A few years ago, the song “Persephone” by John Mark McMillan caught my attention. Every so often, I become hyper-fixated on a piece of music. It typically annoys my wife, and she is justified in her annoyance, because, for a week or more, it’s the only thing I’ll play, whether it’s in the car driving around, in the kitchen cooking, or one last listen before bed from the Bluetooth speaker on our dresser. I just can’t get enough of it. AirPods saved my marriage in this regard.

But I’m pretty sure that with this song, my hyper-fixation lasted longer than a week. For a month or more, the melody and lyrics of this track completely enchanted my imagination and gave me hope in an uncertain time of life. Take a listen.

When I discovered this song, I was in a season of uprooting, a “liminal-space,” if you will, a transition from what was to what will be. But the horizon of my future was blurry at best.

Sometimes songs can hit at just the right time and in just the right way. This was one of those times for me.

Faith was graduating from her master’s program in two short months. The pressure was on. We had agreed that, upon her graduation, we would chase my prospects. The only problem was that I didn’t have any substantial ones. I was lost.

I was managing a coffee shop, driving a school bus, pursuing a seminary degree, and traveling the ministry circuit like John Wesley. The only difference was that Wesley preached and carried a bible. I led worship and carried an acoustic guitar.

In the song, McMillan uses the ancient Greek myth of Hades and Persephone as a foil to explore some deeper themes in the human experience. I’m not much of a Hellénophile, so I had to rely on my trusty friend, Google, to understand the allusion. But as soon as I began to map my own story alongside it, things started clicking.

As the story goes, one day Persephone—who was the beloved daughter of Demeter (the goddess of nature, agriculture, and harvest)—was frolicking in a beautiful field picking flowers and enjoying her youthful innocence. She came across a patch of narcissus flowers (also known as spring daffodils) that were carefully crafted to entice her. When she reached down to pick them, the earth opened up beneath her, and she was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld.

Demeter’s grief over Persephone’s abduction drove her into relentless mourning and a desperate search, during which she refused food, abandoned her post at Olympus, and caused the earth to wither. Eventually, a compromise was struck—Persephone would split her time between Hades and Demeter, giving rise to the seasonal cycle of growth and decay.1

This Greek myth explains the changing of the seasons, but perhaps more importantly, it reflects the human experience of transition—that often brings forth grief, transformation, and renewal… if we’ll allow it.

On this interpretation, the underworld is not a place that we despise, nor is it a place we try to avoid.

No.

The underworld is an inevitable destination in life. As sure as the sky is blue, Persephone will be splitting her time between the underworld and the earth.

Like Persephone, we all go down for a season.

My experience of the underworld is that I’m not aware that I’ve been there until I’ve left it behind for the next thing.

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a transition in life? A big move? A job change? A new relationship? A loss? A gain? If attended to carefully, these transitions can be spaces of great transformation, especially if we are attentive to the dynamics of the in-between, when we are moving from one thing to the next.

McMillan continues, writing from the perspective of Persephone in the dark and gloomy underworld. Whatever it was she saw or acquired there, cannot go with her to the land of the living. These lines point toward that peculiar human tendency toward acquisition and disordered attachments. In short, clinging.

Persephone must leave everything behind. She cannot take anything with her.

She must not cling to what was there.

In seasons of great uncertainty and change, humans are inclined “to cling” to things. We cling to all sorts of things—money, relationships, success, youthfulness, comfort, etc. But we must not cling. These hoarding tendencies keep us from being open to receiving what’s next.

Clinging amounts to chaining ourselves to the underworld, never again to see the spring sun.

Ronald Rolheiser riffs on this in his book Holy Longing, highlighting the story in John’s Gospel where Mary attempts to hold on to the resurrected Jesus. The problem with this, says Rolheiser, is not Mary’s love or affection for Jesus. It is that she is clinging to a former version of Him, holding on to who He was and not allowing Him to be who He is now and who He is ultimately going to become: the resurrected Christ and the ascended Lord. It is for this reason that Jesus utters the famous words, “Do not cling to me, Mary” (John 20:17).2

I look back to when I first discovered this song, and realize now that I was clinging to my life as I had come to know it. I was quite comfortable with what I had and where I was, but deep in my guts, I knew that it was time to move on. I needed to loosen my grip so that I could move to the next thing. It was this clinging tendency that kept the horizon of my future so blurry. But as soon as I loosened my grip, things became clearer.

The lyrical genius of the song lies in the chorus.

Nostalgia is a beautiful gift. For example, when you are in the middle of a rocky season with a spouse or other relationship, it can help to practice nostalgia together, recalling a time when you were deeply in love or when things were smooth sailing. Such a practice can sustain and nourish the relationship when things are less than ideal.

There are other times in life where an image, or a meal, or even a smell can set off a flurry of activity in your brain’s memory center, evoking feelings of great joy and satisfaction. This experience is good nostalgia at work. Remembering the joy of playing outside with friends during summer break, riding bikes, and having ice cream. Conjuring these memories and their corresponding emotions is nostalgia’s superpower.

But nostalgia can turn devilish on a dime. Like many things in life, it has the potential to become an idol. It transforms into something harmful when we allow it to dominate our thoughts and feelings. Nostalgia becomes dark and idolatrous as soon as we hand over our souls to it.

Nostalgia becomes detrimental when we view the past through rose-tinted glasses, ignoring the challenges we faced or warping the truth for a lie. It can also lead us astray when we become entranced by its myth-making abilities, believing that “nothing compares to the past,” which hinders our ability to appreciate the present and move confidently into the future. We start chanting things like “Make ___________ great again,” and our emotions follow suit.

McMillan’s anthem chorus reminds me that to move out of this dark and detrimental dance with nostalgia, I must make a declarative statement and choose to let go.

We may cling and grasp and cleave, but if we ever want to receive the blessing of a new season, we must let go of the dreams and live in reality, so as to experience a new future.

Hope is not something that you understand, but a trust.

This is a mystery. Some Christian traditions call it the Paschal Mystery, where death and letting go become the doorway to something greater than we can ever imagine.

On a smaller scale, transition in life can be a kind of paschal mystery as well. I wish I had this concept back then; I might have done things a bit differently.

In my season of transition, those many years ago, I remember looking everywhere for answers, searching for understanding. Every little thing was a sign. Every conversation circled back to me and my problems. Finding understanding was an all-consuming activity. In a sense, it was self-centric. I was so hell-bent on trying to find the answer to my own problems that I missed what was right in front of me. Had I known that what was in front of me was an opportunity to enter into the paschal mystery, I might have managed this life transition a little differently.

Our obsession with certainty and understanding is actually slavery, chaining us to the underworld, dancing with nostalgia for eternity, keeping us from seeing the spring sun ever again.

This is all very clear to me now, partially because it is all hindsight, and you know what they say about that.

I’ve had sufficient time to process and reflect on that transition many years ago and make sense of it in light of new learnings and experiences. But transitions in life are manifold, and as soon as we think we’ve made sense of one, we find ourselves in the middle of another.

McMillan’s bridge ties it all together for me.

Today, I find myself on the precipice of a new transition in life. I’m staring at daffodils while the world is opening up beneath me.

Not to be dramatic or anything, but what I am referring to is my 30th birthday.

I remember a time when the sound of 30 seemed ancient. Time is weird, and so is aging.

But I can honestly say that I am not afraid or worried about what’s ahead. I’m excited and know that the death of the 20s is not the death of me, but only the beginning of something beyond what I currently know.

I relate to the lyrics above so much in that I truly could have never imagined my life the way it is today. Any dream or vision I had for my life as a young man is gone by the wayside. Things are so much different from what I had envisaged for myself and my future. The key is in learning to accept this reality and find the gift in what is rather than what could have been.

I love that McMillan invokes weakness as strength. This is gospel, and this is good.

The fact that I do not know what lies ahead in this new decade places me in a position of vulnerability and weakness. But I am learning that in my weakness and vulnerability, I am keeping good company with Christ, who, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).

Or as it says elsewhere, ^“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

In navigating life’s transitions, we often find ourselves in a liminal space, much like Persephone in the underworld, where clinging to the past can hinder our growth and transformation. Nostalgia, while a beautiful gift, can become a burden if we allow it to dominate our thoughts and emotions. Embracing the paschal mystery of letting go opens us to new possibilities and deeper understanding. As I enter my 30s, I recognize that the end of one season is merely the beginning of another. By accepting the reality of change and finding strength in vulnerability, we can move forward with hope, trusting that what lies ahead is greater than what we leave behind.

I caught a glimpse of some spring daffodils outside my little cottage home in Arkansas. They are beautifully weak creations, and so are we. And that is how it should be.

This series explores the search for a “sacred home,” asking what it means to be a Christian and how spiritual and religious identities shape our understanding of ourselves and others.

Today, I am excited to share with you a book I read recently called Why I Am Protestant by , which has helped me think more about my own sacred home. This book is one of three books in the Ecumenical Dialogue Series from IVP Academic. The goal of the series is to cultivate greater dialogue between the three major branches of Christianity.

The book will officially be out on September 30th, but you can pre-order a copy now. Or, if you’d like to read a little sampling of the book, you can download this free excerpt.

What does this have to do with finding a sacred home? Well, as it turns out, Christianity is quite a large house, with many rooms and places to explore. In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis employs this metaphor of a large mansion to conceptualize the vastness of the Christian tradition. Lewis says that the great hall inside the mansion represents historic orthodox Christianity unified around the early church creeds, and that the doors and rooms attached to that great hall represent the major branches of the Christian tradition.

I like this metaphor. And it’s helped me understand my place in that great house.

I grew up in a church tradition that began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries during the Second Great Awakening in America. It was called the Restoration Movement and was led by two Presbyterian ministers, Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone. The goal of the movement was to bring unity to the Church by patterning itself after the early church, a worthy goal and its greatest strength, which ultimately became its greatest weakness.

I do not despise the tradition in which I was raised, and in many ways still hold on to the good fruit born out of that particular tradition while leaving behind the chaff on the threshing floor. After all, it was this church that introduced me to Jesus, taught me the gospel, baptized me into Christ, and played a pivotal role in my education and spiritual formation well into my adulthood. But as I have learned more about Christianity in all of its vastness, I have come to realize that the Church of my youth was not the only “one true church,” as I was often taught. To borrow Lewis’s metaphor, the church of my youth was more akin to a shoe box within a drawer, inside a dresser, inside a room attached to that great hall within the big house of Christianity. And it has done me a lot of good to step out of that room for a bit and explore other parts of the house—not necessarily to switch rooms or abandon the shoe box altogether, but to find a greater appreciation of the whole, and to understand my place within it.

’s book has helped me do just that: Find a greater appreciation in the whole of Christianity, but particularly Protestant Christianity, a specific wing of Lewis’s great Christian house. The book has helped me understand why I am Protestant and why I remain so, and has helped me articulate what the particular goods of Protestantism are for the Church today, and there are many.

Now, before I go any further, let me say this. I have dear friends who were raised Protestant but are now Catholic. I also have dear friends who were raised Catholic, but are now Protestant. I even have friends who have either become Eastern Orthodox or are actively considering making that leap. I also have friends who have left the big house of Christianity altogether and are either renting different properties down the road or have bought a new house in some other neighborhood (I am milking this metaphor for all its worth).

I say all this to say, I consider my Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends as brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. I am not writing from a posture of triumphalism, as if Protestantism has all the answers or is somehow the only faithful expression of Christianity. Rather, I write as someone grateful for my own tradition while also deeply aware that the Body of Christ is larger, more diverse, and more mysterious than any one stream of it. My intent here is not to convince anyone to stay or to leave, but to share why I remain Protestant, what I see as its particular treasures, and how I believe it contributes to the flourishing of the Church universal.

With that in mind, and ’s book in hand, here are three reasons that I am Protestant:

Three Reasons I Am Protestant

1. I Was Born Into Protestantism

If you find yourself resisting this reason, then you might be swimming more in the cultural waters of neo-liberalism than you think. In a neo-liberal framework (the predominant worldview of the West) the model human is the entrepreneur of the self. Individual identity is relatively independent of context and relationships. Individuals have the power and right to govern themselves. Individuals should pursue the satisfaction of their own desires, including happiness and well-being. (Check out this post for more insight into the neo-liberal framework and how it functions in a therapy setting. Very interesting stuff). Therefore, to say that we are Protestant because we are born into it goes against our neo-liberal inclinations that we are autonomous, self-made individualists. We are certainly not self-made.

But, just because we are born into something doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not good or true, and that the grace of God cannot be at work there too.

I love what writes in the first chapter of her book,

In many Protestant circles, “I-grew-up-in-a-Christian-home” tends to be voiced as an apology, with sheepishness, as though the work of God were less than when it happens through childhood and home and being raised in the church.

Grace, though, works in domesticity and in community. Grace works in parents who nudge their kids out of bed every Sunday, despite the “I don’t wanna go” and the “Church is boring.” It works in mothers who teach the Lord’s Prayer by bedsides and fathers who model giving and integrity. It works in local churches through Sunday school classes and youth groups and sermons and Bible studies. God does not eschew the domestic or the local. God does not disdain the quiet or the small.

God came to us to grow-up-in-a-Jewish-home, and that same God is happy to work in gentle and slow stories in other homes where God is honored. God also works in explosive and public ways. I love the dramatic conversion stories some of my friends can tell. But I am not a Christian because of my quiet story, and those friends aren’t Christians because they met God in fireworks. We are Christians because of God. We are Christians because of who God is and what God is doing in our lives, in the church, and in all creation.

Beth has helped me see the grace of God at work in my own faith story. She has helped me see that just because I was born into a particular Christian stream does not mean that God was not at work in it. She has helped me see that even though my church tradition was far from perfect and had many flaws, grace is still always working in the Church, and I thank God for that.

2. Protestant Ecclesiology Makes Space for Brokenness

*Ecclesiology is a fancy way of saying “theology of the church.”

I must confess: More often than not, it is easier for me to see the brokenness of the church rather than its beauty. I am not necessarily proud of this statement, but it is true nonetheless. And I say this as a pastor at a church. Don’t tell my boss.

I do not blame my friends who have left the great house of Christianity altogether. I do not blame those who were raised in the church and have left it behind, never to return. I do not blame those who “love Jesus, but hate religion.” I find myself somewhat agreeing with their oft-touted reason: “the church just doesn’t seem to have any redeemable quality to it.”

Indeed, church experiences have been the source of a significant amount of pain for many folks. The church is rampant with human sin and abuse. The church has often traded its witness for influence in the world. It has prostituted itself to political power, to wealth, and to status. The church of history has initiated and funded religious wars. It has segregated the body of Christ and compromised its witness through racism, patriotism, misogyny, and the list could go on.

While it is true that the church has been the cause of much pain and much suffering in the world, it is equally true that the local church is God’s plan for working out the revelation of Jesus Christ in the world today. For all my woes about the church, I am equally confronted by the God revealed in Jesus Christ. I am confronted by the God who comes to us and speaks to us and who establishes the Church on earth, not as an institution, but as a witness to this remarkable revelation. The church is a community of witness to King Jesus first and foremost, to a King-dom that is not of this world, but one that has broken into it by the God enfleshed in human skin, and carried forth in power by the Spirit who lives and animates that community of witnesses.

In chapter three, Jones writes,

Protestant ecclesiology is the necessary flowering of Augustine’s ecclesiology of grace. If God can and does work in corrupot places, who are we to limit the church to our own institutions and borders? If every historical church is riddled with sin, who are we to claim the rightness of our own churches? But if church is grace, then Protestant churches are church. More, they are church with the very important mission of promulgating the good news that church is powered by God and not by us. The church is the church by grace and not by institutional structures.

If you are a theology nerd, I do not doubt that you will love the way weaves an account of Protestant ecclesiology in chapter three. She focuses on the unique claims that Protestants make about the revelation of God and then connects those ideas, quite unexpectedly, to Augustine and the early Donatist controversy to spin an ecclesiology of grace amidst brokenness, a theology of church that is both realistic and contextual, non-institutional and non-hierarchical. It is an account of the church that is fundamentally rooted in the grace of God, and quite honestly, I don’t like it because it forces me to accept the scandalous fact that God might be at work somewhere I was certain He wasn’t. But I’m afraid she is right, and I think that Protestantism has labored this theology of the church into being, and that it is a theology we need now more than ever when we are constantly confronted with the blatant brokenness of the church in the world, but especially in the West.

If you look out into the world of Christianity and see nothing but brokenness, perhaps there might be room for you in the Protestant tradition of Christianity, for it is a tradition that fronts God’s grace before anything else, and not only makes space for God’s grace to work in dark places, but insists that God has always worked that way and will continue to do so.

Grace scandalizes our notions of how God is at work in the world today.

3. It Continually Points Me Back to the Word of God

Anyone familiar with the Protestant Reformation ought to be familiar with the five solas: Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), Sola Fide (Faith alone), Sola Gratia (Grace alone), Solus Christus (Christ alone), and Soli Deo Gloria (To God alone be the glory).

The 16th-century Protestant Reformers were insistent that God must come to us from outside ourselves. This claim rests on the assumption that because humans are flawed and marred by sin, we cannot come to know God through our own reason or intellect or any tradition presented to us. Natural revelation is not enough. That is why the reformers insisted on the primacy of special revelation, and that special revelation comes to us through the Word of God revealed in scripture. That is, no institution, no tradition, and no ritual could effectively mediate the revelation of Godself to us.

This led them to the doctrine of sola scriptura. They claimed that apart from the primacy of scripture, we were incapable of coming to know God fully. Scripture contained the fullest of God’s revelation to us in the sense that it was the primary medium. The Word of God became, for the reformers, the “norming norm” upon which everything else was based.

The reformers did not view scripture in terms of a mere biblicism, worshipping of a book, and denying the need for reason, tradition, or experience. But they placed scripture as the primary means of knowing God above all else.

Beth writes,

We know God because God acts to make Godself known. Scripture is not the only way God does this. Jesus is the decisive revelation of God in history. Scripture is not God, nor does it have the same status Jesus does, but between the first and second comings of Christ, knowing scripture in the power of the Spirit is our primary mode of revelation about him, and it is to him, together with the Father and the Spirit that scripture testifies.

In some circles I run in, I have found that people have a lot of hang-ups with the bible. Sometimes scripture has been wielded more as a weapon than as a healing balm. People have used scripture to justify hate, twisting it’s words for their own selfish purposes. Scripture is at times confusing, alarming, seemingly anti-science, and doesn’t always seem to live up to our experience of reality and the world we inhabit. For some, it is archaic and outdated.

While I understand these qualms about scripture, I also recognize that without scripture, I would not have come to know Jesus. The one who is God’s decisive Word to us. The one who came to us and “tabernacled” among us as the gospel of John writes. It is because of Jesus that we must continually return to scripture, and it is through the lens of Jesus that we must ultimately interpret all of scripture. For those who struggle with the bible, check out this article about moving from a “hermeneutic of suspicion” to a “hermeneutic of trust.”

Oh, and please consider buying this book if you found this topic interesting and want to support a great theologian.

I was recently sitting at a doctor’s appointment with my wife. We’d never met the doctor before, and at one point during the appointment, he asked us what we did for a living. After my wife gave him a very acceptable answer to his kind question, it was my turn.

I gulped, took a deep breath, and proceeded to tell him, “I’m a pastor at a local church.”

Other pastors reading this will know that when someone asks you this question, and you answer them honestly, there is truly no telling where the conversation is going next, and you either love that fact or hate it. Personally, I tend to fall in the latter category, and so I try to avoid these situations at all costs.

Doc said, “Oh, how many people are at your church?”

I said, “Uh, maybe two-hundred-and-fifty. We don’t really keep count.”

Doc said, “Oh.”

And then he asked me something my nerdy, church history, spent-too-long-in-seminary brain couldn’t give an easy answer to. He asked, “So are you like Protestant or non-denominational or what?”

I squinted my eyes and tilted my head, caught off guard by the question. It didn’t compute with my theological brain. “A non-denominational church IS a Protestant church,” I thought to myself. “What are you even asking me?” Thankfully, I did not share this internal monologue out loud, but I did proceed to rattle off something that was probably way too technical, not at all thought out, extremely reactionary, and likely made the whole situation worse. I said,

“We are an independent, non-denominational church that has roots in the American Restoration movement, which gave birth to the Christian Church, the Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ denominations.”

All in one breath.

Cue the awkwardness.

I wanted to say, “I’m just a Christian,” but that seemed too vague, and didn’t really answer his question.

I could have said, “We’re just a non-denominational church.” But I didn’t want to give him the impression that we were just a bunch of Christian free-floaters, untethered from any sort of legitimate tradition.

I should have just said, “Our church loves King Jesus and we are trying to obey and follow him in every aspect of our lives.”

But you and I both know that’s really not what the doc was asking. None of those answers would likely have given him what he was looking for. The doc was simply trying to size me up, to tuck me into his mental framework of religion in America—particularly in the south—all triggered by the moment I mentioned “church” and “pastor” in my initial answer to his question about what I did for a living.

In other words, he wanted to make sense of my religious identity, to put me on a team, associate me with a group of people, a particular doctrine, or a certain set of beliefs. He wanted to fill in the gaps of who I was as a person by squaring me up with pre-conceived assumptions about what it means to be a “pastor” of a “church,” whether that be a Protestant, Methodist, Baptist, non-denominational, evangelical, or however one would answer that question.

I suspect that my all-in-one-breath self-identification as an “independent, non-denominational church that has roots in the American Restoration movement, which gave birth to the Christian Church, the Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ denominations,” was NOT what he bargained for in asking that benign, and quite frankly, nice, question. After all, he was just trying to get to know me.

Now, before I go any further, let me be clear. I know this is partly a preacher’s story, meant to punctuate a point. And the point is this: I often wrestle with disclosing my religious identity (or any identity for that matter) in a world where language is too easily weaponized, reducing people to stereotypes and slotting them into ideological camps.

Call me a millennial or whatever you want, I simply do not want to be boxed into an identity, a label, or a stereotype. I value authenticity, and I want my authenticity to come through. This is very neoliberal of me. I recognize that. More on that in another post?

So yes, this is a bit of a preacher’s story. I accept that the doctor was simply making small talk with my wife and me while carrying out the professional duties for which we were there to see him in the first place. He probably had no intention of probing the nuances of my religious self-identification. His words could easily be chalked up to good bedside manner, and we could have left it at that.

But—and this is a bit but—I ask you, for just a moment, to let this story linger and see what it stirs within you.

How do you identify religiously? What’s your spiritual label? What do you say when someone asks you what type of Christian you are? Or what type of church you attend, or pastor?

In this series, I am interested in helping folks find their sacred home, for we are sacred creatures in need of a dwelling place. I want to explore what shapes our spiritual identity. Ask what it means to be a Christian? Explore what our religious identities tell us about how we understand ourselves, our world, or those around us?

I want to do this by writing some about my own story, to tell of how I have come to be where I am, in hopes of helping you get to where you are going. I want to explore our collective stories, which are, in my estimation, stories about humans searching for a sacred home. I don’t necessarily know where this series will lead, or if it will be coherent to you, my readers, but I do covet your feedback. Genuinely. I have some ideas for a few posts, but maybe my community could lead me to greater clarity for what to explore or say in this series. Your comments are welcome.

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Today’s post is roughly about the limits of language. Language is not a static thing. It is a world-creating property. Words, especially religious ones, are slippery things. They carry centuries of history, cultural baggage, and evolving meaning, and yet they also hold the power to connect us, to place us in a story bigger than ourselves. I am convinced that language can be both a powerful force for good or a destructive force for ill in the world, but it is rarely neutral. We must tend to the dynamics of language if we are to begin searching for a sacred home. This “tending to language” looks like asking how language is used, exploring what words mean, and thinking about how we make meaning together.

As a little thought-experiment.

What comes to mind for you when you think about the word Protestant?

Is it helpful?

Is it vague?

Too broad?

Meaningless?

Maybe you get a mental picture of a young German Catholic Priest with a hammer in hand, nailing his 95 theses to an old church door, and think to yourself... well, that’s not me. Perhaps you think in either/or categories, assuming that ‘Protestant’ simply means the opposite of ‘Catholic,’ the word itself functioning as an antonym. Or maybe something else comes to mind for you.

Whatever it is, it seems to me that most Christians who are in fact Protestants don’t self-identify that way. It’s just not a term that is used much anymore. Where I live in the South, people are much more inclined to claim denominational fidelity rather than paint themselves in broad Protestant strokes. It is more meaningful (and perhaps safer?) to use denominational titles when naming their religious self-identification. For example, people might claim they are a Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Pentecostal—but rarely a Protestant. Others who come from more independent, autonomous, or “free churches” more often use terms like evangelical, non-denominational, Christian, or disciple of Jesus to describe their religious identity, but Protestant rarely makes the cut.

I’m not knocking this practice. There are good reasons to use these other titles in our day-to-day conversations. For one, denominational titles and these other labels can provide more nuance, context, and clarity for those trying to understand who we are. On the negative side, these titles and labels are rife with stereotypes that could potentially lead to misunderstanding and othering.

Alas, this is the nature of language in general, and so we should take this fact as a word of caution that leads to a formative practice for our lives. Always ask people what they mean by the labels they use to identify themselves.

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This is not just true for religious conversations, but for all manner of conversations. In a world where discourse has become extremely antagonistic, divisive, and, for lack of a better term, ideological, curiosity and active listening go a long way. Asking what people mean by the words they use communicates that you value that person, that you see them, and that you want to know them and understand them. What a gift to be valued, seen, known, and understood in a world of sound bites and stereotypes. Words have power, but the meaning we give to words might be different than our neighbor’s understanding, so let us ask.

Stay curious.

Lean in.

I digress.

I’ve been following Ryan Burge for a couple of years now. He studies religion in America, and his findings are fascinating. If his work has taught me anything, it’s that measuring religion in America is hard, and much of that is due, in part, to how people self-identify religiously. Sometimes his work goes over my head a little bit because I am not a statistician or a data junkie, but I often find his research trails illuminating.

Some of his research has suggested that a growing number of Americans just don’t know what basic religious words mean anymore. He actually has data showing that young people don’t know what the word Protestant means, which complicates how one measures religion in America and could significantly impact how religious data is interpreted.

This suggestion is confirmed in a recent series on his Substack, where he investigates the Four Types of Nones. Some of you may be familiar with the Nones and Dones categories. They have become mainstream in dialogues and books about religion in America, church growth movements, and evangelism.

However, this new research nuances the Nones a bit more to provide a fuller picture of these non-religion-affiliated persons. There is an emerging category called the NiNos (Nones in Name Only) which, according to Burge, “have an openness to spirituality and religion that far surpasses the other three types.” He suggests that most of the NiNos are actually just Protestants, but that they don’t know what that means.

In other words, the NiNos are not a group to be converted, but to be educated.

Honestly, I can’t blame anyone for not knowing what ‘Protestant’ means. If it weren’t for my vocation in ministry and years of theological study, I probably wouldn’t either—and I’d likely avoid the term in everyday conversation because it seems too broad and unhelpful for the particularities of religious self-identification. It’s a confusing word, a religious word, and therefore a slippery word.

The doctor’s question may have been casual, but it revealed something to me: our cultural vocabulary for religion is shrinking, and with it, our capacity to understand ourselves and one another. If most people no longer know what Protestant means, then what else have we lost in translation? What other Christianese words, like faith, grace, church, or salvation, are sliding into vagueness or distortion?

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This is not a small matter. Language frames reality, and when we lose our words, we lose our ability to tell our story. That’s why I think it still matters to claim a religious self-identity even if it feels awkward or outdated. In my next post, I’ll wrestle with the word Protestant, why this word, messy as it is, might still be worth keeping. I’ll do this while reflecting on a forthcoming book by a former professor of mine, Beth Felker Jones, called “Why I am Protestant,” equal parts book review and personal reflection. Oh, and by the way, you can preorder the book now!

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My heart is heavy today. It’s one of those days when I know I’ve reached my threshold of media intake, but my eyes cannot turn away.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days when the news cycle is a restless beast and my personal algorithm is its angry sidekick, churning out an endless array of images, hot takes, and ideological antagonizing.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days when I’ve fed the machine… perhaps I’m feeding it now. And it’s eating my lunch.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days when “compassion fatigue” paralyzes me, and I cannot bear the reality of seeing another school shooting, another senseless act of political violence, or another bomb being dropped on kids.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days where my desire to be right comes up against my capacity for compassion.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days where I find myself fighting against that peculiar spiritual discipline that Jesus so often practiced, weeping.1

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days when my prayers feel hollow and meaningless, incapable of enacting change in the world around me.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days when I have become acutely aware that I am a human creature, made from dust, designed for locality, and created for context, but I find myself living in a globalized world, made for complexity, designed for confusion, and created for chaos. I think I can choose to turn aside, but my flesh is weak.

Lord, have mercy.

It’s one of those days…

What do we do in these dire times?

When the weight of sin is too heavy for our hearts to handle?

When numbing is easier than showing up?

What do we say in these sick moments?

When the log in our neighbor’s eye is easier to see than the speck in our own?

When the antagonisms of the left and the right hold us hostage and keep us from seeing our collective humanness?

I do not know what we ought to do.

I do not know what we ought to say.

I am finding relief in the gospel of grace today, where the “right thing to do” has never been a prerequisite for Kingdom citizenship.

Thank God for grace.

I’m glad that God is not a God that only answers to the right incantation and the perfect combination of words.

Thank God for mercy.

I find peace in knowing that a groan is good to God.

Groan on, brother.

Groan on, sister.

‘Til Kingdom come.

Maybe your heart is heavy, too. Heavy hearts come and go, but let us not wish them away too soon. Let us not fall prey to numbing, or to medicating, or to soothing our aching hearts too quickly.

Let us, rather, tend to them, for I am suspiciously convinced that heavy hearts might be signposts to the Kingdom of God among us.

The Spirit of God is always going before us, leading us, guiding us, and by God’s grace, “interceding for us with wordless groans.”2

Thank God for wordless groans.

And if your groan runs out, perhaps you can turn to the ancient prayers of the church, which have sustained generations before you and will surely sustain generations to come.

It is with a heavy heart and a feeble groan that I offer this ancient prayer to you now, dear reader.

It is the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy;

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we recieve,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

In this time between the times—the now-but-not-yet, this “liminal space” we all inhabit—between God’s initial disruption of the human story through the incarnation of Jesus and His promised return to bring ultimate victory and judgment, let us not lose hope, dear friends.

Let us not lose hope.

Let us groan.

And let us recognize our groan as a grace.

And let grace have its way with us.

This past winter I enrolled in a course called “Christian Formation: Practicing the Ways of Jesus.”

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Instead of a large paper at the end of the course like many of my classes in Seminary, the primary written work in this class was a weekly integration journal. The goal of this journal was honest personal reflection and wrestling, listening for what the Spirit may be inviting me to attend to in my own character, practice, and leadership. Ideally these journal entries would provide me with a kind of “roadmap to growth” in the years ahead. I’ve already revisited this journal multiple times since the class ended, and it has proved useful.

Here is what my teacher wrote in the syllabus about the integration journal assignment as a whole and how it relates to spiritual formation:

Deep Christian formation is a slow-cooker exercise that cannot be rushed. Although the journals themselves will not be submitted until the end of the course, students should plan to write each entry within a few days following the relevant class discussion. It may be a good idea to set aside a regular day and time each week for personal reflection and prayer (I recommend 2 hours).

As I read over the syllabus, I knew that this class was not going to be easy. Faking spiritual formation is nearly impossible, akin to putting a slow cooker meal in the microwave and expecting the same results. And taking two hours to sit and reflect? Yuck.

When I read the first journal prompt, my suspicions were confirmed. THIS CLASS WAS NOT GOING TO BE EASY.

Here’s what it said:

Start by writing your own (brief) eulogy, focusing not on accomplishments but on character. What do you hope that people say about you at the end of your life? What do you most hope your legacy is? Then reflect (in writing) on it. Where are you on track for this vision? Where are you not?

Yikes.

Deep breath.

Here we go.

This is what I wrote:

Graeme lived a courageous, conviction-filled life and taught others to do the same. He was a husband, a pastor, and a friend. He is survived by his loving and dear wife, Faith. Graeme and Faith’s marriage was a testament to the gospel and God’s covenant faithfulness. Graeme viewed his marriage as a sacrament and a vocation, one that was intended for mutual life-long transformation and growth in Christ-likeness. He considered his marriage to be the most joyous pursuit of his life.

Graeme often embodied an irrepressible and contagious hope for life, not a pollyanna-type hope that ignored injustice, grief, or lament, but a true and living hope that was fueled by his steady trust in Jesus and the coming reconciliation of all things. If you knew Graeme, you were likely shaped by his tenacious hope.

People knew Graeme as a stable and loyal friend. He was there for the people in his life and made it a priority to show up and be present to those he knew. He was the first to admit his flaws and imperfections but embodied a resiliency in his desire to grow and be better.

Above all, the trajectory of Graeme’s life moved toward humility and gentleness. Being in Graeme’s presence was fun and joyous, but also safe and comforting.

I’m only posting the eulogy part here, not my personal reflections which was the second part of this journal process. Sorry.

But I will share some lessons learned in the process and how that might help us think differently about spiritual formation.

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Here are three lessons I learned from writing my own eulogy

1. Death doesn’t have to be morbid

I love this clip from the Mr. Rogers Movie “Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” It’s better watched than explained. In the scene, Mr. Rogers (played by Tom Hanks), breaks the awkward silence of a family gathered around a death bed and says,

Death is the inevitable destination of human creatures. We’re not getting out of this world alive. Sorry to break the news to you if you haven’t heard. And so a part of “living life to the full” might be learning to accept that truth sooner rather than later. Or, put another way, spiritual formation is the process of learning to die before we die. As Galatians 2:20 says,

I’ve been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Followers of King Jesus, above all people, have license to talk freely about death, because we know that death has been swallowed up in life (1 Corinthians 15:54). This does not mean that we do not grieve, that we do not mourn, or that we do not shake our fists to the wind when death comes too soon, or when a loved one is taken from us tragically, or when the weight of loss feels too great to carry alone. Lament is an acceptable Christian response to death. But our lament is shrouded in hope. At least, it ought to be.

As I wrote my own eulogy, and imagined the end of my life and the legacy that I hope to leave, I became just a little more comfortable speaking about death. Perhaps this is because I merely mentioned it. And as Mr. Rogers says, anything mentionable is manageable.

2. Character outlasts accomplishments

I recently attended my friend’s grandmother’s funeral. I didn’t know her personally, I was only there to support my pal. But I remembered in college hearing some keynote speaker whose name I can’t remember tell a room full of 18-21 year olds to attend as many funerals in life as possible. He said, “over time, it will change you.” I never could shake that piece of advice, and so now, whenever I have the opportunity to attend a funeral of an acquaintance, or a person I know, or a friend’s beloved, I do my best to be there.

As I sat there in the pew of that old country funeral parlor and listened to my friend eulogize his grandmother, I was driven to tears by his recounting of her life. It was simple and ordinary. By the world’s standards, it was pretty unremarkable. And yet as I listened to my friend, through tears and heaps of emotion, share stories and memories of her, the emphasis was consistently placed upon her character, not her accomplishments: who she was, how she loved, and how she made you feel. Very little was said about what she achieved in life, even though some of those things were mentioned, it never was the spotlight.

Several years ago, columnist David Brooks wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “The Moral Bucket List,” where he explores becoming people with deep character. He writes about two different sets of virtues that he calls “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” While everyone knows that “eulogy virtues” are really what matter most, Brooks argues that our culture, educational institutions, and media teach us more about how to achieve career success and accomplishments than about how to shape a moral life.

I think Brooks is on to something and reveals what is woefully lacking in our day: A moral vocabulary and a roadmap to get there. As I wrote my own eulogy, I was forced to sift through what really matters in my own life. In a sense, I was forced to develop my own moral vocabulary, or at least begin the process. And the result? The freeing realization that what you do is not as important as who you are.

3. Every change begins with a clear vision

The Graeme that is eulogized above is not the Graeme that sits here and writes this post. Most days the real me is fearful—drifting through life without direction or impact. My marriage is often self-centered and transactional, and lacking in the transformation I long for. I can easily fall into cynicism, sometimes spreading discouragement rather than authentic hope. My friendships are not stable or strong; too often I am unreliable, inconsistent, or simply absent. I resist change, hold tightly to my flaws, and at times give up more quickly than I should. Pride and harshness creep in, making me less gentle than I want to be. I know there are times when my presence leaves others uneasy or unsafe instead of comforted and at peace.

The point is, I am not where I want to be, but the practice of writing my own eulogy has clarified the end goal. It’s given me a roadmap for the journey ahead. It’s showed me the gap between my present reality and my desired legacy. It’s clarified the areas where God is calling me to grow.

Dallas Willard coined the acronym VIM as a framework for personal change, but particularly spiritual formation. It stands for Vision, Intention, and Means. Vision is a clear, inspiring picture of the desired outcome. Its purpose is to motivate and provide direction for the entire transformation process. A lack of vision leads to weak intentions and ineffective means, resulting in pipe dreams rather than actual change.1 The eulogy writing practice falls within the vision category. It motivates. It sets us on a trajectory for the life we long to lead.

Is our eulogy set in stone? Of course not. Mine mentions nothing about children, ministry, or countless other possibilities that may very well shape my life in significant ways. But that’s not really the point. A eulogy is less about predicting the future and more about clarifying direction.

Writing my own eulogy didn’t magically change me. I didn’t walk away instantly transformed into the person I hope to become. But it did something perhaps more important: it gave me a vision, a target to aim for, a prayer to carry with me. It shaped my moral world. It was a reminder that God’s grace is both patient and persistent, shaping me slowly, like that slow-cooker spiritual formation my professor described.

If spiritual formation is “learning to die before we die,” then maybe writing a eulogy is a small rehearsal in that process. It strips away illusions, surfaces the gaps, and calls us back to what matters most. And perhaps, by God’s mercy, if I keep walking this road of vision, intention, and means, my future eulogy might one day sound a little more like the one I dared to write.

Welcome to my first subatck post!

This past June, I finally completed that pesky seminary degree I’ve been working on for far too long. I started my Master of Divinity degree back in 2018, when I was young and naive. Newly married and fresh out of Bible College, I immediately set out on my next theological adventure without much forethought, unsure of where it might lead. But I knew that God was calling me to be a laborer in His field, and so seminary seemed like a good training ground for that vocation. I recall a mentor of mine asking me if I was pursuing the full-time, 4-year sprint or the part-time, 10-year marathon. I didn’t really know how to answer him at the time, but I am proud to say that I finished it in a much more biblical timeframe—7 years. And then Graeme rested from all his labor… maybe.

Shout out to Northern Seminary for getting me across the finish line.

For those unfamiliar with this Harry Potter-sounding degree, the Master of Divinity is not a curriculum in divination or potions that one might find at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, although I am convinced that Koine Greek must count towards something in the magical world of Hogwarts.

No, the M.Div is the original bread and butter degree of seminary, a graduate-level, professional degree designed for those pursuing leadership in faith-based vocations. It’s a behemoth 108-hour program that covers the gamut of theological subjects: Old & New Testament Studies, Ancient Languages, Theology, Church History, Spiritual Formation, and Ministry Praxis courses.

I promise you I’m not tooting my own horn. I have friends who graduated from law school and med school and launched successful careers within that timeframe. Meanwhile I’m parsing Greek verbs, debating atonement theories, and reading more books and writing more papers than I know what to do with, all the while trying to figure out if I should add two more pizzas to my dominos order because some of the teens I pastor might invite their buddies to youth group on Wednesday night. Ministry is a weird and unpredictable vocation, full of God’s great mercy and never what you’d expect.

But, while 7 years of seminary might seem like enough reading and writing for a lifetime, the truth is, I’ve been missing those dual companions of mine as of late, and I need a place to commune with them once again.

This is what you’ll find here at Quotidian Mysteries. A communion table of my own thoughts, and I’ve pulled up a seat for you. Some posts might be morsels of bread, and others might be a feast. It all depends on you, dear reader. And yet it could be that a morsel to some might be a feast to another. After all, one man’s trash is another’s treasure. Maybe that will be true here also.

Nevertheless, QM is a curation of my own reflections, but I’ll try to keep it focused on things that I care about: spiritual formation, church & culture, life in the way of Jesus, and an occasional detour on topics like music, coffee culture, or the outdoors (I’m a seven on the enneagram people… three topics is too confining). Either way, I can’t be sure what will come of this digital communion table, but I do want it to be grounded in “the ordinary.” That is the thread I wish to punctuate, ordinariness with a dash of profundity.

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The name for this publication comes from a memoir I read several years ago called Acedia & me by Kathleen Norris. It’s a beautiful memoir that shows the mystical and spiritual beauty in the bland ordinariness and repetitive monotony of life. If we’re honest with ourselves, most of our life is spent doing the same things, eating the same things, saying the same things, and then trying to convince ourselves to death that our lives are more interesting and spontaneous than this. The subtext is that repetition is not good for us, ordinary is not sexy, and monotony is meaningless.

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Ordinariness might even cause us to question the meaning of our precious lives, like the teacher Qohelet in the book of Ecclesiastes (1:1-4),

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.

If we’re not careful—when we are faced with the rote mechanics of existence—we might inch ourselves toward something more nefarious lurking beneath our ordinary lives: a naturalism and a nihilism, where, in the first place, we convince ourselves that only what can be seen and heard and tasted and touched is all that is. And in the second place, if we’ve seen and heard and tasted and touched everything there is to see and hear and taste and touch, we might very well come to the end of our rope, left only with a nihilism that forces us to question the meaning of it all.

The goal of Quotidian Mysteries is to help us befriend ordinariness. It is to persuade you away from naturalism and nihilism, to tame that nefarious beast lurking within us all, and to explore the possibility of a more beautiful and just worldview, where divine intervention is the rule rather than the exception, to be caught up in the drama of God’s work in the mundanity of individual human lives, and to proclaim, as the Psalmist writes (Ps. 24:1a)

The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it.

You are beloved, dear reader. You are created for purpose and for meaning. There is a personal, knowable God who created all of this, and you are a part of it, no matter how small and insignificant you think you are. This is an ordinary mystery, a quotidian mystery. And it is worth our curious contemplation. I’m glad you’re here.

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