Showing results by author "Schmitt" in All Categories

Many men live faithfully yet quietly—carrying responsibility, enduring loss, and showing up day after day without much language for what they hold inside. The Long Way Forward is written for those men. This book is not about reclaiming masculinity or winning cultural arguments. It is about formation—how faith is shaped over time through presence, restraint, honesty, and love lived quietly. Drawing on Scripture, pastoral ministry, prison ministry, and lived experience, Geoffrey Schmitt invites readers to walk a different road: one marked by endurance rather than speed, faithfulness ...

My Journey Through the Three Streams : Discovering the Beauty and Balance of the Charismatic Episcopal Church is an accessible and inspiring guide of the author’s journey to the Charismatic Episcopal Church (CEC), a Christian community rooted in the ancient faith, alive in the power of the Holy Spirit, and grounded in the authority of Scripture. Drawing from the rich heritage of the Church through the ages, the CEC embodies the convergence of three vital streams: evangelical, sacramental, and charismatic. Whether you are a seeker curious about liturgical worship, a believer longing for ...

Prayer takes many forms — spoken and silent, ancient and spontaneous, joyful and aching. Yet beneath every method lies a single purpose: communion with God. In Prayer: Many Methods — One Goal, Geoffrey Schmitt invites readers into an honest, spacious exploration of prayer as lived relationship rather than spiritual performance. Drawing from Scripture, pastoral ministry, prison chaplaincy, hospice work, marriage, grief, and decades of faith, this study honors both structure and freedom, words and silence. Each chapter explores a different dimension of prayer — words given, words found,...

Permission to Grieve is written for those whose faith has not failed—but has been wounded. There are seasons when Scripture remains true and love remains sincere, yet neither feels sufficient to carry the weight of loss. In those seasons, grief does not ask to be explained or corrected. It asks to be honored. Drawing from decades of pastoral ministry, personal loss, hospice work, and lived faith, Geoffrey Schmitt writes as a companion rather than a guide. This book does not rush healing, demand optimism, or offer tidy answers. Instead, it offers permission—permission to grieve honestly,...

History Without Illusion is an honest, pastoral exploration of how memory shapes faith, identity, and hope. Rather than treating history as a collection of facts to defend or dismiss, Geoffrey Schmitt invites readers to remember truthfully—without erasing pain, denying complexity, or surrendering to nostalgia. Through personal story, Scripture, poetry, and reflection, the book moves from childhood faith and family inheritance through loss, regret, culture, nationhood, and progress, finally arriving at a mature practice of “remembering forward.” Along the way, Schmitt shows how ...

Love Without Illusion: Loving Real People in Real Life explores what it means to love honestly in a world where disappointment, difference, and limitation are unavoidable. Moving through relationships that shape every life—parents, siblings, spouses, friends, mentors, leaders, the poor, enemies, and the self—Geoffrey Schmitt writes with pastoral wisdom and lived experience. This book does not offer sentimental answers or quick resolutions. Instead, it invites readers to release idealization, confront reality with courage, and discover a love that endures precisely because it sees ...

In a world marked by anxiety, division, exhaustion, and uncertainty, many people sense that something essential is missing beneath the surface of modern life. Techniques abound, opinions multiply, and information overflows — yet stability, meaning, and wholeness remain elusive. Christianity as Foundation explores the Christian faith not as an ideology to defend or a system to manage, but as a grounding reality — a foundation capable of forming mature, healthy lives in a fractured world. Drawing from decades of ministry experience in parish life, prison ministry, hospice care, and ...

Just a Fool for Christ is a gentle, story-driven exploration of joy, presence, and holy foolishness, told through the unexpected lens of clown ministry. Drawing on decades of experience as a priest, chaplain, hospice caregiver, prison volunteer, and clown—known affectionately as Pockets—Geoffrey Schmitt reflects on how laughter lowers defenses, silence creates space for grace, and vulnerability opens doors that authority cannot. From churches and hospitals to prisons and nursing homes, he discovers that the most faithful ministry often happens when performance is laid aside and presence...

What if faith is not about arriving at certainty, but learning how to walk faithfully when answers are incomplete? A Rule of the Road offers a gentle, lived approach to Christian spirituality shaped by decades of ministry, marriage, loss, prison chaplaincy, and pastoral presence. Rather than presenting doctrines to master or techniques to perfect, this book offers a set of guiding commitments — a rule of life for those walking the long road of faith. Each chapter explores a simple but demanding choice: presence over answers, relationship over results, love before usefulness, being before ...

What if the faith you started with was never meant to last? In The Faith I Did Not Start With, priest and chaplain Geoffrey Schmitt tells the story of a faith that had to be dismantled before it could become real. This is not a story of rebellion or abandonment, but of maturation—where borrowed belief gives way to truth, truth alone proves insufficient, and faith is slowly re-formed through encounter, loss, love, and presence. Schmitt writes candidly about early disillusionment, a profound encounter with God, a call to ministry, and the long road of formation that followed. Seminary study...

The Ministry of Touch: Faith You Can Feel explores one of the most overlooked yet powerful dimensions of Christian faith: embodied presence. Drawing on decades of pastoral ministry in parishes, prisons, hospitals, hospice care, and retreat settings, Geoffrey Schmitt invites readers to rediscover how God works through hands, proximity, restraint, and sacrament. From holding a trembling hand to anointing with oil, from baptismal water to bread broken in communion, this book traces how grace is not only believed—but felt. With honesty and reverence, Schmitt also addresses necessary ...

Love Under Pressure: Faithful Living When Love Is Tested explores what it means to remain faithful when love is strained by suffering, loss, disappointment, fear, doubt, anger, silence, fatigue, and time. Drawing on Scripture, ministry experience, marriage, caregiving, aging, and seasons of unseen labor, Geoffrey Schmitt (Willingheart) reflects on love not as sentiment or success, but as endurance shaped by grace. This book does not offer quick solutions or spiritual shortcuts. Instead, it invites readers to discern when to stay, when to rest, when to speak, and when to let go—without ...

Untroubled Hearts: Christ’s Peace in an Anxious World is a pastoral, Scripture-anchored journey into a question many believers quietly carry: Is it truly possible to live with peace in a world that feels increasingly anxious? Rather than offering quick fixes or spiritual clichés, this book invites readers into a deeper, steadier way of faith—one shaped by presence, trust, and lived experience. Drawing from the teachings of Jesus, the wisdom of Scripture, and decades of pastoral ministry, the author explores peace not as the absence of trouble, but as the gift of Christ’s presence ...

Here I Am, As I Am is a gentle yet deeply honest spiritual study about learning to live from being rather than doing. Written out of a lifetime of ministry, grief, caregiving, and quiet discovery, this book invites readers to step off the treadmill of performance and rediscover faith as presence. The study begins with a simple, vulnerable question—“Can’t I just be?”—and God’s equally simple answer: “Yes—and I AM.” From that encounter unfolds a journey that reframes identity, worth, prayer, and spiritual growth. Rather than offering techniques for self-improvement, this ...

The Sword and the Cup: Prepared Without Losing the Soul is a pastoral exploration of faithful readiness in uncertain times. Rooted in Luke 22:36–38, this book examines what it means to walk forward with clarity and courage without surrendering tenderness, humility, or love. Rather than calling readers to fear, aggression, or withdrawal, Geoffrey Schmitt (Willingheart) traces a spiritually coherent path from being to readiness, from presence to discernment, and from strength to surrender. Through the paired symbols of the sword and the cup, the book explores preparedness without paranoia, ...

Seeing with the Heart: Biblical Faith and Human Awareness invites readers to rediscover faith not merely as belief or behavior, but as a way of seeing. Drawing from Scripture, pastoral experience, and lived prayer, Geoffrey Schmitt explores how the Bible consistently addresses human awareness—how we perceive God, ourselves, others, and the world. From creation’s first light to resurrection recognition, this book traces how awareness is given, distorted, healed, and renewed. It examines fear, anxiety, distraction, suffering, and trauma as forces that shape perception, and shows how Jesus...

Walking with God is one of the most familiar images of faith — and one of the most misunderstood. In Walking with the Lord: Learning to Share the Road — One Step at a Time, priest, chaplain, and writer Willingheart, Geoffrey Schmitt, invites readers into a deeply personal, pastorally grounded exploration of what it truly means to walk with God across a lifetime. Drawing from decades of ministry in congregations, prisons, hospice care, and ordinary daily life, this book traces the spiritual road through beginnings and callings, companionship and solitude, detours and valleys, stumbles ...

Bearing One Another’s Burdens: Faithful Love Along the Long Road is a pastoral, lived-faith reflection on what it truly means to love one another over time—through grief, aging, illness, friendship, prison walls, and the ordinary demands of daily faithfulness. Drawing from Scripture, decades of ministry, personal loss, and prison and hospice chaplaincy, Geoffrey Schmitt explores the biblical call of Galatians 6:2 with honesty and discernment. This book carefully distinguishes bearing burdens together from unhealthy co-dependency, showing how love can be both generous and wise, present ...

Set Apart for Love: Why God Calls Us to Be Holy reframes holiness as a life shaped by grace rather than perfection. Drawing on Scripture, pastoral experience, prison ministry, aging, suffering, and everyday faith, this study invites readers to see holiness as relational, compassionate, and deeply human. Through twelve chapters, readers are guided from God’s holiness to Spirit-led transformation, ordinary faithfulness, shared community, compassion, and finally a life offered in love. Written with warmth, honesty, and humility, this book speaks to seekers, longtime believers, and anyone ...

Kindness rarely makes headlines, yet it remains one of the most powerful forces in the world. In The Quiet Strength of Kindness, Geoffrey Schmitt weaves together Scripture, personal stories, pastoral wisdom, Kairos prison ministry experiences, and gentle reflections to reveal how small acts of compassion can shape souls in lasting ways. Across ten chapters, readers are invited to explore kindness that costs something, kindness that listens, kindness that heals, kindness that shows up, and kindness received as a grace from God. With Poems, Meditations, Prayers, and Smithy’s Forge practices...