By nature and by trade, I am a true story teller. What I mean is, I tell true stories. And there is no truer story than the gospel. So here I am.

I got to know Sam playing volleyball at his church over a decade ago, but our friendship didn’t really mature until last spring, when we met on an overcast morning and he shared this modest idea for a website. He had already bought the URL, he said. And then I heard Tim Keller saying the bible is not about me, and it was as if a flame flickered—the old flame, as it would turn out, like a pilot light, waiting for the right time to flare up. I had been stacking the firewood my whole life, and returning to the gospel as my daily bread lit the fire.

My undergraduate degree is in literature, and as soon as I saw how Jesus unifies, fulfills and amplifies every redemptive character and story in the bible, I knew I would never read it the same way again. Every literary bone in my body testifies to the validity of the gospel as the hermeneutic norm for all of scripture. In other words, I believe this is how God intends his people to read his word. I have always loved the bible, but it has never nourished or wounded or washed me the way it does when I read Jesus on every page.

Contrary to what the table of contents may imply, God did not write sixty-six books. He wrote one book in many voices over thousands of years, and they’re all telling the same story. I am now convinced that during all those years as a bible reader, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees—and that wide cross-sections of the church, regardless of denomination or culture, are also tragically missing the forest.

Sam and I have now been working on gospelthread for well over a year—a process known as “bootstrapping” in the startup world. And I have loved every minute. Soon, I hope to be overseeing an editorial team curating content from all over the world and assembling a resource that will help brothers and sisters experience the fresh joy that I now feel every time I reach for my bible.

This is my personal ambition for gospelthread: Not just to edit a commentary, which has been done plenty of times, but to build a digital media platform that can instantly reach the furthest corners of the globe with life-giving gospel content. I want to bring a diverse network of pastors and teachers together and shepherd their collaboration in such a way as to produce a commentary unlike any that has ever been published. And to have that content translated and taken into closed countries.

I believe we’re standing at a unique point in church history—this place where we have the most viral message in history in one hand and the most powerful distribution system in history in the other.

I can’t wait to find out what happens when we put an entire gospel commentary on the internet and start giving it to people for free. What a blessed, intense, irresistible calling it is to be steering the editorial development of gospelthread.

I will leave you with a couple of key prayer requests from the editorial side of the house:

  • Please pray with us that God would bring on the right men and women to start filling up our run sheet with solid content—and rejoice with us for those he has already brought on board!
  • That we would be given wisdom to build our editorial machinery to meet the demands of curating more than 3,000 posts.
  • That we would connect with financial supporters who believe in the vision of gospelthread so that we can begin the core work of editing and posting full-time as soon as possible.