Editor’s Note: Below is a lightly edited automated transcript of their conversation. There may be typos or grammatical errors.
Aaron Lee: Hi, everyone. This is Aaron from SOLA Network. And we have a very special guest today. Tim Challies. Tim, thanks for joining us. Would you mind introducing yourself?
Tim Challies: Sure. Thanks for having me. Tim Challies, as you said, I live in or just outside Toronto, Canada, up here in the cold. I am husband to Aileen. We’re coming up on our 25th wedding anniversary. And we’ve got two girls who are college age and then a son who’s in heaven. And I’m a pastor / elder at Grace Fellowship Church that’s just within the bounds of Toronto.
Aaron Lee: I’m sure that most people who are watching or listening to this already know who you are. But maybe people don’t really know about SOLA Network. And so I wanted to ask you, how did you hear about us? I also want to say thank you for including our articles and your a la carte, it always boosts the traffic on our website.
Tim Challies: I don’t exactly remember, but I think it’s because you either hosted or were associated with a conference. And, I was hoping to be able to attend that conference. I spotted it somewhere online. And it just looked interesting. It’s, I guess it was geared specifically for ministry within an Asian American context. I serve in a Canadian context. But it’s still standard. It’s very interesting. And I was really hoping I’d be able to make it. Unfortunately, it came right down to the wire, and I just couldn’t make the flight to work. But I think from there, I maybe traced it backwards to the website. That’s the best I can reconstruct.
Aaron Lee: That’s awesome. Yeah, that might have been the Asian American Leadership Conference. That was probably, maybe that was it. But anyways, I’m glad that you’re visiting the website. And thanks for checking out the work and giving it some boosts. I reviewed your book for our website, Seasons of Sorrow. And that was kind of it; I didn’t know if we would be able to get in touch with you. And so I’m happy that we can talk about that. Did you want to just give a brief rundown about the book? And then it’s been six months, pretty much, since it was published. I wanted to ask, how have you felt during that time?
Tim Challies: Yeah, yeah, so Seasons of Sorrow. The subtitle is “The pain of loss and the comfort of God.” And that’s a book that came out of a really devastating loss of my son, Nick, who was 20 years old. He was a student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he was just newly engaged. And then he was out just playing a game with his friends in a nearby park close to the campus and just collapsed and passed away.
And at the time, we were in Canada, we were at home, Aileen and I. His sister is with him, his fiancee is with him, but the rest of the family was at home and we got the news. And that just sort of launched us into what I would later describe that as a season of sorrow.
And I didn’t realize it as I started writing, I didn’t realize I was writing a book, I was just writing my own thoughts and reflections. It’s just the way I think and meditate and process life’s events. And so I started writing things working through the pain and the grief and my own heart and mind.
And then eventually, as I started getting through that first year, I thought, well, maybe I could just take all this writing and turn it into a book and see. It’s been out for about six months now, and I’ve been just very, very encouraged with the response. And as much as I wrote it for a broad audience, I think there’s something there for everyone because we all suffer. We may not suffer the loss of a child, but we’re all going to suffer in some way in this life. And all of us will suffer some sort of loss in this way. So mine is very specifically written out of my own experience. I think there’s a lot of universal themes, but then I wrote it very, particularly for people who have lost a child. And I think the greatest encouragement for me has been to hear from parents who have lost a child and to learn that it does describe not just my experience but a lot of universal experience. And then it’s been helpful and comforting to them.
Aaron Lee: So you’ve written blogs giving family updates since everything has happened. Do you find that it helps you to write about it still and to give updates? What’s your thought process behind that?
Tim Challies: Yeah, so I do write about it from time to time. There’s a couple of things going on in my mind. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately.
Number one, I don’t want to be somebody who only writes on that subject. And so I’m trying to make sure I write about a wider variety of things. I don’t want to just be focused forever on, on grief in general or even on that grief because as hard as it was, as hard as it still is, it doesn’t define me. It’s not my identity. And I think at times it could threaten to be that and so. So I’m aware that I don’t want to be only about that more as well. If people are going to keep coming to my site, eventually that just won’t interest them forever. And so I think there is a place for some updates, and there is a place just to be real about. It would have been his 23rd birthday just a few days ago, and I wrote about that.
And so, you know, I think from time to time offering those updates and those reflections is, but on the other hand, God hasn’t called me to just that. This is something I believe God caused me to pass through this loss. But I think he’s still got other things for me to do in life and other things to accomplish. And so I’m still very much eager to try to understand what those are and to just carry out those tasks for his sake and his glory.
Aaron Lee: I do read your site, and I do offer up some short prayers when you do give the updates. So yeah, you’re definitely being prayed for on that part. And I do appreciate the updates just to hear what’s going on.
Tim Challies: Yeah, thank you.
Aaron Lee: For SOLA, you wrote something for us as well. What you wrote was an article called “If God Would Outsource His Sovereignty.” And so like you said, you don’t want to be necessarily writing about grief for the entire time. But I do see hints of it in that article, maybe a little bit. Can you give us a behind the scenes of that article that you wrote for SOLA?
Tim Challies: Yeah, well, you probably know that we’ve been in touch. And there’s just been thought about, hey, what about writing an article for SOLA? Your team had proposed one that I tried to write, and I just didn’t find the ability to write it. And it was on the theme of loss, but a particular area, and I just never found my bearings with it. And so, after trying and flailing for a while, I just thought, what I’m gonna do is, find something else that’s on my heart and write about that.
So the theme I wrote, about God outsourcing His sovereignty, was this idea that all of us want to be used by God. We all want to as Christians want to live in this world for his glory. But most of us hold back a lot of areas in life where we don’t want to be used by God. We honor people who have been used by God in very difficult ways.
In the article, I bring up someone like Joni Eareckson Tada. We love Joni–who hasn’t been inspired and encouraged by her? Yet, I don’t think too many of us would be willing to be her to endure the pain, the sorrow that she’s endured, the lifetime of paralysis that she’s endured. And so even as we, you know, live before the Lord with what we think are open hands, maybe we’re holding back a lot and saying, I’m willing to be used by you in this way, and that way, and the other way, but not, not these ways. And so that was on my heart. And that’s where the idea came up. What if God allowed us to choose our gifts, and he said, you know, you can select whatever you want, however you want to serve me, I don’t think there would be too many of the Joni Eareckson Tadas in the world, to bless the church and to serve as examples to us because none of us would would choose that. And so we have to entrust all these things to the Lord.
Aaron Lee: Thank you for writing that article. It did speak to a lot of people. And I think that it will stay on our site and still affect a lot more to come.
So you normally write for your own website. But for writing for somebody like us, it’s like a platform, I guess we have multiple authors and things like that. You’ve obviously been doing this for a long time, even longer than SOLA has. And so I wanted to ask you for some advice, maybe some wisdom in terms of how can a platform like SOLA, a ministry, parachurch ministry, have longevity and keep being faithful in what we’re trying to do?
Tim Challies: I suppose I would start by just making sure you know who you are and what you’re convinced the Lord is calling you to do as an organization. And I think in the church in general, and maybe I see this, especially in the American church, is this drive to be big to keep growing and you know, there’s that business principle that you must keep growing, because if you’re not growing, you’re declining. And so your business must always be reaching new people and introducing new products, and so on and so forth. And I think a lot of ministries adopt that mindset. And there may be very good reasons for that.
But I think what can happen in quite a number of ministries as they get too big, and then as they get too big, they start to lose the plot a little bit. They forget what they were all about to begin with. And so I think it’s very hard to do: Keep that original sense of our purpose as we grow and grow.
And so, you know, you start as a site that’s just about writing, you know, we’re gonna serve the church through writing. And then you begin to add podcasts and conferences and all the rest. And those may be very, very good things, as long as they’re connected back to the main purpose and as long as they’re not causing you to overextend yourself financially, or in terms of manpower and other things. So I think just really focusing on here’s how we think we can best serve God’s people.
And, yeah, another thing that comes to mind is that the age of the generalist writer has probably come and gone, I think. And so I started very early in the era of blogging, and at that time, there weren’t many writer. We could write about just about whatever was of interest to us, and people would read it because there’s so little content being created by comparison back then.
Today, it’s much more important, I think, to be a specialist and to pick your area of expertise or your area of interest and to write to that, and your team has obviously done that in making your focus on the Asian American church. And I think that’s absolutely perfect because now you’ve got a focus, and you’ve got a dedicated audience, and you know what you’re about, and you’re not trying to be all things to all men, you’re trying to reach this, this one group for this one purpose, I think that’s very healthy and will serve you well.
Aaron Lee: Well, thank you. And thank you for just supporting us by writing and by doing this one. I want to be able to direct people towards things that you’re doing as well, can you tell us about any upcoming projects you might have?
Tim Challies: Yeah, so I’ve got a new book coming out in the summer. I’ve got a series of books called Words from the Wise, which has graphics combined with quotes from figures in the church and church history. And then those are combined with graphics that’s created by a friend of mine, Jules Koblun. And then together, we create that and then I made a little devotional. And so Volume Two of that Words from the Wise series is coming out in the summer.
And then I’m also this year working on a project called Worship around the World. And this is a project where the end result will be both a book and a documentary, 12-part documentary series. And the purpose of the project is we’re going around the world to worship in 12 different churches that are theologically sound, and committed to Scripture, but also deeply embedded in their own culture.
And so we are very interested in seeing how Christians worship truly, rightly, in a way that honors God, but also in a way that’s really influenced by their local culture. That could be in the style of music, it could be in the style of worship, it could be in just in the way they worship within their building. And so, you know, I’ve been to churches in India where the men will sit on one side of the room, and the women will sit on the other. That would be shocking and inappropriate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, but there’s good reasons they may do that there in India. And so these are the sorts of things we want to explore.
Or I will be visiting a church in South Korea, where there’s a prayer meeting every day at 5am. You can do whatever you want, you’re not going to be able to start a 5am prayer meeting in Toronto, I don’t think–so what is going on in that church? And what’s the context and culture there, that such a thing could not only happen, but even thrive?
At a church in Cambodia, where brand new people grew up that’s just been reached with the gospel, and they’re just starting to develop their own songs, their own hymnody and very little instrumentation in that culture. So how do you develop music in a new culture like that? So these are the sorts of things we’ll be exploring around the world, and hopefully just giving this big global vision of what God is up to each and every Sunday, people rise, gather and worship him.
Aaron Lee: Yeah. And I love that. It’s like looking at local churches, right, and their specific contexts and cultures. But when you look at a bunch of them from all over the place, you do get this spectrum of what God is doing. That’s gonna be awesome.
Tim Challies: And what I’m really hopeful for is that I think that the church in the West tends to have this idea that we’ve got it right and we need to export what we do to the rest of the world. And I’m hoping that in some ways, a project like that just messes with our presuppositions a little bit. Sure there’s strengths in our cultural context we can export, but there’s weaknesses that can be addressed by importing. And so what can we learn from other cultures from other Christians and other cultures and how they apply the truths? I think that should be, I hope, just fascinating.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, that’s right in our wheelhouse. I’ll be looking forward to checking that out and sharing it with everybody as well. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I did want to dedicate some time and ask you if you’d be willing to read, “If God would Outsource His Sovereignty,” would you be willing to do that for us here? Thanks, man.
Tim Challies: Yep, I even have my iPad here. On it. Do you just want me to read the writing from beginning to end?
Aaron Lee: Yeah, you can just read it straight.
Editor’s Note: You can read Tim’s article and listen to him read it here.
Aaron Lee: Thanks, Tim. That was great. And thank you for writing that. And thank you for your book. Thank you for sharing your story and your life and your faith. I thank God for your faith, man. Thank you for everything.