Hello. My name is Johnathon Bowers and I’m currently a student at The Bethlehem Institute, a two-year apprenticeship program at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN. The purpose of the program is to offer seminary-level education in the context of the local church. It’s designed to be a God-centered incubator for the head and the heart. I love it. My second year of the program is underway, and I’m happy to sit at the feet of men who love the books and love the church.

My wife’s name is Crystal and we’ve been married for three years now. I love her to bits. We were born and bred in Ohio, where we met at church when I was eleven and she was ten. She was a blossoming beauty and I was a nerd with pleated pants. God was kind, however, and we were married about a decade later.

Crystal is a nurse and cares for kids with blood diseases and cancer. She likes to sew, laugh, and listen to the wind rustle through tree leaves. Ideally, she would do all three at the same time, but it doesn’t always happen that way.

I’m very much not a nurse, but I do like to laugh. I enjoy reading, telling cheesy jokes, and dancing to a searing bluegrass fiddle tune:

Somewhere under my skin runs a hip-hop nerve, as well, which I scratch by the occasional attempt at beatboxing (the act of making percussive sounds with one’s lips and tongue to mimic a recorded beat):

Thankfully, I can enjoy things such as these without fear of condemnation because Jesus atoned for my sin. I was once a fool, dead in my trespasses and wise in my own eyes. But God, being rich in mercy, was pleased to give life to me through the preaching of the cross.

Oh, I’m still a fool. Just a different kind. And I hope that, above all things, this blog points you to my Wisdom. His name is Jesus, and he has become to me “wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (1 Corinthians 1:30-31).