Jason Byassee

Jason Byassee is senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, North Carolina. He is also a Fellow in Theology and Leadership at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School, a program dedicated to funding the imaginations of Christian institutional leaders. He writes for LEADD’s web-based magazine, Faith & Leadership, and especially its blog, Call & Response (www.faithandleadership.com/blog).

He previously served at Duke as Director of the Center for Theology, Writing and Media and Special Assistant to Dean L. Gregory Jones. He was also an Executive Director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.

He is a contributing editor to Christian Century magazine, where he was an assistant editor from 2004-2008. He writes there on such topics as theology, church history, politics, liturgy, popular culture, and spiritual practices. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Theology Today, Books & Culture, Sojourners, United Methodist Reporter, and First Things. He serves on boards for The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, the School for Conversion, and The Other Journal. His work has been recognized with several awards from the Associated Church Press and in 2007 with the American Academy of Religion’s first place award for newswriting for outlets with circulations under 100,000.

He is the author of four books: Reading Augustine: A Guide to Confessions (Cascade, 2006), An Introduction to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Cascade, 2007), Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Eerdmans, 2007), and The Gifts of the Small Church (Abingdon). He is presently working on a volume with Westminster’s new Interpretation series on the history of biblical exegesis.

He holds a B.A. from Davidson College, an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School and a Ph.D. in systematic theology and church history Duke University. He has taught at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, North Park Theological Seminary, Wheaton College, and Northern Seminary, all in the Chicago area, as well as Duke Divinity School. He is an ordained elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. His wife Jaylynn serves as a pastor at Duke Memorial UMC in Durham where he and their three young boys attend.