Hi, I'm Steve.

I have spent thirty years in ministry, and I am still in it. Not on a stage between books — in a real church, in Oakwood, Georgia, preaching every Sunday to people who will tell me on the way out whether it landed.

None of it has been a solo act. Angie and I have served together from the beginning, and our daughters, Madison and Lexi, grew up inside this life with us — in the services, in the seasons that were hard on all of us, in a home where the church was never something I left the family to go do. Ministry has never been my job. It has been ours.

That is the reason I write. Thirty years puts you in a lot of rooms. Marriages that were coming apart at the kitchen table. Parents who could not get through an evening without it turning into a fight. People carrying something that happened to them decades ago and still steering by it. Men and women in recovery, rebuilding a life from the studs. Hospital rooms. Funerals. A leader across my desk, certain he had disqualified himself for good.

You learn something in those rooms that you cannot get any other way. You learn which ideas actually hold weight when a person is under pressure, and which ones only sound good on a Sunday. I do not publish theory. I publish what I have watched hold.

Built For More came out of that, and so did The Daily Practice, its ninety-day companion journal. A third book, Built By Design, lands this winter. I write as somebody who has needed every bit of it himself.

When I am not preaching or writing, I build practical tools for churches — systems that make sure a hurting person never quietly slips through the cracks — and through 250 Collective I work with pastors of smaller churches who are tired and carrying it mostly alone. It is one conviction, really: what we practice, we become — as people, and as the church.