AbouT

Welcome to Forming Ordinary Saints—a blog about helping normal ordinary Christians to become the saints we were always called to be.

Saint is the word often used to translate the word agioi, "holy ones", in the New Testament. A holy person set apart for good works and made to be part of God’s people. This is the calling of every Christian. This is a saint. However, over the course of time in normal everyday language, saint has come to mean an extra holy, extra special, generally unattainable status meant for extraordinary Christians. We’ve split following Jesus into two tracks; one low and one high. We think there are normal Christians, going to church and just trying to get by, and saints, people who live exceptional lives above what most of us are capable of. But the Bible doesn’t have two tracks, one for ordinary Christians and one for holy ones. We are all called to the high track. We are all called to be saints.

I think it is time to take back the word saint, and the calling that comes with it, for normal ordinary Christians. We have an integral role to play in God’s plan for God’s world, and we need to be shaped and changed in order to live up to the task. God calls us to this high role right where we are in our jobs, our neighborhoods, and our families as fathers, mothers, children, and neighbors.

We’re ordinary people becoming the saints God wants us to be. This site is about that process and will offer tools and encouragements for getting there. I’m on that journey too and if I can share anything that would be helpful to someone drawing closer to Christ and becoming the saint God has called him or her to be, then I will.

My name is Ryan Bennett. I’m a church planter with World Team in Paris, France from the small city of Springfield, Ohio. I studied psychology at The Ohio State University, spent a year with a student ministry in Istanbul, Turkey, went to graduate school at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary where I got a Master of Divinity and Master of Theology in Biblical Theology. Now my wife Erin and I, along with our son Elias, are attempting to tell people in Paris about the Good News of God’s love displayed in Jesus Christ and bring them into communities that want to follow him. We’ve been in France since 2013.