I (Tim Gavigan) have lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and serve as lead pastor at Glad Tidings Church (GT), where I started as worship pastor in November 2001.
I have been husband to Katie since October 2, 2004, and a father since December 7, 2017.
The posts on this blog are primarily intended to equip the church I pastor to be the church to the City it lives in. Posts might be devotional, theological, practical, philosophical, and/or all of the above. But I will not be 'thinking out loud' merely for the sake of being thought-provoking. Our church's mission statement is:
Love God. Love Each Other. Love the City. Change the World.
My intent is that anything that appears on this page will result in that vision being fulfilled in the lives of the people who decide to tune in to this channel.
Before committing my life to Jesus in 1999, I searched for God behind just about every door the world has to offer: Wicca, Buddhism, and Mezo-American Shamanism; I read the Tao Te Ching, Sufi Poetry, and the Koran. I used hallucinogenic drugs in my attempt to discover a gateway into the supernatural, the cosmic, the divine.
My personal mission is still the same: to know the really Real, the truly True. But I have personally experienced things in church that cannot be explained by psychology or biology, that surpass the intensity of any high I ever encountered using drugs. I have found myself drawn into a wisdom, pulled into orbit around a Center that holds everything together, that hints ('hints' because they can never truly be grasped, only glimpsed) in the direction of eternal truths that no other study or practice of spirituality or religion has ever approached in terms of its fullness, richness, comprehensiveness, or beauty.
I once speculated that there was some unifying, cosmic consciousness that permeated and animated everything, and I wanted more than anything else to be more experientially connected to it, tapped into it. Now I am convinced beyond any doubt that, all along, this "in all, over all, and through all" consciousness that I had intuited had been the God revealed to Moses as Yhwh, to the First Century Jews as Jesus from Nazareth, and continues to be experienced throughout the world through the Holy Spirit.
While I had imagined that I had been pursuing God, I know now that it was God who had been pursuing me. There is no greater privilege than–and no experience that compares to–knowing and encountering God personally and intimately. My hope is that in some way, God will use these writings to draw others to Him. As the Apostle Paul said, "My life is worth nothing to me unless I spend it on fulfilling the commission God has given me." As much as I ever wanted to know God, and as much as I always want to be on a journey of growing in the knowledge of God, so I also want everyone else to have the privilege and experience of knowing Him.
May you experience this love, though it is too wonderful to comprehend. And may you, together with all God's people, know just how long, how high, how wide, and how deep Jesus' love for you really is. - Eph 3.19