Jason Byassee is the twelfth Senior Minister of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, Ontario. He previously taught preaching and served as the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics at the Vancouver School of Theology.

Jason is the author and editor of more than 20 books exploring Christian faith, biblical interpretation, thriving congregations, leadership, and church history. Through his teaching, writing, and ministry, he is passionate about helping people and churches grow in faith and live out their calling.

Learn more about Jason at www.jasonbyassee.com.

Hi, I'm Angel.

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Praise God for you, Jason.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

I'm in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Up north, yeah?

Up north.

How did you come to meet Jesus?

So my parents weren't religious.

They were reacting against the faith of their parents, but they felt a little guilty about that.

So they sent me to a Baptist camp.

And the counselors at this camp really loved the kids and had a kind of passionate desire to have us meet Jesus.

And I think you can tell when it's genuine love as opposed to when it's manipulative.

And so I was about eight years old.

That was the only thing I had was one week at camp once a year until as a teenager, I worked at the camp.

So I got 12 weeks of that kind of Jesus infusion.

And that sort of kicked in as an ongoing relationship with him through his church.

How did they react after they saw the effect the camp was having on you?

One of my parents, it kind of reawakened something of her memory of having been a church kid that went away subsequently, but it became a kind of invitation to my mom.

My dad was impressed that suddenly I wanted to read and do well in school in a way that I never had.

And he said, you know, I think it's because of all that Bible reading you're doing, you're suddenly more interested in the world in general.

So he was happy about the kind of academic side benefit, but less about the heart of the thing.

So what happened next?

What did you go for after that?

Yeah, I got really involved in campus ministries.

At my high school, it was called Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

And then at my college, it was called InterVarsity.

So it was a matter of trying to kind of encourage my friends to have a similar encounter with Jesus that I'd had.

And so I found that, you know, I was good at some of that work and not good at some of it.

And so eventually came to discern a call to ministry in the church where I could hopefully encourage others to have something similar.

When you were eight years old, did you foresee that would be the trajectory?

No, not at all.

I mean, you know, when I first had my conversion, I was actually pretty mad at the church in that I had been dragged to church, you know, Christmas and Easter occasionally, unhappily.

And I felt like, well, why didn't they tell me this stuff about Jesus, right?

So I spent some time kind of angry with churches, like they get in the way.

And we all understand that that can happen.

But then when I went into ministry and started preaching myself and that kind of thing, I heard myself saying some of the things I had actually learned in church when I was a kid there reluctantly and unhappy about it.

So I guess it had some positive effect.

It feels as though there's some level of an emotional intelligence that you lived in, even as a very young child.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, I think that's probably right.

I mean, anybody who comes from a family that's not perfect has to figure out what's going on inside someone behind the mask.

And so I think I tried to have a bit of that when I had the language for that till later.

The litmus test really comes in when you take an audit of the people you attract.

So when you think about who you attract, yeah, please confirm.

That's an alarming point, isn't it?

I mean, in one way, the group of people Jesus attracts do nothing but fail and mess things up, right?

And then He turns their failure into salvation for them and the world.

I do think my own friendships are the thing that matter the most to me.

And yet I'm also struck, sort of like marriage and friendship is a kind of arena where you learn your own failures, as well as your own gifts.

And yeah, I think in general, we way over afraid the importance of our romantic and married relationships, they're important.

But we speak of them as if they're the only relationship.

And we under afraid the importance of our friendships in terms of our life in the world and with God.

Hmm.

What you just said there resonates from a breakdown I saw done by the Bible Project for Proverbs.

The reality of the Proverbs sitting as wisdom nuggets, but there are no guarantees.

I studied St. Augustine in the early church and a great North African thinker.

And he points to where the psalmist says, look, I was young now I'm old.

I have never seen the righteous begging for bread or their children go hungry.

And Augustine says, yeah, in the Bible, righteous people beg for bread and their children go hungry.

So it's not 100% rule.

Like we got to kind of work a little here what this means.

So yeah.

Tell me about marriage, like meeting that person.

Even though you spoke about, yeah, sometimes, yeah, we definitely put too much weight on that one relationship.

But what was that like for you?

You know, I preach a pretty kind of non-romantic line on marriage.

And my wife will say, could you just make marriage sound good just once?

You know, like I'm sitting out here and I have to listen to this.

Yeah.

So my wife's also in the same pharisaical line of work.

She leads with Presbyterians here in Toronto.

And so we met in seminary.

And I've just always found her deeply empathic and deeply kind and a lot of fun.

So I do think of marriage as a kind of first among friendships, right?

Like it can't just be another relationship.

It's first in order.

But I am struck that if you want to check on the health of someone or the health of their spiritual life, inquire about the state of their friendships, that that's kind of one of the most important things it means to be human.

We just met, we're having a conversation.

I'm about to leave.

And you only have one story to tell.

What story would you tell me?

Well, I've talked a lot about reading the Bible.

So let me talk about singing hymns.

And I'm totally borrowing this story.

There's a great teacher of preachers named Tom Long, but he tells the story about a patriarch of a family who's dying.

And everyone's gathered around the bedside, except for one grandson who couldn't make it yet.

And the kids don't go to church.

The grandkids really don't go to church.

But as he lays dying, somebody has the idea to sing one of his favorite hymns.

And he hadn't spoken in days.

And they start singing the hymn and he starts singing along.

And they sing, a mighty fortress is our God, the great ether hymn.

And they get done and he dies.

And the son whose grandson had been absent, phones him up to say that your grandfather's died.

And he says, son, there's one other thing, I need you to get to church.

I need you to learn the songs.

So when it's me lying in that bed, there's something to sing to me.

I just think it's amazing the way singing borrows something in your soul where when you need it, it's there, right?

So it's another thing Christians have always been is kind of singing people.

I mean, arguably, that's just what it means to be human is that you're a singing creature.

There's just a deep relationship between the songs you sing and the way you pray, right?

Like that's why we have such an investment in singing in worship.

Five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

What's a message you'd leave for future you listening to this conversation?

Well, Angel, you can tell that you do a lot of these interviews because that's such an interesting question.

I guess I wouldn't assume that, I mean, I'm closer to myself in one way than others, but then we're also really good at deceiving ourselves.

So this is another reason we need friendships for people to be able to say, I know you think this, but actually that.

I hope looking back that I'm not overly embarrassed by what I say, I often look back on previous versions of myself and kind of, oh gosh, why did I think that or say that or whatever?

So hopefully we'll be tender and gentle with my younger self, but also hopefully I'll see some kind of thread that I didn't see now that I brought to some fruition that I wouldn't have anticipated, right?

Sort of like the eight-year-old me praying a prayer to accept Jesus because somebody I admired said it was a good idea.

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