Showing results by author "Geoffrey Schmitt" in All Categories

For nearly a century, Christianity in the Western world has appeared to be in steady decline. Sanctuaries thinned, cultural influence waned, and many faithful believers quietly wondered whether the Church had entered a long season of exile—not unlike Israel’s displacement in Babylon. This book is written from within that tension: honest about loss, yet alert to hope. Drawing on Scripture, history, and lived experience, the author suggests that what we have been witnessing is not simply decline, but pruning. Beneath the surface, something unexpected has been stirring. In recent years, ...

The Holy No: Learning Faithful Limits is a pastoral and deeply personal exploration of boundaries as a spiritual practice rather than a failure of love. Drawing from decades of ministry, caregiving, and lived experience, Geoffrey Schmitt challenges the quiet assumption that faithfulness requires constant availability, exhaustion, or self-erasure. Through Scripture, reflection, prayer, and honest confession, he examines how good intentions can become bad theology, how love can slip into rescue, how guilt and unspoken expectations bind us, and why burnout is not a spiritual virtue. At the ...

We live by the clock—but we are called by something deeper. In Between the Clock and the Call, Geoffrey Schmitt explores the tension between Chronos, the measured time that structures our days, and Kairos, the lived time in which God meets us with grace. Drawing on Scripture, pastoral ministry, prison outreach, caregiving, aging, and long experience with waiting, this book invites readers to reconsider how time forms the soul. Rather than offering techniques for managing time more efficiently, Schmitt invites readers to receive time as gift—to recognize that waiting can change us, that ...

We live in a world that prizes clarity, certainty, and control. We sort our lives into categories—political, psychological, theological—hoping they will steady us when life feels uncertain. Even faith can become something we try to manage: a set of beliefs that align with our views, soothe our wounds, or provide clear answers. The God Who Refuses Our Categories: Trust Beyond the Need for Control invites readers to encounter a different God—the living God of Scripture who consistently resists being boxed in by human expectations. Through reflection, Scripture, prayer, and lived ...

The Bible’s Recurring Themes: Creation, Fracture, and Renewal traces one of Scripture’s most enduring patterns—the story God tells again and again because we need it again and again. The Bible begins with goodness. God creates the world as gift, calling it very good before it ever proves itself. Yet trust fractures. Humanity doubts God’s goodness, and what begins as mistrust spreads into shame, violence, and broken relationships. Still, God does not abandon what He loves. He restrains destruction, calls His people to return, binds Himself in covenant, and patiently works toward ...

What if the voice of God has been calling you all along—and you just didn’t recognize it? Called by Name: Hearing God’s Voice Through the Noise is a gentle yet powerful guide to discovering the ways God calls us—not just once, but over a lifetime. Drawing from biblical examples, personal testimony, and decades of ministry, Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Schmitt invites readers into a deeper understanding of vocation as relationship, not just assignment. From Abraham’s first step into the unknown to Paul’s dramatic conversion, from prison ministry to pastoral burnout, this book explores how ...

What does it really mean to love your neighbor? In a world shaped by division, fatigue, and constant moral pressure, love can feel either overwhelming or abstract. We know the command. We struggle with the practice. In Here You Are, As You Are: Loving My Neighbor, Geoffrey Schmitt (writing as Willingheart) invites readers into a grounded, humane exploration of love as it is actually lived—imperfectly, wisely, and faithfully—among real people in real situations. This book is not a theory of love. It is a companion on the road. Beginning with Jesus’ reversal of the familiar question—...

What does it mean to live faithfully in a culture that no longer naturally supports Christian belief? In Citizens of Heaven, Neighbors on Earth, Geoffrey Schmitt explores the enduring challenge of being in the world without being shaped by it. Rather than offering slogans or culture-war strategies, this book invites readers into a deeper way of living—one formed by discernment, patience, and embodied love. Drawing on Scripture, pastoral experience, and decades of ministry—including extensive work in prison settings—Schmitt examines how culture quietly forms us through stories, rhythms...

Life rarely unfolds as planned. Roles change, seasons shift, certainty fades, and the familiar gives way to something new. In the midst of these changes, many people find themselves asking quiet but urgent questions: Who am I now? Where is God in this season? How do I walk forward without losing my way? The Road Before You: Faith, Wisdom, and Purpose as Life Changes is a reflective Bible study for anyone navigating transition—by choice or by circumstance. Drawing from Scripture, pastoral experience, prison ministry, hospice care, and lived faith, Geoffrey Schmitt (writing as Willingheart)...

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 ...