Jason Blair

http://www.arsgratia.com/

I was born in the early 70s, came of age in the 80s, learned some vocational stuff and started working in the 90s, and began learning new stuff in the late 00s. I was raised in the United Methodist Church, where I was baptized and confirmed. After that, I gave God hardly a second thought. In the later half of college, God chased me down and reconciled me to himself through his son, Jesus. I was evangelized by a fundamentalist, and discipled in the Evangelical Free church, where I serve to this day. During that time, I got baptized again (which if you asked me about it today, I would say was unnecessary). I was taught the typical "ask Jesus into your heart" evangelicalism, with all the culture war, moralist, pre-mil-dispy accessories. I became a fan of CCM (which in the 90s was pretty cool, but today is a steaming pile of ...), and was fortunately introduced to the Cornerstone Festival, which may lie at the beginning of my understanding that there's a whole lot more to Christianity than the evangelical wasteland. I'm a network administrator (computer geek) by trade. That makes me a Slashdot reader from way back. It was there that I noticed a tag line at the end of someone's post (probably PWinn or Kurt, but I honestly don't know) that lead me to this site called the BHT. After getting used to the layout and the stream of converstaion, I was hooked. It also confirmed my suspicions that not all was well in the evangelical world. It was about this time that I was getting into the emerging church conversation, and serving the one thing our church did along those lines. Tapping into the iMonk site, and getting into Robert Webber has since broadened my Christian experience to the point that I accept that my theological home lies somewhere between an evangelicalism that hasn't gone off the rails and the Anglicans. In other words, I'm a theological mutt, and I have no one spiritual home, save that of Christ himself. Other than that, I'm a seminary student (Baptist, if you must know: Bethel Seminary in Saint Paul, MN) aspiring to pastoral service, a musician (guitar and sax, mostly rock/blues, but I'll try almost anything once), a martial artist (taekwondo plus a few other goodies). More importantly, I'm a husband to the coolest chick on the planet who I don't deserve, and the dad to two amazing little girls we adopted in the late fall of 2009. Most importantly, I belong to Jesus Christ, and I want nothing for this life but to love him, and in him to love others.