Jonathan Grace (PHOTO BY STEPHANIE EMBREE/SHIFT MAGAZINE)
He looks a little like Jesus. As he leans back against the darkly patterned couch the ends of his curly brown hair are just long enough to cover the top of the Rangers logo that runs across his shirt. At first glance you never would have guessed that he used to wear piercings on his face, and can head bang to the screams of metal music. The scruff on his face frames a smile that is quick to greet you, but is easily pulled taut in thought. He’s a God-loving, death metal fan with a degree from the Perkins School of Theology. Jonathan Grace’s life is radical in more ways than one.
He’s a man with a mission
As the sky lightens Grace adjusts his glasses, and lifts the thick tan book into his hands. His voice settles in the living room that held several couches and a stop sign coffee table as he reads the first verse of prayer, “Oh Lord, let my soul rise up to meet you.” A chorus of the men with weary but diligent eyes joins him in the response, “As the day rises to meet the sun.”
At 7 a.m. this sounds of prayer, song and passage reading comes from inside a slightly worn down, grey-green duplex. Tucked away in between Grace United Methodist Church and a local bed and breakfast the Bonhoeffer House can easily go unnoticed.
This is where Grace lives with three other men, and serves as house pastor. The Bonhoeffer House is one of six houses in the Epworth project. The Epworth project is a scholarship program, which according to its website gives recipients the “context to experience emergence, new monasticism, and missional ecclesiology within the United Methodist tradition.”
A non-traditional journey
New Monasticism is countercultural. This movement within Christian communities focuses on giving what you have, submission, and lifting up others. While the widespread pockets of New Monastic communities express this in different ways they are all characterized by 12 Marks. These marks include hospitality to strangers, moving to neglected places, and sharing economic resources within the community and with the needy.
Grace has always been far from traditional. Born and raised in the United Methodist Church he said he always searched for “the deeper things in life.” As a kid his two biggest fears were eternity and having his life planned out. When he was a sophomore in high school Grace went on a mission trip, and found a lot of condemnation from the Methodists around him. During this trip he saw faith being used for political or social gain. Grace said these people acted with an attitude of, “hey, I’m going to show you and brandish my bible. I’ll quote a lot of scripture that I don’t live by.” He says it was, “a really jarring moment” that pushed him away from his roots.
Leaning his head against his fist Grace says that what drew him back to the Christian faith was “that all these things [the actions of those on the mission trip] that had been done to me were done to me by people and not God.” But the negative experience caused him to shut people out. He explains his attitude was, “Screw other people. It’s just gonna be me and Jesus.” This attitude followed him as he started his undergrad career at the University of North Texas.
Even when Grace found and visited a campus ministry at UNT he kept his distance. It wasn’t until he had a conversation with the ministry’s director of music about the importance of cursing that he found the faith he was looking for. Through this two minute, seemingly trivial conversation, Grace tested this campus pastor to see if he was as judgmental as those before him. But instead he found himself having an open conversation about scripture and what it said about cursing. The way the pastor listened and shared his beliefs without pressing Grace to believe them too made a deep impact on Grace. It showed him that God’s followers aren’t all bad.
Coming to SMU
After having his focus realization Grace found the value in engaging in a community of fellow believers, and ended up going to Perkins School of Theology to focus on a future in ministry. At Perkins he received his master of divinity degree and sought to find ways to reach people no one else wanted to.
For a while Grace worked at the Loophole bar in Denton to help pay for Perkins. He laughs as remembers calling it “booze money.” This job often took his Christian friends by surprise, and his faith brought about some interesting conversations with his customers. “It was a great place to do ministry,” Grace said, “to talk to people that would never step foot in a church, and hear other people’s stories.”
Those who know him think he’s different from most religious men. Shellie Ross worked with Grace at the Wesley Rankin outreach program. Ross says, “Jonathan is nothing like you would guess. Because you want to stereotype Jonathan…but he really has this huge heart. It just has a lot of body piercings around it.” Ross worked with Grace on a worship team for Wesley Rankin where they spent time working with kids and homeless men and women. “We had an 80-year-old woman, and she would call him her boy,” she says. “And for a Spanish-speaking elderly woman to embrace Jonathan and every week hug him and get lost in his hair…it was amazing.”
The Bonhoeffer House
While he loved going to classes at Perkins, Grace wanted more. He sought for a way to have his faith influence his entire world. That’s when he was approached about living in and being house pastor for the Bonhoeffer House. Now, two years later, it was been a transformational experience. “I’m living deeper,” he says, “like I was searching for when I was a kid.” It made him more aware of the role that faith plays in life, and of the needs of his neighbor.
The Bonhoeffer House opens their doors every Thursday night to have dinner with various guests. Most are homeless, but they are always welcoming people interested in that they do. Sometimes they even buy greyhound tickets for a homeless person to go see their family. While they have many homeless friends who hang out with them or do little things like take showers in their home the men of the Bonhoeffer House are willing to help anyone who needs it.
Robert, a regular at the house, is one of the homeless men Grace has reached out to. He’s the kind of person who’s shy until he gets to know you. He’s always smiling timidly behind the thin circular rims of his glasses. Robert said, “I’ve never run into anything like this. I was freaking out at first…Jonathan and these guys are crazy. But in a good way.”
One example of their “crazy” ways is captured in a photograph. The photo shows a cardboard sign, crudely duct taped to one of the house’s window frames. The message on the sign starts out with, “dear person who took our grill, we forgive you and apologize for the circumstances that led you to need the grill…” While the message continues with a one-line request to have the grill returned, it holds no bitterness or biting sarcasm. A situation that usually would have ended with a phone call to the police ended with an invitation to the house’s Thursday night
meals. They even taped a lighter in the bottom right corner, writing, “The igniter is tricky so you might need this.”
In his dining room Grace sits around a table with his fellow housemates and a few of his homeless friends for the Thursday night meal. “This is a place where we get a lot of different people,” Grace says. “We get rich people, people who have never met a homeless person…we have people here who are addicted to crack.” In between passing the pots of sausage and rice he excitedly shows off the cover art of his favorite death metal book to Robert. He asks Mario about his hurt wrist, and laughs as the man tells a joke about his wife. “We sit around a table so we can break down those barriers and see the humanity in each other.” It’s in this simplicity, this community without social expectations or boundaries, that Jonathan Grace finds a home.
