When the world pressed pause, we pressed play.

It was March 13, 2020—the first day of shelter in place. While the rest of the world was hoarding toilet paper and learning to spell quarantine, we rubbed two nickels together and started a Christian publishing company.

It was the ultimate zig-when-others-zag move.

Why then, of all moments?

The plain truth is almost embarrassingly simple. The state of Christian publishing was abysmal, and co-founder Arthur Jones and I wanted to make it better. That was the whole plan.

Invite Ministries exists to help people learn to live more like Jesus, and we believe publishing is a good place to do that.

Why publishing at all? Because we believe in the ministry of the written word. The New Testament has a term for the church’s central task—kerygma, the command to proclaim. Proclamation comes in two forms.

One is preaching: to voice the good news of Jesus in a particular time and place.

The other is publishing: to carry that same news across time and place, to a reader you will never meet, on some Tuesday years from now, in a chair you will never see.

The need became evident faster than we expected. Across our pan-Wesleyan tradition and its many tribes, leaders and thinkers began sending me manuscripts and proposals—more than I knew what to do with. Within five years we had published over a hundred titles. Forty more are scheduled for the coming year.

But it has not been easy. We have faced headwinds, and still do.

First was launching during COVID. As it turned out, the timing was a strange gift. When everyone else’s plans and agendas got dialed back to nothing, a window opened, quiet and unhurried, to do the hard and unglamorous work of learning what on earth we were doing. A startup needs low expectations, yet many never get it. We got a longer season than normal to tinker with little expectation.

The second challenge was closer to home. Our legacy denomination, the United Methodist Church, had entered its long season of disaffiliation. I am irenic by nature, and I had no appetite for the skirmishes. So I said early, and out loud, that Invite would run on three simple values.

We would be high on Jesus, low on politics, and biased toward innovation.

High on Jesus speaks mostly for itself. A strong Christology sits at the center of how I understand the faith. Things like church growth and social justice are features of the kingdom; they do not inaugurate it. Put the cart before the horse and you get much of the trouble the modern church is in right now, so I wanted to name the horse first.

Low on politics follows from the first, and it comes down to a question of power. Lift Christ high—all authority in heaven and on earth—and everything else settles into its proper size. The other issues still matter. They simply stop being ultimate. Lower Christ, though, and something has to rush in to fill the authority vacuum, which is precisely why politics becomes a life-or-death religion for so many people. In practice this is straightforward. We gladly work with authors who sit left and right of center. What they cannot do is turn our shared work into a partisan weapon. If we can agree on the lordship of Jesus, and keep the majors and the minors straight, maybe we can recover a little of the civility that once marked both the church and a healthy society.

Biased toward innovation is both a theological claim and a practical one. Theologically, I happen to think Jesus loves innovation. How do I know? For one, he was a tekton—a builder, a technologist. For another, the incarnation itself is God’s announcement that he loves us enough to inhabit a specific time and place—a specific culture. Cultures shift. Generations turn over. So the calling of anyone who carries Christ is to keep incarnating him for the people actually alive right now, because our faith lifts up a person, not a set of period customs. I had no idea in 2020 how much I would come to lean on this one. Publishing has been a moving target every day since.

And now a fourth value—new, and one I am proud to announce. We are serious about discipleship. The longer I do this work, the more urgent it becomes to me that we publish resources built for one purpose: helping followers of Jesus become more like him. There was a day when a Christian publisher could happily print an endless catalog—biblical studies, theology, devotionals, books on growth and relationships, age-graded curriculum, and on and on. I have nothing against any of these categories. But I have grown convinced that the most important thing we can do is stay stubbornly specific about the core work of the church, which is discipleship: the slow, lifelong business of becoming like Jesus.

Over the next four Sundays, I’ll take these values one at a time and give each the fuller treatment it deserves. After that, we’ll turn to what they mean for the church right now—on the ground, this year.

That is what The Sunday Read is for. Glad you’re here.

I own several shelves of books I’ve purchased. Many I have read. Some I even agree with.

They’re mostly good books. Some of them I edited. A few, I wrote. Almost always, I reflected on chapters and underlined parts that stung. In the end, I closed the cover and went on living exactly as I had before I’d begun.

The information landed fine. But few books on my shelf are dog-eared, and even fewer of them have actually fostered change in my life.

A book that dislodges the inertia in our hearts is a rare and beautiful thing.

What makes them so powerful and effective?

We’re swimming in information. My first twenty-five years in ministry, most of which I also spent writing, editing, and publishing my own stuff and other people’s stuff, convinced me that that the Church’s problem today is rarely ignorance or, as I used to think, poor communication.

We are not under-informed. Especially now. We have podcasts, study Bibles, and a smartphone with AI that will explain Romans on our morning commute. What we lack is that special something that unsettles our heart and mind, something that connects the page and screen to our hands and feet.

What we need isn’t information, but formation.

That’s what Invite Press is about. We publish in the Wesleyan tradition, which means that we believe grace forgives, and then keeps going. It works on the appetites. It goes after the habits a person is embarrassed by. Over years, it produces someone their kids can tell has changed. That’s the whole promise, and it isn’t ours — Wesley got it from the New Testament and we’re reflecting it back.

Our books are high on Jesus and low on politics. There is no shortage of people willing to tell you who to be furious at this month. We’re after something that outlasts a news cycle.

So what is this page?

Mostly a front porch. Our authors are why you’re here. We publish leading pastors, scholars, and practitioners scattered across the Wesleyan world, several of them now writing on Substack and all of them worth your valuable time. Our goal is to connect you to them. We’ll share excerpts from both existing and upcoming books, video from the Invite channel, our monthly letter, and the occasional note from my desk about what we’re making and why.

Subscribe if you want to know what’s coming. Then go follow the writers we recommend. That’s the invitation.

The shelf is still in my office. My hope is that every Invite Press book becomes the dog-eared kind.

Len Wilson
Publisher and Executive Director
Invite Ministries
Plano, TX