Eden: Luke, we’re excited to hear from you today. We typically start our interviews asking to get to know you a little bit. So what are a couple of things that bring you joy?
Luke Davis: Well, several. I mean, the list is as long as my arm. I would say, starting out, my family. I have been crazy in love with my wife Christi, for a number of years. We’ve been married for 27.5 years now—a little bit over that. And we have three children—two still with us, one is with the Lord.
Joshua is 26. He has a rare neuromuscular disorder. He has been wheelchair bound since he was about, I want to say, 8 or 9 years of age. But he’s still a very plucky soul. He has been through a lot medically, but he still soldiers on and brings us great delight. Lindsay is our daughter. She is presently 23 years of age. Jordan was our youngest, and he had the same neuromuscular disorder as Josh did. Very few and a very small single digit percentage of boys who have it live past the age of ten. And Josh has made it. Jordan did not. He died at 19 months of age. Soon after we moved up here to St. Louis he passed away—had a bout of pneumonia, and that was basically it. But we have, in a way, replenished the quiver, if we want to put it that way. Our daughter, Lindsay gave birth to our granddaughter, Tori—Victoria Anne. We call her Tori. She is a bouncy, active, crazy, little rug rat who keeps us on our toes but really breathes life into us.
I would say writing books obviously gives me joy. I keep doing that. I’m always looking for the next project. I also like to write new songs and set them to traditional hymn tunes. So I’m not a musician, but I’m a lyricist. I serve at our church—Anglican Church of the Resurrection. I’m the assisting priest there, and I love the congregation, love the opportunity, love working with our rector, Ben Wagner.
And just an ancillary note, some things that bring me joy would probably be any time that Swansea City or Rangers F.C. would win a soccer game. That gives me a lot of joy as well. But nothing like previously on the list.
Eden: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing those things. A lot of our audience we expect to be those that didn’t grow up in a Christian home and are newer to faith in Jesus. And typically when I ask people what has brought them joy, they list things as you did, like soccer or whatnot, but they often don’t mention some of the sorrows of their lives. And your first thought when you answered about what brings you joy, were also tied to some things that have brought sorrow. Would you share with a newer believer a little bit of how the Lord brought you to that place of great joy?
Luke Davis: Yeah. I think there’s the long runway and the more immediate bit of tragedy, I would say. And this is mainly centered on our two sons. Josh keeps enduring, keeps enduring, keeps enduring. But he’s always had decreased muscular strength, muscular endurance because of his disorder. And he has collapsed his lungs a number of times over the years. He’s been hospitalized. His spine curvature was so bad when he was about nine years old, he had to have steel rods put in and nearly died. He came within hours of death soon afterwards. And God was very, very good to keep him going and have him remain with us. He’s still a very sharp kid. He’s got all his mental faculties. He’s writing a novel of his own right now. He loves military history and everything. He’s as active as he can possibly be. That also means that you’re enduring along with him in the medical care. You just press on.
Jordan was different because that was acute. That was more immediate. It happened soon after we moved up here, like I said. And I just remember how God was able to bring us through that grief. [He] transformed our family in a number of ways, relationally, for the better. Not that things were bad, but it was one of those things that the death wasn’t good, but good came out of it. And I always came back to what Job said, “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away” (Job 1:21). But you have the choice, in a sense, whether you’re going to go on blessing God and following Christ or not. And one way is going to be difficult, but it’s going to lead to your flourishing and the flourishing of others connected to you. And the other way you’re going to be spinning your wheels at best, and to your own personal demise at worst. So that’s a choice that you have to make every day. We’re kind of in that phase. It was almost exactly 16 years ago that Jordan died. So this is a tough stretch for us. We relive it. But we’re able to look back on how God has brought us through that. And we can be very grateful.
Eden: Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s so helpful to hear that joy is not something that can’t coexist with sorrow, and it often does. I love hearing you talk about your son and how much delight you take in him, and how in all of these things, the choice to bless God is a choice that we make in faith, knowing that he’s worthy of being blessed. He’s worthy of our praise.
Luke Davis: And the fact that joy is not dependent upon your circumstances. I mean, my dad said something else along that vein once on the issue of peace. We don’t have peace because things are peaceful, but because Jesus has aligned himself to us. There’s a greater reality. There’s a slab of concrete at the bottom of your life that gives rise to the joy and to the peace that is otherworldly.
Eden: Yes, yes. Amen. Well, I would love to hear how you first came to know Jesus, how the Lord first introduced himself to you and brought you to himself. So could you share a little of your own testimony with us?
Luke Davis: Sure. In a way, it’s almost like asking the question, how does one learn to breathe? Because that was kind of my environment. Even though God had chosen me well before (Ephesians 1:4-5), I would say that when things happened in space and time, he multiplied that grace primarily through my parents’ influence and their example of life both in word and deed, but also their diligence in terms of raising myself and my two younger brothers. I became much more aware of this the older I grew. Because when you’re younger and you have family worship at the dinner table or your father’s reading to you from Scripture or another story—like going through the Chronicles of Narnia with you—you get into this mode of thinking that, “Oh, this is normal. This is everyday life.” And then the more you talk to your friends, you realize this is really a unique environment that I’m a part of. And then you ask why? The fact that God placed you there is really a mark of his grace and his mercy.
The time where I think it really took off and became more real—I would say I don’t have a sense of the moment. Some people look at the Apostle Paul and he has this lightning, almost literally lightning, moment on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19) and Jesus gets a hold of him. It wasn’t like a strong grip [for me]. It was more like Jesus was slowly sinking his fingers into me all along the way through my parents’ influence. But where it became especially concrete was when I was going through high school and my dad was back in the pastorate again, pastoring a church in central Maryland, I noticed that for some time, but especially during those years, after dinner and after family worship devotions then dad would circulate throughout the whole house and he’d go to me and my two brothers individually and would read and talk and pray with us. That was probably a good 15-20 minutes with each of us. That took upwards of an hour out of his day, every day, which is a huge sacrifice. And it was really God putting into very concrete fashion that whenever I called out to him with a desire to be rescued, that he had been calling me all along. But that was primarily through the work of my parents. And it’s very, very, very unique.
Eden: Yes, yes. And I think you’re right in saying that. It takes maybe even getting to adulthood to realize how unique it is when you hear other people’s experiences and think, “maybe this isn’t normal.”
Luke Davis: That’s not normal.
Eden: Yes. Yeah. But I love how you said that through your dad’s pursuit of you, you recognized that truly it was God’s pursuit of you. And I think that’s a wonderful encouragement for parents, too, that you have incredible influence in the life of your kids, and the environment you create in your home can really serve to help them come to know the Lord.
Luke Davis: We have more influence than we allow. We can sort of overload the grace side of things and that God draws people to himself (John 6:44), which is true, but God’s sovereignty and God’s work in bringing people to faith does not negate human responsibility. If anything, my parents felt that it energized them to do what they were being called to do. They would leave the results to God. But my goodness, they were going to do everything possible to ensure that that there were no spiritual deficits noticeable.
Eden: Yes. Wonderful. Well, and you mentioned earlier that you serve as an Anglican minister. Is this correct?
Luke Davis: Yes.
Eden: And so how did God lead you into that ministry and what does your ministry look like now?
Luke Davis: Sure. Well, I grew up Presbyterian. My dad was a Presbyterian pastor. That’s something that goes way back through preceding generations. I was originally ordained in the Presbyterian Church. Then in 2016, 2017, I was charged here at school to put together some electives or talk to other people about electives in the Bible department. And I said, “you know, I could try church history.” It would be a semester. It would be 2000 years in one semester. It would be a wild ride. Because it was going to launch in the fall of 2017, the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, I was like, “I need to make sure I’ve got everything down.” So I knew my Luther, I knew my Calvin—Martin Luther, John Calvin, the two-pronged initial approach of the Protestant Reformation. But then I was like, there’s also England. There’s also the Church of England. So I need to read and make sure I can speak with some semblance of authority on that to the students. The more I read The Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer’s writings, John Jewell, a lot of the original English Reformers, I was like, “why does this feel like I’m coming to the home that I never knew I had?” It was really, really bizarre.
It took a while but then we made the shift in late 2017. There is a very wonderful reformed evangelical Anglican parish in West Saint Louis County, so we started attending there. We got to know Ben, the rector, and a great guy, great friend. I gradually took on a few more responsibilities here and there and started the Holy Order process and was ordained as a deacon and then a priest (pastor) in 2021. And I’ve been technically on staff there ever since. That’s part of me. I also have been teaching for 25-26 years in Christian schools in Louisiana, Virginia, Florida, and now up here (Missouri) for a while. And so I’m presently the Bible department chairman here at Westminster Christian Academy in Saint Louis. So that’s where I’m sitting right now in my classroom with my Welsh flag behind me.
Eden: Wonderful!
Luke Davis: Yes, it is! It is! I just wish they would win the World Cup once. That would be great.
Eden: Are you Welsh? Do you have Welsh in your background?
Luke Davis: Dad’s side is—I think, as best we can tell, came from Wales, eventually ended up settling in Northern Ireland. Scots-Irish stuff mingled in before they emigrated to the Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) area. That’s just what we can sketch in the crayons of innuendo.
So I’ve been teaching here, this is my 17th year, I believe, at Westminster. And I’m the department chair, I teach ethics, I teach church history. This year I’ve picked up some freshman New Testament. But yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing for some time.
Eden: Wonderful. Well, I was excited when I heard that your church history studies were in preparation for your students because I thought of these books that you’ve written. So, I first heard about you at a conference when I went to the Christian Focus booth, and I saw these books. They look like this.
Luke Davis: Yes.
Eden: And they go through church history. So it starts with The Church in Ancient Times, The Church that Expands Outward, The Church at the Birth of Protestantism, and then, The Church in the Middle Ages. I think I got those out of order.
Luke Davis: That’s okay. There’s a fifth one which covers end of the 19th century to the present age also.
Eden: And I think that’s the purple one.
Luke Davis: That’s the purple one. Yes.
Eden: So I was so excited because growing up my dad loved reading this commentary that he would recommend to everybody on 1-2 Samuel and it was written by a man named Dale Ralph Davis. So he gave me this book in college, and I read it alongside my Bible, and it was one of the most formative books that I had read in a Bible study. And so I thought, “whatever this man Dale Ralph Davis writes about the Bible, I’d like to read it!”
Luke Davis: It’s a good policy to have. Yeah.
Eden: Yes, yes. And I was a Bible student, and I had done a little bit of study in Hebrew, and I really loved studying the Bible academically. But I would often feel discouraged by how often, if you’re focused on Bible as an academic discipline, sometimes you can lose out on the big why. That we’re seeking to know Jesus. And I felt when I would pick up this man’s commentaries, I always felt like, “Wow, this man knows what he’s talking about in terms of Scripture, but you can just tell he loves the Lord, and he loves people.” And that was very formative for me. So I picked up these books and I realized that they were written by his son—who is you! So, that was a wonderful discovery to make. And as I opened the books, I found that same loving tone and gift of writing in your work. So I would love to hear how these books developed and what inspired you to write them.
Luke Davis: Well, I think some writing is based in desperation. I’ve also written an ethics book, primarily because I felt like there’s nothing that’s hitting the proper age level for young people like 12 through 18. So my wife Christi one day said, “Well, you could always write something yourself.” So I did that. And then the church history idea was in the back of my mind, but it was literally the day after my ethics book was published—came on the market with Christian Focus—Katherine Mackenzie emails me and she says in so many words, “Hey, I understand that you’re very interested in church history…” All this stuff. There’s a longer story to this, but the short story is they were doing a reboot of a prior series of church history for young people. And I thought, “boy, if there is one thing that is really missing out there, it is properly done narrative history with a dramatic flair that really brings home the redemptive, God-sovereignty focus to church history that can really inspire (inspire is an overdone word sometimes—but it can really encourage and fortify people, if they are Christians, to encourage them to continue. If they are not, pique their interest and make them think, “this is a story unlike any other, and I want to explore it more.”
So there’s that, the fact that I love it, and it was also a change of pace after writing an ethics book. And before that, my published works were primarily crime fiction and dabbling in a creative allegory-fantasy type stuff. So Katherine said, “Just let me know.” And I said, “I’ll pray about it and let you know.” And then 24 hours later, I said yes, not thinking about the staggering amount of work it was going to be.
But another thing that inspired me along the way with all the—because there’s so much—writing a book is like an iceberg. You see that little bit above the surface, and there is so much below that goes into that. But it was a chance to create a series that is very portable in terms of it’s written with a primary target audience of 12 to 18-year-olds, and it’s very accessible and very understandable, but very robust and rich and draws people along but also for the young at heart. Where anybody can derive value from this. Anyone can enjoy this. Anyone can dive into the story. When you’re reading about Emily Meier and her work in helping in Paris during the cholera outbreak, it’s like you’re riding in the cart with her as she’s rescuing these children. The story with C.S. Lewis, you feel like you’re in the pub there in Oxford with him and Tolkien and others. To have people feel like they’re there on the playbill as a character—all great history is really voyeurism in a way. You’re spying in as a bystander and everything, but people get an opportunity to be part of the story. Where people also with no understanding or little understanding of church history can come away with a lot of value. They can come in and they may not know the Bible, but we know how humans function, and we know how humans go through difficulties and how they react to good times and how they react to bad times. And so it brings a very human element, and it doesn’t gloss over the warts or anything. I mean, I deal with the foibles of a lot of people and their shortcomings and everything. I don’t minor (?) there, but I don’t lionize people. And so people come away with a very human sense of how God works through very fallen people. And of course flawed people. What other category is God going to work with? That’s all he has.
Eden: Totally. Yeah. Well, I would say that everything I’ve heard you say about the book is what I’ve experienced with the little bit that I’ve read of it. As I was reading, I thought, “Wow, this would be a great book to read to kids under eight even.” But then as I kept reading, I thought, “man, my roommate loves history and we’re 27 and 28 and we like to read books out loud to each other.” So I was like, “I should bring this home and read it to her.” So I think it is compelling enough for an older audience, but it’s also clear enough for a young audience. And I think it’s a wonderful service that you’ve done to the church in providing these books. Because, like you said, church history is a long span of time. And I think when church history is reduced to just facts that you learn in a classroom or even just three different names of people that may stand out more than others, we really miss out on a lot of the story, and thus a lot of God’s work that we could learn from and be inspired by, and that could grow our own faith. So I’m really excited that you’ve done this.
I wondered if you could tell us about one of the people in these books that most impacted you as you were writing about them?
Luke Davis: Well, trying to pluck just one seems to do an injustice to so many others. I would probably say there’s a top three in every one of those volumes. But there was one in particular. This is odd because I tend to love ancient, medieval, and Reformation history era the most. And the one that impacted me the most was the last chapter, the last individual, in the last book, Ben Kwashi in Jos, Nigeria. I don’t want to give everything away because I want to encourage everybody to buy the books and read and experience for yourself, but Ben is an Anglican archbishop. He and his wife have a compound where they take in orphans. They practically have a zoo in their home area. But it covered one particular night where Muslim Fulani tribesmen invaded the compound, and they held him [Ben] and his wife at gunpoint on their bedroom floor. And all he had was prayer. All he had was throwing himself before the mercy of God and he came to the point where, “this is it. I’m going to die.” And he was okay with that, but he was trusting God for whatever. And then all of a sudden, he looks up and they’re not there. They had just left for whatever. And the entire story is much more exciting than what I’ve just shared.
But another thing about that was I was able to be—There were many people on this one Zoom call for—We were conferring on something, different Anglican clergy from all over the world. And Ben was on there and Ben was asked to close us in prayer. The best way I can describe that is Ben has a way of, when he prays, you feel like you are in the throne room of heaven with Jesus and Jesus’ smile is so warm upon you and you sense that presence. I was like, “wow, that was unreal.” And to think of what he’s gone through. And after that event where he and his wife were held at gunpoint, the first thing they did, (was) they went out into the surrounding area, and they found 70 Muslim children. And they decided, “we are going to repay evil with good, and we’re going to pay the scholarships for you to come to our school so you can have an education.” The forgiveness. And thinking, if I’m in his shoes, I’m probably not doing that. And I know myself well enough where I know I’m not doing that. And he did. There’s so much Jesus on tap in him that pours out of him that is just a tribute, not ultimately to Ben (because he’s one of the most humble people that I’ve ever encountered) but to what God is able to do through him. It just really floored me. Well, when I hit the last letter, when I ended that and the whole thing [his book series] was done, I was like, “that was the story I had to end on. That was just everything.”
Eden: Wow, wow. And that is such a good reminder that even if in some of the past stories that you write about with people that are no longer living and you’ve not embellished, but you’ve imagined what their lives might have looked like, they’re still true. They’re still real people. And the facts that you’re writing about are real believers and about what God has done in their lives. That encourages my faith, even to hear about Ben, and I’m sure in hearing about all these other people, it can encourage so many other people’s faith as well.
Lastly, so you’ve written your own biographies of other people, but we like to ask our interviewees if there are any books that have transformed your own walk with Jesus outside of the Bible. So our site is encouraging people to go to Scripture, but we also want to help them build a library of things that might help bolster their faith in Jesus.
Luke Davis: Right. I would say, I’m going to disavow any sense of nepotism. Even though I could just wallpaper everything with my dad’s books, we’ll just say, go to Amazon and buy everything that Dale Ralph Davis has ever written. I would say that probably—transformational—definitely J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, but particularly in that book, chapter 19, every Christian should read chapter 19 at least once a year, the one entitled, “Sons of God.” And that’s his coverage of adoption in Christ where he says a Christian is one who knows God as Father. And he teases out why that’s the greatest blessing of the gospel—not the central thing, but it’s the greatest blessing of the gospel. But how traitors such as us are forgiven by God, basically brought to his dinner table, and he gives us the family name. It is just how Packer works with that—not just making sure we get the good news of God right, but what is the ongoing benefit for us. That is just huge. We need to come back to that and remind ourselves of that all the time.
And I would say the other book that I would put up there would be by Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? This is something that was very helpful when Josh was going through his surgery when we lived in Florida. There were some dicey days then and also when Jordan died. And then soon after Jordan died, Josh went back in the hospital for a long spell. What Yancey was able to do—he was utilizing Scripture but not ducking the hard questions about this. And where he really ends up is he answers the question, “Where is God when it hurts?” And the answer has never left me, “God is in you, the one who is hurting, not in it, the thing that hurts.” And so getting back to what you were talking about, the difficulties in the midst of joy, keeping that understanding in front of us, the application of that before us all the time, really shifted things for me. And I was like, “Yeah, that’s something that I need to constantly keep in my head and in my heart all the time.”
Eden: Wonderful. Well, I wrote both of those down, and I’m in the middle of Knowing God. I’m going to go look up that chapter because that sounds wonderful.
Thank you for sharing that with us. And thank you for being willing to take your time and generously give it to us to share about your books.
Luke Davis: I’m grateful for the opportunity. This is great. It’s wonderful to meet you, and to be able to share the behind the scenes of what all went into this. It’s just been wonderful.
Eden: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. If you enjoyed our conversation, I would encourage you to like or subscribe to our podcast so that you can hear the next conversation. And if something that you heard today spoke to your heart or got you thinking, I would encourage you to not let the day go by without talking to God about what’s on your mind. We believe that he loves you and that he’s pursuing you today out of that love.