About

Hi. I’m Hugh. I love Jesus, but I cuss a little.

I’m an ordained minister in the Mennonite Church USA, and I serve as pastor at Love Wins Ministries in Raleigh, NC, a worshiping community I founded in 2007 that provides pastoral care and community support in the homeless and housing vulnerable community. In 2011 I founded what would become the Love Wins Community Engagement Center, a place to belong for people who have nowhere else to go, and where we seek to prove that the opposite of homelessness is not housing, but community.

I’m firmly located in the Radical tradition of Christianity, which is just a fancy way of saying I believe Jesus meant that stuff he said. I operate from a position steeped in liberationist theologies of oppressed peoples, believing that God is always on the side of the oppressed, while staying mindful that we all need Liberation: Some of us from oppression and some of us from privilege.

I’m a practitioner. I don’t have a lot of use for theory, especially if you don’t have any field experience to back it up. Keep your arguments about the true nature of the Holy Spirit or the identity of the author of Second Isaiah to yourself. On this blog, we talk about getting sh*t done.

Every day, I work with drug addicts, sex workers, the hungry and folks who are experiencing homelessness. I see horrible things. A man asked me once why I thought God allowed such things. I told him that I think the God who heard the cry of the slave in Egypt and sent Moses to rescue them still hears the cry of the oppressed, and still sends people.

I told him that God has a plan. God’s plan is us.

This blog is where I talk about that.

Colophon: The header picture is a panoramic shot of my city, Raleigh NC, taken by James Willamor, and is licensed under Creative Commons. My headshot and the picture of me leaning against the wall were taken by my wife, Renee Hollowell. All other images are credited at time of use.