picked up.

There was a small row of cottonwood trees beside the patio that had started to move — leaves flickering like silver coins, clapping softly in the breeze. We lived on the second floor of our apartment building and the leaves were no more than ten feet away from me. It wasn’t loud or dramatic. Just the quiet applause of creation doing what it was made to do. For a moment I stopped thinking about what I had to fix and just listened.

It hit me like an epiphany that the tree in front was never consumed with trying (like I had been for the past few years). It wasn’t hustling for God’s approval. It was simply being what God made it to be. The leaves seemed to praise God in response to the wind in their clapping. And somehow that realization — simple as it was — cracked something open in me.

Maybe joy isn’t found in doing more. Maybe it’s found in becoming still enough to remember who you are.

If you’ve ever sat slumped on a porch somewhere thinking I can’t do this anymore, this is for you.

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What Joy Really Is

We’ve confused joy with positivity. Joy is not smiling through the pain or pretending everything is fine. It’s not toxic optimism.

In Scripture, joy is not a mood — it’s a fruit. It’s the natural result of being rooted in God’s love.

Jesus said in John 15:11, “I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

Notice the flow — my joy in you. Joy doesn’t start with us; it starts with Him. It’s divine overflow.

Dallas Willard called joy “a pervasive sense of well-being based on the reality of God’s goodness.” It’s what happens when your soul remembers that all shall be well — even when everything around you isn’t.

And yet, so many of us have lost it.

Not because we don’t love God. But because life has worn us down to survival mode.

We keep showing up. We keep serving. But deep down, something that once felt alive now feels numb.

That’s not failure. It’s simply a signal — an invitation to return to joy.

The Survival Instinct That Steals Our Joy

When stress rises, our bodies go into protection mode — fight, flight, or freeze. That’s fine for emergencies, but it’s a terrible way to live.

Survival mode keeps you alive, but it also keeps you small. You can’t laugh freely when you’re bracing for impact. You can’t notice beauty when your mind is scanning for threat.

And here’s the great irony: in trying to protect ourselves, we end up losing the very thing that gives us strength.

That’s why Nehemiah’s words hit differently when you remember the context. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” He said that to a people surrounded by rubble, rebuilding from trauma. Their joy wasn’t naïve — it was prophetic!

Joy is not the denial of pain; it’s the defiance of despair.

And that’s where we begin.

Three Joy Suckers

1. Hurry

Hurry kills joy not through crisis, but through erosion. It eats away at your ability to notice. You don’t crash — you just go numb.

One manager I worked for told me once, “I can’t remember the last time I laughed.” Nothing was particularly wrong. He just lived on autopilot — open the shop, check the sales, manage the crew, go home, repeat. The last thing to go was his capacity for wonder.

If you want to recover joy, you have to slow down enough to be surprised again.

That doesn’t mean you need a sabbatical. It might mean pausing before you sip your coffee and actually tasting it. It might mean finishing your commute in silence instead of noise.

Jesus was busy, but He was never hurried. He lived at the speed of love — present, responsive, grounded. I like to refer to Him as the 3 mph God because He always goes at the pace of relationship — walking — and there’s no speeding Him up or slowing Him down. We have to walk at His pace.

2. Comparison

Comparison is a thief disguised as ambition. It whispers that someone else’s success means there’s less room for yours. That God’s favor is a zero-sum game.

But the kingdom doesn’t work like that. The Father’s house has many rooms, and joy grows best when you stay in yours.

When we scroll through other people’s highlight reels, we stop being present in our own story. We start curating instead of cultivating.

You’ll never find joy trying to replicate someone else’s calling. You’ll find it when you do the quiet, faithful thing that God has placed in front of you — even when no one notices.

Joy is the fruit of living loved, not living impressive.

3. Cynicism

Cynicism feels sophisticated, but it’s just disappointment that’s never been grieved. It’s the armor we wear to protect ourselves from hope.

It says, “I’ve seen too much to believe again.” But hope isn’t naïveté — it’s resistance.

Gratitude is the antidote. Not forced positivity, but honest gratitude: “This is hard, but I’m still breathing.” “That conversation hurt, but I’m thankful I still care.”

As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The test of all happiness is gratitude.” When you start naming the smallest gifts — breath, sunlight, friendship, coffee — joy quietly reenters the room.

Three Ways to Reclaim Joy

1. Return to Simplicity

Joy hides in plain sight. You don’t need a retreat in the mountains to find it. You might just need to step outside and notice the sky again.

When life feels complicated, simplicity becomes a kind of rebellion.

Try this: at the end of your day, name three simple things that were good — not extraordinary, just good. The smile from a stranger. The sound of your child’s laughter. The warmth of the mug in your hand.

These are not small things; they are altars.

Jesus said, “Consider the lilies.” Translation: look up. Pay attention. There’s beauty still growing around you.

2. Root Yourself in Presence

Abiding in Christ isn’t mystical theory. It’s the daily practice of turning your attention back to God — again and again — until it becomes instinct.

You can do this anywhere. In traffic. In the shower. Between emails.

When your mind starts spiraling, pause and breathe. Whisper something simple:
“You are here, God. And so am I.”

That’s not a mantra; it’s an anchor.

Henri Nouwen said, “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.” You don’t drift into joy — you return to it.

Presence is where joy lives.

3. Rejoin the Dance

Joy is communal. It grows when shared.

Isolation shrinks your soul, even when it’s for good reason. You tell yourself you’re protecting your peace, but slowly your heart hardens.

When the early church broke bread “with glad and sincere hearts,” their joy wasn’t a personality trait — it was the natural overflow of belonging.

If your joy feels thin, try serving again. Try singing again. Try laughing in someone’s kitchen again.

You were never meant to carry your story alone.

Why Joy Matters for Leaders (and Humans)

When you’ve lost joy, you start leading from scarcity. Everything becomes about control and efficiency. You squeeze harder, but nothing satisfies.

You begin to measure people by output instead of image-bearing. You start resenting what once felt sacred.

But when you lead from joy — when you remember that God is not a taskmaster but a Father — something changes.

Joy gives you permission to be curious again. To listen again. To believe that the Spirit might already be at work before you arrive.

A friend of mine once burned out in ministry so badly that he swore he’d never lead again. After a few months, he started walking every morning — no podcast, no worship playlist, just the sound of his own footsteps and prayer. One day he told me, “It’s weird, but I’m starting to laugh again.”

That’s what joy does. It resurrects what burnout buried.

Joy isn’t just personal — it’s missional. It reminds the world that God’s people are not motivated by fear, but by love. And that love still makes room for laughter.

A Simple Practice for When You Feel Empty

If you feel like joy has left the building, here’s a small practice.

1. Stop.
   Literally stop moving for sixty seconds. Feel your breath. Take inventory of your heart.

2. Name one gift.
   Something real, right now. The air. The light. The fact that you’re still here.

3. Whisper this prayer:
   “God, I’m tired. But I’m yours. Teach me to delight in you again.”

Don’t rush it. Joy rarely returns with fireworks.

It comes back quietly — like the wind through the leaves.

—Bryson

Uninvited

In the past few years I’ve learned this: grief doesn’t knock. It arrives with the casual cruelty of a stranger who sits down and refuses to leave. For me it came again and again these past 6 months: my uncle, a cousin, most recently my saint of a grandmother who helped raise me. Three years ago it was my son. After that night the world rearranged itself. Grief stopped being a season and became a companion I recognized by smell. Like the donkey in Shrek, I simply wanted him to leave me alone!

Although I opened my home weekly to my house church, I had emotionally shut the door on everybody. I convinced myself that isolation was dignity. The whisper was persuasive: No one understands this. Don’t be a burden. Just keep smiling. So I ended up practicing a kind of private grief that pretended to be strength.

Then one late night my dad and I talked until the words ran out. He asked the thing people usually avoid:

“How are you and Abby doing?”

I gave him the same careful answer I’d given a hundred times — the kind of answer that keeps the wound wrapped and hidden. He listened. Long silence. Then, almost to himself, he said, “Yeah. I lost my grandson that day.”

In that moment something shifted. The weight of it all didn’t change, but the load I felt about it did. For the first time I saw this was not a burden only I carried. My father had a wound too. The lie that I was alone fractured in a single quiet sentence. That knowledge didn’t take the grief away; it simply let the grief be shared. And that made bearing it possible.

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The Whisper of Lies

That fracture is the hinge of everything: grief tempts us toward isolation, but isolation is the enemy’s tool.

Scripture names the opposite with steady insistence. We are image-bearers of a God who is not a solitary sovereign but Father, Son, and Spirit — a dance of relationship. Jesus stands at tombs and in kitchens; he weeps before he teaches. Paul commands the church to weep with those who weep and to carry one another’s burdens.

This is not sentimentality but structure. If God is forever communion, then human life — even and especially in loss — is meant to be communal.

“Grief shared is grief diminished.” — Rabbi Grollman

What Psychology Confirms

Psychology is less poetic but equally insistent: people who grieve with others generally fare better. Connection does not erase sorrow, but it shapes the way sorrow moves through a life. Studies show that social support lowers the severity of depression after loss and helps prevent grief from hardening into something chronic.

There is a phrase in bereavement work — continuing bonds. It names something Scripture has always practiced: we hold the dead close in memory, not to be stuck, but to be reshaped. Remembering together keeps grief from becoming an island.

In other words, modern psychology is catching up to what Scripture has been saying for millennia: we are formed in relationship, and therefore we heal in relationship. What therapists call “social support” the Bible names as bearing one another’s burdens. What bereavement specialists call “continuing bonds” Scripture describes as remembering the saints, rehearsing the stories, keeping alive the testimony of the great cloud of witnesses. When science and Scripture begin to rhyme, it should not surprise us; it should wake us up to how deeply God has written communion into the human design.

Two Roads Through Loss

Grief gives us two paths. One freezes the heart into a colder form of life: withdrawn, suspicious, stoic to the point of cruelty. The other breaks us open in a way that enlarges our capacity to love.

Both are real possibilities. Which road we walk depends less on the purity of our theology and more on the small, consistent acts of presence around us. Presence, not perfection, is what heals.

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” — C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Lewis unmasks the illusion: the road of withdrawal feels like protection, but it slowly turns the heart to stone. The other road — the road of risk, of vulnerability, of presence — exposes us to pain but also enlarges our capacity for love. Loss will either shrink us into isolation or lead us into communion. The difference is whether we keep our hearts locked away, or let them be broken open into something more human, more Christlike, more alive.

How Healing Happens

If you are reading this and the ache is raw, permission first: you do not need to be clever or inspiring. You are allowed to be messy and slow. Say the plain sentence out loud to one person: “I’m hurting.” or “I’m not well.” That sentence is an invitation; it allows other hands to meet yours.

Invite a friend to tell a story about the one you lost. Invite someone to come and sit. Let neighbors do the small practical things — a meal left on the porch, the yard mowed, a text that simply says hi. These banal mercies stitch the world back together.

If you love someone in grief, your work is not to fix but to stay. Bring one ritual into their life: keep a date on the calendar, read a name aloud sometimes, show up for the anniversaries no one remembers. Ask fewer questions and listen longer. Learn the difference between saying something wise and saying something true: “I don’t know what to say” is better than a hurried scripture or platitude.

Presence is the theology you can live.

A Communal God in a Broken World

This is not a program; it is a practice. It will feel awkward. You will say the wrong thing. Do it anyway. The gospel is not embarrassed by our fumbling; it is patient with our trembling hands. Grace usually shows up this way — not in epiphanies but in coffee cups and calloused palms, in names spoken across a dinner table.

Grief will rearrange you. It may harden you if you let it. Or it may make you more human — more neighborly, more tender, more willing to enter another’s room with a chair and a wordless cup of tea.

Choosing the latter is not heroic. It is simply allowing the communal God to do what the communal God does: bind wounds with other hands.

The Invitation

If you’re carrying an unwelcome guest tonight, do one brave, ordinary thing: tell one person the truth about how you’re doing. If you don’t know who that person is, tell me and I’ll help you find one.

Because we’re all like Ogre’s in our onion-like nature and we all have layers. We’re all complicated and messy and smelly sometimes. But we’re also beautiful and magnificent and priceless at the same time. Grief is the beautiful revealer and we all need someone like donkey who just. won’t. leave. our. sides. in this journey.

There is no clever theology that substitutes for two hands in the dark. There is no heroic loneliness God desires.

We were made for each other. That is the good news that meets the bad news of loss.

Let someone in.

—Bryson

I remember how easy it was to mistake loudness for righteousness. The feed rewards certainty, the crowd crowns boldness, and we—Christians included—find our souls shaped by applause.

Wesley, standing in the chill of an Oxford morning in 1733, said something deliberately awkward: the mark of true religion is not what you do in public, it’s what has been done in your heart. That old claim hooked me then; and it hooks me harder now.

Especially this week, as my timeline burns with hot takes about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Everyone feels compelled to weigh in—rage, lament, conspiracy, counter-conspiracy. Every post is a claim to moral clarity, a performance of courage, a desperate grasp for the upper hand in the argument. And yet I find myself asking: what if this is exactly the kind of “praise of men” Wesley warned us about? What if the measure of faithfulness isn’t the boldness of our posts but the humility of our hearts?

“Circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, and not in the letter.”
— Romans 2:29

Wesley preached that line with force: external rites and religious badges mean nothing if the inner person has not been cut open by God. True Christianity is not a branding exercise; it is an inward death and rebirth, a divine operation performed on the heart itself. He sketched four marks of such a heart: humility, faith, hope, and charity. Four simple words that slice through our modern moment like a scalpel.

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Humility in the Age of Performance

The digital world, or as Mark Sayers calls it, “The Global Village”, is an economy of spectacle. Everyone has a stage, everyone has a microphone, and the loudest voice usually wins. Humility, then, in this kind of world looks like weakness—like shrinking back in a world that only rewards bold avatars. But Wesley insisted that the circumcised heart is first and foremost humble: grounded, honest, and unafraid to be small.

Wesley wrote:

“The first great channel wherein his mercy flows is humility. So long as we are truly humble, we may be fully assured, that the Giver of every good gift will withhold from us no manner of thing that is good. But as soon as pride creeps in, as soon as we begin to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, then our Lord withdraws His grace; He leaves us to ourselves; and the very first breath of self-sufficiency blasts our hopes, and the strength we fancied we had is turned into weakness.” — John Wesley, Sermon 19

In 2025, humility might mean refusing to post the hot take, resisting the urge to project moral clarity when your heart is still a muddle of confusion. It might mean confessing publicly that you don’t know what to say, or better yet, saying nothing at all. It looks like conversations in living rooms, not debates in comment threads; it looks like small acts of repentance no one but God sees. The internet will call it weakness. I call it holiness.

Faith Beyond Optimization

The circumcised heart also trusts God more than reason or sense. In Wesley’s day, that meant a dependence on grace rather than human merit. In ours, it means something like refusing to treat faith as a lifehack.

I can’t speak for your context (reader), but Austin is obsessed with optimization—optimize your productivity, your health, your morning routine, your emotional state. Faith, in this culture, becomes just another lever to pull for self-improvement. Pray so you’ll feel calmer. Worship so you’ll feel centered. Read the Bible to boost your leadership.

But Wesley’s faith is not a hack. It is raw dependence: choosing to trust God when outcomes don’t improve, when the algorithm doesn’t reward you, and when prayer feels like talking into the void.

Eugene Peterson called this kind of life “a long obedience in the same direction.” Faith means anchoring your life in realities unseen and unverifiable by metrics—acting as if God is nearer than your devices, and more real than your feelings. In a culture of self-optimization, faith looks like surrender and it doesn’t make sense.

Hope in an Age of Outrage

If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that rage spreads faster than truth. Outrage feels powerful. It gives us a rush of meaning and solidarity. But hope? Hope feels slow, boring, and naïve. And yet Wesley insisted that a circumcised heart is marked by hope—a steady confidence that God is working redemption even when evidence seems to point the other way.

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”
— Desmond Tutu

Hope refuses to buy into the news cycle of despair. It refuses to believe the future belongs to the loudest tribe or the strongest army of followers. Hope has the audacity to plant seeds in cracked concrete, to build communities of justice and mercy that outlast headlines, to imagine God renewing a generation more wounded than we can fathom. Hope is not optimism. It is not wishful thinking. It is patient resistance to despair.

Hope may be the greatest act of courage in our world today.

Charity in a Divided World

Finally, Wesley names charity—love—as the crown of the circumcised heart. Not sentimental love, but costly, embodied, enemy-crossing love. For him, charity was the active outpouring of the inward work of God. For us, it is the only antidote to the tribalism that threatens to tear us apart.

We are conditioned to cancel those we despise, to demonize those we disagree with, to reduce opponents to characters of evil. Charity refuses this reduction. It insists on seeing a neighbor where we see only an enemy. It moves toward the other in embodied presence, not digital posturing.

To choose love when all of our flesh wants to attack is quite possibly the greatest and most challenging of Jesus’ teachings.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said:

“Love begins when we see our brother or sister as the person for whom Christ died.”

Imagine if Christians were known for this—love that is inconvenient, uncool, and impossible to fake online. What if we were known for a love that is circumcised into the very flesh of our hearts.

A Call to Renewal

Wesley’s old sermon still cuts. It cuts through our noise, our outrage, our performance, and it dares us to ask: what has God done to your heart? Has it been cut open, or is your religion still a matter of appearances?

The temptation of our time is to be loud, to have an opinion, to get on the right side of the argument, and to prove it with the right words. But the invitation of the Spirit is different. It is to be circumcised in the heart—to let humility, faith, hope, and charity take root where anger and vanity once lived.

The question is not, “What will I say about the outrage of the week?” but, “What has God said about me? …and how will I live differently because of that?”

The world is not waiting for more hot takes from Christians.
It is waiting for a truly renovated heart.

For most of my career, I assumed being “called to ministry” meant being a pastor.

I’ve always loved Scripture, cared deeply about people, and longed to see the church flourish. Pastors, after all, are the ones who walk with people through the highs and lows of life, who keep everyone together, who carry a steady, shepherding presence — with the ability to lead their people from place to place. And so I’ve always done my best to take on that role.

But the deeper I go into ministry, the more I discover a constant ache: I’ve never seemed to fit this mold. While others found joy in maintaining programs or shepherding the flock along predictable rhythms, I always found myself restless, unsettled, almost allergic to the safety of it all. While others celebrated growth in attendance, salvations, and baptisms, I couldn’t help but notice the cracks in the foundation.

For years I carried this restlessness as a flaw, something broken in me.

“Why can’t I just be content with the current system and just play the game like everyone else?”

So I assumed I was a bad pastor. Only recently have I found language for it. Reading Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things and Alan Hirsch’s work on the fivefold gifting, I realized I’m not primarily a pastor — I am a prophet. And prophets, at least in the way the American church imagines them, don’t have much of a home.

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What a Prophet Actually Is

In our culture, the word prophet has been reduced to caricature. Some imagine a fortune teller with mystical visions of the future. Others picture an angry preacher, shouting about the end times with a placard on the street corner.

But biblically, prophets are neither crystal ball gazers nor perpetual doomsayers. They are voices, mouthpieces, indicator lights, and warning signals that something is off. Their task is to remind the people of God who they are and to call them back when they have lost their way. Their core burden is alignment — and when things are off, their job is to alert the body.

Prophets are like the headaches and back pains I recently started getting. TikTok says it’s my pillow. My counselor says it’s tied to my childhood. My trainer says I need to get off my phone and move more. I personally think it’s the three children constantly jumping on my back. Either way, the post-30 ache is real and the pain simply points to a deeper problem.

“The prophets were religious deconstructionists. Without some deconstruction, everything becomes idolatrous.” —Richard Rohr

Jeremiah doesn’t predict distant events as much as he laments the present condition of Judah. Amos thunders about injustice in the marketplaces and courts. Nathan confronts David not with vague symbols but with piercing truth about his sin.

“But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort.” —1 Corinthians 14:3

The prophet is not obsessed with tomorrow. They simply know how to take inventory of today and instinctively prophesy about what is to come.

The Unique Burden

Of course, this vocation is not glamorous. To see what others cannot see sounds noble until you realize it also means carrying grief others do not feel.

“His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” —Jeremiah 20:9

The prophet lives in a tension between despair and hope. On one hand, they see the compromise of the people of God with stunning clarity. On the other hand, they glimpse a future healed and restored — and that vision keeps them from despair.

The prophet is always weeping, always dreaming. This is Rohr’s central idea in The Tears of Things.

The Cost of Prophecy

And the cost is high. Rohr makes a piercing observation:

“Prophets can and should never be paid for their role in the church. After all, their payment is their obedience.” —Richard Rohr

The moment money is tied to prophecy, the temptation emerges to soften the message, to calculate the cost, to adjust the tone for the sake of security. Prophets cannot serve two masters.

This doesn’t mean prophets should never work, eat, or have livelihoods. It means their truest calling cannot be commodified. The prophetic word is not for sale.

Jesus himself hinted at this when he lamented:

“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” —Luke 4:24

To step into the prophetic vocation is to embrace misunderstanding, rejection, and loneliness. It is to love God’s people enough to say the thing they least want to hear.

Why the Church Still Needs Prophets

And yet—this is precisely why the church cannot survive without prophets.

In America, we have frameworks for pastors, teachers, evangelists, even apostles in some spaces. But prophets? They are tolerated at best and silenced at worst. We fear them because they unsettle our comfort. We dismiss them because their vision doesn’t fit our budget or five-year plan.

But without prophets, the church becomes sentimental, addicted to comfort and niceness. Or she becomes institutional, driven by survival and efficiency. Without prophets, we drift into cultural captivity without even noticing it.

Alan Hirsch puts it bluntly:

“When the prophetic is absent, false prophets always rise to fill the void.” —Alan Hirsch

And isn’t that what we’re seeing? Loud voices promising political salvation, cultural dominance, or personal prosperity. These counterfeits are filling the space the church once reserved for holy truth-tellers.

Rohr says hauntingly:

“If the church won’t create space for prophets, the enemy will.” —Richard Rohr

A Holy Invitation

So perhaps it’s time we reclaimed this forgotten gift. Not the caricature, not the celebrity platform, not the doom-scrolling internet prophet, but the real thing: men and women who love God enough to grieve, who love the church enough to wound her with words that can heal, who love the world enough to call it to something better.

They are the remnant and outliers. The few, not the many. They are the ones who don’t simply get angry about the injustices of our world, but those who are willing to let injustice seep into their bones until it produces grief. They act first, then prophesy — not the other way around.

The church does not need fewer prophets — we need healthy ones. Not to burn everything down, but to burn like a refining fire.

“For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap.” —Malachi 3:2

Not to despise the church, but to help her become radiant again. This is the essential role of the prophet.

And so here is my invitation to the Church: may we invite the disruptors. Not without wisdom or their proper place, but by giving them a voice and weighing their words in light of Scripture and eternity.

Bring them into the decision-making process. Listen to their concerns. Invite them into your elder meetings. Give them the pulpit once or twice a year.

It might be uncomfortable. But I promise the short-term discomfort will save you a trip to the organizational hospital later on down the road and — more importantly — deeper into God’s heart.

When I worked as a trainer and manager in coffee, I learned that complaints about pay were rarely just about pay.

At Medici Coffee, whenever someone came to me grumbling about wages, I’d invite them into the mop bucket closet—the smelly, dirty, usually moist, and little makeshift counseling booth where hard conversations happened. For the first five or ten minutes, we’d air out the frustration: It’s not fair. We work so hard. Why don’t they pay us more?

But eventually I’d pause, look them in the eye, and ask a different question: It sounds like pay is tight lately, but how are you doing?

And that’s when the tears would usually come. Because what they were really aching for wasn’t just a bigger paycheck—it was recognition. Dignity. To be noticed.

“Fairness” was just the dashboard light. The deeper issue was a cry for justice: Do I matter? Does anyone see me?

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What We Really Mean When We Say “Fair”

C.S. Lewis once observed:

“The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”

What Lewis is saying is this: every human being carries a kind of glory, a worth so weighty it should change how we see and treat them. To honor that glory takes humility, because it asks us to carry the burden of someone else’s value.

And isn’t that what sits beneath our constant cries of “That’s not fair”? Fairness, at its core, is about more than rules or equal shares. It’s a deep longing to know: Does anyone see my worth? Do I matter enough for someone to carry it with me?

A Vineyard and a Paycheck

Jesus once told a story about workers in a vineyard. Some worked all day, sweating in the heat from sunrise. Others were hired later, at lunchtime. Still others came near the end of the day, working barely an hour before quitting time.

When the foreman lined them up to pay wages, everyone received the same amount.

And the all-day workers were furious. It’s not fair!

But the master responded:

“Friend, I’m not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for this wage? Take your pay and go. Don’t I have the right to be generous with my own money?” (Matthew 20:13–15)

The scandal of the parable is that the landowner isn’t “fair;” he is generous.

The Difference Between Fairness and Justice

If we’re honest, we hate that story. We’ve all stood in the shoes of the all-day worker. We’ve felt the sting of comparison, the burn of being overlooked, the resentment of watching someone else receive what we think we deserve.

But the parable isn’t about wages any more than my mop bucket conversations were. It’s about something deeper.

It’s about the way God’s justice breaks through our obsession with fairness.

“God’s justice is about putting the whole world right, not simply about balancing the scales of reward and punishment.” — N.T. Wright

The Scandal of Grace

Here’s the truth: we think we want fairness, but we don’t.

Because if God were truly “fair,” we’d all be in trouble. Fairness would mean every hidden sin exposed. Every selfish motive counted. Every failure tallied up.

“The wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23)

If God were fair, that’s exactly what we’d all get.

But God is not fair—He is just.

That difference is everything.

Justice means God doesn’t ignore evil. He doesn’t sweep sin under the rug. But instead of giving us what we deserve, He takes what we deserve onto Himself at the cross.

In Christ, God is both “just and the justifier” (Romans 3:26). He makes things right without abandoning mercy.

Tim Keller once put it like this:

“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

Why You Don’t Want God to Be Fair

Fairness is safe because it’s measurable. You get what you earn.

But grace? Grace is scandalous. Grace throws out the scorecard. Grace pays the one-hour worker the same as the twelve-hour worker. Grace welcomes the thief on the cross into paradise at the last minute.

And grace offends our sense of fairness—until we remember we’re not the all-day workers in the vineyard. We’re the last-minute laborers, barely hanging on, desperate for a chance.

So no, you don’t actually want God to be fair.

Because fairness gives you death. But justice gives you Jesus.

Fairness gives you wages. But justice gives you mercy.

Fairness demands what you deserve. But justice delights to give you more than you could ever earn.

And that’s the best news you’ll ever hear: God is just, but He is not fair.

The other day my family and I were talking about new vacation spots for next year. We stumbled on an island in Michigan where cars aren’t allowed. You either walk, ride a bike, or take a horse-drawn carriage. Just looking at the pictures made me feel like I could hear the quiet.

The next morning at work, I mentioned it to one of my younger coworkers — a guy in his early twenties. We started imagining what life would be like if the whole world moved at that pace. No rush hour. No constant hurry. More time to stop and talk to your neighbors.

Somewhere in that conversation, we drifted toward technology. That’s when he said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since:

“Yeah, I don’t think a lot of people my age actually like our phones. But like… we don’t know anything different.”

Here’s someone who grew up with smartphones and social media, saying out loud what many of us feel: we’re not in love with this pace, this constant connection, this digital noise. But we’ve built our lives around it so completely that we can’t picture anything else.

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The Exhaustion We Don’t Talk About

It’s not just a hunch. A 2024 Deloitte survey found that over 80% of Gen Z and nearly as many millennials wish they could disconnect more easily from their devices. Google searches for “digital detox” have jumped over 270% in the last five years. People aren’t just annoyed — they’re tired.

Researchers even have a word for it:

The American Psychological Association found that nearly half of Gen Z say technology makes it harder to maintain good mental health.

I’ve seen it in conversations, too. Ghosting — the cutting off of contact without explanation — has become a cultural norm. Studies show over half of young adults have ghosted someone, and even more have been ghosted themselves. Psychologists say it’s often less about cruelty and more about overwhelm. When your brain is running at full capacity, the easiest option is to step away entirely.

It’s ironic. The tools that promised to make life easier, faster, and more connected are the same ones we secretly wish we could live without.

Chains We’ve Learned to Live With

It reminds me of the Israelites in Exodus. God had just freed them from Egypt — split the Red Sea, crushed Pharaoh’s army, set them on the road to the Promised Land. But almost immediately, they start complaining:

“If only we had died in Egypt,” they said. “At least there we had food!” (Ex. 16:3)

Slavery was brutal, but it was predictable. They knew the routine. They knew where the next meal was coming from. Freedom was unfamiliar and risky.

Our Egypt isn’t brick kilns and slave drivers — it’s the dopamine rush of the notification, the predictable comfort of the scroll, the easy escape of distraction. We know it wears us down. We see what it does to our attention, our friendships, our souls. But freedom feels harder than what we’ve always known.

Life Beyond the Red Sea

In Scripture, God never frees people just from something — He frees them for something. For rest. For relationship. For worship.

Maybe our Promised Land isn’t a tech-free existence. It’s a world where technology takes its proper place — serving human flourishing instead of running our lives.

Freedom often begins in the small choices we make every day. Maybe it looks like this:

• Leaving your phone in another room for an evening, just to let your mind rest.

• Taking a walk without earbuds, noticing the world around you.

• Actually calling a friend instead of texting, just to hear their voice.

• Picking up a hobby that lives completely offline—something real and slow.

None of these make us holy, but they create space — space to breathe, to be present, to connect deeply, and maybe even to find joy in moments we’ve long forgotten.

I think about that Michigan island a lot. I haven’t been there yet. But just knowing it exists reminds me that other ways of living are possible. The chains we’ve grown used to aren’t the only story available to us.

And maybe the first step toward freedom is daring to believe that there’s life — good life — on the other side of the Red Sea.

I used to think people like him weren’t interested in God anymore.

He was the store manager of our café on the Drag—just steps from the University of Texas. He was bright, detail-oriented, deeply kind, mid-twenties, gay, Hispanic, raised in the Valley, passionate about social justice, and one of my best friends at work.

One slow afternoon, we struck up a conversation about what he’d been reading. My friend said he was exploring different gods and religious systems. But it wasn’t in a combative way—it was filled with genuine wonder.

“You’re a pastor, right?” he said.
“I’d love to hear about your God.”

We talked for a while—about Christianity, about his questions, about what each tradition teaches. Then he said something I’ll never forget:

“I don’t know if I can get completely on board with everything your God—Jesus—teaches quite yet.

But I just can’t deny that I know maybe four Christians, and they all work here at Medici. They’re without a doubt the most loving, caring, hardworking, and dependable employees I have.

And you’re one of them, Bryson! You’re like a little lightbulb in the store every time you walk in.

So as much as I may not quite agree with your God yet… the followers make it really appealing.”

That moment didn’t feel like a breakthrough — but it did feel like a glimpse.

A glimpse of what’s coming.

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From Post-Christian to Post-Secular

In a recent episode of the Rebuilders podcast, Mark Sayers explains something I’ve felt bubbling beneath the surface for years—but didn’t quite have words for until now.

We are not just in a post-Christian culture anymore. We’re entering a post-secular one.

In post-Christian culture, religion was seen as something we’ve evolved beyond. We had science. We had reason. God was fine for the past—but irrelevant now. The church was full of scandals, legalism, hypocrisy. It was the age of deconstruction and cynicism. And it was filled with exit interviews.

And for many millennials like me, that made sense. We grew up with Christianity in the air—but not always in the fruit. We knew its weekly rituals, but not always its power. We saw enough inconsistency to walk away without regret.

But Gen Z is different.

They didn’t grow up in church pews. They don’t carry the same baggage. In fact, many of them never really left faith—because they never inherited it to begin with. And that makes them surprisingly open.

Not gullible — just open.

Sayers notes that the post-secular mindset doesn’t draw a hard line between the natural and supernatural. The secular world loved that division—God was out there, the “real” world was in here. But Gen Z is saying something far more agnostic and humble:

“We actually don’t know what’s real. Maybe there’s more to life than what we can see. Maybe we need wonder again.”

The Quiet Return

The data backs this up.

• A UK study by the Bible Society found that weekly church attendance among Gen Z men rose from 4% in 2018 to 21% in 2024—a fivefold increase in six years.

• Pew reports that Gen Z is the first generation in decades not to show accelerated religious decline. In fact, affiliation rates are holding steady—and even improving in some regions.

• Barna’s research reveals that most Gen Zers still believe in a higher power, even if they’re unsure what to call it. One in four say they prayed in the last week. The spiritual instinct is still alive.

But the most compelling evidence isn’t statistical. In my opinion, it’s relational!

It’s stories like my manager on the Drag. Or the Gen Z coworker who asks about church after seeing your integrity. Or the young woman who comes to faith because her roommate loves her with a kind of selflessness she’s never seen before.

The church isn’t “winning” again. But something is shifting.

What If This Is the Purification?

When cultural Christianity fades, something strange happens.

You lose the crowd.
But you also lose the hypocrisy.

And what’s left… is Jesus.

It reminds me of the early church in Acts. Buildings existed, but not required. Budgets existed, but were defined by generosity. They were a strange, resilient people—rooted in love, marked by holiness, willing to die before they would dominate.

In this new generation, the pressure to perform is gone. The inheritance of cultural religion is gone. And yet, the seed of spiritual hunger remains.

What if the church’s cultural collapse wasn’t the end—but the pruning?

What if Gen Z is being drawn, not to nostalgia, but to authenticity?

A Word to the Church

To the millennials who are still licking their wounds: I see you. I am you. You know the pain of spiritual manipulation. You’ve sat through hollow sermons. You’ve questioned if the whole thing is worth rebuilding.

But I want to ask you gently:

What if your pain prepared you to be the kind of Christian this generation can trust?

What if your story could be a bridge?

To the church leaders still leading faithfully: Please don’t sleep through this moment. The revival might not come through your programming. It might come through the quiet witness of a barista, a neighbor, a friend.

This isn’t the time for louder sermons. It’s the time for brighter lives.

To everyone watching this shift: Lean in to the Spirit. Don’t underestimate what God can do in a post-secular world.

The people we thought weren’t interested in God…
They might just be watching to see if His people are any different.

Not Revival—But Something

This isn’t revival — at least not yet.

It’s quieter than that.
It’s slower.
Less dramatic.

But I can’t shake the feeling that something powerful is happening.

Jesus is not being broadcast in the headlines. He’s being whispered in conversations. He’s being discovered in apartments and cafes. He’s being reintroduced through lives that look like Him again.

So may we be the kind of people whose lives stir curiosity, whose presence invites wonder, and whose love makes Jesus believable again.

May we all be lightbulbs.

A few days ago, I saw a post in a Wesleyan pastors' group that hit harder than I expected. It was an announcement: a Wesleyan church had been closed down. Not because of scandal or theological drift. But because the denomination didn’t see any future promise in the church.

Now, to be clear, I don’t know the full story. I trust that the leaders involved made the best decision they could with the data they had. There are always complexities. And I’m not here to point fingers.

But I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that something about it isn’t right. Maybe it’s just the language being used. Maybe it’s the lack of comment from the denomination. Maybe it’s that I’ve seen firsthand how churches that look “unsuccessful” from the outside are often holy ground inside. Maybe it’s that I’ve experienced — firsthand — the preferential treatment of the denomination to overlook the abuse from large church pastors and their staffs. Or maybe it’s that we’ve subtly adopted metrics that sound more like a VC firm than the Kingdom of God.

Whatever the reason, that story unsettled me enough to make me sit down and ask myself a deeper question:
Why am I still Wesleyan?

It’s a fair question. I’ve never fit neatly into any denominational mold. I’ve flirted with Anglicanism. I’m uncomfortable with hierarchy. I bristle at performance-based Christianity. And like many in my generation, I find myself increasingly disillusioned with what evangelicalism has become—its obsession with platform, its thin theology, its conflation with political power.

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But I remain Wesleyan. Not out of loyalty to a certain brand, but because I believe there’s something in the roots of this movement that still has the power to renew the Church.

Here are three reasons why:

1. Because Holiness Isn’t an Escape—It’s an Incarnation

For much of my early faith, holiness was a word soaked in anxiety. It meant rules. Distance. Perfectionism. Holiness was like the gated community for the moral elite—pure, polished, and safe from the chaos of the world.

But Wesley taught me something different.

He believed that holiness wasn’t about retreat—it was about presence. Not passive purity, but Christlike wholeness. As he wrote, “There is no holiness but social holiness.” In other words, holiness doesn’t hide from the world. It steps into it.

For Wesley, perfection wasn’t a static arrival point but a dynamic process—what he called Christian perfection. It was about being perfected in love: love of God, love of neighbor, love that costs something. Holiness, in this light, becomes a kind of sacred courage—a willingness to embody Christ in the grittiness of the world’s pain.

This vision of holiness gives me room to breathe. It makes sense of the tension I feel as a pastor in Austin—too “liberal” for some because I affirm women in leadership and believe justice is central to the gospel, but too “conservative” for others because I hold a traditional sexual ethic. Wesley’s holiness doesn’t play the culture war game. It offers a third way: the narrow road of Christlike love.

2. Because Grace Is Power, Not Permission

Most people treat grace as if it were divine leniency. God letting me off the hook. A reset button for when I messed up.

But again, Wesley reframed this definition.

He spoke of prevenient grace—God’s presence before we ever respond. He wrote of justifying grace—God’s forgiveness and acceptance. But most transformative for me was his vision of sanctifying grace—the Spirit’s ongoing work to make us new.

Grace, in this framework, isn’t passive. It’s active, it’s powerful, and it’s the very divine energy that forms us into the likeness of Christ.

As Dallas Willard once said,

“Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.”

Wesleyan theology offers that rare combination: a fierce belief in grace and an equally fierce belief that grace changes people. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

And in a time when many churches seem stuck in cycles of shallow discipleship or moral burnout, I find myself drawn again and again to this robust, grace-fueled vision of spiritual transformation.

3. Because Tradition Anchors Me—and the Front Lines Inspire Me

I love that Wesley never left the Anglican Church. I love that he held onto liturgy, creeds, and sacramental life. I love that he honored the Church Fathers and trusted the wisdom of history. In a world that often sees tradition as dead weight, I see it as ballast. It keeps me steady. It reminds me that I’m not the first one to walk this road.

But here’s the beauty of Wesley’s genius: he didn’t just preserve tradition—he democratized it!

He believed in the priesthood of all believers. He trained lay preachers, empowered women, organized societies, bands, and classes—not as a novelty, but as a necessity. He brought the fire of the gospel to the front lines—miners, field hands, prisoners. He didn’t build a stage; he built a movement.

I worry sometimes that the Wesleyan Church has forgotten this. That we’ve traded movement for machinery. That we’ve become infatuated with “growth” and “scale” in ways that feel indistinguishable from the worst instincts of evangelicalism. That somewhere along the way, we stopped trusting the slow work of God.

But when I read Wesley’s journals, when I remember how his theology was forged in the streets and not in the seminar room—I remember why I said yes to this in the first place.

As Alan Hirsch reminds us,

“Movements are not led from the center but from the margins.”

And I still believe the Wesleyan tradition has the raw materials to become a movement again—if we’ll return to the vision.

A Final Word

So back to that church that was closed. I don’t know if the decision was right or wrong. But I do know that our metrics for what counts as “future promise” are worth revisiting. Because if Christ is the head of the Church, then every congregation—no matter how small, tired, or unlikely—has resurrection potential.

I’m still Wesleyan because I believe holiness is possible. Because grace is powerful. Because tradition and innovation aren’t enemies—they’re partners. I’m still Wesleyan because I think we’ve forgotten who we are. And I want to remember.

Not to be nostalgic — but to be faithful.

We don’t need another evangelical clone. We need a Spirit-empowered, grace-fueled, justice-driven community of holy love.

And I still believe that’s what we were meant to be.

At the height of World War II, as bombs rained down over London, a young Oxford professor named C.S. Lewis stood before a hall of students and gave a lecture entitled “Learning in War-Time.” Many questioned the purpose of theology and study in a world unraveling at the seams. But Lewis reminded them that while war changes circumstances, it doesn’t change our ultimate purpose: to seek truth, form souls, and prepare for eternity.

In the rubble of the world, the teacher still teaches.

Because truth still matters.
Because formation still matters.
And because ideas still shape our world.

(World War II was the perfect example of ideas shaping our world.)

The final gift in the fivefold framework is the Teacher. And while apostles launch movements, prophets cry out for purity, evangelists invite people in, and shepherds tend to the heart, it is the teacher who ensures the Church is grounded. Rooted. Shaped by the truth.

You may not always notice them. But without them, the whole body begins to drift.

As Alan Hirsch says:

“Without the teaching function, the apostolic and prophetic are ungrounded, the evangelistic is shallow, and the pastoral is misdirected.”

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The Role of the Teacher

Teachers are obsessed with clarity. They want people to not just hear the truth but understand it, wrestle with it, and live it.

They bring weight to the Word. They connect the dots between Leviticus and Romans, between cultural questions and ancient wisdom. They protect the faith from distortion and cultivate theological imagination for the people of God.

If the shepherd carries the person, the teacher carries the truth.
But not as a concept—as a calling.

You’ll often find teachers slowing things down while others speed things up. They ask questions that get beneath slogans and surface answers. They’re always making sure the “why” is never lost in the “what.” And they’re burden is making theology sing in the lives of ordinary people.

They care very deeply about context, they’ll notice the nuance, and they refuse to weaponize the Bible for partisan gain. Teachers delight in helping others marvel at Scripture the way a gardener marvels at soil—always digging deeper, always discovering something hidden.

The Teacher’s Temptation

But every strength has a shadow.

And for the teacher, the danger isn’t just arrogance — it’s armor.

Matt Chandler once described how Scripture became his shield. In counseling sessions, his counselor would quote verses to comfort him. But instead of receiving the words, he deflected them. Twisted them. Used his deep knowledge to avoid vulnerability. It took a different approach—still deeply Christian, just outside his typical paradigm—to finally pierce the armor.

This is the great paradox: teachers know the Word so well, they can hide behind it.

They can bury their wounds in commentary.
They can sidestep healing by staying in their heads.
They can preach what they haven’t yet lived.

As Alan Hirsch writes:

“An overemphasis on doctrine and theology can lead to dry intellectualism, or even Gnosticism, if not constantly re-integrated into the full life of the church.”

When teachers are unformed, they become defensive, dogmatic, or dismissive of mystery. They mistake intellectual clarity for spiritual maturity. And they forget that knowing about God is not the same as knowing God.

The Beauty of the Teacher

But when healthy—oh, the teacher is a gift.

They don’t just explain Scripture with beauty. They embody it!
“The Word became flesh” is no longer something only Jesus did in the book of John, but rather, an invitation for all of us today.
Great teachers have a divine gift to awaken wonder.

They invite the Church to be thoughtful in a reactive age.
They preserve the ancient paths in a world obsessed with novelty.
They help us see that orthodoxy is not a prison—but it’s actually a beautiful and necessary pathway to joy.

The best teachers seek depth: forming 12 is a higher priority than impressing 1,000. And their greatest delight is not in being admired—but in seeing the lights come on in someone else’s soul.

They remind us that the Word still speaks.
That the Scripture still hold true.
And that truth still has the power to set us free.

For the Teachers Reading This

You are the ones who carry the depth and breadth of God’s truth for the sake of the Church’s health.

You are the ones who slow us down, steady our pace, and clarify the message.

Don’t lose heart when it feels like no one’s listening. Don’t give up when nuance is mocked and clicks are king. We need your mind! But even more, we need your wholeness.

Because the world doesn’t just need smarter Christians — It needs formed in the way of love ones.

So please keep learning. Keep digging. Keep delighting in the Word. Because the world needs it!

And above all—let it pierce you first.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the world saw rooftops, helicopters, and rising water. But not everything made the news.

A small church, led by a quiet man named Pastor Louis, opened its doors—not for a service, but for survival. He turned the sanctuary into a shelter and called every member he could.

People came with whatever they had. And Louis moved quietly among them. He prayed. He listened. And he stayed when many would have left.

Long after the storm passed and the cameras left, he was still walking door to door—checking in, helping rebuild, reminding people they hadn’t been forgotten.

The church didn’t grow. No platform came from it. But something sacred happened.

The shepherd stayed.

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The shepherd is the one who knows the sheep by name.

In Scripture, it’s very important that we understand “shepherd” is not a job title—it’s a posture. The word translated as pastor literally means shepherd, but it’s been stretched so far in modern church culture that it’s nearly lost its meaning.

Today, we use “pastor” for everything from visionaries to administrators. But biblically, a shepherd isn’t a CEO, strategist, or brand-builder. A shepherd is someone who moves slowly enough to notice who’s hurting. Someone who walks behind the flock, listening for the sound of a limp. Someone who leads through valleys, not just into vision.

Timothy Laniak puts it simply:

“The biblical shepherd was not simply a religious figure. He was a provider, protector, and guide. His authority came not from position but from proximity.”

In Ezekiel 34, God confronts Israel’s leaders:
“You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured... you have ruled them harshly and brutally.”
So He makes a promise: “I Myself will shepherd My people.”

And in John 10, Jesus fulfills it.
“I am the good shepherd,” He says—not because He’s efficient or eloquent, but because He knows His sheep. He calls them by name. He lays down His life for them.

Alan Hirsch describes the shepherd this way:

“They are the soul-healers of the community. They create environments of trust, safety, and belonging.”

That’s the shape of this gift:
Protection.
Care.
Guidance.

Eugene Peterson said it best:

“The pastor’s question is, not ‘How can I get this person to do what I want them to do?’ but ‘Who is this person, and what is God doing in their life?’”

True shepherds don’t just lead people somewhere.
They walk with them the whole way there.

The Burden of the Shepherd

Every gift carries a burden.

The apostle dreams of new territory.
The prophet aches for truth.
The evangelist burns for the lost to come home.

But the shepherd?
They carry people.

Not theoretically. Not broadly. But personally—name by name, story by story.

They remember the divorce no one’s talking about.
They feel the weight of unanswered texts and wonder what silence might be hiding.
They notice when someone’s eyes go dim, when the laughter softens, when the body doesn’t show up to the circle.

It’s not just that they care—it’s that they can’t not care.

Henri Nouwen once wrote, “Who can take away suffering without entering it?”
That’s the shepherd’s ache. They don’t run from pain. They walk into it.

Shepherds feel the fracture of disconnection in their bones. They don’t just want people to believe the gospel. They want people to belong inside of it.

That’s the burden:
To sit in the slow work of belonging.
To keep the circle open long after others have moved on.
To hold people together—not by force, but by faithfulness.

When the Shepherd Gift Goes Unhealthy

Some shepherds confuse peacekeeping with peacemaking. They avoid conflict, silence tension, and call it gentleness—but really, they’re just afraid of being uncomfortable. They’ve learned to equate quiet with unity, but beneath the surface, trust erodes and unresolved wounds deepen.

Others carry everyone’s emotions but never call anyone higher. They confuse comfort with care, and over time, start enabling instead of discipling. They offer presence without challenge, compassion without boundaries—and eventually burn out under the weight of carrying what was never theirs to hold.

Still others slowly close the gate. Burned by betrayal or overwhelmed by need, they shrink their circle to only the people who feel safe—protecting themselves instead of the flock. They keep showing up, but with less openness, less risk. Leadership becomes about managing their own exposure, not pursuing the wholeness of others.

Each of these is a distortion of the gift. They begin with good intentions. But when shepherds lead from fear instead of love, people may feel comforted—but they rarely get free.

“When we operate in our gift without being formed by the character of Christ, we end up protecting ourselves instead of others. The gift then becomes more about preserving safety than creating healing.”
— Alan Hirsch

The Beauty of a Healthy Shepherd

A healthy shepherd feels like safety.

Like someone who remembers your kid’s name, prays without posting about it, and sits with you through the whole hospital stay. Someone who doesn’t just show up—they stay in.

They see wounds that aren’t visible. They fight for peace that’s deeper than comfort. They speak gently, but with gravity. They ask the second question, and the third.

When shepherds are formed by love—not fear—they create the kind of culture where people actually heal. Where grief is honored. Where growth happens slowly and deeply. Where discipleship is more than a program—it’s a shared life.

Jesus is the model. He is the Shepherd who searches for the one, lays down His life for the many, and leads us with both rod and staff—comfort and correction, presence and power.

When shepherds reflect Him, the Church becomes less like an organization and more like a home.

Where Are the Shepherds?

They’re not always on church staff.

They might be the trauma counselor who remembers your story better than you do.
The friend who drops off soup when you don’t respond to texts.
The teacher who sees the lonely kid and makes space at the lunch table.
The neighbor who notices you haven’t been outside in days—and checks in.

Shepherds exist everywhere love lingers. Wherever people are protected, remembered, and gently led toward wholeness—you’ll find their fingerprints.

Don’t mistake their quietness for absence. Their gift doesn’t need a microphone. It just needs space.

*Personal note:
From the time I first wrote this until now, a close friend of mine—someone deeply gifted in shepherding—pulled me aside after a long day at work and asked me how I was really doing through a difficult transition. Most people had only heard me mention it briefly and didn’t think much of it. I’d unintentionally sent the message, “It’s not a big deal to me, so it shouldn’t be a big deal to you either.”

But this friend heard the news, paused to feel it for themselves, held it in their heart, and later found a way to gently check in with me—someone in leadership—just to make sure I was okay. And the truth is, I wasn’t.

It was strange, because in my mind, it was a small thing. Professionally, I usually guard my feelings closely. But something about the timing, the way they asked, and the presence they brought made me want to stop and open up—sharing feelings I hadn’t even fully acknowledged myself.

After that conversation, they thanked me, reminded me of God’s goodness and His big-picture faithfulness, and I left feeling a deep sense of peace wash over me.

My friends, the gift of the shepherd is a rare and precious thing—one that every workplace, every church, every family desperately needs. Because none of us are as honest with ourselves as we think. Shepherds have the patience and the grace to gently see what’s hidden, call it out, and bring us face to face with the truth within ourselves. That is a beautiful, healing gift.

In the 1960s, Jackie Pullinger—a young woman from England—set sail for Hong Kong with little more than a sense that God was calling her. She ended up in the Kowloon Walled City, one of the most dangerous slums in the world, home to heroin addicts, gang leaders, and those society had long abandoned.

She didn’t arrive with a polished plan or any kind of platform. She came fully and wholly with presence. She walked the alleys, listened to stories, and laid hands on the sick. She prayed for addicts through their withdrawals. She befriended gang members others crossed the street to avoid. Her Cantonese was broken. Her budget was meager. But her heart was full—and it caught fire.

Addicts were healed. Gang leaders were baptized. And the gospel wasn’t just proclaimed; it was demonstrated. Never from a stage, but on the floor of crowded apartments and the corners of back alleys. The Walled City—a place the world had written off—became holy ground.

Jackie never set out to build a ministry. She simply couldn’t ignore the ache in her gut or the Spirit in her chest. And through her, the evangelist gift revealed what it was always meant to do: carry the presence of Jesus into forgotten places and call people home.

What Is an Evangelist, Really?

The word evangelist comes from euangelion—the bringer of good news. But the evangelist isn’t just a deliverer of doctrine. They are a person gripped by joy. Someone who has seen beauty so clearly that they can’t help but share it.

Evangelists are those whose hearts burn with the memory of their own rescue. They don’t speak because they’re trying to win arguments—they speak because they remember what it was like to be lost, and they’ve tasted what it means to be found. Their lives are a kind of invitation: “Come and see.”

Alan Hirsch calls them:

“The infectious communicators of the gospel story... storytellers whose lives are the message.”
— 5Q

“The recruiters to the cause, the naturally infectious people who are able to enlist others into what they are doing. Their infectiousness draws people in.”
—The Forgotten Ways

Their gift isn’t just in what they say, but in how they live. Evangelists are often magnetic not because they try to be, but because grace has marked them so tangibly. They listen well. They laugh and connect with people easily. They believe God is still reaching people, no matter how dark the situation—and they live like it’s true.

Their burden isn’t just that people hear the gospel; it’s more so that people would feel the nearness of God. That no one would be left out. That those who think they’re too far gone would hear, in their own language, the good news of home.

Evangelists are bridges. They stand in the gap between cynicism and wonder, between brokenness and hope. And in every conversation, every moment of welcome, every quiet, unglamorous act of witness, they are whispering the same eternal invitation: there’s more for you. There’s mercy here. Come and see.

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An Imbalance in the Body

If you grew up in the West—especially in evangelical spaces—you’ve likely felt the residue of revivals. Tent meetings, altar calls, and crusades were once the defining marks of spiritual vitality. The air was thick with urgency, the aisles filled with movement, the sermons soaked in passion.

And in many ways, it worked!

People met Jesus, whole families were changed, churches grew. The evangelist’s voice rang clear—and it woke people up.

But somewhere along the way, we confused emotion with transformation. We measured fruit by immediacy. And the very people who helped light the fire were often left alone to keep it burning.

The altar call came and went, but no one followed up. The revival faded, but no roots had taken hold. We were moved to tears on Sunday, but returned to confusion on Monday. Decisions for Christ were counted, but disciples were never made.

The evangelist was platformed, but they were never pastored. They were handed microphones, but rarely given mentors. And the rest of the fivefold was expected to orbit around their gift instead of grounding it.

So while the evangelist’s passion sparked movements, it often left in its wake an unbalanced Church—one driven by results but shallow in relationships, loud in witness but silent in formation.

The sin of the Church in the West is that we honored the fire, but we forgot to build fireplaces.

Still, we cannot let the distortions eclipse the gift. The evangelist is a divine gift—born from God’s own longing that none should perish. These are the ones who bring the gospel into public squares, messy tables, and weary hearts. They stir the Church to remember its mission and shake us free from complacency. Without them, we grow stagnant, inward, insulated.

Their presence isn’t the problem. The imbalance is.

The Middle Finger of the Hand

Alan Hirsch calls evangelists the middle finger of the fivefold hand—bold, far-reaching, extending out into places the rest of the body doesn’t always go. And it fits!

But there’s something else about the middle finger that we don’t always say aloud: sometimes, it dismisses the rest of the hand entirely. (Thus the middle finger)

When the evangelist gift operates from ego, it resents limits. Nuance feels like an obstacle. Questions become distractions. Shepherds who prioritize presence and prophets who name what’s wrong can feel more like resistance than support.

In its shadow form, the evangelist doesn't build the Church—it actually bypasses her. Charisma replaces character. Platform replaces process. Influence grows, but intimacy erodes. And eventually, people begin to feel used rather than loved.

That’s the danger of any untended fire.

The middle finger reaches far—but it cannot hold a hand like the thumb can.
(Remember the apostle?)

The Beauty of a Mature Evangelist

When the evangelist is shaped by love, everything changes.

Their presence feels like an open door. Their message carries weight, not because of volume, but because it rises from a life that’s been deeply formed. You don’t feel pushed—you feel seen.

They know when to speak and when to listen. They’ve learned the difference between being noticed and being present. My old youth pastor used to say, “God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason.” A wise evangelist lives by that. They create space for others before offering truth. And over time, that builds trust—the kind that makes the gospel credible.

They don’t just preach good news—they live it. Their hospitality, their patience, their clarity—all of it points to something deeper. Even if you don’t share their faith, you’re drawn to what they’ve encountered.

As Paul urged Timothy:

“Do the work of an evangelist. Discharge all the duties of your ministry.”
—2 Timothy 4:5

They’ve learned that urgency doesn’t need to be frantic, and boldness doesn’t have to bulldoze love.

There’s still fire in them—but it’s no longer wild. It’s watched, tended, and trusted.

How to Know if This Is You

• You light up when talking about Jesus.

• You’re drawn to outsiders, wanderers, and the barely-hanging-on.

• You often feel others' resistance, but hope anyway.

• You’ve been told you’re “too much” (too intense, too joyful, too eager).

• You hate manipulation, but you still believe the good news is actually good.

• You ache when people feel far from God. It keeps you up at night.

Rekindling the Flame

The Church needs evangelists. Not just the ones on platforms. The quiet, faithful ones in coffee shops and classrooms.

We need those who burn with holy love. Not with anxiety or a manufactured flame. We need evangelists who carry presence before they proclaim truth. Evangelists who remember what it means to be lost, and live in such a way that others might be found.

If that’s you, fan the flame. Please! Guard it. Let it grow deeper, not just louder. Be shaped by love, not just urgency. Because your gift isn’t just about saving souls—it’s about revealing the nearness of a God who still seeks and still speaks.

The evangelist is essential. And when the fire is tended, it can light the way for many.