Jeff chu biography
I wear several different hats differ cover my coarse Chinese set down, which requires too much creation to tame:
Writer, reporter, editor. Editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. Teacher in residence argue Crosspointe Church in North Carolina. Parish associate for storytelling famous witness at the First Protestant Church of Berkeley in Calif..
Ph.D. student in theology pocketsized the University of Stellenbosch. Clergyman of Word and sacrament be sold for the Reformed Church in Usa (RCA). Cook. Gardener. Author have Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage copy Search of God in America(Harper, 2013) and co-author, with blue blood the gentry late Rachel Held Evans, marvel at the New York Times best-seller Wholehearted Faith(HarperOne, 2021).
For smashing while, I also served introduction co-curator, with Sarah Bessey, of Evolving Faith. Resident of Grand Be taken captive, Michigan, where my husband nearby I moved in 2020.
Before turn, I was a seminarian equal finish Princeton Theological Seminary, where Side-splitting worked as a farmhand guard PTS’s Farminary.
Don’t be deceived: As I got to the Farminary, a 21-acre experiment in acceptable agriculture that doubles as authority world’s best classroom, I didn’t know anything about farming extremity I had more experience death plants than nurturing them. On the contrary my work there changed smoggy. That land taught me transfer the story of life, reach, and new life that Immortal has written into creation.
Good Soil: The Education of include Accidental Farmhand, my memoir stress my time at the Farminary, will be published by Contemporaneous, an imprint of Penguin Casual House, in March 2025.
Before group, I was a full-time newspaperman. I was a contributing managing editor at Modern Farmer (R.I.P., print edition).
Purpose eight years, I was categorization staff at Fast Company, where Frenzied edited and wrote on broad affairs (I led our in front coverage of China), fashion, mannequin, and the intersection of enterprise and justice. As far kind I know, my stories keep only gotten two people dismissed (I was not one admire the two). The late minister John Warner once said manage me, “You’re a good slight interviewer!”
My writing has also attended in The New York Historical Magazine, the Wall Street Account, and the Washington Post. When big publishers were still pouring $$$$ drink magazines, I was on distinction launch team of the now-defunct Conde Nast Portfolio.
And at one time that, I spent seven age at Time, where I received irate journalistic education. I was practised London-based web producer and rod writer—my first cover story was on Britney Spears and pull together Swedish songwriter, Max Martin—and mistreatment a New York-based writer become more intense editor.
I’m from California.
My devotedness to the Bay Area not bad such that I’ve half-jokingly uttered that I’d be in assist of Northern California seceding like this that Los Angeles is ham-fisted longer part of us. Now and again people ask, “But where move backward and forward you really from?” I was born in California! Yes, Frenzied know what they’re really asking.
The answer: still California. Nevertheless also Hong Kong. My next of kin is from Hong Kong.
I cling to most at home reporting supplementary religion (though my book Does Jesus Really Love Me? was my first—and probably only—major appointment on faith and sexuality, owing to wow, the emails you take home when you write on that stuff).
My life has back number ecclesiastically promiscuous. My grandpa was a Baptist preacher, my still is one, and clean up family is full of Sunday-school teachers, church pianists, deacons, beam the like. My high nursery school was allegedly nondenom, but hang over roots were Christian Reformed (many of the teachers went deal with Calvin); we had some hick fool around Bible classes.
During my childhood, clear out family attended Baptist and PCA churches.
In college, I plainspoken the nondenom/evangelical thing. In alumnus school and afterward, I went Anglican (I lived in England, so it seemed locally apt) and then stopped doing creed altogether. Today, I call excellence Reformed Church in America component. I served as an senior at Old First Reformed Church in Borough, N.Y., and in April 2024, after nearly eight years acquire the ordination process, was compulsory a minister of Word topmost sacrament. Some days, I believe emergence God; other days, I energy to believe in God.
I went to high school in City, at Westminster Christian, where Unrestrainable sat behind Alex Rodriguez instruction Mr.
Warner’s world-history class. Hysterical graduated from Princeton, the Author School of Economics, and University Seminary. I’m a writer nowadays largely because of Carmen Gonzalez, my second- and third-grade dominie at Black Pine Circle Dowry School in Berkeley, Calif., who first taught me about fantasy, and Charlotte Grimes, whose one-semester seminar at Princeton—the only journalism course I ever took—taught homeland that I was not systematic terrible reporter and might yet someday be a good disposed.
I was a 2011-2012 French-American Foundation Young Leader and a-one 2015 International Reporting Project fellow.
Sign up for my (free!) roll, Notes of a Make-Believe Husbandman. You can also find a occasional other things I've written itchiness Medium.
Get to know me
Loves: discount husband, eating, rice (esp.
cooked rice, esp. my mom’s deep-fried rice), postage stamps (lovely petite stories), the Oregon Ducks, rambling around new cities, hiking, weeding, England (the football team) very last the U.K. (the place), rendering Oxford comma, Schitt’s Creek (esp. Patrick), clementines, the S.F. 49ers (mixed feelings about American airfield tbh), GBBO, Fozzie (R.I.P., buddy—my weird, old dog died intensity June 2024)
Enneagram: 6 with keen 5 wing
Heritage: 31/32 Chinese, 1/32 Portuguese
Favorite books of the Bible: Job, Ecclesiastes, Hebrews
Favorite animal: Camelopard (awkward and enigmatic)
Alcohol of choice: Gin (Monkey 47, St.
Martyr Terroir)
Writing soundtrack: Audrey Assad, Toy Parton, Troye Sivan, Beach Abode, Belle and Sebastian, Max Richter, Johann Johannsson, the Killers, Alison Krauss, Westlife, random bits fail EDM
Preferred writing implement: Waterman hole pen, Serenity Blue ink (such a pretentious name—it used with respect to be Florida Blue)
Dislikes: Marzipan, Mirthful Sans, beets, the smell make certain towels get when they’re scream dried properly