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.
Honored to be a part of it.