Graham Joseph Hill

The self the world rewards (productive, polished, performative, perfect) is the self Jesus unmasks. In Christ, we’re called to the slower, riskier, more human work of being present to our wounds, our wonder, our world, and the holy gift of being fully present and alive.

There is no formation without disorientation. The path to maturity is paved with unlearning: shedding the illusions, idols, and false selves that once felt like home.

The cross is divine love and solidarity. God enters our violence, absorbs it, and breaks its cycle with mercy. At Calvary, judgment and love meet, and love wins.

We aren’t saved by ideas, arguments, platforms, or even virtue. We are saved by love (wild, divine, cruciform love) that breaks its own body for enemies and calls the least beloved, beloved. Until the church looks like that, we’re only echoing the powers we've been called to resist.

Prayer is yielding our desires until they harmonize with God’s kingdom. In prayer, our restless will is slowly crucified and resurrected into love.

God doesn’t meet us at the finish line of our perfection but in the mess, the middle, the murky unresolved spaces of our becoming. Grace is the gift that makes becoming possible.

The church’s greatest dangers are complicity and comfort. A domesticated faith will bless every empire, baptize every weapon, mirror every idolatry, repeat every ideology, and silence every prophet. But faithfulness to Jesus always disrupts the status quo.

Missions on the Move: Ten Global Shifts in Christian Mission - Graham Joseph Hill "Missions on the Move: Ten Global Shifts in Christian Mission" by Graham Joseph Hill OAM PhD.

New blog post on global shifts in Christian mission

grahamjosephhill.com/mission-shif...

Many Christians fall for fascism because it feels like strength, but it’s a counterfeit gospel. It deforms our witness and betrays the cross. Christ calls us to resist fear and follow the way of cruciform love, not coercive power.

At 56, I’ve begun lifting weights at the gym three mornings weekly. It’s humbling to lift weights with people 30 years younger who lift four times the weight. But gosh, it feels good to lift weights when you’re older.

Fear makes us cling to what we know. But grace invites us to release, to surrender control, to trust that resurrection comes through the things we’d rather avoid. The gospel isn’t about self-protection; it’s about repentance, surrender, intimacy, and being crucified and resurrected in Christ.

The temptation of relevance will always try to replace God’s call to presence and prayer. But the world doesn’t need more influencers; it needs more people who’ve been shaped by silence, solitude, and the slow, cruciform wisdom of love.

Too many have traded the wildness of the Spirit for the safety of control. But God isn’t tame. The Spirit disrupts our certainties, breaks our idols, and calls us beyond borders we were taught to fear.

Jesus doesn’t call us to grasp but to release, not to accumulate but to surrender. It’s a narrow, different way, where joy is found not in having but in giving, not in power but in servanthood.

#TheJesusWay
#tenmovementsofthejesusway

Too often, we build lives that look full but feel barren: overflowing with possessions, noise, and achievements, yet starved of peace, joy, and meaning. But Jesus invites us into a life rooted in love, simplicity, communion, and grace.

#TheJesusWay #TenMovementsOfTheJesusWay

Slavery, Freedom, and the Crucified Christ: A Christian Spiritual Response - Graham Joseph Hill "Slavery, Freedom, and the Crucified Christ: A Christian Spiritual Response" by Graham Joseph Hill OAM PhD

The church must be a people of memory. We remember because remembering redeems. Forgetting perpetuates bondage; remembrance opens the way to freedom. To minimize slavery is to forget, and to forget is to betray both the oppressed and the God who sets them free.

grahamjosephhill.com/slavery/

Slavery, Freedom, and the Crucified Christ: A Christian Spiritual Response - Graham Joseph Hill "Slavery, Freedom, and the Crucified Christ: A Christian Spiritual Response" by Graham Joseph Hill OAM PhD

“To minimize slavery is to forget, and to forget is to betray both the oppressed and the God who sets them free.”

grahamjosephhill.com/slavery/

Set goals that echo eternity, not ego or empire. The Spirit doesn't invite us to build platforms, construct monuments, or polish reputations, but to walk toward the margins, love our enemy and neighbor, relinquish pride and status, and plant vineyards in desolate places.

One of the benefits of getting older: I’m in the most productive writing season of my life. I have four book projects nearing completion:

1. Faith and addiction recovery
2. Jesus’s alternative to Christian nationalism and political idolatry
3. Digital monasticism
4. Ten movements of the Jesus Way

To love your neighbor is conversion. God’s love turns your face toward the margins and your heart toward the wounded. Love undoes the myth of self-sufficiency and renewes the world with kindness, embrace, and tenderness. Love will cost you everything you thought was yours.

Loneliness is the often hidden grief of our age, yet even in its longing lies a holy invitation: to rediscover one another as gifts, to imagine hospitality as embrace, to incarnate love in the imitation of Christ, to gather the scattered, & to remember that no soul is forgotten in the heart of God.

“Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off” (a business slogan baptized into church leadership) turns the body of Christ into a machine of efficiency. Jesus doesn’t drive a bus of elites; he hosts a feast for the least and last, the broken, the overlooked. Grace, not pruning, is the way.

In a world obsessed with strength and dominance, we worship a God who bleeds. Power is redefined in the shape of the cross. Glory isn’t in domination but descent. The church forgets this at its peril, for the moment it chases influence over intimacy, it trades the kingdom of God for a counterfeit.

The Wounds That See: Empathy Shaped by the Cross - Graham Joseph Hill "The Wounds That See: Empathy Shaped by the Cross." By Graham Joseph Hill OAM PhD

Christlike empathy isn’t weakness or sentimentality. It’s cruciform strength: the courage to let another’s pain pierce us without rushing to defend ourselves.”

grahamjosephhill.com/empathy/

Discipleship isn’t membership in a religious club. It’s cruciform. It ruptures allegiances. It baptizes us into a life of risk, repentance, and radical service and belonging. If your faith fits neatly inside your politics or comforts your prejudices, it may not be the Way of Jesus you’re following.

Hope isn’t optimism. It isn’t a forecast, nor a strategy. Hope is a slow, stubborn act of resistance in a culture that bows to despair, control, and speed. It’s planting fig trees under falling skies. It’s weeping and lamenting while acting courageously.

A faithful, prophetic church stirs holy trouble. It calls forth an alternative imagination that refuses to bless domination or baptize despair.

The hope of our age won't be found in missiles or markets, but in the moral awakening of people who choose love over violence, mercy over greed, and truth over power. Christ’s revolution of love can lift valleys of despair and bring justice to the earth.

Faithfulness isn’t measured by the applause of the influential and powerful but by the nearness to the brokenhearted. Here, in the dust and the silence, in the tears and dependence on God, holiness burns.