Originally from Chicago, Illinois in the United States, I am married to Rachel, and we have three children, Charlotte (10), Winston (7), and Adler (3). We relocated to Brisbane in June 2023 and are excited for the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a new culture and to explore this part of the world.

Growing up in a Christian family and church context, I discerned a future vocation in Christian ministry during high school (this was the result of, among other things, a particularly invested Middle School and High School Pastor named Jason). As a result of this vocational direction, I completed a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Languages from Moody Bible Institute in 2006. Nearing the end of my time there and convinced of the need to ground my academic engagement with local church pastoral experience, I began serving in the Student Ministries department at Christ Community Church, a non-denominational church in the western suburbs of Chicago. After working happily for more than twelve years as a High School Pastor, College Pastor, and Teaching Pastor and, again, desiring to keep church and academia in constant conversation, I completed a Master of Arts in Biblical Exegesis from Wheaton College Graduate School from 2012-2015.

Throughout my years serving as a pastor, I became more and more convinced that my convictions about the relationship between church ministry and biblical and theological education needed to be seen through to their end, so we began a discernment process to determine if another degree, this time a PhD, was next for me. I was asking a lot of questions that resulted from my ongoing studies and practice of ministry, and they were only going to be given adequate attention in a focused and rigorous way, so in 2016, Rachel and I, along with our two kids at the time, Charlotte and Winston, moved to Durham, England for three years so I could study in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. I completed my PhD in Theology at Durham in 2019 (it was later published as Bonhoeffer as Biblical Interpreter: Reading Scripture in 1930s Germany with T&T Clark), relocated back to Chicago where we welcomed our third child, Adler, into the family, and I served in leadership roles in two non-profit organizations, The Center for Pastor Theologians and Made to Flourish.

In late 2022, we began talking with Trinity College Queensland about the position of Lecturer in New Testament and Early Church History. As we considered the opportunity, it became clear that another international move was worth it, mostly because of the learning culture here, the Uniting Church context, the people that we’d met, and the opportunity to continue to expand our learning as a family through new experiences in new places.

My academic interests include biblical interpretation, theological education, Modern Theology, and the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When I’m not reading and working in these areas, I’ll most likely be hanging out with Rachel (who is my best friend in the whole world), playing with my kids, talking to a friend over coffee, watching a show or a movie, or riding my bicycle.

Bonhoeffer as
Biblical Interpreter

Reading Scripture in 1930s Germany

Jameson E. Ross (Author)

By oscillating between Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s explicit hermeneutical reflections and his actual practice of interpreting biblical texts, Jameson E. Ross shows that Bonhoeffer’s interpretive acts consist of a theologically self-reflective hermeneutic in which Scripture is for interpretation, underscoring how essential the interpreter’s Spirit-given freedom, actions, theology, context and needs are for reading Scripture. Offering a fresh vision for methodological discussions in theology, this book is a valuable resource for graduate and postgraduate students and researchers on modern theology, political theology and ethics, and biblical exegesis.