James Oliver
Campus multiplier
Hi! Thanks for taking a minute to get to know us here at Antioch.
I don’t know if you are like me but nothing captures my attention more than a good story.
When I was just little James living in Alabaster, AL, my mom and dad told me a story about a man named Jesus. This story always stuck out to me from the others. What made it different for me, you ask? Mom and dad said that “We are part of this story, too. It is a story come true.” None of the other stories were like that!
“Jesus is the hero of this story,” they said. “And for him to be your hero too, there is nothing you must do but trust him.” No story ever asked something of me or ever cared to have me in it. It was a story that spoke to a deep longing of any boy or girl, one that has carried through my life, a longing to be part of something meaningful. In God’s mercy, the trust came at five for me.
I remember an immediate joy and interest in everything I was taught about the Bible and its hero. However, the excitement eventually leveled off as slightly older James was exposed to and began to believe that other heroes, other realities, other worlds, and other narratives were better than my own. For a time, I slowly lost vision of the story I was in. At the same time, it became hard to see anything, especially who I was, why I was here, and what I was supposed to do.
Was the world really how my parents led me to believe? I do not know about you, but what I found is that we live in a world full of narratives and we all will choose one to believe. The question we all face next is “which one will we believe?”
In my journey with this question, I found I was blind in my own sin and in need of God’s ongoing help through Jesus to see the true story and God’s ongoing power to believe Him, the true storyteller. I found that to leave behind the story where Jesus is honored as a hero and that the Bible is true and act as if any other story is true will only lead to a disorienting life. By the grace of God and while being among this loving church, God has reoriented me toward and guided my rediscovery of the story faithfully told to little James, “a story about a man named Jesus.”
An amazing new chapter in my story: I am married to Ariana as of August 5, 2022, and with whom I now discover the most with :)
I graduated from UAB in 2020 and am currently attending Beeson Divinity School.
What you must know about me is that clearly, I am obsessed with finding how any story leads back to the story of all stories. I am an extrovert but only in very particular situations. I also enjoy playing a laid-back soccer game. To sum it up, I am just a dude who is there for it.