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W. Vance Grace
After graduating from Denver Seminary with an M.Div Degree in Historical Theology in 1994, I moved with my family to plant churches in rural Southern Colorado. While we planted churches in a rural ...view moreAfter graduating from Denver Seminary with an M.Div Degree in Historical Theology in 1994, I moved with my family to plant churches in rural Southern Colorado. While we planted churches in a rural Western context and helped other planters begin additional new works nearby, we spent a great deal of our free time learning to enjoy the natural beauty of our surroundings. In 2003, as a result of successful endeavors in a difficult context, I was offered a position as the Director of Church Planting over a region of five western states. During the nearly three years as I worked out of a District Office in Omaha, Nebraska I found myself increasingly frustrated at the apparent disconnect between new church start-ups in an American context and a culture (particularly in the Western United States) which seemed to be detaching itself from the Christian faith. It was apparent that the church had bought into the consumer mentality which believed that the answers to any crisis were to be found in a greater influx of cash and resources. While larger churches continued to grow at the expense of smaller, local community churches, the overall picture of the Christian Church in America was in decline both numerically and in its apparent impact on behavior. This realization precipitated a more personal crisis for me. My family and I moved to Western Colorado where I began working as a roughneck on a drilling rig in 2006. Nearing my middle years, I became personally broken and frustrated with my own sense of wothlessness as my education and experiences seemed to have all been for naught. It was following a particularly dark year of my life and in the presence of a wise Christian counselor that I was finally able to piece together some sense of perspective on why I--and people like me--were apparently unable to find any anchorage in life. Along with my wife and three teenage children, I continue to live on the Western Slope of Colorado where I still roughneck and utilize every opportunity I can to escape to the wild places of the mountains and deserts where I find perspective. I spend a great deal of time backpacking, climbing and reading about wild places where I believe there remain some important sources of perspective too many of us in our consumptive, materialstic and mechanized culture have forgotten. My writing is an effort to provide an important interface between natural settings and our spirituality in order to help us face the eb and flow of life with some sort of balance and anchorage.view less
Books by W. Vance Grace
Sojourn: Learning Life from Wild Places Landscape of the Soul: Confronting the Ethos of Progress and Restoring American Spirituality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings