One Year of Slow Burn Christianity

Gratitude

One year of Slow Burn: Thanks for joining me.

The mission of this Substack remains what it was at the beginning, to revive your Christian walk one step at a time.

I chose the word “revive” on purpose because I really do think that the Christian life is one of constant revival. The grave is relentlessly pulling us downward to sin and death, but Jesus is even more relentlessly breathing his breath into our lungs afresh so we can wake up to-and-with-and-in his life-giving Spirit.

The origins of this Substack are profoundly personal to me. I remember feeling angry when I started studying theology at the university level. Not rage, but zeal—the kind of anger that Paul recommends when he says we should be angry and not sin (Eph 4:26). I was angry because I felt like the churches I grew up in, and the people tasked with my discipleship, had failed me.

I’d had an odd mix of Pentecostal, charismatic, Baptist, and reformed evangelical catechesis. Most of what I’d learned was that Jesus was a threat to me and that the Christian life was more about avoiding Jesus’s ire than getting close to his love.

Part of the reason I became convinced in that first year that I was called to ordained ministry was because I just kept thinking to myself how I didn’t want anyone in the generation after me to miss out on the joyful profundities I was learning in class.

I remember the first time I translated John 1 from the original Greek—“In the beginning was the Word…”. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I had to stand up from my desk and move a bit because I felt so viscerally inspired.

Pentecost, German, 16th Century. The National Gallery of Art.

My father had told me about the first time he prayed in tongues being like a watery outpouring of heaven on his head. I wanted that experience. I’d prayed in the tongues of men and angels but it had never been that ecstatic. Yet, I felt something like what I imagine my father felt when I read the Greek version of John 1. My Christian walk was revived, like I’d breathed again for the first time.

Biblical Greek isn’t for everyone. But revival is.

Slow Burn Christianity is a parallel publication of Pastoral Theology. Click here to go there

As you walk your Christian walk, I pray Jesus meets you in your own unique and special way. He’s still making post-resurrection appearances to his disciples (that’s you!) even though, like the on road to Emmaus, we don’t always recognize him. And he’s always breathing his life-giving Spirit, the Spirit of Joy, into our mouths.

Receive him.

🤲 👅