“Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God Who raises the dead.”  (2 Corinthian 1:9)

I am an unexceptional product of the last 50 years of American Christianity. I am the eldest son of an orthodox Lutheran pastor. I committed my life to Jesus in response to an evangelist with Campus Crusade for Christ. I was nurtured by a handful of Jesus-freaks in a Pentecostal house-group, received an undergraduate degree from a small, Christian, liberal arts College, served on a missions team with Youth With a Mission, before earning a Master’s degree from one of the largest interdenominational Seminaries in the world. I worked with trailblazing teachers, writers and pastors from every flavor of evangelicalism while serving with Fuller Theological Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry Program.

During those years, I studied and promoted the strategies of Church Growth from the inside out. I had numerous offers to work with successful church leaders, and in 1990 I accepted a pastoral position with an aggressively growth-minded church in the Southwest.

There, I teamed with talented ministers for 20 years. I was a tireless propagandist of new programs, and invested myself in populating these groups and activities. I was fretful when members disappeared and Sunday morning attendance dipped, and lived with an unstable sense of temporary success when numbers increased. I was an impassioned advocate for unity as a leader of our local network of churches, and ardently encouraged fellow pastors in the throes of their own ministry enterprises. As the lead pastor of our vivacious congregation, I was also “the keeper of community”; attending birthday parties, pot lucks, anniversaries, visiting the sick, officiating at weddings, baptismal celebrations and funerals… My whole life was zealously immersed in the American, Evangelical Culture. I loved it. I found satisfaction and significance as a champion in it’s ranks. I unabashedly gloried in it’s ways and was intemperately bound to it’s pace.

I had no idea a confluence was forming that would profoundly redirect my life-style and substantially reshape my view of God Himself.

BREATHLESS
The first tributary burst into my life in August of 2006. While returning from a four-day conference, on a half-full flight into Phoenix,  Arizona, a voice that was audible to my ears, spoke my name three times.  “Jon. Jon. Jon.” I turned in my seat wondering, “Who else on the flight knows my name?” The seats beside me and for two rows behind me were empty. Facing forward again, I surmised, “someone’s conversation must have carried from the back of the cabin, or perhaps it was a sputtering air-vent.” Then, just above my left ear, in the same way that I heard my name, I heard the word: “Breathless”! This time, the voice was unmistakable.

The message however, was not immediately clear. As we descended into the airport, I sat astonished, waiting for more.  “What was I experiencing – and what did the word ‘breathless’ mean?” I silently gathered my belongings and exited the plane. As I walked through the bustling concourse a wave of deep sorrow came over me and, in my spirit, I could sense Jesus weeping: “My Bride. My Bride.”  The grief was pervasive, and I began to weep with Him. I turned away from the crowds into a remote section of the terminal, and with tears running down my face, was overcome by His beautiful heart. “My bride, My bride is breathless!” In that moment of mourning I understood the content and the compassion of His message: Jesus was telling me that His heart was breaking for the condition of His Church – and it was breaking for me.

I have no apology for this experience. In the space of 15 minutes Jesus leveled my enterprising image to dust and scored me as “a breathless man living in a breathless culture.” He had branded me with a tangible manifestation of His materiality and I was reeling to know how to regain His honor.

When I returned home, I abruptly implemented a list of corrections within our congregation; scheduling more corporate prayer times and creating increased space in our Sunday morning program to “wait on the Lord”. These adjustments were largely received in the spirit in which I had conceived them: as organizational modifications. The truth was, I had no idea how to address my own breathlessness, much less the breathlessness of hundreds of others. Furthermore, I had no vision for how breathless we really were; how deeply it mattered to God, and how intent He was to address it. In the months that followed, the grave truth of my own breathlessness would become quite evident.

DEATH
On the morning of February 14, 2007, my wife of 23 years, was diagnosed with a rare strain of untreatable stomach cancer; “linitus plastica”.  The surgeons took me  into a small room and soberly informed me that there was no record of anyone surviving this type of cancer. Their words shook me like a sonic boom. Barb, now in recovery, had 9 to 12 months to live and was unconscious to the diagnosis. At the same time, our twleve-year-old daughters were with my parents 200 miles away, waiting for results of the tests. I trust I will never know an anguish more grim than breaking that news to the three people I loved the most. The weight of those moments still burns like hot coals in my stomach.

Within hours of the diagnosis, the four of us were immersed in the goodness of the body as friends and ministry associates extended their affirmations of love and commitment to pray. Our church valiantly interceded for God’s intervention – even initiating a 24/7 prayer team in a camper trailer outside our home. My compatriots in the local network of pastors bound themselves to us with prayer vigils, meals and massive emotional support.

Because of her prognosis, Barb was given only palliative care: medication to reduce the pain. With the approval of our oncologist and with the help of several extraordinary nurses in our fellowship, we turned our living room into a make-shift convalescent center.  There, Barb was able to receive treatment in a familiar atmosphere, filled with sounds and the people she loved most.

Two months after her diagnosis, surrounded by family, care-providers, intercessors and worshippers, Barb died of respiratory failure.

Abruptly, I was a 48 year old, emotionally razed widower, and a single-father of two preteen girls. After Barb’s memorial my congregation graciously gave me an indefinite leave of absence. I took three months to travel, visit family and friends and in the billows of pain began to assess the breadth and width of my emptiness.

GASPING FOR BREATH
As I resumed my pastoral responsibilities, my desolate heart was buffeted with a typhoon of questions that submerged every theological point I had held as a “matter of fact”. I had believed in God’s omni-presence all of my life. Now I could only confirm His omni-absence. My church friends were tremendously understanding as their pastor stood before them Sunday after Sunday: weeping, praying and speculating. They could see their friend was gasping in a fathomless ocean.

Unfortunately, I was not alone in this ponderous sea. In less than two years, our small church buried 6 dear mothers, grandmothers, wives and sisters – all highly involved in our congregation and deeply loved. The hole these women left was enormous.

I was ripped between offering substantive hope to my grieving friends and being honest about God’s vacuous absence in my own mouth and soul. I yearned to boldly assert God’s perspective; praying and encouraging with quiet certitude. Instead, I felt only a dearth of God’s breath; nothing that invigorated the desolation of our very mortal congregation, or quelled my own tumultuous heart. I winced at the sound of my own vapid words and grimaced at the thought of our powerlessness. For weeks at a time I found myself crying with Job: “O that I may know where to find Him, that I might even come to His dwelling.” (Job 23:3)

Had I have been expected to dispense humanistic sophistry, I could have disbursed it with some wistful abstraction. However, the Kingdom that we’d been baptized into was linked to more than profundities and philosophical “words of human wisdom” (1 Corinthians 2:5). Faced with the daily task of ministering “de facto assurance” to a community that was rooted in New Testament realities I agonized, “Am I really giving people the substance of the God of 300 billion galaxies, or sentimental, “party-line” verbiage? What if my “theology” is no more effectual than my prayers?” God had deemed me “breathless” months before Barb’s death. How breathless was I now?

It was becoming increasingly discordant that I could recite a creed and preach from a book that was filled with the phenomenal, and experience so little of it’s materialization within my life.  At the same time it was becoming increasingly abhorrent that I might let a business-as-usual approach to the pastoral ministry rob me from pursuing what I knew I needed, what my daughters needed, and what I suspected the breathless church needed. It sounds brusque and uncompromising, but the prospect of strapping myself back into a status-quo, Christian apparatus that was not prioritized to daily and prayerfully pursuing God felt like an invitation to a long, forced march with no legs.

RESIGNATION
Emotionally dismantled, hounded by my own quest for answers, professionally vexed and desperate for God’s authentication I brought down my organizational-charts, boxed up my books and resigned from 25 years of professional pastoral ministry.

I had no alternative prospect for employment; no vast wealth in reserve. I told friends “I need to meet with God in His tent of meeting”. I told God, “If You want me to serve You then You need to show me how to have Your Breath.”

The simple testimony from these years was that in spite of my tangled prayers, dull spirit and incessant impulse to “fake it”, YHWH God faithfully met me in His tent of meeting. In His mercy He brought me face to face with my own breathlessness, pierced my soul with questions that much of Evangelicalism seemed too preoccupied to engage, and relentlessly tethered me to the truth that “it is His breath alone that gives life.” (Job 33:4)

It was within the deep sustaining streams where the Lord also paired me with Kathy, herself a widow, resurrected into His Kingdom perspective through the grave, and then the daily bearing of a cross. In 2010 we moved to Kansas City, Missouri and began to cultivate a new way of living; abandoned to His provision; dependent on His grace, and daily tuning our ears to His life-giving Voice.

Over these last 15 years, the Lord has brought us into relationship with literally hundreds of dynamic, Spirit-filled individuals who can share the very same story: moved to the edges of evangelical enterprise, (through dreams, life-circumstances, visitations, and other supernatural encounters) compelled into dialogue with the Voice of the Lord, confronted with their own “breathlessness”, and urged into daily reliance upon His (Hebrews 1:3) Words of life. The Lord is preparing the Bride of His Son to walk in Holy Spirit, impulse-power in anticipation of our nimble obedience to the end-times judgments and activities on the earth.

Far from a peaceful place where we blissfully encounter the refreshing breeze of His Spirit, meeting with Him is most often, like engaging a tornado. Henri Nouwen writes: “It is in solitude that I lose my scaffolding.” Rather than benignly putting our lives back together, and quite apart from our design, (or vote) it seems to please the Holy Spirit to dismantle didactic theology and Americana ambitions in exchange for the all-consuming whirlwind of His presence.

After eight years of pastoring within a large, multi-ethnic, praying community in Kansas City, in the Summer of 2018, the Lord led Kathy and I to return to the White Mountains of Arizona where He has sovereignly established the All Nations House of Prayer Southwest. Here He has grafted us into a new community of believers who are radically prioritized to “inquiring in the place where His glory dwells” (Psalm 26:8). While exacting, we are convinced this vanguard lifestyle is essential if we are to lose our breathless scaffolding and become living witnesses to His reality in this age.

In 2019, as we moved through an in-depth study of Psalm 27, the Lord began to speak to Kathy and I about “the time of trouble” (Psalm 27:5) that was coming upon the earth. Beginning in January of 2020, He told our House of Prayer that He wanted us to further “let go” of our scaffolding and come before Him, and simply “seek His Face” in abject humility – bringing only a blank notebook with us, to hear the revelations of His heart for our lives. For 180 days we amplified our experiences of prayer with Him, listening intently for His Words as the events of the COVID outbreak exploded across the nations. What He taught us during these six months (specifically about the nature of His heart for the Church, and His corporate judgments) will forever mark our relationship with Him, and the people of God. It is primarily from the vantage point of the dialogue the Lord birthed with us about the events of these six (plus) months that we continue to speak, minister, pray and teach – for His glorification in this age.

JSB • November, 2025 (UPDATE)