12 min read ⭑

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to a meal than palate and preference. How does your go-to order at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

Throughout my late high school and early college years, my closest friends and I ate two-for-one chicken wings at Montana’s Cookhouse every Tuesday night after basketball for about three years straight. We were all young in our faith and on fire for Jesus, glistening with sweat and drenched in hot sauce. The conversations ran deep and wide. A few years later, we were all in each other's wedding parties, and I still retreat to camps and cottages to pray and play with those same five guys nearly two decades later.

I’m with Cicero in defining true friendship: mutual pursuit. Life is a relational success if you have enough true friends to carry your coffin. Friendship gets harder as you get older. Men in particular seem to ossify in their ways. Maybe it’s the isolating effect of money-getting, the shame of unconfessed sin, the feeling of falling behind thanks to lingering competitiveness, the ceaseless distraction of screens or probably some mix thereof. I keep coming back to Psalm 133:1: “How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity.”

So I try to get people together. I aspire to be a mangrove Christian. Mangroves thrive in brackish water, sinking their roots in low-oxygen soil and then accumulating sediment from slow-moving currents. Over time, they plant offspring, attract birds and fish, and eventually become massive island ecosystems teeming with life. I think Christians are supposed to be like mangroves.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests, but we tend to hide them. What do you love doing that might surprise (or shock) people?

My wife and I are known locally for “star-sauntering.” Unless the weather is particularly heinous, you’ll find us tramping back lanes by moonlight every night of the week. Walking is great for health and creativity and all that, but we do it for the sake of our faith and our marriage. 

I need nature in my life. It’s how I connect with God and behold his majesty. If I go a week without seeing the stars, I get depressed. Then, when I see them again, it’s like reuniting with old friends. There’s the Big Dipper. There’s Taurus. There’s Cassiopeia, where my dumb 22-year-old self “bought” a star and named it after Michelle as a wedding present. Can you believe Orion is mentioned in the Bible? Job stared at that same constellation 2600 years ago.

My wife and I have three talking places: on drives, in bed and on night walks. Michelle usually drifts off to sleep in the bed or car just as I get going, so keeping her ambulatory keeps her talking. I’m told most men don’t communicate enough in their marriages. I’m sure Michelle wishes I’d take it down a notch. 

But, hey, we’re keeping a centuries-old tradition alive — our local historian told us the village used to teem with night-walkers, mostly drunk ship captains searching for their land legs after months on sea swells. We have a baby now, so star-saunters happen far earlier; but we’re committed to raising another generation who remembers there’s more out there than screens and skyscrapers.

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 broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?

Let’s see: lust, anger, pride, impatience, anger, sloth, gluttony, Mammon-worship, anger, unkindness. Ask my wife for the rest. The list is too long to tabulate. Thank God for grace. 

I saw porn for the first time when I was ten years old, and lust has been a battle ever since. We made a documentary about pornography a few years ago called “Over 18: A Documentary About Pornography” and that really opened my eyes to how sick and pathetic the voyeur industry really is. Luckily I don’t own a cell phone, so at least I’m not carrying porn in my pocket 24/7. And I’m experiencing compounding victory thanks to a habit of confessing lustful thoughts to God immediately after they happen. It’s so annoying that it curbs dark thoughts quickly.

My anger is just fear that God won’t come through on his promises and frustration that he doesn’t deliver on my timelines. I pray Psalm 89:47 a lot: “Remember how short my time is!” Anger isn’t a sin, but I haven’t yet learned how to use it for kingdom good. I still need to master Psalm 4:4 first: “Be angry, and do not sin; ponder in your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.”

Gluttony is another long-fought battle. I’ve struggled with my weight since I was a kid. Recently I’ve picked up the spiritual discipline of fasting until supper every Wednesday and Friday like the early church. As John Mark Comer says, it starves the flesh, the world and the devil. Mercifully, age is delivering an ever-growing hatred of sin. I’ve been praying every day this year that God would simply change my desires. I would rather die than sin.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

I just published a book entitled “A God Named Josh: Uncovering the Human Life of Jesus Christ.” Here’s the 1-minute trailer.

My wife and I were cooking Mexican food, and I was tossing beans in lime juice when she asked, “How often do you think Jesus farted?” We descended into a fit of giggles, and the next thing you know I’m learning that Jesus didn’t wear long robes and wasn’t born on December 25, 0 AD, and didn’t have 12 disciples and they weren’t all men. His name wasn’t even Jesus! Plus, I discovered the despotic crime family who covertly engineered his assassination. They were nuts, and I can’t believe I’d never heard of them before. Jesus even tells a parable about them.

I loved Jesus before this book, but we’re on a whole other level after this journey. The world needs more Jesus. His politics are brilliant. His philosophy is cutting edge. His economics are out of this world. Plus, he’s the Son of God and God the Son. I should note that A God Named Josh contains over 1,000 Scripture references, so I really only wrote half the book.

If I have an obsession, it’s trying to discover the truth. John says if we abide in Jesus, we will know the truth, and the truth will set us free. So maybe I’m obsessed with freedom. (And not this sham American “freedom,” which is actually just hyper-individualist autonomy.) How then shall we live? By walking in the truth. What is the truth? Jesus is the truth. Truth is a person.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace 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?

When I was in my early twenties, I bought a decrepit Ford for $300 and filled it up at the Pioneer gas station on Upper James in Hamilton every Tuesday night because that’s when gas prices were the cheapest. The car averaged 260 miles to the tank. I’d just heard a sermon about Elijah filling a bunch of jars from a little jar of oil, and I thought, What’s the modern equivalent of oil in a jar? Gas in a car. God … can you make gas last longer?

That week I got 280 miles to the tank. Weird. Filled up again. God, can you make gas last longer? I got 310 that week and 340 the next. God, can you make gas last longer? 400 miles. 460 miles. 500 miles. I was filling up every two weeks. Then I started thinking about selling this miracle car for hard cash. It didn’t matter when or where I filled up — even on road trips eight hours from home. Things topped out at 546 miles to the tank, well beyond the car’s original specs.

And then one day, it simply went back to 260 a tank. I wasn’t mad or even disappointed about it. I just felt this deep satisfaction in Jesus. It was like God said to me, Yes, I can make gas last longer. I can do anything at any time in any place with anyone.

So these days, I just assume that every good and perfect gift comes from God. Michelle has this thing she yells in our house every once in a while: “My ideas aren’t even my own!” That pretty much sums up our approach. Ignatius of Loyola said, “Pray like work won’t help, then work like prayer won’t help.” I wrote my first book, all 113,000 words, in exactly four weeks. I still have no idea how it happened, but it felt like an out-of-body experience, like my body was just a participant. Our job is faithfulness, and his job is faithfulness. We work, he works. We act, he acts.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Some people divide things sacred and things secular. But you know, God can surprise us in unlikely places. How do you find spiritual renewal in so-called “nonspiritual” activities?

The first thing that came to mind was Sabbath. I grew up in a strict Brethren home where Sunday meant no basketball or movies or fun. So it took Michelle a good decade of marriage to ease me back into it. Now, I don’t know if I could survive without it. Sabbath truly was made for man. A typical Sunday looks like this: gather with our local church, have a family over for lunch, go for an hour-long walk, take a nap, read mostly Christian books by the fire all afternoon and dinner-and-a-movie date night. It checks all the boxes for me: faith, friendship, fun, family.

But my second thought was Agapae! (Full disclosure: I’m about to push a long-suppressed Christian practice on you.) Today’s church communions consist of a sip of juice and an anemic cracker; this is hardly the lavish dinner enjoyed by the early church when they celebrated the Lord’s Supper (Jude 1:12, Acts 2:46 and some 2 Peter 2:13 manuscripts). For the first 150 years after Jesus, Christians ate a full celebratory meal, called the Agapae Feast, before taking communion. In every society in human history, eating is the primary way we start and maintain relationships, with the dinner table as a society in microcosm. 

The Christian lovefeast, or agapae, took things to the next level, celebrating Jesus’s unconditional love while offering an opportunity to practice radical fellowship across socioeconomic lines. It became a picture of the Revelation wedding feast. When participants joined in an agapae, they were bound to think it was a foretaste of heaven. Sadly, it didn’t always work out that way, and Paul had to play referee for a church potluck in 1 Corinthians 11:20-21: “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk.”

Agapae abuses aside, eighty years after Jesus’s death, this lovefeast was still mentioned both by early church fathers like Ignatius of Antioch and secular Romans like Pliny the Younger. Hippolytus of Rome and Tertullian both mention the lovefeast, but, by this point, the Western church had begun to separate it into a morning communion and an evening supper. Those communal evening meals got quite outrageous by the time of Clement of Alexandria, with so much gluttony and drunkenness and so little focus on Jesus, that Augustine of Hippo believed they should be stopped. The Councils of Laodicea, Carthage, and Orléans all banned lovefeasts in church buildings, with the Trullan Council of 692 AD excommunicating anyone who continued to share a meal together. It would take more than a thousand years and a Protestant Reformation to see the agapae make its reemergence, first with the German Brethren, who believed the lovefeast required a good foot scrubbing, a hearty communal meal and a proper Eucharist celebration. Ludwig von Zinzendorf brought the practice to his legendary Moravian community, which is how John Wesley picked up the torch and brought it to the Methodists. Unfortunately, the global church never revived this important New Testament tradition and instead settled for a mere coffee hour. Let’s bring Jesus’s agapae back.

But to actually answer the question, the spiritual practice that’s working best for me right now is reading and praying (I know–boring). To me, seeking first God’s kingdom and righteousness means growing the church wider and deeper and growing my spiritual life wider and deeper. Until recently, I’ve gone straight to work every day and then had family time; then if there was anything left, I’d read and pray. Now I’ve flipped it. The day starts first with reading and prayer (1 Old Testament chapter, 1 Psalm, 1 Proverb, 1 New Testament chapter), and then I work on whatever kingdom project is on the docket. If there’s any time left after all that, it goes to money-getting. Jesus promises if we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, he'll keep us fed and clothed. I’m banking my life on that promise.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are three of your favorite resources?

My writing mentor, Mark Buchanan, wrote a fabulous book about Sabbath called “The Rest of God.” Other books that have seriously impacted me include Mark Batterson’s “Wild Goose Chase” and Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life,” which I re-read every year while meditating on Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

My high school buddy James Kelly runs a stealth global ministry for Christians in the tech industry called FaithTech, and my producing partner Dave McSporran directs a Christian TV show called “THIS IS ME.” While most people our age are more focused on renovating their houses and padding their investment portfolios, it’s encouraging to have a few brothers who are still actively fighting the good fight after all these years.

Can I sneak in one more? Subscribe to “The Plough.” It’s published four times a year by this group of Christians called the Bruderhof — a community of 3,000 people spread across two dozen villages around the world, all sharing everything in common like the Acts 2 koinonia. If you want God to mess with your head, heart and wallet, grab the issue called “All Things In Common.”

We all have things we cling to in order to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it’s done for you.

When I was 20, my best friend and I got in a car and drove 3,000 miles to Arkansas, where we spent several grueling days digging for diamonds under the blazing summer sun. (In a dry county, no less!) We found zero gemstones, but we certainly made some memories. 

Proverbs 2:4 says to seek wisdom like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures. So I spend about an hour a day toggling between GPT-3 and Biblehub. I know a lot of people who are mining Bitcoin and other append-only spreadsheets, but I want to strip-mine the Word because it’s chock full of treasure that actually lasts. The combo of these two programs is astounding for unlocking scriptural insights. Pick a topic, ask AI to find you all the verses about that topic, and then dive into Biblehub’s parallel, commentary, cross-reference and lexicon features. It’s like a treasure hunt for the soul.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is 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 pay the bills by running a political blog, but if I were freed from the grip of land-lorders and banksters, I would dedicate 100% of my professional time to calling the church back to financing faithfulness. Right now, Christians think that stewardship means listening to radio money gurus, exploiting the working poor to pad their pensions, and tithing. But that’s not what stewardship means at all. The Greek word for steward is oikonomos, meaning household manager. Stewardship is only the part that we steward for someone else. Everything else is just churchified money management.

As I researched and wrote “A God Named Josh,” particularly the economic chapter, I sensed a growing uneasiness in my spirit that the Christian church is about to get smashed by the truth that we've been ignoring nearly everything the Bible and Jesus have to say about money. I hope it leads us to radical repentance, like when the Israelites re-discovered the Book of Moses while restoring Jerusalem in 2 Kings 22-23 and Nehemiah 8-10. 

But I’m not holding my breath. I started sharing my learnings about what the Bible actually said about money, and the reaction from church-goers was absolutely brutal, both publicly and privately. Christians patted me on the back when I made films about human trafficking, porn addiction and slavery, but as soon as I mentioned massive economic injustices like bonds and interest and land-lording and stock speculation, the fangs came out.

I’m naturally combative, so I was made for this fight, but my worry is that I’ll be brutal like Jeremiah instead of loving like Jesus. I’m praying Proverbs 25:15 over this new foray into Christian economics: “With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.”

Martin Luther said we Christians need three conversions: conversion of the mind, conversion of the heart and conversion of the wallet. Mammon and I have a long history, and both my wife and I sense a big war is coming.

What does it mean to seek his kingdom first in your life? Jared reminds us that giving God a few leftover moments at the end of an exhausting day isn’t giving God our first or best. Jared encourages us to seek out his truth like we’d search for buried treasure. How can you dig deeper into his Word this week and search for his promises? How can you stand on those promises in new ways?

Jared Brock is an award-winning author and director of several films including Over 18: A Documentary About Pornography and PBS’s Redeeming Uncle Tom with Danny Glover. His books include A Year of Living Prayerfully, and his most recent book is A God Named Josh: Uncovering the Human Life of Jesus Christ.

Related Articles