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Short Bio:

Geoff Holsclaw (PhD) is cohost of the Embodied Faith podcast, which seeks a neuroscience-informed spiritual formation. He is also an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary (Lisle, Illinois) and a pastor at Vineyard North in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Geoff is author of several books, most recently Does God Really Like Me? Discovering the God Who Wants to Be With Us.

Longer Bio:

While a native Californian who lived in Chicago for 18 years (Go CUBS), I now live in Grand Rapids, MI.  I’m wonderfully married to Cyd (since 2000) and have two teenage boys (by the way, Cyd is a pretty awesome coach and spiritual director if you are looking for one).

Besides being a pastor, professor, and theologian, most of all, I’m just trying to work out my faith for the real world.

I serve as a co-pastor of youth and family ministries at Vineyard North.

I recently launch the Embodied Faith podcast on neuroscience, spiritual formation, and faith.

Cyd and I also just wrote Does God Really Like Me? Discovering the God Wants to be With Us. Check out part of it here.

I also co-authored, Prodigal Christianity, with David Fitch, and wrote Transcending Subjects: Augustine, Hegel, and Theology (a version of my doctoral dissertation).

I work as an affiliate professor of theology at Northern Seminary.

Please follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

My writing focuses on the church, theology and philosophy, politics and culture.  My goal is that everything here would make theology and mission accessible for everyone.   I’m all over the place but hopefully you’ll find some of it interesting and helpful.

Subscribe to my weekly “soundings” newsletter and I’ll send you Does God Even Like Me? The good news of not being alone.

 

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6 replies on “about”

Hello Pastor. Im from the Philippines. Just want to thank you for the article i’ve read about “hilasterion”. It helped me a lot. Just subscribed to your podcast and youtube. God bless you and your fam!

I’m enjoying your blog quite a lot. I’ve been involved with primarily Baptist type churches for the past 30 years, and had become disconnected from the current Charismatic church. I remember there were intellectual charismatics, I just didn’t know where they had gone off to. (is that too mean?) Does anyone remember Watchman Nee, T. Austin Sparks or Art Katz? By the way, I was involved in the early Vineyards in the San Fernando Valley back in 1979, pre John Wimber.

Hello. Thank you for your exploration 😉 I found you, eventually, because Julie Roys interviewed Scot McKnight about his book, A Church Called Tov. That led to Beth Allison Barr, then Aimee Byrd who was interviewed by Gravity Leadership. Scrolling down their interviews Attachment Theory and you showed up. THEN the real gem, your interview of Fred Liggin. WOW!!! What a refreshing drink of water you two are!!!

I am a child hospitalized in 1950 at 26 months. My attachment problems started at birth being a forceps baby that damaged my vision. It took 66 years in 2014 for me to BEGIN the process of realizing what happened to me. Praise God for Alan Schore, Dan Siegel, Bruce Perry, Curt Thompson and Jim Wilder. Recently I also came across Summer Joy Gross (The Presence Project)

This is what I think. We are made in the image of God and He is revealing that design. Baby is supposed to be with mama for 1000 days (Schore) uninterrupted. Women hate this because they want to get out there and create (Curt Thompson “create beauty”) But, generally, nursing mama doesn’t get pregnant. Baby is ready for weaning around 1000 days and she gets pregnant again and baby is ready to be pushed off her lap. Toddler begins his exploring and separating. That separation, if optimal, happens correctly around age 25. This process gives men the misguided notion, because she is vulnerable caring or an infant ALL the time (and then another one comes!), he’s the important one because he needs to protect this little group. So 6 or 7 little groups (Bruce Perry) form a tribe and everybody CONNECTS.

The Gaze

Imagine being mama, called Mary. Baby emerges and WANTS to look in your eyes. Imagine THAT. God’s heart is this desire to look into your eyes. (Left eye to left eye begins “right brain” formation.) Attuement, synchronization. With God. WOW!!! What an amazing experience THAT must have been!!! (Listen to Maverick City Music song Beautiful “with just one look, everything changes, I’m captivated, nothing will be the same”). I’ve started collecting images of The Gaze. Because of listening to Wilder, Thompson, Perry I’ve become very very aware of the importance to being as fully present with an other. Bruce Perry is an amazing guy. He’s doesn’t declare Jesus is God, but he ACTS more Christ like than anybody I know. He’s Matt 5,6,7. He doesn’t raise his voice. He’s slow to speak and act. Listen to his book What Happened to You so you can hear HIS voice.

Back to the future . . . well everything plods along until about 2010 and youtube gets invented. Kaboom . . . everything changes. 1940’s research about infant development begins, 1980’s micro chip begins shrinking, brain scans become available. But it is youtube where info is available to EVERYBODY, only 10 years ago that explodes our understanding. Schore’s research reaches all of us. Thanks be to God.

Women’s Window: late 60’s Feminine Mystique wakes up the sleeping giant and women abandon infants across the nation and eventually world. You have to remember NOBODY knew anything about infant development and the harm being created. It had to happen men were (are) out of control and harmful to everybody! Complementarianism is all about power. I can’t see a difference between what’s going on in Afghanistan and burkas. I digress . . . so in the 70’s greed grips the family and mortgages became more important than children. Kids kicked to the curb. Millions and millions over 2-3 generations now. WITH ATTACHMENT DISORDERS. All this political divisiveness is a cry for their mama. Nobody saw them. Sees them. Gazed into their eyes. Present with them. As Curt Thompsons says “baby comes looking for someone looking for them. And it never goes away.”

Suggest focusing your ministry on earned attachment. I do not know anything, yet, about adult healing to attach optimally. I believe it’s possible, but the information isn’t very accessible yet. Not enough therapist recognize the scale of the issue. My kids have attachment issues from my unhealed self forming them. Had I received the information/healing earlier (40 years 🙁 ) things could be very different I believe.

Is this your Esther story???

Geoff,

Refreshing to find young pastors like you, especially from the Vineyard. Yeah!!! 🙂
I’m an old vineyardite from the early canyon years circa 82. The Anaheim Vineyard has been my church since I became a believer. Now that Alan and kathryn have tried to systematically steal our building, fire our young pastors and scatter all our homegroups in order to establish his own movement a la bethel style, which all if not most serious Vineyard leaders oposse, we are now regrouping and resetting our wonderful community with what is left of the vintage legacy. Your article is refreshing as we consider what’s ahead for us and what has happened to us thru these very deceiving and conniving couple from Ireland.
I appreciate your depth and intelligent commentary.
Will definitely drop in for more…

I encountered your work when I was searching for additional commentary on Deleuze https://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2007/06/gilles_deleuze_.html#comments your comments have been beautifully archived from 2007!
Unfortunately it was very hard to muster up a contact email until I found this somewhat more recent blog.

Your writing about the rise of a GloboChrist was deeply moving and weirdly parallel to my own thinking in 2023. Ideas that I have come to personally uncover in my re-submersion in Christianity by attending a Traditional Latin mass (something which may have different political connotations in the US then in my home Sydney). The final argument you introduced about deterritorialization struck a deep and lasting note with me. Your writing genuinely came across as prophetic writing from 2007! You describe the immergence of what is known as “the Synodal Way” in purely philosophical argument (the term within the catholic landscape for a Globo-local church within the context of domiciled catholic orthodoxy, moving the Catholic -latin universal- Church from a missionary Latin rite church to a union of Orthodox churches with every people finding the expression of the universal Christ in themselves) and the sloughing off of the inane ‘myth of Western Christianity’ (in Catholic circles the tension between; the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar world where in the 21st century with take Latinized orthodoxy out of the pseudo-western landscape and reap the fruits grown by the Lord in every corner of the world).

In a vague bumbling fashion I’ll pitch my own experience of the Global-Local; I regularly correspond with a Nigerian priest I met in England at a parish service when before attending my friends Anglican wedding, my parish priests are from Kerala and K.L (excellent Priests who deliver a mass in the Latin style, their fourth/fifth language) and our last special plate collection was for churches in Lebanon and the middle east, our parish often attracts an array of Protestants and Orthodox who seek to experience a divine liturgy in the Tridentine style. I am beset by Orthodox Podcasts like the Symbolic World (Matthieu Pageau, and associates) and the evangelical works such as N.T Wrights Unbelievable, and secular Christian learning from Tom Holland (Atheist / Christo-phile author of Dominion).

Thanks for your work and looking forward to the incredible world growing with us.

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