Jason Byassee

VST announces appointment of Butler Chair

The VST Board of Governors is pleased to announce that Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee is the inaugural appointment to the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics at Vancouver School of Theology.

Jason Byassee was most recently senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in Boone, North Carolina. There he directed eight other pastoral staff members and pastored a congregation of 1500 from five worshiping communities.

Jason studied at Davidson College and Duke University, where he earned a Ph.D. in systematic theology in 2005. He is also a contributing editor to Christian Century magazine, where he served as an assistant editor from 2004-2008. He is a Fellow in Theology and Leadership at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School. He has served previously as a Research Fellow in the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

He is the author of six books: Reading Augustine: A Guide to Confessions (Cascade, 2006), An Introduction to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Cascade, 2007), Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Eerdmans, 2007), The Gifts of the Small Church (Abingdon), Discerning the Body: Searching for Jesus in the World (Cascade, 2013), and most recently Trinity: The God We Don’t Know (Abingdon). Another recent volume is Pastoral Work: Engagements with the Vision of Eugene Peterson, coedited with Roger Owens and featuring essays by Will Willimon, Stephanie Paulsell, Lillian Daniel and others (Cascade, 2014).

Jason’s work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Theology Today, Books & Culture, Sojourners, United Methodist Reporter, and First Things. He has served on boards for The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, the School for Conversion, and The Other Journal. His work has been recognized with several awards from the Associated Church Press and in 2007 with the American Academy of Religion’s first place award for newswriting for outlets with circulations under 100,000.

His deepest hope is to serve the church as a teaching pastor. To that end he writes on such diverse topics as theology, church history, politics, liturgy, popular culture, and spiritual practices. His primary vocation is to reinvigorate today’s church with the best of ancient and contemporary wisdom for creatively faithful living.

He is married to Jaylynn Warren Byassee, director of Mission Pathways for the Western NC Conference of the UMC, and together they have three boys, ages 12, 10, and 7.