At a glance
John Goehle has been an entrepreneur and a lay pastor, a community-theater director and a healthcare executive — an ordinary man who needs six months to switch his brand of milk.
For nearly twenty years he has served as a pulpit supply pastor — the preacher congregations call when they need someone to fill the pulpit — and, by his own cheerful admission, he is in more demand than a man of his modest theological training has any right to be. Not because he knows the Bible better than the seminary-trained pastors around him, but because he learned the one thing he believes too many of us in the pulpit forget: people don't come to church to hear another lecture about an ancient text. They come aching to know whether that text has anything to do with the Tuesday they have to go back to.
So he stopped explaining the Bible at people and started telling them his life, and letting the Scripture light it up from the inside. And the rooms got fuller.
“A parable is not a lie. It is the truth wearing clothes you can see.”
The Tug is the fruit of those years. Nearly everything in its pages was first preached from a pulpit, born of some real thing that happened to him and the slow discovery that it rhymed with something far older. It is, in the truest sense, his actual life — held up to an ancient light to see what it was always trying to say.
Today John is a sought-after speaker who has spent a lifetime helping others discover how their own story is still being written.