John Ortberg

John Ortberg (1957–)

John Ortberg was born in 1957 and grew up in Rockford, Illinois, in a family shaped by the Evangelical Covenant Church, a small Scandinavian-rooted pietist denomination with a long suspicion of creedal rigidity and a long habit of asking "Where is it written?" He has described his upbringing as formative for a faith that took Scripture seriously without taking itself too seriously, and humor would become one of the recognizable marks of his preaching and writing.

He studied at Wheaton College in Illinois and went on to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, where he earned a Master of Divinity and later a PhD in clinical psychology. The pairing mattered. Ortberg did not treat psychology as an ornament to theology or a rival to it; the training gave him a working vocabulary for the inner life, for habit, motive, fear, and self-deception, that he would bring into the pulpit for the rest of his career. At Fuller he also came under the influence of Dallas Willard, the philosopher and teacher whose writing on spiritual disciplines and the "kingdom of God now" reshaped a generation of evangelical thinking about discipleship. Ortberg has named Willard as his most important mentor, and has said that Willard's central question, how ordinary people actually become different, gave direction to his own ministry.

His first major pastoral post was at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, the influential megachurch founded by Bill Hybels. Ortberg served on the teaching team there during the 1990s, a period when Willow Creek was at the center of evangelical conversation about church growth and outreach to the unchurched. It was also where his writing began to reach a wide audience. In 2003 he moved to Menlo Park, California, to become senior pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, a congregation in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a denomination he joined at the time of the call. He led Menlo Church for fifteen years, during which it grew substantially and became one of the larger churches in the denomination, and in 2019 the congregation chose to leave the PC(USA) for the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a move connected to disagreements over denominational positions on sexuality and ordination.

Ortberg's pastorate ended amid a controversy of its own. In 2018 he learned that a volunteer at the church, who was not a staff member, had disclosed an attraction to children, and he and the church's leadership decided to allow the man to continue volunteering with youth under restrictions. Ortberg later said he should have informed the congregation and his fellow leaders more fully, and acknowledged that his handling of the matter was mistaken. The decision drew sharp public criticism, and the church's elders conducted an independent review. In 2018 Ortberg stepped down as senior pastor and took a leave of absence. He returned to a leadership role at Menlo Church from 2019, as the church's pastor, and then moved on in a transition that was reported at the time as a mutual decision. The episode is part of the public record of his ministry, and his own account of it has emphasized repentance and the failures of process, while critics have maintained that the lapse reflected a deeper weakness in how the church weighed risk against grace.

After leaving Menlo Church, Ortberg continued as a speaker and writer and served in teaching and leadership roles at Fuller Theological Seminary, including as a leader of its work in the area of spiritual formation, returning to the institution where his formation had begun. He is married to Nancy Ortberg, herself a pastor, author, and leadership speaker, and the two have three children.

His Writing and Its Influence

Ortberg began writing for a wide readership during his years on the teaching team at Willow Creek, and his first major book, The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People, appeared in 1997. It was the clearest early statement of what became his governing concern: that the classic disciplines of the Christian tradition, silence, solitude, simplicity, service, are not the property of monks and mystics but a training available to anyone willing to arrange an ordinary life around them. The debt to Dallas Willard was open and acknowledged. Willard's insistence that spiritual growth is neither automatic nor merely a matter of trying harder, but of wise training, runs through the book, and Ortberg's contribution was largely one of translation, carrying Willard's philosophical argument into stories, humor, and the idiom of the suburban congregation.

That pattern held across the books that followed. If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat (2001) took the apostle Peter's step out of the boat as a picture of risk and calling. When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box (2007) used a board-game image to press the question of what lasts. The Me I Want to Be (2010) framed spiritual growth as becoming the person God had in mind, and Soul Keeping (2014) drew on Willard's death in 2013 to reflect on the soul as the integrating center of a person's life. Who Is This Man? (2012) turned from the inner life to the historical impact of Jesus, and All the Places to Go (2015) took up the question of how to discern a decision. Ortberg's training in clinical psychology gives the books their recognizable texture: attention to habit, self-deception, fear, and the gap between what people say they believe and how they actually live.

His reception has been broad and uneven in the way of any writer who aims at popular audiences. Readers across evangelical and mainline settings have used his books in small groups and church study programs, and the accessibility that made them widely read is also the ground of the criticism they have drawn. Some theologically conservative critics have argued that his emphasis on the practices of formation, and his comfort with sources outside the Reformed and evangelical mainstream, shortchanges the doctrine of justification by grace alone. Defenders reply that he writes as a pastor to people already inside the faith, and that his work consistently assumes grace as the starting point of training rather than its reward. A separate, public debate attached to his name after 2018, when his handling of a volunteer's disclosure at Menlo Church drew criticism; some readers and institutions reassessed their association with him, while others continued to use his books, and his own account has emphasized acknowledgment of error.

Within the larger story of evangelical writing, Ortberg is best placed among those who carried the renewed interest in spiritual disciplines, associated with Willard and Richard Foster, out of seminary and conference circles and into the ordinary church. He has continued to write and teach, including in his work with Fuller Theological Seminary since the early 2020s, and his books remain in print.

Who should read Ortberg: Readers who want a warm, plainspoken, story-driven introduction to spiritual disciplines and who are looking for an on-ramp to Willard's thought rather than Willard himself. The books suit small groups and churchgoers who have heard much about grace and little about how a life is actually changed. They are not for readers seeking sustained theological argument, rigorous engagement with the Christian contemplative tradition, or a sharp prophetic challenge to the church; the register is encouraging and practical, and the humor is part of the method.