I WROTE A BOOK!!

And Its Available For Pre-Order Now!!

I’ve been talking for a while about some projects I can’t wait to share with you. Today I’m excited to get you to tell you about the first one.

My first book, How To Remember: Forgotten Pathways To An Authentic Faith, will release Tuesday, October 7.

Yes! That’s right! I wrote an actual book!

And you can pre-order right now!

It’s a feature length version of the things I write about on here regarding the church in America.

In many ways, I feel that we as the church have lost our way because we’ve forgotten the songs, prayers and practices that have for so long defined what it means to live a Christian life.

Actually, I don’t think we’ve forgotten them, I think we’ve outsourced them.

We have let capitalism tell us what we believe.

What songs do we sing? The hits.

What verses have we memorized? The ones they sell at Cracker Barrel that our grandmother hangs up on the wall.

What themes and ideas are we familiar with? Whatever the Passion conference or John Piper‘s latest book is about.

For so many of us, what we know about our faith is based more on a product cycle than we realize.

That’s why I’m not surprised people have been leaving the church in the large numbers as they have. (Well, consumerism + scandal + politics + hypocrisy, etc…)

But God‘s not done with people - and people aren’t ever going to be fulfilled without him - so I’m also not surprised that folks are continually coming back. And it’s not a shock that interest in older traditions like liturgy and hymns is at a generational high.

We are desperate for a faith that seems genuine and authentic. To believe in something that is not for sale.

So we look backwards.

Thankfully, there is such a rich history from countless generations before us who have faithfully followed Jesus. They have left behind all sorts of tools we can learn from - in their poetry, intentionality and symbolism.

Are we willing to slow down and listen?

How To Remember is my attempt to document my own journey of discovering these old paths, and to share some of what I’ve learned as a guide to others.

I imagine I’m not the only one who’s needed church to be more than five pop songs and a Ted talk (for sale in the lobby on the way out.) There is SO much more depth and beauty in many of the traditions of the past.

There’s so much to say here, I keep re-writing these paragraphs because there is so much to talk about! A couple hundred pages worth!

So that’s what the book is: I take a walk through some of the songs, prayers and practices that have most impacted me - from songs of suffering, doubt and mystery to creeds, guided prayers like Lectio Divina, and even overlooked aspects of church life like architecture and intergenerational friendship.

My hope and prayer is that this book can be a guide for you - out of the gift shop and into the wild.

It was a joy and honor to get to write it for you.

How To Remember is available for pre-order now.

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Here’s the quick story of how this happened:

I won’t lie. Writing a book has been a dream of mine since as long as I can remember. I worked at the local library all four years of high school and I was an English major before I dropped out of college to go live in a van and play rock and roll with my friends.

I’d pretty much given up on that dream when I got a call a few years ago from my friend Trillia. She’s a best-selling author who I met via my podcast forever ago (I chased her down to have her on because I loved one of her children’s books so much.) I was able to invite her to be a part of The FAITHFUL Project, and through that we became actual friends.

In the past few years she has become the head of acquisitions at Moody Publishers - in charge of which authors get signed and which books get made - and for some reason she decided to call me and ask “Would you want to write a book?”

After years of hoping for a call like that I was shocked by my own answer. “Yes,” I said, “but not yet. I don’t know what I would say, and I want to have a good reason to write something.”

“Ok,” she replied. “Well, call me when you’re ready.”

That’s actually why I started writing on Substack. This was my practice to see if I might have something to say for a book someday.

Two years later, after I’d had one similar conversation over and over with literally hundreds of broken-hearted songwriters struggling to stay a part of the church that they loved, and simultaneously realizing that I was no longer in that place myself because of the new foundation God had built in my life through the hymns, liturgies and practices I’d been surrounded by, I finally knew I had a story to tell.

I called her up and asked if the invitation was still open. Miraculously, it was. And here we are.

So a huge thanks to Trillia, for her invitation and her patience, and her willingness to get into a little trouble with me. And to Pam Pugh, my editor, who had to remove, literally, nine, thousand, unnecessary, commas, , , ,

That’s what you get when you let college dropouts write books. Grammar schmammar.

Mostly, I want to say thank you to YOU READING THIS who have followed along here, supporting me with your comments, your questions, some of you even supporting financially (which has been HUGE). This book would quite literally not be possible without you.

I hope you love it.

(and, you know, buy it.)