Tim Sledge is a former Southern Baptist minister, speaker, and writer. Born and raised in conservative West Texas and called to ministry at the age of 16, Sledge is a graduate of Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton College, and earned Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
Tim began writing Southern Baptist curriculum materials as a 25-year-old seminary student. For more than a decade, while serving as a pastor, he was a writer for nationally distributed mission and discipleship training materials for youth. He was the co-author of a year-long study on lifestyle evangelism for Baptist men, and a member of the writing team for The YouthDisciple Notebook, a Southern Baptist discipleship guidebook for teens.
After devoting his career as an evangelical preacher to leading and growing ministries in Illinois, Tennessee, New Jersey, and Arizona, he moved to a suburb of Houston, Texas, where, as senior pastor, he led his church to experience dramatic growth and wrote two books that launched a ground-breaking support group ministry that spread nationwide. Making Peace with Your Past and Moving Beyond Your Past have now been in print for more than 20 years, and have been used as interactive guides for 20,000 support groups across the U.S.
At the peak of his ministerial career, Tim Sledge experienced a series of events that led to a decade-long process of realizing that faith was no longer working for him. Since 2002, he has been a full-time developer of custom business software.
In his book, Goodbye Jesus, he chronicles nearly four decades of pastoral ministry in a highly personal, sometimes painful, and frequently provocative spiritual autobiography. Part memoir, part exposé, part polemic—the book is very nearly a case study in how faith may begin, how it evolves, and how it can fall apart.
Ultimately, Tim found new ways to live a positive, value-driven life and emerged as a new version of the same person he had always been, still interested in creating avenues for personal growth in the lives of others. He explores, articulates, and shares his views on meaningful living in two books that share many of the same principles but from slightly different persepctives. A Meta-Spiritual Handbook addresses key life issues within a framework of secular sprituality, while How to Live a Meaningful Life emphasizes a focus on the things that matter most in life.
In Four Disturbing Questions, he raises four challenging questions that need to be addressed by every Christian believer and then offers one incredibly simple answer—an answer that challenges the veracity of the Christian faith but can also be the gateway to a rewarding new life that is based on truth.