10 min read ⭑
“I couldn’t get over how often significant things happened around tables. Jesus ate with friends, strangers, religious insiders, outsiders, people with good reputations and people with terrible ones. Around meals, people became more than categories.”
The oldest of seven homeschooled kids in a God-fearing family, Ian Simkins spent a lot of time at church growing up. It gave him a glimpse of God’s work in bringing the gospel to the world. Now, as pastor of The Bridge Church outside Nashville, Tennessee, Ian walks in that same calling, bringing God’s Word to anyone who will listen. His recent book, “Every Table an Altar,” reflects his congregation’s mission: welcoming everyone to the table to encounter Jesus.
Recently, Ian answered Rapt’s standard eight questions with humor and wisdom. He’s talking about what it was like to grow up in a family that refused to waste hot dog water, why he doesn’t wait for life to “feel” sacred and how he’s pursuing connection in our lonely, distracted culture. Ian entrusted these words to Rapt — and we’re sharing them now with you.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
I grew up outside Detroit as the oldest of seven kids in a family of nine, so when I think about a meal that reveals something about me, I don’t immediately think about a restaurant. I think about a tiny kitchen in Michigan.
One summer when I was a kid, my grandmother was visiting from Arizona. We had eaten hot dogs, and afterward, she noticed we were about to pour the leftover hot dog water down the drain. She stopped us. Water was precious where she lived, so she carried that greasy water outside, poured some of it on the flowers, put the rest in the refrigerator and told us, “Don’t ever waste water.”
It’s funny because decades later, I wrote an entire book about ordinary tables becoming sacred places. Maybe Grandma was onto something.
Home for me now is Columbia, Tennessee, just south of Nashville, where my wife, Katie, and I are raising our three boys. But Michigan is still in me. I love good food, but what I really love is what happens around it: people lingering, laughing, telling stories, making memories. I’m increasingly convinced that the best meals aren’t necessarily the ones with the best food. They’re the ones where somebody looks around and sincerely thinks, I belong here.
That’s probably the truest version of me behind the bio.
Megan Lee; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
Travel is probably one of mine. Katie and I joke that travel is one of our love languages. Give me a new city, somewhere good to eat, something interesting to do and people I love, and I’m pretty happy.
I especially love doing that with our boys now. Recently, I took them to Huntsville, Alabama. We went to a museum, found a pizza place with cosmic mini-golf and wandered around looking for a waterfall. None of that sounds particularly “spiritual.” There was no worship music playing while we golfed under black lights. I did not deliver a devotional thought over the pizza.
But I will say that I’m increasingly suspicious of the category “nonspiritual.”
I spent years assuming the places where I would encounter God most profoundly would be the obviously religious ones. I still love those places. But some of the moments when I feel most awake to God now are laughing with my boys, exploring a city with Katie, sitting over a great meal, walking somewhere beautiful or having an unexpectedly deep conversation with a friend.
I think we miss a lot of God because we’re waiting for life to feel sacred before paying attention. One of the deepest convictions of my life right now is that God is already present in ordinary life. Spiritual renewal sometimes begins by becoming present enough to notice.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power?
Productivity.
I can make being busy look remarkably virtuous. I’m a pastor, writer, husband, father and leader, so there is always another good thing I could be doing. Another email. Another person to call. Another message to prepare. Another idea to chase. I can even get a little dopamine hit from knocking something out late at night and feeling like I squeezed one more productive thing out of the day.
The problem is that underneath my productivity is sometimes deep insecurity.
I’m an Enneagram Three, and one of the recurring battles of my life is separating my usefulness from my belovedness. When I’m unhealthy, accomplishment becomes a way of reassuring myself that I’m valuable. I don’t necessarily hide insecurity by withdrawing. I can hide it by producing.
Having a wife and three boys has exposed that in beautiful and sometimes uncomfortable ways. My family does not primarily need my output. They need me. The people I pastor ultimately need the same thing: a human being who is actually present.
So I’m learning to ask a different question. Instead of “How much did I accomplish today?” I’m trying to ask, “Was I present to God and to the people God gave me today?” I’m slowly learning that belovedness comes before usefulness. Everything gets disordered when I reverse those.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
Most of my professional life is invested in two overlapping things. I serve as lead pastor, and I just wrote my first book.
The obsession underneath both is really the same: How do we become people who are genuinely present to God and one another in a culture that is making that increasingly difficult?
We’re chronically distracted. We’re lonely. We make enemies of people we’ve never actually met. We argue online with strangers while sitting six feet away from people we love. Our technology has made communication nearly instantaneous while deep connection can feel harder than ever.
Then I started paying attention to the life of Jesus, and I couldn’t get over how often significant things happened around tables. Jesus ate with friends, strangers, religious insiders, outsiders, people with good reputations and people with terrible ones. Around meals, people became more than categories.
That became “Every Table an Altar.” It’s an invitation to recover ordinary spaces as places of presence, hospitality, reconciliation, justice and mission.
I think we keep looking for God in extraordinary places while Jesus keeps meeting people at ordinary tables. And I wonder what might change if we simply learned to show up there again.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
One of the strangest parts of writing or preparing to teach is that I can spend hours trying to force an idea into place. I can have books open, notes everywhere, 20 browser tabs staring back at me and still feel like I’m pushing a boulder uphill.
Then sometimes a connection appears that I wasn’t looking for.
A story I hadn’t thought about in years comes back, or a familiar passage suddenly opens in a different way. Something happening in our church intersects with something I’ve been studying, and suddenly I can see a thread connecting all of it. I don’t mean that every creative idea I have is a divine download. Sometimes an idea is just an idea, and some (a lot) of mine are terrible.
For me, discernment happens over time. Does this sound like Jesus? Is it consistent with Scripture? Does it produce love rather than ego? Does it move me toward truth, courage, compassion, humility and greater attentiveness to people?
I’ve also learned that the Holy Spirit often invigorates my work through other people. Some of my best ideas get better because somebody challenged them, sharpened them or saw something I missed.
I used to think inspiration would feel like certainty. More often, it feels like paying attention: listening to God, Scripture, people and the world in front of me and trusting that the Spirit is already at work there.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
Prayer is becoming less complicated for me.
One of the postures I’ve been returning to is simply opening my hands. I’ll sometimes invite our church to do this when we pray, but I need the physical reminder myself. Closed fists are great for gripping, controlling, protecting and fighting. Open hands can receive and release.
That little movement has become a picture of what I want my life with God to look like.
I lead a church. I’m raising three boys with Katie. I’ve written a book and am entering all the vulnerability that comes with putting your words into the world. There are people I love whose circumstances I cannot fix, leadership situations I cannot control, outcomes I cannot guarantee and questions I cannot answer.
So I open my hands.
Sometimes prayer is words. Sometimes it’s naming people. Sometimes it’s gratitude. Sometimes it’s basically, Jesus, I don’t know what to do with this, but here it is.
I’m learning that prayer is less about convincing God to pay attention and more about becoming attentive to the God who is already present. Open hands remind me that I am loved before I accomplish anything, that I can release what was never mine to control and that whatever God gives me today can be received as a gift.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
It’s nearly impossible to narrow this down to just three! There are so many books that have shaped my understanding of God, the church and what it means to follow Jesus. But here are six that have been particularly influential in my life:
1. “The Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard. This book profoundly shaped my understanding of discipleship as learning to live the kind of life Jesus lived, here and now.
2. “Life of the Beloved” by Henri Nouwen. A beautiful reminder that our identity begins with being loved by God, long before anything we accomplish or contribute.
3. “Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership” by Ruth Haley Barton. An important reminder that the health of our leadership is inseparable from the health of our souls and that we cannot lead others somewhere we’re unwilling to go ourselves.
4. “The Pastor” by Eugene Peterson. Peterson helped reshape my imagination for pastoral ministry around presence, attentiveness and faithfulness.
5. “Surprised by Hope” by N.T. Wright. This expanded my understanding of resurrection, the kingdom of God and what Christian hope means for the world we’re living in right now.
6. “Liturgy of the Ordinary” by Tish Harrison Warren. This book helped give language to something I’ve become increasingly convinced of: ordinary life is full of opportunities to encounter God, and even our most mundane routines can become places of spiritual formation.
These books represent several different streams of thought that have shaped me, but they share a common thread: following Jesus is about the transformation of our entire lives.
For a much longer list of my favorite thinkers, authors, theologians and other influences, I’ve put together a collection here.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. What’s one resource that’s boosting your spiritual growth right now?
One resource I’ve returned to in this season is Glenn Packiam’s work on resilience, particularly his framework around recovery and recalibration. I appreciate it because resilience can easily get confused with toughness. We imagine resilient people are the ones who can absorb more pressure, work longer, hurt less and keep moving. But that isn’t a particularly human vision of resilience, and I’m not convinced it’s a particularly Christian one.
This has been a season where I’ve needed the reminder that healthy resilience includes both recovery and recalibration. Sometimes you need to recover: sleep, breathe, pray, laugh and get around people who know you beyond your usefulness. But sometimes you also need to recalibrate. Something difficult may be revealing that the way you were operating wasn’t sustainable in the first place.
That distinction has helped me ask better questions. I can’t control everything happening around me. But I do have agency over how I respond to it, what I give my attention to and whether hardship makes me more fearful and closed or more rooted in Jesus.
I’m trying to become resilient enough that difficulty doesn’t get the final word on who I become.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
I think I’m becoming increasingly interested in what happens when Christianity moves out of the building and back into ordinary life.
That’s obviously underneath the book, but I don’t think the idea ends with a book. At The Bridge, our mission is to be with Jesus and become like him for the sake of the world, and our vision is to bring the gospel to every table.
I’m fascinated by what could happen if ordinary Christians really believed their homes, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, coffee shops, dinner tables and even jail mess-hall tables were places where God could meet people.
I don’t know exactly what shape all of that takes yet. More writing? Probably. New expressions of church? Maybe. More work around formation, hospitality, reconciliation and helping Christians recover a sense of calling in ordinary life? I hope so.
And there can be, at least for me, a fear attached to dreaming. Writing my first book has reminded me that creating anything means giving people the opportunity to misunderstand it, criticize it, ignore it or simply not care. Leadership carries its own version of that vulnerability.
But I’m less interested than I used to be in building something impressive. I want to spend the next season helping people discover that they don’t have to go somewhere extraordinary to participate in the work of God.
The table in front of them is a pretty good place to start.
We love the process Ian uses to discern whether something is of God or not. “Does this sound like Jesus?” he asks himself. “Is it consistent with Scripture? Does it produce love rather than ego? Does it move me toward truth, courage, compassion, humility and greater attentiveness to people?”
As we filter our situation through these questions, we don’t simply rely on our own intuition. The Holy Spirit is with us to guide us in all truth.
Jesus said, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (John 14:26-27a, ESV).
Our prayer for you this week is that you walk in discernment — and receive abundant peace.
Ian Simkins is the lead pastor of The Bridge Church just outside Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of Every Table an Altar. He and his wife, Katie, have three boys who keep their home incredibly loud and their table beautifully full.