And we need spaces where Christian leaders, pastors, and congregational members can be honest about their own struggles with these things. Open conversations. Care within community. And gracious steps toward reconciliation where needed, and toward help, wholeness, and hope.

Mental Health and Addictions in the Church

Mental health issues and addictions are as common in the church and among its leaders as they are in society. In fact, the W.H.O. indicates that mental health problems are on the rise and will become the # 2 health issue worldwide by the year 2020.

So we need to realize that theologies of practices of pastoral care, community, vulnerability, humanity, human flourishing, sin, brokenness, sexuality, addiction, forgiveness, reconciliation, healing, restoration, and present-future hope (to name a few) are not just nice ideas or worthy projects for doctoral students; these theologies will become priorities for the church and its ministers.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that a hurting person with a disease that is generally not visible could turn to the church in the assurance that the church seeks to understand the complex issues of mental health? For a person with a mental health issue, there is nothing better than simple validation.

Caring for Those Who Struggle

The church has a problem. Often, even when someone is honest about their struggles, they still may not receive the support they expect from the church. Many leave the church because it took a lot of courage to be open about their mental health issues, and they felt they didn’t receive the support they needed once they had opened up. This comes from a lack of understanding about how to help someone, along with a lack of willingness/knowledge about the need to travel with someone for the long term (perhaps also some unrealistic expectations on the part of the person who is struggling).

This will take a shift in how we care for those who suffer among us. It’ll require a change in how we conceive human brokenness and flourishing. We’ll need to allow Christian leaders to be open and transparent. The wounded healer can assist the wounded and understand healing. If any group should understand what it means to be human, forgiven, and healing, surely it is the church.

My Own Struggles with Depression

Throughout my ministry, I’ve struggled with varying degrees of depression.

Most of the time, it’s a low-grade depression and easily managed. Sometimes it’s more significant. This depression comes and goes, but lately it hasn’t been so frequent.

A book that’s really helped me is Arch Hart’s Dark Clouds – Silver Linings. Arch Hart is a master of understanding the complexities of depression. He validates the struggle, and then he assists in ways to climb out of the depression. He typifies what I’m trying to say: he has excellent clinical insight and integrates it with considered theological reflection. His book gave me a helpful introduction to the nature, causes, symptoms, management, and healing of depression. It helped me work out where to get help for depression in ministry.

I now understand the various sources of depression in my life. I know where to go to get help. I’ve built habits into my life to sustain personal wellbeing.

And, importantly, I’m not afraid to talk about my experiences and struggles.

Let’s Start Talking About Mental Health Issues and Addictions, and Help People Recover

Mental health issues have afflicted Christian leaders and members of congregations throughout biblical and contemporary times. These include anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, addictions, eating disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and more.

Sadly, many Christians have been ashamed or afraid to speak about these struggles.

But if we are truly the church, we shouldn’t feel condemned. We don’t need to feel guilty or ashamed when we struggle with mental health issues.

We shouldn’t fear that if we talk openly about these things, then people would look down on us. We shouldn’t worry that they’ll think we’re unspiritual. We shouldn’t worry that honesty will impede our careers or limit our ministries.

Being assured and certain of this helps prevent struggles from spiraling out of control. And it helps us feel confident about getting the support, care, and healing they need.

We can allow seasons of difficulty to drive us toward our ultimate source of recovery, comfort, healing, hope, and strength—Jesus Christ.

And, of course, God uses healthcare professionals in the recovery process.

When we cooperate with God’s healing presence in the midst of our struggles with mental health, we find that God and his people can guide us toward healing, recovery, wholeness, and hope.

We can turn to God and others for the resources we need for recovery and health.

Because of my own personal struggles, I’ve tried to be intentional about developing my emotional, relational, and spiritual resources.

I’ve tried to foster a vital relationship with God through spiritual practices. These include devotional reading, mentoring, exercise, recreation, and prayer.

So, Where Do We Start?

The church needs to talk openly about mental health issues (including depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety). We also need to talk honestly about addictions (including alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, work, and sexual).

The reality is that people are sitting in our churches every week with mental health struggles. So is church a place of solace for them or another place where they feel unclean, strange, to be pitied, or, as is often the case, to be avoided!

I could say so much here. But I think it begins with local churches making concrete commitments to change.

Churches, colleges, and denominations need to cultivate a new openness and transparency about the struggles of Christians and their leaders. Each of us must decide to embody a new openness and vulnerability.

We must choose to embody the change in our own relationships, conversations, and self-disclosures.

We need spaces where Christian leaders and congregational members can be honest. We need open conversations, care within community, and gracious steps toward reconciliation where needed.

Let’s be communities of peace, grace, faith, hope, help, wholeness, and love. Those are the kinds of communities that help people heal and find hope and freedom.

I know that answer is just a beginning. But I think it starts at the personal and local church levels. It then moves out to include colleges, seminaries, and denominations.

We need to get to a place where grace permeates every part of our lives and communities. These churches can be places where we can live vulnerably, without fear of being judged or misunderstood for our struggles.

People’s struggles with mental health and addictions can help us be the church. But, first, we must choose to be a safe, healing, loving, embracing, and vulnerable community.

See my new book: “Unshackled: Breaking Addiction’s Chains Through God’s Grace”

Unshackled: Breaking Addiction’s Chains Through God’s Grace is a deeply personal and theologically rich book that joins memoir, Christian spirituality, and practical guidance for recovery. Drawing from my own battle with alcohol addiction and depression, I offer a raw and redemptive narrative of how faith, community, and spiritual practices led me from despair to freedom. The book outlines a Christ-centered journey through eight transformative stages—from recognizing the need for help to embracing a life of purpose and community. Each chapter integrates biblical wisdom, recovery principles, and soul-searching reflection, inviting readers to encounter God’s grace in the very places they feel most broken. With honesty and vulnerability, I explore addiction as not only a physical or psychological issue, but as a spiritual crisis rooted in disordered loves and unmet longings. Unshackled is a hopeful, compassionate guide for anyone seeking healing from addiction, a richer life in Christ, and the strength to walk one day at a time toward wholeness and joy.

https://www.amazon.com/Unshackled-Breaking-Addictions-Chains-Through/dp/B0GTCWYPNR/

Links to Sites that Give Info Both for People Struggling and Those Wanting to Support Them

Mental Health Issues

Reachout.com - http://au.reachout.com/tough-times/mental-health-issues

CalmClinic -

http://www.calmclinic.com/

Black Dog Institute -

http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/

Beyond Blue -

https://www.beyondblue.org.au/

Headspace -

https://headspace.org.au

Kids HelpLine - https://kidshelpline.com.au/parents/tips/anxiety-the-facts/

Lifeline -

https://www.lifeline.org.au/

Addictions

Reachout.com - http://au.reachout.com/the-facts-about-drug-addiction

Family Drug Help -

http://www.familydrughelp.com.au/

Alcohol and Drug Foundation -

http://www.adf.org.au

Self Help Addiction Resource Center -

http://sharc.org.au

Youth Substance Abuse Service -

http://www.ysas.org.au

Youth Drugs and Alcohol Advice Service (Victoria) -

http://yodaa.org.au

Drugs and Alcohol Fact Sheets - http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/mentalhealth/Factsheets/Pages/default.aspx

Psalm 1 hands us the picture whole. The blessed person is “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither” (Ps 1:3). The Hebrew carries the sense of a tree transplanted on purpose, set down deliberately where the water runs, its roots drinking from a source it didn’t dig. That’s what a rule does for us. It plants you within reach of the streams, so that on the days you feel dry the water is already close.

Notice how the first believers built theirs. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). Four settled rhythms, held in common, repeated until they became the shape of a shared life. They gave themselves to these things because the Spirit had been poured out on them and they longed to stay near the fire. Their rule grew from grace already received, and it carried them.

Here’s where the words “you can actually keep” earn their place. A rule holds when it fits the life you’re living, so begin small enough to sustain. One fixed time of prayer. One Gospel read slowly across a week. One shared meal, one day set aside for rest, one practice of giving. Grace welcomes your effort and asks for faithfulness at a scale you can carry, and a trellis of three sustained rhythms holds more weight than ten you abandon by Lent. Add slowly, as the vine grows into the space you’ve built.

A rule kept in secret has a way of showing in public. The person planted by the streams yields fruit in season, and that fruit is always for others: the neighbour fed, the stranger welcomed, the tired friend who finds you steady because you’ve been drinking somewhere they can’t see. Your hidden rhythms become the reason you have something to give when the day asks it of you.

So build the trellis this month. Choose two or three rhythms, write them where your eyes will land, and keep them with the gentleness you’d offer a friend. The growth is God’s to give. Your part is to stay planted, close to the water, letting the love that first found you draw you up toward the light.

Episode links:

https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-3ct58-1b41401

YouTube video of this episode:

Book recommendation: “Unshackled: Breaking Addiction’s Chains Through God’s Grace” - https://www.amazon.com/Unshackled-Breaking-Addictions-Chains-Through/dp/B0GTCWYPNR

You can read the tribute to his life here: https://ifesworld.org/en/the-gospel-embodied/

Graham Hill: As you travel, what’s your sense about the greatest challenges facing the church today?

Daniel Bourdanne: That’s quite a challenging question. From my personal perspective, I think some of the greatest challenges are internal ones. They aren’t the external, theological challenges, such as Islam or things like that. I have the sense that one of the greatest challenges is the church itself.

I think the church is like someone who has lost their teeth and so can’t bite. In my culture, you enjoy eating bones, and if your teeth aren’t in place, you can’t enjoy the bones. I’m using that image because I think the church has lost its teeth, and it isn’t as prophetic as it should be.

Everywhere I travel, my sense is that one of the greatest challenges for the church is to restore confidence in itself. It has the theology and it has the truth, but the church is no longer standing on the conviction of the uniqueness of Jesus. For me, this is the greatest challenge.

Related to that, the second challenge I can see is a sense of fear. I think maybe the two are connected. The church is fearful. It’s like somebody who has lost confidence in itself and can’t articulate their convictions and the truth.

The third thing is losing a significant element of joy. Again, maybe this is reading things from my African background, but when I visit a Gospel like the Gospel of Luke, I’m impressed by the number of times Luke uses the word joy. I think the Gospel is the Gospel of liberation, bringing joy to our lives, and it’s a message. It’s good news, and the good news is good news of joy.

With my African background, I look at the history of Africa, which went through different sorts of slavery, the Arab slavery and the Western slavery, and colonisation. Our history has always been a history of violence and of confrontation with other cultures. Then, having a sense of good news that makes you free, even if you aren’t joyful by nature, there’s a sense of excitement. I think the church has to recover that dimension of joy, which is exciting, which can communicate excitement and passion, and which can also communicate hope to the rest of the world.

For me, those are the main things I would see as the challenges. Of course, you can add to that the external challenges, like pluralism and so on. The world is redesigning itself culturally, and we don’t know what the future will be. It’s in process, and so it gives us a sense of insecurity, including theologically and from a missiological perspective. We are searching. Those are the kinds of challenges I can mention briefly.

Graham Hill: As you know, there’s been a lot of talk about what it means for the church to be missionary today. I think that conversation is happening in the West and also as a global conversation. If I asked you what the mission of the church is, how would you answer that question? What is the mission of the church, and how does it pursue that mission?

Daniel Bourdanne: Again, the church can’t have a mission of its own. The mission of the church is the mission of God. For me, it brings me to the heart of the gospel, which is the incarnational gospel: Jesus coming and living among us.

Even though we didn’t receive him, he still came down, leaving his privileges to be with us and to identify himself with us. For me, the mission of the church today is to recover the mission as expressed and demonstrated by Jesus himself, which is a mission of service. He said, “I come into this world not to be served, but to serve. I come not to be first, but to be a slave, and I come to die.”

That movement of going down, of not seeking to be first but being a slave and a servant and dying, should be the mission of the church today. It’s really for the church to be a servant of our world in different ways, and it involves much more than proclamation in an aggressive way, telling people they need to be saved.

Looking at the heart of the Gospel, things don’t end with the death of Jesus. There is a resurrection provided by God. So it suggests that God is actually helping us to do things in his way and not in the way of the world, serving the community, because he has the power to provide the resurrection to the church.

If the church isn’t ready to die, then the church won’t experience the miracle of the resurrection, because that is God’s power. We can’t change the world, but God is suggesting that our mission as a church is to make ourselves really available to the world, and he will bring the revival. I think we have to rediscover that mission of service to our communities.

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Graham Hill: One of the challenges we seem to face today is making disciples in a global consumeristic society. How does the church go about making disciples today? What are some of the things the church needs to rediscover to do this well?

Daniel Bourdanne: There’s no easy answer, but personally I believe that discipleship is about our entire life. We need to rediscover the Gospel as a holistic gospel and to be there, and to move past a narrow focus on conversions and salvation. I think it’s important and vital, and it’s our first calling, to go out and invite people to meet Jesus and to be followers of Jesus. But we need to go beyond that.

One of the things coming out again and again in our African context is that you have this massive number of people converted to faith, but what kind of impact are they making in their communities and in their societies? Is salvation in Jesus leading them to make an impact? That question is raised, I believe, because our discipleship isn’t taking us deeper, to really live the entire life of Christ and to be salt and light. It’s a hard process. It needs us to question ourselves as a church about whether we’re doing the right things.

I also think that in that process we need to rediscover discipleship in families. I think we’re losing the battle of families as a place of discipleship in the churches. Maybe we’re becoming too individualistic and too busy with all sorts of things, and we’re not giving enough space. We tend to trade the discipleship to the church and to other organisations, and to leave it out of the context of our families. I think we need to come back and rediscover what it means to be a disciple in our context and in our family.

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Graham Hill: When you see families doing discipleship well, discipling children and discipling each other, what are the kinds of things they’re doing as a family?

Daniel Bourdanne: I think being open as family members, because discipleship involves much more than teaching. Discipleship is about living it out. It’s like Jesus and his disciples working together. Even though Jesus is God and knows everything, from a human perspective he was also learning from the togetherness with the disciples.

So I imagine our families as a place where we can be accountable to one another, where we can explore the Gospel together, where we can ask hard questions, and where we can grow together. I think that is what I call discipleship. Discipleship is being together, exploring our faith in Jesus together, and growing together. My observation is that more and more Christians are losing that side of discipleship.

Graham Hill: You mentioned that discipleship is about the holistic development of the person. As evangelicals, we’re often good at engaging people’s minds. How do we go about helping people grow as disciples in their whole life?

Daniel Bourdanne: I think it’s about the whole life: the heart, the mind, and everything. I’m in this ministry with university students, and I always, or at least often, challenge them to connect their studies with their faith. It should be integrated. What does it mean for me to be a biologist and a Christian? If I’m unable to make that connection, then I’m doing poor discipleship for myself.

I need to be intentional in building the connection between where I stand and where I’m going, so that when I’m out in the marketplace I can really connect and engage, as part of the ecosystem and part of the community, and not as an external person who is coming into the marketplace. We need to understand discipleship in a very holistic way, in the sense that we integrate our heart, our emotions, and our mind, and make a clear connection between our faith and all the areas of life we’re engaged in.

Graham Hill: You’re African, and you travel all over the world, but you’re living in the UK at the moment. I’m really interested in what majority world Christians in Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East, First Nations, and Indigenous communities can teach the Western church.

Daniel Bourdanne: One of the things is how the Western church can learn about being weak like Jesus. Even looking back in history, it seems to me that Jesus is moving to the fragile places. From the Jewish countries, in less than a hundred years he was already going among the Gentiles, who during that time were the weak and the fragile. Then he moved to the barbarians in Europe, and now he’s moving to places where poverty is predominant, and so on.

One of the things, from my view, is that when a society becomes too autonomous and independent, it gives no more place to Jesus and stops welcoming him. Then he goes where he can be welcomed. So one thing the Western church can learn is how we can make ourselves a place of humility to welcome Jesus. This is about our heart and the disposition of our heart, much more than about material possession. Are we humble enough to say that yes, we have everything here, and we still need Jesus? That can be a lesson to learn.

The second thing I would throw out is how we relate to spiritual things. I’m living in the West, and I identify myself with the Western churches too. The Enlightenment brought very good things into our life, leading to great progress, and we need to celebrate that progress. I think it comes from the Lord. At the same time, it makes us autonomous, and we become more and more blind to spiritual realities.

We no longer see engagement with the gospel as a spiritual combat, as a spiritual battle, and we’re losing that perspective. Maybe one thing we can learn from the global church is that the global church takes engagement with the gospel seriously as a spiritual combat. We need to learn how to pray, learn how to depend on God, learn how to depend on one another, and learn humility. I think this is something we can learn, and it’s related to suffering and to all sorts of things.

I’d also suggest, and I’m glad that Christians are starting to question the overemphasis on material possessions, that we need to learn again that the problem lies in the way possessions become our gods, much more than in the possessions themselves. We need to give space for God. Maybe we can have a slightly different perspective and say that these material possessions are a blessing from God, and they should keep leading us towards God. On the contrary, they should lead us to more acts of worship.

Finally, I’d suggest that maybe the church in the West should rethink how it reads the Bible, and realise that it holds no monopoly on good interpretation of the Bible. Maybe it can learn that other parts of the world can approach the Bible in a different way, and God is still able to speak to them. Again, this is maybe connected with the Enlightenment, which thinks that everything needs to be inductive and rational. You take the text, and if there’s a proposition here, you make a deduction, and this is how we read the Bible, and we’ve been shaped by that culture. I believe there may be other ways of listening to God as well, and we need to be open to learn and to explore together as a community whether we can be enriched by different approaches.

Very often I have the sense that from the Western perspective we quickly reject other ways of looking at the scripture, and we don’t even take the time. It needs time. I’m talking about decades here, well beyond five minutes. The way we’ve developed the biblical sciences took hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s about giving space, allowing space and freedom, and listening in order to learn together as a community how we can discern from God’s word in different perspectives.

Graham Hill: It would seem to me that it’s good for local churches to learn from global conversations, and for global churches to be fed by conversations happening at the local level as well. Have you seen examples of where that’s working well? Do you have any thoughts about how we might encourage those kinds of conversations, global and local, to enrich each other?

Daniel Bourdanne: I don’t have many spaces in mind right away where global conversations are taking place. In our ministry, IFES, we intentionally emphasise our diversity, theological diversity and cultural diversity, so it naturally creates a space for the students to explore.

When you look back, for example, during the Lausanne Congress in 1974, the emphasis on the holistic gospel was predominantly coming from Latin America. When you look at the people who were leading it, you have names like Samuel Escobar and René Padilla. They were involved in IFES. Even though the movement was smaller in those days, their connection with other people was able to shape them, to shape their theology, and to rethink it. I think we need more and more to be intentional in creating that kind of space. Lausanne could be a space like that, but we need more and more spaces like that.

And yet, one of the challenges the church is facing that I haven’t mentioned is the challenge of fragmentation. The church is so fragmented over some little issues, and those issues prevent us from building a real space of dialogue and discussion, engaging with the difficult things in order to grow together.

Graham Hill: How do we hold that tension together, of dialogue and diversity, theological and cultural, on the one hand, and the kind of inevitable slide towards conflict or fragmentation on the other? How do we deal with that tension that seems to emerge for us all the time?

Daniel Bourdanne: I think very often the tensions are important, and we need to maintain them, because at some point we need to be concerned about the integrity of the gospel, and that will lead to some tensions. They need to be healthy tensions. One of the issues is that we need to find some tools to manage the tension, and one of the tools, from my perspective a key tool, is leadership. We need to have leaders worldwide, Christian leaders, who can bring us together and absorb the tensions and create a space of trust so that we can dialogue.

Unfortunately, my sense is that we have very few of those kinds of leaders at this time, and so it’s difficult to manage the tension. It’s about the management of the tension, because the tension is healthy and it’s inevitable. We need to pray that God will raise up more and more global leaders who can help us to sit together around the key things about the gospel.

Most of us have a doctrinal base, at least in the evangelical community, and we can agree on some of the essential things regarding the gospel, even though we disagree on some things. Agreement about the essentials would help us to have a space for dialogue. For me it’s also a way of discipleship, because it helps me to live with my friend who is different from me. Even though my brother holds a different view on the role of women in leadership, we can still share something in common and actually advance the discussion on the involvement of women. This is how I see the way forward to manage the tension, a healthy tension.

Graham Hill: It seems like there are some spaces being created for evangelicals and Protestants to gather together across the globe, to discuss issues and to listen to each other. What is the role of listening to and dialoguing with other Christian traditions, Catholic, Orthodox, and so on? How does that play into all of this?

Daniel Bourdanne: Personally, I think the evangelical community needs to listen to other faiths. This is where security about our convictions comes in. Because our convictions feel insecure to us, we’re afraid to engage, and we engage from a perspective of fear. Therefore we’re very cautious in our engagement. It relates to that insecurity in our convictions.

I always make a difference between certainties and convictions. Certainties are fine as they are. What we need is to hold some convictions, because they are like an anchor for the ship, keeping us stable during difficult times. They may change, and we still need to hold those convictions and go into the engagement from a stable background. I believe there’s a place to engage with those faiths, dialoguing with them in a very positive way and contributing together.

Secondly, I think in the community there are some things in the area of the common good. Whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, there are some things like what happened in Rwanda and the idea of reconciliation. For me, that’s really the idea of the common good. I would love every single person in Rwanda to know Jesus, and at the same time I see the value of reconciliation in the community for its own sake. Maybe there are spaces to engage in the common good across the worldwide Christian family while each of us keeps holding our own convictions. This is how I see the engagement.

Graham Hill: Sometimes there’s a bit of debate about the relationship between the church and politics and secular organisations. What do you see as an ideal relationship between renewed missional churches and those secular institutions and groups?

Daniel Bourdanne: In fact, regarding secular institutions, even though I dislike the word secular, what is secular and what is spiritual? I hold a different view from that dualistic one, but I understand your perspective. Personally, I think that the world out there, or I would rather say the community, is the place where we can be salt and light, and that brings me back to the whole idea of the gospel. The gospel involves much more than our salvation. I’m saved, and then what next? How do I live out my faith, and where do I live out my faith?

The church is a place where I can build resources in order to go out. I see the church as a gas station for the believer, to get renewed, energised, and encouraged, in order to drive several miles in the wilderness, sometimes in the desert of a community that holds a different faith or none. I need to be there precisely to be salt and light in the public arena, in the media, and everywhere. We need Christians there who are well engaged.

At some point I wonder whether one of the reasons some Christians tend to leave the church is that, yes, they’re safe, but where is the place they have to live out their faith? If we encourage them to be engaged in their community and in politics and so on, and if we support them, they’ll find a new excitement in being Christians.

I have a little observation, and I’ll hold it loosely rather than draw conclusions from it. I think one of the reasons the church is growing in places like Africa is actually the place of lay people. In Africa, you’ll find very few church leaders who have been trained in a normal system, in a theological college and so on. They are believers, and they have to play a role. So the laity become an important part of their life, and they feel engaged and excited to contribute. They discover that their faith involves much more than their personal salvation, which is the foundation, and they ask, “Where do I move from that starting point? How do I grow? How will I engage with my pocket to support the ministry?” So the two things are in some ways interconnected, from my view.

Graham Hill: Are there practical things those churches are doing to empower people to be disciples in society? What are some of the things those churches are doing?

Daniel Bourdanne: They’re engaged a lot in development. Many of those churches are taking part in the wellbeing of the community they’re living in. They may establish a school somewhere, or a small hospital, often on a small scale.

I remember my wife, who is a gynaecologist and obstetrician. We were living in a city in West Africa, and it’s difficult for poor women to have access to a specialist. There are very few of them, and it costs a lot of money. She decided that she would offer her service as a Christian to the poor community, and it had such an impact. Both my wife and the community benefited. It became a discipleship process and brought excitement to my wife, and she said, “My Christian values can add value to the community.” Those kinds of engagement are the kinds of things they’re doing, helping the community, being present, and offering hospitality. Hospitality is a key thing, and those are the kinds of things they’re trying to do.

Graham Hill: You mentioned that in places like Africa, maybe one of the keys to the growth of the church is the way in which lay people are empowered to serve.

Daniel Bourdanne: Women. Women, yes.

Graham Hill: What does all this mean for the way we develop people for ministry, and train and develop people for ministry? By that I mean the whole church for ministry, and not only professional pastors.

Daniel Bourdanne: I think we need to revisit the way the church is becoming too professional. I need to pause here, because I may say some challenging things.

Graham Hill: No, that’s good.

Daniel Bourdanne: My sense is that the church of God tends to grow in a more chaotic setting. It seems to me that God cares most about our faithfulness and our heart, about being rather than doing, about who we are, and that our professionalism matters far less to him. I can understand the pressure of our society, which invites us to be more and more professional.

I want us to make a difference between doing our best for God and being professional. Seeking excellence for God is something we as believers are always invited to, because it’s an act of worship. It comes from our heart. There’s a nuance between seeking excellence and being too professional. We tend to professionalise the ministry too much, and I think that gets in the way of participation and contribution.

Again, looking across the line, one of the reasons the Pentecostal churches are growing is maybe also that everyone can pray in the church. It seems to be chaotic sometimes, but what it brings is the suggestion that everyone has the freedom to participate. So we need to look beyond the chaos in the church’s service. I may feel uncomfortable in that setting at times, and the lesson I’m picking up is that it allows every single member of the community to participate.

Praying and standing in the church carries more weight than we can think of. Inviting people to participate may produce something other than the order you want to see. It may be a little chaotic. But if that helps people to feel part of the kingdom, why not? If we’re people who believe in heaven, and if we’re as evangelicals the people of hope, we know the time will come when the order we’re seeking will be present, when Jesus is with us around the table. We need to have that eschatological perspective in our mind when we see a little chaos for the time being.

Graham Hill: I really appreciate the time you’ve given us today to share something of your passion for Jesus, for mission, for the church, and for theology. I hope the rest of your trip here in Sydney is a good one.

Daniel Bourdanne: Thank you very much.

Graham Hill: Thank you.

The Global Church Project is located at https://grahamjosephhill.com/worldchristianity/. On our website you’ll find a wide range of interviews and resources for colleges, universities, and churches. I look forward to your company next time. From me, goodbye.

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My new book, Digital Monasticism: Ancient Wisdom for a Scrolling Age (Cascade Books), has arrived!

I’ve dedicated this book to my spiritual mentor, Lynette Leach.

We’re living in a world saturated by digital media and distractions, and it risks making us spiritually numb and shallow. In this book, I explore how ancient spiritual practices (especially those from monastic traditions) offer us ways to live deep spiritual lives online and in the flesh. I offer ways to craft a digital rule of life, shape rhythms of prayer and digital abstinence, and approach this digitally mad age with holy resistance. We shouldn’t try to escape the digital world, but we can approach it differently, and ancient wisdom and spiritual traditions offer us wonderful resources.

You can buy the book on Amazon in the US, Australia, and across the world.

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Amazon US: https://a.co/0aWXdZSN

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I’ve started a new Substack called On Being a Man, and I want to tell you about it and to invite you along. You might subscribe for yourself, or you might pass it on to a man you love who could use a friend in his corner. Either way, I’m glad you’re reading this, and I hope what follows earns a place in your week.

Everywhere I look, men are struggling. I see it in my brothers, my father, my friends, and the sons of my friends, and I hear it whenever I listen closely to their stories, their insecurities, their uncertainties, and their pain. I’ve been through my share of pain and failure too, including addiction, mental health struggles, insecurities, divorce, family estrangement, and the loss of my dream job, along with my fair share of joys as a man, including marriage, children, and meaningful work. So I understand the struggle a lot of men carry, often in silence, and I write from inside it as a fellow traveler.

On Being a Man

I'm Graham Joseph Hill, a writer based in Sydney. I've spent decades among the world's wisdom traditions and the teachings of Jesus. I'm a husband and a father. Here I think out loud about strength, service, character, and manhood at its best.

Our culture celebrates the strong and the gifted, the men who seem to have been handed the whole package. Meanwhile the average bloke can feel lost, overlooked, and unsure what it even means to be a man, let alone how to thrive as one. If that’s you, or if it’s someone you care about, then this is written with you in mind, and you’re welcome here exactly as you are.

Something has gone missing in the way we talk about men. The loudest voices offer either contempt or a cartoon of dominance, and young men are left to work out manhood from whatever the algorithm feeds them. This publication starts somewhere else, taking for granted that manhood at its best is one of the good gifts of being human, worth understanding, worth practicing, and worth passing on.

In these pages I’ll draw on the deep wells of wisdom about what makes a good man. That means the philosophers and the mystics, the Stoics and the sages, the rabbis and the desert monks, the poets and the elders of many peoples. It means the example of Jesus above all, a man whose strength showed itself in service, whose authority made room for the weak, and whose life was given away for others. And it means honest attention to the questions men actually face about work, love, fathering, friendship, money, failure, and the search for a life that counts.

You’ll find writing here about strength that protects, and generosity that gives out of surplus. You’ll find reflection on marriage and fatherhood, on friendship and mentorship, on integrity and courage and the slow work of becoming whole. This is a place for renewed respect between men and women, and for the flourishing of both. Young men and young women are welcome here, and so is anyone who wants men to be well.

Let me tell you how I mean to write. I write as one man among others, still learning, still being formed, with plenty of my own ground left to cover. I’ll aim to be honest about the hard things and generous with hope, to tell the truth without shaming anyone, and to treat you as a friend across the table instead of a student in a lecture hall. Some pieces will be practical, and some more reflective, and my hope is that each one leaves you a little more equipped and a little less alone.

If that’s the kind of conversation you’ve been looking for, I’d be glad to have you along. New pieces arrive regularly, free to read and open to reply, so tell me what you’re wrestling with and what you’d like me to write about. Subscribe below, and let’s think this through together.

The wisdom this Substack draws on

Good men have always been made, and every age has left us its counsel on how. This publication reads widely and gratefully across that inheritance. I’m a follower of Jesus, so I look closely at his message and example when it comes to being a man. It also sits with the Stoics on self-mastery and duty, with Aristotle on the great-souled man and the virtues, and with Confucius on the exemplary person of character and courtesy. It listens to the Jewish tradition of the mensch and the wisdom of the rabbis, to the spiritual chivalry of Islamic futuwwa, to the desert monks and the Benedictine Rule, and to the rites of passage by which many peoples have carried boys into manhood. Above all it keeps company with Jesus, whose strength showed itself in service, whose authority made room for the weak, and whose life was given for others.

From those wells come the pillars this writing returns to. It’s about strength that protects and serves, and integrity that holds under pressure. It follows the formation of men across a life: the rites of passage we’ve mostly lost, the fathers who bless or wound, the elders and mentors who show a younger man how to live. And it gives honest attention to the inner life, to courage and self-mastery, to anger rightly ordered, and to the failure and shame every man meets along with the grace that meets him there.

It cares about the bonds that hold a life together: marriage and faithfulness, friendship deep enough to answer the loneliness so many men carry, family, and the steady work of protecting the vulnerable. It honors work and craft as good gifts, and it takes seriously the making and giving of money, provision offered out of surplus for the good of others. It keeps the body and the spirit in view together, health and discipline, prayer and stillness, and an honest reckoning with our own mortality that presses the question of what a life well lived would be.

Running through all of it is a hope for renewed respect between men and women. This is a place that wants men to be well and wants women to flourish, and it treats the two as bound up together. Young men and young women are both celebrated here, and anyone who longs for a better account of manhood is welcome to read along.

If any of this might help you, or a boy or man you love, I’d be honored if you’d subscribe and pass it on to someone who needs it. You can also write to me directly at onbeingaman@icloud.com, and I read every note that comes in. It would be good to have your company on the way.

Your friend,

Graham

On Being a Man

I'm Graham Joseph Hill, a writer based in Sydney. I've spent decades among the world's wisdom traditions and the teachings of Jesus. I'm a husband and a father. Here I think out loud about strength, service, character, and manhood at its best.

Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash

I’ve had five new books released in recent months, with two of them released this week. Please consider purchasing them and leaving honest reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

Advance Australia Fairer: Towards Justice, Belonging, and the Common Good (Resource Publications)

Winner of a Gold Medal at the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards, in the Asia-Pacific and Oceania Non-Fiction category

Description: Australia’s anthem calls us to advance “fair.” I wrote this book because that word still waits on its promise. Millions live in poverty, trust in our institutions keeps sliding, a generation finds home ownership out of reach, and the ecological pressures on this continent grow heavier each year. So, I ask a plain question: what would it take to advance Australia fairer?

I’ve drawn on research, lived experience, and stories gathered across the country to map two things at once: the fractures running through our common life, and the remarkable renewal already taking root within it. I found that renewal in First Nations truth-telling, in interfaith friendship, in grassroots climate action, and in communities built around the full belonging of people with disability. Everywhere I looked, I met Australians hungry for something deeper than slogans and self-interest.

I write as a public intellectual open to every worldview, inviting secular, spiritual, and religious Australians into one shared conversation about the common good. I set out what “the good life” looks like when we measure it by dignity, belonging, and care for the land that holds us. And I offer practical pathways for the people, communities, and institutions ready to start building it now.

Available on Amazon US: https://a.co/0a6rKckY

Available on Amazon Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/0b4BkQwI

Digital Monasticism: Ancient Wisdom for a Scrolling Age (Cascade Books)

Description: Digital Monasticism is my invitation to meet a distracted age with ancient wisdom. I’ve drawn on the monastic tradition, Scripture, and the global church to offer a way to slow down, listen deeply, and recover the sacred center of your life. It’s a book about attention, and about the God who meets us in stillness.

Notifications pull at your attention all day, and your digital habits form your desires over time. The real cost lands on the things that matter most: your walk with God, your presence with others, and the health of your own soul. I wrote this book to open a path built on stillness, simplicity, and presence.

Through theology and storytelling written to be lived, I’ll show you how to craft a digital rule of life, embrace rhythms of prayer and rest, and inhabit the online world with holy resistance. You’ll learn to hold your devices with open hands and to let your deepest attachments run toward God and neighbor. This is an invitation to live in the digital world, and to live in it well.

Available on Amazon US: https://a.co/0aWXdZSN

Available on Amazon Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/0cLsRhxq

Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship (InterVarsity Press)

Description: Ten Movements of the Jesus Way is a call to reimagine discipleship not as belief alone but as a life radically shaped by the sacrificial way of Jesus. Rooted in Scripture and global Christian traditions, this book offers a prophetic invitation back to the radical, countercultural path of Jesus: a path marked by humility, servanthood, justice, and love. Release date: 28 July.

Available on Amazon US: https://a.co/d/01h8HhOw

Available on Amazon Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/096aHPCI

Kingdom or Empire?: Following Jesus in an Age of Nationalism, Populism, and Political Idolatry (Cascade Books)

Description: Drawing on Scripture, history, and global case studies, I expose the dangers of Christian nationalism while offering a compelling vision of the kingdom of God: a kingdom marked by justice, humility, reconciliation, and love. Each chapter moves from theology to practice, equipping individuals and communities to resist political idolatry and embody Christ’s alternative way in the world. Kingdom or Empire? is a call to courageous discipleship. It invites Christians to disentangle faith from partisan agendas and to rediscover the dangerous, beautiful hope of following Jesus in a world that confuses power with truth..

Available on Amazon US: https://a.co/d/0iG8x28K

Available on Amazon Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/0565P9Td

Unshackled: Breaking Addiction’s Chains Through God’s Grace (Cascade Books)

Description: Drawing from my own battle with alcohol addiction and depression, I offer a raw and redemptive narrative of how faith, community, and spiritual practices led me from despair to freedom. The book outlines a Christ-centered journey through eight transformative stages—from recognizing the need for help to embracing a life of purpose and community. Each chapter integrates biblical wisdom, recovery principles, and soul-searching reflection, inviting readers to encounter God’s grace in the very places they feel most broken. I explore addiction as not only a physical or psychological issue, but as a spiritual crisis rooted in disordered loves and unmet longings. Unshackled is a hopeful, compassionate guide for anyone seeking healing from addiction, a richer life in Christ, and the strength to walk one day at a time toward wholeness and joy.

Available on Amazon US: https://a.co/d/0dWRKuOU

Available on Amazon Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/0bjycO9H

Thank you again for reading, engaging with my updates, and being such an essential part of this research community. If you happen to pick up a copy of any of these books, I would love to hear your thoughts, and leaving a brief review on Amazon and Goodreads would mean the world to me.

Warmly,

Graham

The church must replace division with unity, exclusion with embrace, accusations with thanksgiving, animosity with love, fear with hope, and enmity with prayer.

Bible Reading

Colossians 1:1–14

Reflection

For those who’ve been watching traditional and social media, it’s clear that these divisions run deep and are red hot. These divisions are over race, politics, religion, and more.

What’s concerning is the way this division has affected the Christian church. Instead of discussing the policies calmly and empathetically and respectfully, many Christians have resorted to name-calling, accusations, anger, and division.

Not only are the divisions in society replicated in the church, but the animosity toward the “other” is also repeated.

Paul wrote the letter of Colossians to a church that was focused on differences rather than on Jesus Christ.

They had begun to put their energies into an outside philosophy and its ways of seeing and engaging with the world. They had allowed themselves to get caught up in internal debates, disunity, and division. And they were in grave danger of taking their eyes off Christ, and of failing to see and give thanks for the work that Christ had done in their sisters and brothers.

Instead of emphasizing Christ’s supremacy—and his call to be the church and to be disciples—the Colossians had begun to look a lot like the surrounding culture. They had taken their eyes of Christ and the salvation that was theirs in him. Like their neighbors, they had begun to focus on rituals, spiritual personalities, mystical practices, additional spiritual agents, ascetic observances, and other lesser things than Christ and his salvation. And they had begun to allow disagreements and division to shape their life together and in the world.

‪The challenge for the Colossians was the same as the challenge we face today. Our challenge isn’t relating (or being relevant) to our age. It’s seeing how much Christianity has become assimilated into the values and outlook of the surrounding culture and then choosing to resist and to pursue another way.

In Colossians, Paul shows us another way. Instead of division and animosity, God calls us to unity in diversity. Instead of hatred and accusation, Jesus calls us to thanksgiving and prayer. Instead of focusing on the debates and philosophies of the surrounding culture, the Spirit calls us to focus on the supremacy of Christ and our salvation in him.

This isn’t to say that we don’t engage in politics and in social change. The church needs to debate the issues internally and in the public square—in respectful, humble, and unified ways. We need prophetic voices that name the racism, sexism, and worldliness that has crept in among us. And we need to move toward repentance and change.

What if post-Christendom, secularism, materialism, sexuality, immigrants, refugees, nationalism, and Islam aren’t things to be feared but are, instead, opportunities to truly be the church? What if these social changes are opportunities to embrace fuller discipleship, to reform our beliefs and practices, to dig deeper into the stories that shape us and our society, to see God’s presence within expressions of doubt and questioning, and to practice a distinct social ethic?

What if these are opportunities to cultivate a distinct community with a distinct love and ethic and grace and holiness and reconciliation and hope and welcome? What if these are opportunities to discern how we’ve become thoroughly secularized, and to be the new humanity and new creation in Christ?

What if these are opportunities to ask what really shapes our identities and desires, and to repent? What if these are opportunities to join with God in his mission, to live full and joyful lives, to listen to the hopes and longings of others, to embrace fresh confidence in the gospel, to open our hearts and homes and lands and families, and to invite the Spirit to convert his church?

And what if the current acrimonious social and political climate is an opportunity to show the world the way of Christ—the way of humility, love, honor, and forgiveness?

Why does the church mirror the divisions and animosities and accusations of the surrounding culture? Isn’t it time we pursued and showed a different way?

Paul shows us a different way in Colossians 1:1–14. Although the Colossians have their flaws, he honors and values them. He gives thanks for them. He shows us the way of love, thanksgiving, and prayer.

Our world is plagued by deep divisions—racial and political and social and other. If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, you see people express such misunderstandings and animosities every day. Sadly, the church too often mirrors and repeats these divisions. But Jesus calls the church to replace division and animosity with renewed life together and in the world—a life of love, peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, thanksgiving, and prayer.

Let’s replace division with unity, exclusion with embrace, accusations with thanksgiving, animosity with love, fear with hope, and enmity with prayer.

Let’s have open and respectful (and even animated) discussions about the issues. And in doing so, let’s not lose sight of who we are as the church. Let’s continue to focus on the supremacy of Christ, and on the incredible things he is doing in and through our brothers and sisters, and on what he is doing in the world.

Along with Paul, let’s give thanks for one another while praying this prayer for each other (given the current climate, we should pray this prayer passionately and often):

“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God’s people— the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel that has come to you. In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace…

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

Prayer

Jesus, forgive us for being caught up in the world’s anger, conflicts, and divisions. Help us to replace division with thanksgiving, embrace, love, and prayer.

Action

Show practical love to someone this week who holds different political or social views than yours (a kind word or action is a great start).

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Today is the book’s launch day!! To celebrate this day, I’ve attached a free discussion guide to go with this book. Here it is:

Discussion Guide Ten Movements

201KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Ten Movements of the Jesus Way is a call to reimagine discipleship not as belief alone but as a life radically shaped by the sacrificial way of Jesus. The book offers a prophetic invitation back to the radical, countercultural path of Jesus—a path marked by humility, servanthood, justice, and love.

Look inside the book and find links to purchase the Audible, eBook, and print versions here: https://www.ivpress.com/ten-movements-of-the-jesus-way

Discover ten transformative movements such as:

• Moving from material success to spiritual riches, confronting the idolatry of wealth and status.

• Shifting from power to servanthood, exposing the ways Christians have clung to cultural dominance instead of Christlike humility.

• Moving from exclusion to embrace, challenging systemic racism, xenophobia, and the politics of division with the inclusive love of Jesus.

The Jesus Way is a path of deep love for God and neighbor, where discipleship isn’t defined by status or success but by sacrificial love, radical generosity, and faithful commitment to justice and reconciliation. This book invites readers to walk that path, living as a people who reflect Jesus in a world desperate for his hope and renewal.

Ten Movements of the Jesus Way features:

• Embodied practices for living like Jesus in radical love and compassionate discipleship

• Practical ways to join God’s mission to heal, reconcile, and renew the world

• A global perspective drawn from Scripture and diverse Christian traditions from African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American expressions of faith

• Questions for reflection and discussion great for book clubs or small groups

With Ten Movements of the Jesus Way, discover how you can anchor your discipleship in the life and teachings of Christ, reclaim a gospel that’s been politicized and commodified, and help restore the Western church.

GET THE BOOK

Look inside the book and find links to purchase the Audible, eBook, and print versions here: https://www.ivpress.com/ten-movements-of-the-jesus-way

REVIEWS

“‘The Jesus Way’ sounds like an attractive road to walk, but too often we’re missing a workable map. In Ten Movements of the Jesus Way, Graham Joseph Hill offers guidance that will help us pilgrims journey away from the sinful patterns that entangle us to a place of deeper and abundant discipleship. Every chapter offers an opportunity for transformation; please read this book slowly and reverently!”

Rob Dixon, senior fellow with the InterVarsity Institute and author of Together in Ministry and Allies in Ministry

“Ten Movements of the Jesus Way is a compelling and accessible guide to the Jesus Way as a way of life rather than a set of beliefs. Through storytelling, biblical reflection, and practical wisdom, Graham Joseph Hill invites readers into a lifelong journey that requires intention, practice, and courageous reimagining of how we live. These ten movements challenge and inspire, calling us toward deeper discipleship and a more faithful engagement with the world.”

Grace Ji-Sun Kim, professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion and author of Invisible and When God Became White

“In a distracted and disoriented world, Graham Joseph Hill offers wise and gentle guidance along the life-giving way, marked by biblical integrity, pastoral sensitivity, and prophetic insight. Reflective, discerning, and practical for anyone who genuinely seeks to follow Jesus.”

Xiaoli Yang, research fellow and adjunct faculty with the University of Divinity and author of Chinese Christian Witness

“From my context in the Middle East, where Christian communities live as a minority and are constantly challenged to witness to the gospel with both courage and grace, Graham Joseph Hill’s reflections resonate deeply. The movements he describes remind us that the church’s strength is not found in dominance but in faithful presence, sacrificial love, and unwavering hope in Christ. I warmly commend Ten Movements of the Jesus Way to pastors, leaders, and believers who seek to follow Jesus more faithfully and to guide their communities in embodying his kingdom in our complex world.”

Jack Sara, president of Bethlehem Bible College and general secretary of World Evangelical Alliance for the Middle East and North Africa

“In a world driven by competition, power, and self-interest, Graham Joseph Hill calls us back to the simple, yet not easy, path of Jesus. Ten Movements of the Jesus Way is a wise and courageous call to discipleship marked by humility, compassion, justice, and community. Through ten formative movements, Hill reminds us that the life Jesus offers is found not in power, success, or recognition, but instead in surrender, grace, and welcome. This book offers a hopeful vision for those longing to see the church embody the way of Jesus in our time.”

Lisa Rodriguez-Watson, national director of Missio Alliance

“Paul calls us not to be conformed to this age (world, culture) but to be transformed. What does that mean practically? Graham Joseph Hill perceptively exposes ten cultural temptations that are opposed to the way of Jesus, and he perceptively unpacks the wisdom of Jesus concerning ten dynamic, alternative practices. An important book for all Christians.”

Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at St. Mary’s Seminary and University

“In a time when the church has been reduced to mumbling in corners, with nothing to say to a world in great crisis, this book offers people of faith a way to recover Scripture’s prophetic insight, compelling us in practical ways to live as Jesus lived. Like the book of Proverbs, it brings down to ground-level social life the ways and teachings of Jesus. What does it mean to be communities of grace—to be open, inclusive, and peacemaking societies in the face of racial tensions and boundary-keeping orthodoxies? This book is a helpful signpost to making our churches a palpable social context in which the saving power and love of God is made visible. In all, it shows us ways of bearing witness in the public square, the nuts and bolts of what it means to make every thought captive to obey Christ in a time of post-truth and media-constructed ways of looking at the world.”

Melba Padilla Maggay, president of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture

“Graham Joseph Hill has long modeled the kind of scholarship the church needs—one that listens to voices often overlooked and works toward a community where everyone can flourish. He invites us to pursue a deeper faithfulness marked by justice, humility, and mutuality. He presents a hopeful vision for a global church that more fully reflects the heart of Jesus.”

Sandra María Van Opstal, pastor, activist, and author of The Next Worship

While my temporal home is in Sydney, the Spirit and the Word remind me constantly that my eternal home is in Jesus Christ. In John 14 and 15, Jesus doesn’t hold us at arm’s length or ask us to admire him from a distance. He says our home is with him, the loving and true Vine, who invites us to live where he lives, love as he loves, and rest in his presence, his abundance, his provision, and his belovedness. “Remain in me, as I also remain in you” (John 15:4). The Greek menō carries the sense of staying, remaining, and settling in; the opposite of the passing visit.

During the first few years of my life, we lived with my grandparents, as my parents saved to buy their own house. Once we’d moved to our own house, I never lost the feeling that my grandparents’ home was a warm, welcoming place to return, without ever waiting for an invite. Their home felt like my home. Home is the place you return to without knocking, where your heart is settled and secure, where you belong before you perform.

Sometimes we treat Jesus Christ as somewhere we drop in during a crisis and leave once it passes. A quick prayer to a parent who can help us in time of great need, but once the trouble has passed, we move on. But Jesus offers himself as the address where our whole life can reside.

What home means

So, what is home? Some of us have experienced healthy homes and others abusive or dysfunctional ones. No matter your experience of home, we know that homes where we flourish have certain qualities.

Home is permanence, where you can put your roots down, instead of merely arriving and departing. Home is belonging; people truly know you there, see through your disguises, invite vulnerability and transparency, and receive and love you as you are. Home is rest, where we lay aside our striving and embrace the freedom of putting things down and simply being present. Home shapes you slowly through the ordinary hours—the meals and the conversations, and the laughter and tears—more than the dramatic moments.

So, when we talk about Jesus Christ being our home, we mean he’s our identity, security, and rest all draw from one settled, loving source.

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The mutual dwelling

One of the things I love about this image is the way it runs in both directions. We make our home in Jesus Christ, and he makes his home in us. “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23).

This is a strange and wonderful reality. God the Father and God the Son together take up residence in our surrendered hearts, through the work of the Spirit, so the indwelling is personal and trinitarian. God’s grace surpasses our efforts, as Christ moves in first, and our abiding is a response to being inhabited, to receiving grace, and to being called beloved. The Spirit is the one who makes this dwelling real and felt within us day by day.

We enjoy a mutual intimacy and a shared life, discovering that our Christian pilgrimage is walking the Way with a near and caring God.

How we dwell

I’m often tempted to believe dwelling is done in dramatic moments of prayer, worship, or belief, and often God is in those things. But, more often, dwelling is built in the small and ordinary returns: the morning turning of attention, the simple prayer as we work, the repeated coming back after we’ve wandered.

Dwelling grows through Bible study, prayer, reading, and stillness. In these daily, simple acts, we show that he is the Vine and we are the branches abiding in him, letting go of our illusions of control, our desire for recognition, our grasping after independence. Instead, we let go and trust the Vine, expressing our dwelling in the ordinary and daily habits and practices of a life kept near to Christ—prayer, obedience, Scripture, surrender, and service. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love” (John 15:9).

We all go through dry seasons, when our abiding is by faith and habit rather than by feeling. That’s the human condition. We always need God’s grace and Christ’s Spirit abiding with us, but in those dry seasons we feel the need more acutely. And God promises to dwell with us through it all.

Dwelling happens in the working day, at the desk and in the interruptions, as well as in the dedicated devotional hours. God cares more about constancy than intensity, more about staying than surging, more about abiding than performing. But we must never lose sight of the truth that we abide and dwell by grace. Jesus Christ abides in us and enables us to abide in him.

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The outward turn

Home is meant to be a place of welcome, especially for those who have no home, but also to all people, as an expression of God’s welcome and love. Abiding in Jesus Christ makes us hospitable and generous, welcoming all to the healing of the Vine and to the safety and love of our divine Home.

Jesus promises that if we abide in him, we’ll bear much fruit, showing ourselves to be his disciples (John 15:8). The fruit Jesus promises flows from abiding, from resting in his goodness and love, and from learning to obey the Father’s commands and love as Jesus Christ loves (John 15:5–17). As branches, we bear fruit because we remain joined to the true Vine, Jesus Christ, and to the gardener, our Father and Creator in heaven (John 15:1–5).

Discipleship isn’t a solo pilgrimage or a lonely path. We abide in One who is always near, always calling us beloved. Rootedness in Christ steadies us for the long work of love, justice, and mercy in a restless world. What we receive at home we carry outward, into the church and toward the neighbor, the enemy, the stranger, and our sisters and brothers in Christ. The good news is that a life made at home in Jesus Christ becomes a home where others can meet him too.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today.

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

You wake, and before your eyes are fully open the weight is already there, resting on your chest like something with actual mass. The day hasn’t begun and you’re behind it. You get up anyway. You make the coffee, answer the message, smile at the person in the corridor, and every ordinary act costs more than anyone watching could guess.

A friend told me once, over the phone, that the hardest thing they did each morning was put their feet on the floor. For two years they’d sung in church on a Sunday, shaken hands at the door, asked after my week and meant it, and carried underneath all of it a heaviness they had no words for and no permission to name. I’d seen none of it. That’s the strange mercy and cruelty of this particular weight: it’s so often carried by the people who look most put together.

Words old enough to hold it

Scripture has language for this, older and rawer than most of our churches let on. Open Psalm 42. “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” The word for soul there is nephesh, and nephesh means the whole living self, the throat, the breath, the appetite, the life in you. So this is the whole self speaking, the entire life bent to the ground. The verb, shachach, means folded low, pressed down, bowed under. Whoever first prayed these words knew what it was to be flattened.

A few lines on comes one of the most honest confessions in all of Scripture. “Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.” The word is tehom, the primal ocean, the dark waters from the first breath of Genesis before there was light. To pray this is to say: I’m going under, into the chaos that was here before the world began. And the Holy One did not strike that line from the songbook. Love left it in, handed it to us, and said, when you feel this, here are the words.

If you’d like to sit with this further, I go deeper into it on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Elijah, Gethsemane, and the God who tends a body

Consider Elijah, fresh from the greatest victory of a long prophetic life, fire falling from heaven, a whole nation turning back in a single afternoon. Then, with no warning, the collapse. Elijah runs into the wilderness, sinks down under a solitary broom tree, and asks to die. “I’ve had enough.” Watch what happens next, because it reorders much of what we were taught about faith and feeling. No rebuke comes. No lecture about gratitude arrives. An angel simply lets the exhausted prophet sleep, then wakes Elijah for bread and water, and lets the prophet sleep again. Only after the body has been fed and rested twice does any word come. When it comes, it arrives as a sound of thin silence, a whisper you’d miss if you were straining to hear thunder.

Heaven’s first move is to tend a body. Sleep, food, rest. Long before anyone asks Elijah to believe harder or feel differently, the Holy One meets the prophet as a creature of flesh, because flesh is what we are. We’re embodied lives, breath and chemistry and weariness woven together, and the One who made us knows this better than we do. So when a person carrying depression is told to pray it away, something has gone wrong in our theology. Sometimes the most faithful step available is to sleep, to eat, to see a doctor, to receive the good gift of medicine with open hands.

Then there’s the garden. On the last night, in Gethsemane, Jesus knelt under the olive trees and began to shake. The Gospel reaches for a word that resists easy translation: perilypos, sorrow that surrounds a person on every side, grief rising like water past the shoulders. “My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death,” Jesus said, reaching for that same word, nephesh, the whole self pressed to its breaking. Christ knew the weight from the inside, as sweat and trembling and a cry flung into the dark. Whatever depth you’re in, it’s a depth where Christ has already knelt.

My friend on the phone told me something later that I keep returning to. The weight didn’t lift the day they finally said it aloud. What shifted was that it stopped being theirs to carry alone. Another set of hands had come underneath it, and that, they told me, was the first morning the whole thing felt survivable. Love tends to work this way in the depths, by climbing down and staying, until the staying itself becomes the start of healing.

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What our moment has done with the weight

Look at what our moment has done with all of this. We’ve taken suffering that people once carried inside a family, a village, a congregation, a shared story that told them what their pain meant and who would sit with them in it, and we’ve handed it back to each person as a private problem to solve alone. The medicine is good. Thank God for the medicine. The isolation around it is doing its own slow harm. And the church, which should be the one room where a person can walk in flattened and be held, has too often asked for the smile at the door with nothing allowed underneath it. We inherited a stoicism that prizes the composed face and calls it strength. Harden up. Push through. Don’t make a fuss. That silence carries a cost, and in this country we know its name, because we’ve grieved too many people who were never given permission to say they were going under.

Long ago, contemplatives had a name for the heaviness that settles at midday and drains the colour from prayer. They studied it, walked through it, wrote of it with tenderness. They knew the dark could visit the most devoted heart, and they named its arrival as part of the life of faith. A cast-down soul was, to them, a place to meet Love, not the proof of a soul’s collapse.

There’s a version of belief circulating now that treats joy as a performance and sorrow as a failure of nerve. It hands a struggling person a verse like a plaster laid over a wound that needs a surgeon, and it has bruised a great many faithful hearts. The Scriptures are wiser than that. Close to a third of the Psalms are songs of lament, complaint set to music, grief spoken plainly into the ears of Love. A faith with room for lament can hold you on your heaviest morning and not flinch.

Picture a church brave enough to make room for this. Once a month, a song in a minor key. A prayer said out loud: “How long, O Love?” A silence held long enough that the person three rows back can breathe out and stop performing. Honesty like that in worship tells the flattened ones they belong here, cast-down soul and all, and that they can bring their whole selves through the door and leave nothing in the car park.

Something to try this week

Try something this week, and it’s simpler than you might expect. Pray one lament psalm a day. Begin with Psalm 13, which opens with “How long?” and travels, without pretending, toward trust. Then Psalm 42. Then Psalm 88, the darkest of them all, which ends in shadow and was kept in the book exactly as it stands. You don’t need to manufacture a feeling. Say the words. Let the old prayers carry your weight on the days you have no prayer of your own. Hold the praying and the practical together, too. Ring your doctor. Tell one trustworthy person the truth. Walk out into the morning light, sleep when your body begs for it, eat something good. All of that is faith in action, the shape belief takes in a body worn thin. And if the depths aren’t yours right now, find someone for whom they might be, and ask the question twice. “How are you, really?” The second asking is where the truth tends to surface.

Here’s my question for you, and I’d love your answer in the comments. When the weight has pressed hardest, what has actually helped you carry it: a person, a practice, a psalm, a doctor, a presence you couldn’t quite name?

If this stirred something in you, there’s a longer and more searching conversation about all of it in the latest episode of The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, then come back and tell me what you’re carrying, and what’s been carrying you.

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

We’re living in a fractured moment, pulled apart by political polarization, performative religion, consumerism, nationalism, and widening inequality. The book offers an alternative: the slow, countercultural, life-giving path of Jesus. Across ten movements, from material success to spiritual riches, from power to servanthood, from exclusion to embrace, it traces a discipleship shaped by humility, justice, generosity, and love.

Rooted in Scripture and drawing on the wisdom of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American Christian traditions, it’s a prophetic invitation back to the radical road Jesus walked, and a hopeful vision for a church longing to reflect Christ again. Every chapter closes with questions for reflection, making it a companion for personal devotion, book clubs, and small groups.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today through conversations about faith, justice, spirituality, theology, culture, and the global church.

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

Photo by Alex Machado on Unsplash

You can find it in the book of Acts, tucked into the story almost as an aside. When Saul set out for Damascus breathing threats, he was hunting for anyone who belonged to “the Way.” That was the movement’s first name for itself. A road you walked. In the ancient world, a philosophy was a way of life you practiced with your body, in a community, day after day, and the first followers of Jesus understood the gospel exactly like that. Following Jesus meant learning to live as he lived, love as he loved, forgive as he forgave, share as he shared. The watching Roman world found it astonishing. Here was a community that welcomed slaves and citizens at the same table, nursed the sick when the plagues came, and everyone else fled, took in the babies the city had abandoned, and refused to hate its enemies. People looked at that and wanted in.

I met that Way as a skeptical teenager who wanted nothing to do with Christians. The believers I’d known up close often seemed harsh and sure of everything and short on the love they kept talking about, so I made up my mind to walk away. Then one day I picked up the Gospels and read them straight through, and I met the person underneath the religion I’d rejected. The way he spoke. The way he touched the people nobody else would touch. The way he knelt down and washed feet, forgave the men who were killing him, blessed the poor, and turned the whole world’s idea of a good life upside down. I couldn’t shake it. Forty years later, I’m still walking it.

What I want to do here is trace the heart of that Way, name the ten movements that make it up, and hand you one step you can take this week.

The Age of the Sovereign Self

We’re trying to walk this Way inside a culture with very firm ideas about what a good life is.

The message reaches us everywhere. You are the project of your life. Build your brand, grow your platform, climb the ladder, look after number one, and happiness will follow. Success is measured by money, influence, followers, and control over your own outcomes. Sociologists have a name for the deepest version of this. They call it expressive individualism, the belief that the point of a human life is to look inward, find your authentic self, and express it, with as little interference from anyone else as possible. The sovereign, self-made, self-expressing individual is the hero of the age.

Yet a great many of us are exhausted inside it. We curate ourselves online, count the likes, compare our insides to everyone else’s highlight reel, and wonder why we feel so tired and so unsure of who we are. A whole generation has been handed the job of inventing and defending a self, alone, with the internet watching. By many measures, we’re the most anxious, most medicated, loneliest generation in modern history, and we’re living in the most comfortable societies there have ever been. It turns out the sovereign self is a lonely monarch, ruling a very small kingdom. Into that exhaustion, Jesus says something startling: come to me, all you who are weary, and I’ll give you rest. You can put the performance down.

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The Road That Has a Name

So what is the Way? Start with the word itself. When the first believers called themselves the people of the Way, the Greek word was hodos. A road. A path. A journey you’re actually on. And it’s the very word Jesus used about himself: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. He didn’t say, "I’ll give you a map, hand you the rules, and point you down the road." He said, “I am the road.” To follow the Jesus Way is to walk in the footsteps of a person, staying close enough for his life to start to rub off on yours.

You see that life laid out most fully in the Sermon on the Mount, the charter of the whole Way. Jesus climbs a hillside and begins to describe the flourishing life, and the word translated as “blessed” is makarios, which means something like “truly well,” the way a human being is meant to be. Then he names who’s flourishing. The poor in spirit. Those who mourn. The meek. The ones who hunger for justice. The merciful. The peacemakers. He takes the world’s scoreboard, with its winners and its wealth and its strength, and turns it clean over.

And he presses it all the way to the center. If anyone wants to follow me, he said, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and come with me. Whoever tries to save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. The word there for life is psyche, the very self. This is the great reversal underneath everything. The self, curved inward, clutching, grasping, and defending, slowly dies of its own grip. The life poured out in love is the life that comes alive. Jesus holds open the one door out of the prison of the self, a door marked self-giving love. Walk through it, and you find the self you were always made to be.

If you’d like to sit with this further, I go much deeper into it on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

The Engine of the Whole Thing

Anyone who’s tried to live like this knows how fast good intentions collapse. So how is it possible? The New Testament points to two things, and together they change everything.

The first is the pattern. Paul tells the Philippians to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in very nature God, held his glory with open hands, emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and humbled himself all the way down to death on a cross. The word for that self-emptying is kenosis. Christ poured himself out, moving willingly from the highest place to the lowest, from glory to a manger, to a towel and a basin, to a cross. Every one of the ten movements is a small share in that one great movement of the God who comes down. It’s all the same shape, the shape of a cross, which turns out to be the shape of love.

The second is the secret of how it grows in us, and it marks the difference between the Jesus Way and every self-improvement scheme ever sold. We can’t manufacture this by willpower. On the last night, Jesus gave his friends the picture that holds it together. I am the vine, he said, you are the branches. Remain in me, and I will remain in you, because apart from me you can do nothing. The word for remain is menō, to abide, to stay, to make your home in him. A branch bears fruit by staying joined to the vine, letting the life of the vine flow up into it. That’s the whole secret. We abide, and the Way grows in us like fruit on a branch. The ten movements are ten kinds of fruit that grow, almost without our noticing, on a life that stays close to Jesus.

Which means the pressure is off. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once drew the line between cheap grace, the sort we award ourselves, forgiveness without repentance, and faith without following, and costly grace, which calls us to leave our nets and come, and gives us the only life worth having. The costly grace of the Jesus Way is free, and it will cost you everything, and its yoke turns out to be lighter than the yoke of the self-interested life you were already carrying.

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Ten Movements

Here’s the Way, mapped as ten shifts that carry us out of the culture of self and into the life of Christ. From material success to spiritual riches. From competition to compassion. From power to servanthood. From retribution to forgiveness. From indifference to justice. From conflict to peacemaking. From legalism to grace. From exclusion to embrace. From expressive individualism to community. And from frenetic hurry to a slower, deeper discipleship.

These are ten roads to walk, each with a practice attached. From material success to spiritual riches begins with open hands: giving money away before you feel you can afford to, asking how much is enough, and living there on purpose. From power to servanthood looks like finding the job nobody wants and simply doing it, the way the King of the universe wrapped a towel around his waist and washed his friends’ feet, including the feet of the man about to betray him. From retribution to forgiveness means naming one person you’ve been rehearsing a grievance against, and beginning, even haltingly, to pray for them. From indifference to justice can start with a single refusal to keep stepping around the person in need, learning one name. From frenetic hurry to slow discipleship comes down to the oldest practice of all: keep a Sabbath, take one day in seven and truly stop, and remember that the world holds together without you, because God is holding it.

Every one of these is really the same lesson in a different key. It’s learning to be the Samaritan who crosses the road everyone else avoids, instead of one of the busy, respectable people who hurried past.

One Step, Together

Ten movements can feel like a lot, so here’s the one thing to actually do. Don’t try to walk all ten. Pick one. Read back over that list and notice which one landed on you, the one you flinched at or felt drawn to, and this week, take the single small practice attached to it. Learn one name. Set down one rock. Keep one Sabbath. Forgive one person. That’s how a Way gets walked, one step at a time.

And don’t try to walk it alone. Find one other person, a friend, a small group, a wise older Christian, and tell them which movement you’re working on, and ask them to walk it beside you. The Jesus Way was never a solo hike. It’s a road we walk together, and we get further arm in arm than we ever could on our own.

Here’s what gives me hope. All around me, I see people walking off the treadmill of the sovereign self and onto this road. Young Christians forming little communities to share meals and money and prayer. People rediscovering the old disciplines of silence, Sabbath, simplicity, and hospitality, and finding their souls come back to life. A global church, in places that know real hardship, showing the comfortable West what costly discipleship looks like. And ordinary people I know, a nurse, a teacher, a grandmother, who’ll never write a book or lead a movement, and who forgive and serve and welcome and give, day after unglamorous day, and who are some of the most Christlike people I’ve ever met. The Way was always meant to be walked by people exactly like that. By people like us.

Because in the end, the Jesus Way comes down to a person. He is the Way. And the best news of all is this: he walks the road himself, right beside you, every step.

Here’s the question to carry into your week: of the ten movements, which one is Jesus inviting you to take a single step in, starting now?

I’d love to hear which one you chose. Share it in the comments, and pass this along to someone who’s tired of the treadmill and ready for a different road.

And if you’d like to walk through all ten movements slowly, with the stories, the Scripture, and the practice behind each one, I go much further in the latest episode of The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast. You’ll find the full conversation there, wherever you get your podcasts.

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

We’re living in a fractured moment, pulled apart by political polarization, performative religion, consumerism, nationalism, and widening inequality. The book offers an alternative: the slow, countercultural, life-giving path of Jesus. Across ten movements, from material success to spiritual riches, from power to servanthood, from exclusion to embrace, it traces a discipleship shaped by humility, justice, generosity, and love.

Rooted in Scripture and drawing on the wisdom of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American Christian traditions, it’s a prophetic invitation back to the radical road Jesus walked, and a hopeful vision for a church longing to reflect Christ again. Every chapter closes with questions for reflection, making it a companion for personal devotion, book clubs, and small groups.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today through conversations about faith, justice, spirituality, theology, culture, and the global church.

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

We’re proving we’re competent, so we answer the email at eleven at night. We’re proving we’re worth loving, so we perform a curated version of ourselves for people we barely know. We’re proving we’re on the right side, so we post the right opinion in the right voice at the right moment. And underneath the striving runs an exhausting suspicion, one most of us would never say out loud: that our worth is something we have to keep earning, and that we are one bad quarter, one wrong take, one exposed failure away from losing it.

Our culture has built a machine for this. Everything is measured now. Performance reviews and follower counts, the running tally of likes and shares, the algorithm that decides whether your work will be seen today. Even our rest gets optimised. And the machine has a shadow side that grows crueller by the year. Get it wrong in public and you can be sentenced, quickly and without appeal, to a kind of permanent unforgiveness. We’ve built a world with a long memory and a short mercy.

Which is why the oldest word in the Christian vocabulary lands like water on cracked ground. Grace. The unearned, unpayable, wildly generous favour of God toward people who have done nothing to deserve it. In a culture where everything must be earned and nothing is forgiven, grace is the most subversive word we have.

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What Grace Actually Is

Let’s be precise, because grace is a word we use so often that it can go soft in our mouths.

The Greek word is charis. It means favour, gift, generosity freely given. In the ancient world it carried the sense of a benefactor bestowing something on someone who could never repay it. Paul takes that word and drives it to its limit. Grace, in Paul’s hands, is the free gift of God’s own self to people who have nothing to bring and no way to settle the account. You were dead, Paul tells the Ephesians, and God made you alive. By grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is the gift of God.

Notice where the initiative lies. Grace begins in God. It arrives before we ask, before we improve, before we get our lives together. While we were still weak, while we were still enemies, Paul says, Christ died for us. The gift comes first. Our response comes second, and it comes as gratitude for something already given.

The Hebrew Scriptures had already been singing this for centuries. The word chesed, that great untranslatable word, names the loyal, tender, steadfast love God keeps pouring out on a people who keep wandering away. Israel was chosen for no reason it could point to, rescued before it was righteous, and carried through the wilderness by a mercy it never managed to earn. The whole story is grace before it’s anything else.

And here’s the thing that makes grace so hard to receive. Grace is offensive to the part of us that wants to have earned it. Something in us would rather be worthy. We’d prefer a God who runs a fair exchange, where we put in the effort and take out the reward, because that leaves us in control and lets us keep a little pride. Grace takes the account book out of our hands and closes it. And the closing of that book is the beginning of freedom.

Grace with a Face

Christian grace is never an abstraction. It has a body, a name, and a set of scars.

John writes that the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth, and that from the fullness of Christ we have all received grace upon grace. Grace arrives as a person. You can watch it walk around in the Gospels.

Watch it at a well in Samaria, where Jesus asks a woman with five failed marriages for a drink and offers living water in return. Watch it at a table full of tax collectors and sinners, the people the religious establishment had written off, with Jesus at the centre of the party, eating with them, which in that world meant something close to family. Watch it when a woman caught in adultery is thrown into the dust with stones already raised, and Jesus bends down, writes in the dirt, and sends the accusers away one by one until the stones lie unthrown on the ground. Watch it in the story Jesus told about a father who sees a wastrel child a long way off, and runs, which no dignified man in that culture would ever do, and throws both arms around the one who spent the inheritance, calling for a robe and a ring and a feast before the rehearsed apology is even finished.

And then watch it at the cross, where grace pays for itself. Here is the thing we forget when we call grace cheap. Grace is free to us and it cost God everything. The debt was real, and it was settled, and the settling happened in a body nailed to Roman wood. Grace is the most expensive gift ever given, handed over to people who could never afford it, at a price the giver absorbed in full.

Hanging there, in agony, Jesus prays for the executioners. Father, forgive them. That prayer is what grace looks like when it reaches the end of itself, and it holds when everything else falls away.

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Living as People Who’ve Been Forgiven

Grace received becomes grace lived. A person who has truly been forgiven turns into a forgiving person, the way a warmed room warms whatever comes into it.

Let’s clear up a misunderstanding that has done real damage. People sometimes hear grace as permission to stay exactly as we are, a divine shrug that leaves us untouched. Grace runs the other way. It sets us free and it sets us to work. Paul, who fought harder than anyone to keep grace free, also wrote that the grace of God trains us to live differently, and said of a lifetime of furious labour that the grace of God was the one doing the working. Grace is the ground we stand on and the power that moves us. We work from acceptance, never for it, and that changes everything about how the work feels.

Jesus told a story with real teeth about this. A servant owed a king an unpayable fortune, and begged, and the king wiped the whole debt clean. That same servant walked straight out, found a colleague who owed a trivial sum, and had that colleague thrown into prison. The story lands like a slap. To receive an ocean of mercy and then ration out a teaspoon of it is to prove that we never understood the ocean at all. Forgiven people forgive. That’s the shape of a life that has actually taken grace in.

What does this look like on a Tuesday? It looks like refusing to keep a ledger on the people close to you. It looks like letting go of the grudge you’ve been feeding, the one you’ve half enjoyed keeping warm. It looks like giving someone the benefit of the doubt when the uncharitable interpretation would be easier and more satisfying.

It also looks like grace turned inward, toward yourself. Many sincere believers extend mercy to everyone except the person in the mirror, replaying old failures, keeping their own account open long after God has closed it. To receive grace is to let yourself be forgiven, to speak to your own tired heart the way Love speaks to you. A person still punishing themselves has little mercy left over for anyone else.

And grace shapes how we speak. In a culture fluent in contempt, gracious speech becomes a discipline. It means arguing without dehumanising. It means leaving people room to change their minds, and room to have been wrong. It means keeping the door open.

Communities of Grace

Grace was always meant to take social form. The New Testament imagines a community shaped by it, and that community is meant to be visible.

The early church became a place where the accounting of the world was suspended. Slaves and masters ate at one table. Jews and Gentiles, divided by centuries of hostility, were made one. Women found dignity. The poor were fed. Nobody had earned a place, and everybody had one. What the watching empire saw was a strange society where worth was given instead of achieved, and people found it magnetic.

A church living out of grace looks recognisable. It’s a place where you can tell the truth about your life without losing your seat at the table. Where confession is safe, because the response to failure is mercy and not exile. Where the newcomer is welcomed before they’re vetted, and the wanderer is met on the road while still a long way off. Where the leaders serve, having given up any pretence of being the ones who have it together. Where the poor are treated as those the gospel came for, and generosity flows out of the community into the neighbourhood.

The counterfeit is easy to spot, because most of us have been in it. Churches that preach grace and practise performance. Where the singing declares that all our righteousness is filthy rags and the culture demands that everyone appear to have their act together. Where the wounded learn quickly to hide the wound. A community like that can talk about grace endlessly and still starve people of it.

Grace also has hands. A community shaped by it feeds people, houses people, welcomes the refugee and the addict and the ex-prisoner, and works for a world where the vulnerable get treated as those God has already valued. Grace received leads out into justice, mercy, and generosity, because a people who’ve been given everything for free find it hard to hoard.

A Practice for the Week

Grace grows in us through practice, so let me offer something small and concrete.

First, receive. Take five minutes each morning this week to sit with one sentence: I am loved by God, and this love was never something I earned. Say it slowly. Let the striving in you go slack for a moment. Most of us are so busy performing for God that we never stop long enough to be given anything, and grace can only be received with open hands.

Second, give. Choose one person you’ve been keeping an account on, and close the book. You don’t have to pretend the wrong never happened. You only have to stop charging them for it. If you can, do something generous for someone who can offer you nothing in return, and tell no one you did it.

Third, make room. Look for the person on the edge of your community, the one who fits awkwardly, whose life is untidy, and offer them the same welcome you were given. Grace is meant to move. It comes to us in order to travel through us.

A world that keeps score is exhausting itself. Every day, people around us are running harder to prove a worth they suspect they might not have, bracing for the moment they get found out. Into all that noise, grace speaks a word so simple it takes a lifetime to believe. You are loved. It was never something you earned. The gift is already in your hands, and there’s nothing left to prove.

Here’s a question to carry into the week: where in your life are you still trying to earn what God has already given you for free?

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

We’re living in a fractured moment, pulled apart by political polarization, performative religion, consumerism, nationalism, and widening inequality. The book offers an alternative: the slow, countercultural, life-giving path of Jesus. Across ten movements, from material success to spiritual riches, from power to servanthood, from exclusion to embrace, it traces a discipleship shaped by humility, justice, generosity, and love.

Rooted in Scripture and drawing on the wisdom of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American Christian traditions, it’s a prophetic invitation back to the radical road Jesus walked, and a hopeful vision for a church longing to reflect Christ again. Every chapter closes with questions for reflection, making it a companion for personal devotion, book clubs, and small groups.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today through conversations about faith, justice, spirituality, theology, culture, and the global church.

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

Photo by Nitish Meena on Unsplash

The numbers tell one version of the story. Rates of anxiety and depression climb year over year, among the young most of all. Loneliness has been called an epidemic. We work more, sleep less, and check our phones a few hundred times a day, scrolling through a feed engineered to keep us slightly afraid and never satisfied. A whole industry has grown up promising to fix this, a vast machinery of self-help and wellness and life-hacking, and somehow the promise of happiness keeps receding as we chase it, like a horizon that steps back once for every step we take.

Part of the trouble is the thing we’re chasing. We’ve been taught to pursue happiness as though it were a destination, a state we could reach and then keep. So we assemble the pieces we’re told will deliver it. The career, the relationship, the house, the body, the experiences worth posting. Each piece, once acquired, settles into the background of our lives and stops giving the lift it promised, and we start looking around for the next thing. The pleasure of the new car fades into the ordinary fact of owning a car. The thrill of the promotion becomes, within months, the baseline we measure the next disappointment against. Researchers have a cold phrase for this. They call it the hedonic treadmill. You run and run, and the scenery never changes.

Into this exhaustion, the Christian faith makes a claim that sounds almost impertinent. It says that joy is possible: a deep and steady gladness that can hold a human life together even when the day falls apart. It says this joy flows from a source that never runs dry, and that a tired and fearful age needs it the way a parched field needs rain. The world is starving for a joy it cannot manufacture. And the followers of Jesus, of all people, are meant to be the ones carrying it.

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Scroll for five minutes and you’ll feel it. The pleasure people take in a stranger’s humiliation. The comment section sharpening its knives. The public figures who built whole followings on contempt, and the millions who tuned in for the cruelty and called it honesty. We’ve turned mockery into entertainment and outrage into a personality. Disagreement curdles into disgust inside a single exchange. And somewhere along the way, a lot of us came to believe that gentleness is for the naive, that the world rewards the sharp elbow and the cutting word, and that to be soft is to be prey.

Into a moment like this, the Christian faith says something the age can barely hear. It says that kindness sits close to the centre of everything. That the God who flung out the galaxies is kind, tender, patient beyond reason. That the coming of Jesus was kindness taking on a human face. And that the followers of Jesus are asked, right here, in this coarse and contemptuous hour, to become people through whom that kindness keeps arriving in the world.

We tend to file kindness among the smaller virtues, the manners we teach children, a pleasant manner laid over the serious business of life. That instinct has never been more mistaken, or more costly. Kindness runs closer to the centre of the Christian faith than we imagine, and a cruel age needs it the way dry ground needs rain. So let’s take it seriously, in three movements: what kindness is in God, how it grows in us, and how we practise it in a world that’s forgotten how.

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The Kindness at the Centre of God

Start where all Christian thinking about kindness has to start, with God.

Hebrew Scripture carries a word that hums underneath the whole story: chesed. Translators reach for it with phrases like steadfast love, lovingkindness, mercy, and covenant faithfulness, because no single English word holds it all. Chesed is the loyal, tender, unearned goodness that God keeps showing a people who keep wandering off. Psalm 136 sets the word to a drumbeat, twenty-six times over: God’s chesed endures forever. The universe, the exodus, the daily bread, the long patience with a stubborn nation, all of it flows from a goodness that will not quit.

When the story crosses into Greek, the word for kindness is chrestotes. It stands in the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. It’s what Paul tells the Colossians to wear each morning. And it carries a working double meaning: goodness that’s useful, goodness that does something, kindness with its sleeves rolled up. A close cousin of the word, chrestos, means good or kind or easy to bear. Jesus reaches for it in one of the gentlest invitations in all of Scripture: take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is chrestos, kind, easy, well-fitted to your shoulders.

Here’s a detail the early church loved. The word for Christ, Christos, sounded almost identical to that word chrestos, the word for kind. Outsiders sometimes misheard it and called the followers of Jesus the Chrestians, the good ones, the kind ones. They heard kindness in the very name, and they weren’t wrong to. To sum up the whole arrival of Jesus, the incarnation, the cross, the mercy poured over the world, Paul reached for exactly this word. When the kindness of God our Saviour appeared, along with God’s deep love for humanity, we were saved. The coming of Christ was the kindness of God taking on a face, a voice, and a pair of working hands.

And this kindness is the very thing that draws us home. Paul tells the Romans, in a line worth memorising, that the kindness of God is what leads us to repentance. Not the thunder. Not the fear. Not the threat. It’s the sheer, disarming goodness of God that breaks a hard heart open and turns it around. Which means kindness in a Christian is the overflow of a kindness that was there first, older than the world, running through the character of God like grain through wood. We’re kind because we’ve been dealt with kindly by the Holy One who made us and came for us.

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The Kindness That Won an Empire

Here’s something worth remembering in a hard age. The first Christians grew up inside an empire that could be casually brutal, a world of slavery and exposure and the arena. And the thing the watching world kept noticing about them was their kindness.

When plagues swept the cities and everyone who could afford to flee fled, the Christians stayed and nursed the sick, their own people and their pagan neighbours alike. They took in the infants that others left out to die. They treated slaves and women and foreigners as people of real worth. A historian who spent years studying how this small movement grew concluded that this was the engine of it. Political power came late in the story. What spread the faith was the slow, attractive pull of a community that loved better than the world around it. People looked at that tenderness and wanted in. Kindness was the argument. In an age like ours, it still is.

How Kindness Grows in Us

Kindness of this depth is a gift before it becomes a duty. It grows in us the way fruit grows on a tree, slowly, from the inside, out of a life rooted in something.

Receiving is the root. Before kindness becomes something we do, it’s something done to us. You can only give away what you’ve been given, and the person who has tasted the kindness of God has something to pour out. The people I’ve known whose kindness ran deepest were nearly always people who knew, in their bones, that they were loved. Their gentleness with others came from a settledness in themselves, a sense of being held that freed them to attend to someone else. Kindness has a source, and the source is grace received.

There’s an inner spaciousness that kindness needs, and the contemplatives have always understood this. When we’re anxious, hurried, and full of our own noise, kindness gets crowded out. We rush past the person in front of us because we’re already three steps ahead in our minds. The practices that still the inner racket, prayer, silence, the slow reading of Scripture, sabbath, do a hidden work here. They clear a space inside us. They loosen the grip of our own urgency long enough to notice another human being and respond with care. Contemplation and compassion have always travelled together. People who pray deeply tend, over time, to grow kinder, because prayer keeps enlarging the heart until there’s room in it for others.

And kindness reaches all the way to the self. Many sincere Christians are gentle with everyone except the person in the mirror, carrying a harshness toward their own failures they’d never dream of turning on a friend. The kindness of God reaches down into that hidden cruelty and offers a gentler word. To receive God’s gentleness toward your own broken places, to speak to yourself the way Love speaks to you, is part of how kindness grows. A person at war with themselves has little peace to give away. A person who has made peace with being loved becomes a wellspring.

The Practice of Kindness

Kindness is made to move. It takes shape in hands and words and choices, out where people can feel it.

Jesus told a story about this that has never lost its edge. A traveller is beaten and left half-dead by the road. Two religious professionals pass by on the far side, busy, careful, unwilling to be delayed. Then a Samaritan, a member of a despised group, stops, kneels in the dust, cleans and binds the wounds, lifts the wounded traveller onto the animal, pays for the care, and promises to return. Jesus tells the story to answer a question about who counts as a neighbour, and the answer turns out to be practical to the point of bandages and coins. Kindness, in the Gospels, has a body. It gets down in the dirt. It costs time and money and comfort.

Attention comes first, and it’s the hardest of the practices. Most unkindness is a failure to notice. We’re preoccupied, hurried past the cashier, the colleague, the family member who needed a moment of our real presence. So kindness begins with the discipline of looking up. Seeing the person in front of you. Slowing down enough to register that they’re tired, or anxious, or lonely, and letting that recognition move you toward a small act of care.

Then comes kindness in speech, which we underrate constantly, and never more than now. In an age that treats the cutting remark as a sport, a kind word is close to countercultural. It costs nothing and can change the shape of someone’s day. Encouragement offered out loud. Gratitude spoken instead of assumed. The choice, in a hundred small conversations, to build a person up. Our words carry more weight than we know, and a steady practice of kind speech is one of the most available forms of love we have.

The sharpest practice of all is kindness toward the people who’ve earned our coldness. Jesus set the bar exactly where we’d least like it: be kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, because that’s what God is like. Kindness toward the person who irritates you, the one who wronged you, the one on the far side of every line your culture draws, is the practice that marks the Jesus way as something beyond ordinary decency. Anyone can be kind to the kind. Kindness like this takes more strength than cruelty will ever need. The followers of the Chrestos are asked to be kind the way God is, generously, toward people who’ve done nothing to deserve it.

A Practice for the Week

Let me offer something concrete, because kindness grows through practice, one small act at a time.

This week, try what you might call the ministry of the extra minute. Once a day, with one person, give a minute you didn’t have to give. Stay in the conversation thirty seconds longer than usual. Ask the follow-up question, and actually wait for the answer. Notice the person doing invisible work around you, the one who cleans, serves, drives, or cares, and say a real word of thanks. Write the message you keep meaning to send. Let one interaction each day be slower, warmer, and more attentive than efficiency would allow.

Pair it with a hidden practice, one nobody sees. Each morning, before the day picks up speed, receive the kindness of God toward you. Sit for two minutes and let yourself be looked at with love. Speak gently to your own tired heart. You’ll find that the kindness you take in at the start of the day has a way of spilling out of you before the day is done. We give what we’ve received.

This work will never trend, and no one hands out medals for it. And still, a life given over to kindness, day after unremarkable day, does a work in the world that the loud and the cruel keep missing. It softens the hard places. It carries the love of God into rooms no argument will ever reach. In an age that has made contempt a habit, a single kind person becomes an act of resistance, living proof that the hard story about the world is a lie.

The kindness of God appeared, once, in a person. In a cruel age, it’s still meant to.

Here’s a question to carry with you: whose face will you turn toward this week, with the unhurried, undeserved kindness that God has already turned toward you?

Photo by Adam Nemeroff on Unsplash

I have a new book releasing on 28 July with InterVarsity Press, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way, and I’m gathering a launch team of around fifty people to help it reach as many readers as possible. I’d be honored if you’d be one of them.

The book explores ten movements that shape a life of following Jesus: material success to spiritual riches, competition to compassion, power to servanthood, retribution to forgiveness, indifference to justice, conflict to peacemaking, legalism to grace, exclusion to embrace, expressive individualism to community, and frenetic activity to slow discipleship. It’s a call to a countercultural discipleship shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus, and an invitation to a way of life marked by love, grace, humility, justice, and community.

Here’s what I’m asking of the launch team:

- Reply to this email to let me know you’re in. I’d love to hear from you.

- Buy a copy of the book and post an honest review on Amazon sometime in July or August. Reviews shape how a book is discovered and trusted, so this one simple act makes a real difference. Here’s the book link: https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Movements-Jesus-Way-Self-Interest/dp/1514015641

- Tell others about the book: friends, your church, your small group, and social media if you use it. I’ll provide images and suggested posts, so this takes only a few minutes.

Here’s what you’ll receive as a thank you:

- A free Study Guide for the book, good for personal reflection or for working through with a group.

- An invitation to ten Zoom gatherings across the coming year, for the launch team only, where we’ll explore the themes of the book together, go deeper into the ten movements, and I’ll share further resources. These will be spaces for conversation, learning, prayer, and encouragement, and you’re welcome to join as many as you’d like.

- A private space to connect with others on the team and support one another.

- First access to new resources as I create them.

- My thanks, and the joy of sharing this work, together.

If you’d like to be part of this, please reply and let me know, ideally in the next week or so. I’ll follow up with everything you need as we get closer to launch.

Thank you for your friendship and support. It means a great deal to me.

With gratitude,

Graham

Just a heads up that I have a new podcast, simply named “The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast”.

I’m learning about podcasting as I go, and I hope the episodes enrich people’s faith and life in some small way.

New episodes are released weekly, and the first 5 episodes cover:

1. Exvangelicals and the Exodus: Deconstruction and the Future of Faith

2. Love in the Age of Algorithms: God’s Children in an Age of AI

3. The Cross and the Flag: Following Jesus in an Age of Political Idolatry

4. A Place at the Table: Singleness, Loneliness, and the Family of God

5. The Rumour of God: Is Secularism Actually Dying?

Podcast Description

A theologian who’s done the reading, following the Jesus Way through the hardest questions facing Christians and the world, with depth, honesty, and hope.

I’m Graham Joseph Hill, and I research and write every episode myself, then think it through with you the way two people might talk across a kitchen table. These are long-form, deeply researched explorations of faith, justice, spirituality, culture, and the global church. You won’t always land where I land, and that’s the point. On each topic, I’ll lay out the strongest case on every side, go deep into what the Bible and the Christian tradition actually say, draw in history, philosophy, science, and sociology, and ask what it all means for how we live now. Every episode ends where I believe the gospel leads: in hope. And I close each one by recommending three books that have shaped my thinking, in case you want to go further.

We take on the questions people are genuinely wrestling with. Faith and honest doubt. Anxiety, grief, burnout, and the care of the soul. The global church, and what Majority World Christians can teach the West. Following Jesus in a post-Christian Australia. Power, gender, sexuality, and who gets to lead. Technology and the shape of the human person. Justice for refugees, the poor, the imprisoned, and the land. Science and the case for God. Politics when the nation pulls the church sideways. Indigenous justice and reconciliation. And the slow, steady work of prayer and formation. No topic is off limits.

If you’re looking for Christianity engaged with mind and heart together, thoughtful, fair to the people it disagrees with, grounded in Scripture, honest about the hardest things, and alive to the present moment, you’ll be at home here.

Graham Joseph Hill (OAM, PhD) is an Australian theologian and the author of more than thirty books, and an Adjunct Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University.

There’s a written companion to every episode at my Substack, grahamjosephhill.substack.com, so you can read along or go deeper. Follow the podcast so you don’t miss an episode. If something here resonates, share it with someone who needs it. And if you’ve got a question you’d like me to take on, or a topic you wish I’d explore, email me at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com.

Where to Listen

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast

Spotify:

Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12

Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef

iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112

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Grace and peace,

Graham

“You know I don’t believe any of it,” my friend said, turning a coffee cup on the saucer. “The God stuff. I never have. But lately I’ve started to wonder whether we threw out something we actually needed. Whether all this hurry is what’s left when you take the meaning away.”

I didn’t say much. I listened. Because I’ve been hearing a version of that sentence more and more, from the people you’d least expect.

For two hundred years, the cleverest voices in the West were sure of one thing. Religion was a phase. As we grew up, got educated, got comfortable, we’d leave God behind the way a child outgrows an imaginary friend. That was the story everyone clever agreed on. Here’s the question worth sitting with. What if that story is running out of road?

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The Story Runs Out of Road

Go back twenty years, to the middle of the two-thousands, and you’ll remember the noise. Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion. Christopher Hitchens published God Is Not Great. Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett rounded out the group the press called the New Atheists. Their books sold in the millions. Faith was finished, the grown-ups had arrived, and history moved in one direction only.

Look where the conversation has landed since. In late 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a leading atheist for years, wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Now a Christian.” Dawkins now answers to cultural Christian, holding onto the music and the buildings while holding back from the creed. The broadcaster Justin Brierley wrote a whole book mapping the mood and called it The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

Beyond the famous names, the signs are everywhere. Bible sales are climbing, reaching record levels in Britain in 2025. The Alpha course reports a sharp rise in sign-ups. Many of those drawn back toward faith are young, and a striking number are young men, describing the same hunger: for meaning, for belonging, for something solid to stand on. In the United States, the Pew Research Center found the long Christian decline slowing and, for now, levelling off.

Let me be honest straight away, because this is a topic where it’s easy to believe what you want. The decline is real, and it isn’t over. Australia’s most recent census recorded the number of us calling ourselves Christian falling below half the population for the first time. The data on churchgoing is mixed. A much-publicised report claiming a surge of young men in British churches recently collapsed on inspection, its safeguards switched off and its sample contaminated. The data that flatters what we hope is the data to hold most loosely. Anecdote is not data.

And still. Something is stirring that the old confidence cannot explain.

If you’d like to sit with this further, I go deeper into it on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

The Altar to the Unknown God

The first Christians knew how to live as believers in a sceptical, sophisticated, pluralist culture, because they did it constantly. The clearest picture is Paul in Athens, in Acts chapter seventeen.

Picture the scene. Paul walks into the most sophisticated city in the ancient world, full of philosophers and competing gods, and gets invited to address the city’s thinkers. The speech begins with respect: “People of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way.” Paul has been walking the city, and has found an altar inscribed “To an unknown god.” Agnosto theo. To the God they didn’t know they were missing. The message lands like this: that God you’re already reaching for without a name, that’s the One I’ve come to tell you about.

Then Paul does something remarkable for a Jewish teacher in a pagan city. Paul quotes their poets. “In God we live and move and have our being.” “We are God’s offspring.” Standing in the heartland of ancient secular thought, Paul finds the fingerprints of the forgotten God woven through their own poetry, and treats their longing as real, their search as the beginning of an answer.

A line in Ecclesiastes explains why this works. Ecclesiastes chapter three says that God “has set eternity in the human heart.” The Hebrew word is olam, reaching toward the everlasting, the far horizon, the sense of something past the edge of time. Every human being carries a homing instinct for the eternal, a space the visible world leaves unfilled. You can suppress it, ignore it, build a whole philosophy to talk yourself out of it. And it keeps surfacing, in the small hours, in grief, in beauty, in the sudden ache that arrives from nowhere on an ordinary afternoon.

Augustine named it sixteen centuries ago, praying back to God: you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. That restlessness is the thing. People are running out of things to put in the hole, and the longing is leading them home.

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The Bill Comes Due

Here’s where the modern story runs into trouble, and where, of all people, Nietzsche saw it most clearly. When Nietzsche announced that God is dead, there was no cheering. Nietzsche was the atheist who understood the bill. In the famous parable, a madman runs into the marketplace crying that we have killed God, and asks the terrifying question: who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?

Get rid of God, and the things God was holding up start to come loose. The worth of every human life. The reality of good and evil. The meaning of history. All of it rested on a foundation, and when the foundation goes, the building shifts. Tom Holland has pressed this on secular audiences. The modern West has been living on Christian capital, drawing down an inheritance of compassion, equality, and dignity while forgetting the account it came from. The New Atheists wanted to keep the Christian fruit, kindness and human rights and care for the weak, while cutting down the Christian tree. Fruit withers fast on a severed branch.

I want to name a danger here, because honesty asks for it. A lot of what gets celebrated as a return to Christianity is admiration for Christianity’s effects, with the belief left out. A Christianity valued only for its usefulness is a hollow thing, and it won’t hold. Jesus didn’t go to the cross to make the West feel good about itself.

The hunger now stirring flows in every direction, toward the church for some and toward astrology, wellness spirituality, and psychedelics for others. An age can lose its disenchantment and still wander a long way from home.

Green Shoots in Cracked Concrete

So where does this leave people of faith? Holding two things at once. The decline of institutional Christianity in the West is real and serious. And the grand theory that said religion would die as we modernised has failed on its own terms, while a real openness to faith drifts back into the air. What we’re seeing is green shoots coming up through cracked concrete, and green shoots can be trampled or they can grow. The posture that fits is hopeful realism: take the decline seriously, take the openness seriously, and get to work.

Step back from the West and the picture widens. This is one of the most religious centuries in human history. The centre of gravity of world Christianity has moved south and east, to Africa, to Asia, to Latin America, young and growing and full of fire. Renewal has almost always come from the edges: from the desert, where contemplatives prayed while the comfortable cities slept, and from the poor, who often held the gospel more fiercely than the people who first carried it to them. When the tired churches of the West feel thin, the long story says watch the margins.

So here’s something concrete to try this week. Have one honest, unhurried conversation with a friend who doesn’t share your faith, and make it a listening conversation. Ask what gives their life meaning. Ask what they find beautiful, and what they think we’ve lost. Then listen, really listen, the way Paul walked Athens looking carefully before saying a word. You’re looking for their altar to the unknown god, the longing already at work in them. You don’t have to win anything. You only have to notice it, honour it, and maybe, gently, name it.

Here’s the question to sit with this week: where do you see the altar to the unknown god in the people around you, the God-shaped longing already stirring beneath the surface?

I’d love to hear your story. Share it in the comments, and pass this along to someone who’s been wondering whether they threw out something they needed.

And if you’d like to go deeper, I explore this whole subject at much greater length on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast. You’ll find a longer, more in-depth conversation there on whether secularism is really dying, and what the rebirth of belief asks of us, wherever you get your podcasts.

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

We’re living in a fractured moment, pulled apart by political polarization, performative religion, consumerism, nationalism, and widening inequality. The book offers an alternative: the slow, countercultural, life-giving path of Jesus. Across ten movements, from material success to spiritual riches, from power to servanthood, from exclusion to embrace, it traces a discipleship shaped by humility, justice, generosity, and love.

Rooted in Scripture and drawing on the wisdom of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American Christian traditions, it’s a prophetic invitation back to the radical road Jesus walked, and a hopeful vision for a church longing to reflect Christ again. Every chapter closes with questions for reflection, making it a companion for personal devotion, book clubs, and small groups.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today through conversations about faith, justice, spirituality, theology, culture, and the global church.

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

Photo by Caleb on Unsplash

Many single Christians know it well. You arrive at church, and the sermon illustration is about marriage again. The small groups are organised around couples and young families. The well-meaning questions arrive on schedule. Are you seeing anyone? Have you tried the apps? Don’t worry, your person is out there. And underneath all of it runs a message, rarely spoken aloud yet felt in the bones: you are not yet complete. You’re in the waiting room. Real life, the life that counts, begins when you find someone and settle down.

For some, the waiting room lasts a few years. For others, it stretches across decades. For some, by choice or circumstance or loss, it lasts a lifetime. And the ache is real. The longing for partnership is good and human and worth honouring. Layered on top of that longing, though, is a second wound, one the church itself has inflicted: the subtle suggestion that a single life is a lesser life, a holding pattern, a story still waiting for its real beginning.

Something has gone badly wrong here, and it goes deeper than awkward small talk. The church has absorbed an assumption the wider culture taught it, then baptised that assumption and preached it back as gospel. We’ve made an idol of marriage. And in doing so, we’ve lost something the Scriptures hold dear, and we’ve wounded some of the people Jesus loves most.

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The Idol in the Sanctuary

Many churches have made marriage and the nuclear family the centre of their vision of the good life. The family gets celebrated from the platform, written into the mission statements, treated as the goal every young believer should be moving toward. Sermons on Ephesians 5 outnumber sermons on singleness a hundred to one. The married-with-children household becomes the unspoken standard of spiritual maturity, the picture of what a flourishing Christian life looks like.

None of this comes from malice. It grows from good things: love of family, concern for strained marriages, a desire to support parents. The instinct to honour marriage is right and good. Trouble comes when honour curdles into idolatry, when a good gift gets treated as the highest good, when the church starts to act as though the family is the thing it exists to serve.

Yet the cost falls hardest on the people who don’t fit the picture. The single. The widowed. The divorced. The person who longed to marry and never did. The one whose marriage ended in grief. To all of them, the marriage-obsessed church says, often without meaning to, that they’re standing at the edge of the real thing, looking in.

The Unmarried Christ

Here is the truth that should reshape everything. The most complete human life ever lived was a single one.

Jesus never married. The One Christians follow as the pattern of all true humanity lived and died unmarried, without a spouse or children. If singleness were a deficiency, a lesser state, a holding pattern before real life begins, then the life of Jesus makes no sense at all. The Word made flesh shows us that a human life can be whole, fruitful, and overflowing with love, entirely apart from marriage.

Paul, who carried the gospel across the ancient world, was single too. And when Paul wrote to the Corinthians about marriage and singleness, the verdict was startling. Paul described singleness as a good and desirable way of life, one that frees a person for undivided devotion to the Lord. “I wish that all were as I myself am,” Paul wrote, before adding a phrase worth dwelling on: “each has a particular gift from God.”

The Greek word there is charisma. A grace-gift. The same family of words used for the gifts of the Spirit poured out on the church. Paul placed marriage and singleness side by side and called each one a charisma, a gift of grace from a generous God. Singleness, in Paul’s vision, is a grace to be received and lived into.

And Jesus redrew the lines of family altogether. When word came that Jesus’s mother and brothers were waiting outside, Jesus looked at the people gathered around and asked, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then came the answer that relativised every bloodline: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” The deepest family, Jesus taught, is the one formed by the shared life of the kingdom, the whole company of those who do the will of God.

If this strikes a chord, I go further into it on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

A Sign of the World to Come

There’s a deeper truth still, one the contemplatives understood, and it turns the whole question on its head.

Marriage is good and beautiful. The Scriptures speak of it as a living sign of the love between Christ and the church, a parable in flesh and vow of the union God desires with us. Like every signpost, it points to a destination greater than itself.

This is where singleness carries its own startling dignity. Jesus once said that in the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In the life of the age to come, the marriages that meant so much will open into a deeper and wider communion, a love that holds everyone in the embrace of God. Which means the single person, even now, bears witness to that coming world. A life given wholly to God is a sign, even now, of the way things will be when love is made complete.

The contemplatives knew this in their bones. Across the centuries, countless women and men gave themselves to God in lives of consecrated singleness, and they were among the most fruitful, most loving, most alive human beings the church has ever produced. They found in their singleness a freedom to love widely, a heart undivided, a life wholly available to God and neighbour.

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The Cure for Loneliness

Loneliness deserves an honest word, because it sits in so many hearts.

The ache of loneliness is real, and singleness can carry it. So can marriage. Plenty of people lie awake beside a spouse and feel utterly alone. The hard truth is that the hollow place in us was carved out for God and for the whole community of God’s people. A single human relationship, however good, can carry only part of that weight. When we ask marriage to bear all of it, to be the one cure for loneliness, we crush it.

The answer the gospel offers is a different one, and the church has largely forgotten how to give it. We belong to a family. The body of Christ is a household, a community of sisters and brothers bound together by something stronger than blood. In that family, the single and the married, the young and the old, the widow and the orphan and the lonely, all find a place at one table.

This is the calling the church has neglected. We were meant to be the place where the single person is fully at home, woven into a web of relationships deep enough to hold a whole life. We were meant to be the family with no edges, where no one eats alone, where the love of God takes on hands and faces and shared meals and Tuesday phone calls. When the church becomes that kind of family, the loneliness of the single person finds its truest answer, and so does the loneliness of everyone else.

Becoming the Family

So what do we do? The change begins in concrete, ordinary ways, and any of us can start.

If you lead, examine the assumptions baked into your preaching, your programs, your language. Honour singleness from the platform as a full and faithful way of following Jesus. Tell the stories of single saints. Build a community where every person belongs fully, single or married.

If you’re married, widen your table. Pull the single people in your church into the heart of your life, welcoming them as family, not as projects to be fixed or matched. Invite them into your home, your holidays, your ordinary weeks. Let your children call them aunt and uncle.

And if you’re single, receive your life as the gift it is. Pour it out in love. Build deep friendships. Give yourself to the community of God’s people, and let yourself be loved by them. Set down the lie that you are waiting for your real life to begin. Your real life is already here, already overflowing with the chance to love God and others with an undivided heart.

Here’s the question to sit with this week: what would your church look like if single people were treated as a full and flourishing part of the family of God, exactly as they are?

I’d love to hear your story. Share it in the comments, and pass this along to someone who needs to know they belong.

And if you’d like to go deeper, I explore this whole subject at greater length on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast. You’ll find a longer, more in-depth conversation there on singleness, loneliness, and the family of God, wherever you get your podcasts.

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

We’re living in a fractured moment, pulled apart by political polarization, performative religion, consumerism, nationalism, and widening inequality. The book offers an alternative: the slow, countercultural, life-giving path of Jesus. Across ten movements, from material success to spiritual riches, from power to servanthood, from exclusion to embrace, it traces a discipleship shaped by humility, justice, generosity, and love.

Rooted in Scripture and drawing on the wisdom of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American Christian traditions, it’s a prophetic invitation back to the radical road Jesus walked, and a hopeful vision for a church longing to reflect Christ again. Every chapter closes with questions for reflection, making it a companion for personal devotion, book clubs, and small groups.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today through conversations about faith, justice, spirituality, theology, culture, and the global church.

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

Photo by Daniel Capelani on Unsplash

They could assume that the surrounding culture shared their basic convictions. That the church sat near the center of public life, its voice respected, its buildings prominent, its leaders granted a seat at the table. To lead in the church was to hold a kind of cultural authority that the world recognised and, for the most part, honoured.

That world is ending, and in much of the West it’s already gone. We live now in a society that’s secular in its assumptions, pluralist in its makeup, and post-Christian in its memory. The church has moved from the center to the margins. Its leaders speak into a culture that often regards them with indifference or suspicion. The old authority has drained away.

And here’s where many Christian leaders make a fateful choice. Feeling the loss of power, they reach to take it back. They pursue political alliances that promise to restore the church’s influence. They adopt the strategies of the marketplace and the campaign, chasing relevance, platform, and applause. They fight culture wars to reclaim the ground that’s slipping away. The grasping takes many forms, and underneath all of them runs the same instinct: to meet the loss of power by seizing more of it.

There’s another way, and it was marked out two thousand years ago by the One whose name these leaders claim. The way of Jesus runs in the opposite direction from the grasping, and it offers the church a form of leadership that the present moment makes newly visible and newly necessary.

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The Kingdom Turned Upside Down

Begin with the teaching that opened the public ministry of Jesus.

On a hillside in Galilee, Jesus sat down and described a kingdom that overturned every assumption about greatness and power. Blessing belongs to the poor in spirit, to the meek, to the merciful, to the peacemakers, to those hungry for righteousness. The ones the world overlooks are the ones heaven lifts up. The Sermon on the Mount paints a community where enemies are loved, where the other cheek is turned, where the last become first and the humble inherit the earth.

This was a direct challenge to every theory of power the ancient world knew. Rome led by domination, by the sword, by the iron logic of conquest. Jesus described a different kind of greatness altogether, one measured by love, service, and self-giving.

Later, when two of the disciples came asking for the chief seats in the coming kingdom, Jesus answered with startling clarity. The rulers of the nations throw their weight around, lording it over the people beneath them. Among the followers of Jesus, greatness would wear a different face. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” The Human One, Jesus said, came to serve, and to give life itself as a ransom for many.

A leadership revolution was being seeded in those words. Authority, in the kingdom Jesus announced, flows downward. It expresses itself in service. It looks like a towel and a basin in the hands of the one who could have claimed a throne.

The Cross as the Shape of Authority

Everything in that teaching found its fullest expression on a Roman cross.

On the night before the crucifixion, Jesus knelt before the disciples, wrapped a towel around the waist, and washed their feet. The act stunned them. This was work for the lowest servant in the household, and the teacher was doing it. When it was finished, Jesus told them plainly that this was the pattern they were to follow. The leader kneels. The greatest serves. The one in authority takes up the towel.

And then came the cross itself. Here the way of Jesus reached its deepest point. The One who could have summoned legions of angels chose instead to be handed over, mocked, stripped, and nailed to a Roman scaffold. The crucifixion was the deepest refusal of coercive power and the fullest expression of self-giving love. Authority was redefined forever. From that day, the truest power in the universe would be understood as the power that pours itself out for others.

An early Christian hymn captured this in words that still astonish. Though existing in the form of God, Christ held that glory with open hands, let it all go, took the form of a servant, and became obedient even to death on a cross. And precisely because of that descent, Christ was raised and exalted above every name.

This is the pattern. Down before up. Service before glory. The towel before the crown. The way of Jesus moves through self-emptying into exaltation, and it sets the shape for everyone who would lead in the name of Christ.

Why This Is Good News for a Post-Christian Church

Here’s the surprising gift hidden inside the church’s loss of cultural power.

For centuries, the cruciform pattern was easy to forget. When the church held the reins of culture, Christian leadership could rest on position, prestige, and the assumption that the world would listen. The towel and the basin could be set aside. Leaders could lead from the center, clothed in borrowed authority.

That arrangement is gone, and its passing clears the way for something truer. A church on the margins, stripped of cultural dominance, is a church returned to the very position the first Christians occupied. They were a small movement with no political power, no wealth, no cultural clout. And they turned the world upside down. They did it through the quality of their love, their care for the poor and the sick, their welcome of the outcast, their readiness to suffer for what they believed. Their leaders led by serving, by suffering, and by the integrity of lives that matched their message. Outsiders looked at these communities and saw something they couldn’t explain, a love that asked for nothing and gave everything, and the watching world was drawn in.

Our present moment calls for exactly this leadership. In a pluralist society, the followers of Jesus lead through love, service, and persuasion, and they have no business reaching for the tools of coercion. The world has seen enough of religious power that grasps and dominates, and it has rightly grown wary of it. What disarms that suspicion is a leadership that refuses to grasp, that serves without seeking reward, that loves without demanding allegiance, that bears witness through sacrifice and service.

A secular age can ignore an institution that clings to its privileges. It struggles to ignore a community that washes feet, that cares for the forgotten, that returns love for hostility, that holds to its convictions while laying down its power. This is the witness that broke open the ancient world, and it’s the witness that can speak to ours.

Leading with the Towel

So what does cruciform leadership look like in the ordinary places where we lead?

It looks like authority exercised as service, in the home, the church, the workplace, the community. It looks like leaders who listen more than they speak, who share power instead of hoarding it, who take responsibility for failures and hand the credit to others. It looks like a willingness to be unseen, to do the lowly work, to set down the platform when the platform would cost the soul.

It looks like influence pursued through love and persuasion, through the slow building of trust, through patient service that earns its hearing over time. It looks like leaders who prize faithfulness above fame, who measure success by the depth of their love, who carry a towel into every room they enter. None of this is weakness dressed up as virtue. It takes more courage to serve than to dominate, more strength to kneel than to stand over others, and the leaders who walk this road discover a settled authority that no title could ever grant.

The Invitation

The way of Jesus has always run downward, into service, into self-giving, into the laying down of power for the sake of love. The world that once made it easy to forget this pattern has now made it impossible to ignore. The church can grieve its lost dominance and scramble to take it back. Or it can recognise, in the loss, an invitation to become what it was always meant to be: a community led by servants, shaped by a cross, following the One who knelt with a towel and changed the meaning of greatness forever.

Pick up the towel. Kneel down. Lead the way Jesus led. In a world that has grown weary of power that grasps, the church has been handed a rare chance to show what love that serves can do.

What would change in the places you lead if you measured greatness the way Jesus did?

A new book for the journey: releasing 28 July 2026

If something here has stirred you toward the way of Jesus, you might find a companion in my new book, Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship, releasing with IVP on July 28, 2026.

We’re living in a fractured moment, pulled apart by political polarization, performative religion, consumerism, nationalism, and widening inequality. The book offers an alternative: the slow, countercultural, life-giving path of Jesus. Across ten movements, from material success to spiritual riches, from power to servanthood, from exclusion to embrace, it traces a discipleship shaped by humility, justice, generosity, and love.

Rooted in Scripture and drawing on the wisdom of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American Christian traditions, it’s a prophetic invitation back to the radical road Jesus walked, and a hopeful vision for a church longing to reflect Christ again. Every chapter closes with questions for reflection, making it a companion for personal devotion, book clubs, and small groups.

Preorder your copy now at IVP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org.

Available also as an audiobook.

Keep walking the Jesus Way: the podcast

If you’d like to go deeper, join me on The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast, where I explore the questions that matter most for Christians today through conversations about faith, justice, spirituality, theology, culture, and the global church. -

https://ghill8.podbean.com

Episode 1: Exvangelicals and the Exodus: Deconstruction and the Future of Faith

Episode 2: Love in the Age of Algorithms: Following Jesus in an Age of AI

Episode 3: The Cross and the Flag: Following Jesus in an Age of Political Idolatry

New episodes drop weekly. Listen and subscribe at - https://ghill8.podbean.com