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What Can We Learn from Christian Author Tish Harrison Warren?

Tish Harrison Warren has established herself as a Christian writer who can be published in secular or faith-based publications, with a unique take on living the Christian life. So what makes her unique?

Contributor
Updated May 24, 2023
What Can We Learn from Christian Author Tish Harrison Warren?

Tish Harrison Warren is an award-winning book author whose work discusses prayer and other spiritual practices. In addition, she is a columnist for Christianity Today, writes a weekly newsletter for the New York Times, and has contributed various articles to other publications.

Also, Warren is an Anglican priest and has worked as a campus minister with InterVarsity and with addicts and folks living in poverty through different churches and organizations. Lastly, she is one of the founding members of the Pelican Project, a guild of Christian female writers and speakers committed to orthodox belief and practice across cultural, denominational, and racial lines.

Important Events in Tish Harrison Warren’s Life

Born in 1979, Warren grew up in Texas and later attended Wake Forest University in North Carolina—where she met her husband, Jonathan. They both attended Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, where she received her M.A. in theology. After graduating, they moved to Nashville, where Jonathan pursued his Ph.D. in church history at Vanderbilt, and she served as campus pastor for InnerVarsity Christian Fellowship. Currently, They have three children, and both serve as pastors in the Austin area.

What Has Tish Harrison Warren Written?

Warren has written many things, but her best-known work is:

Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. The 2022 winner of Christianity Today’s Book of the Year, Warren transparently discusses suffering and God’s seeming absence. Using her own experience of loss and doubt, she writes how prayer gave her a foundation to keep going. As one navigates through the struggles of work, relationships, and health, Warren provides an honest and prayerful perspective on the trials of life.

Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life. Walking the reader through an ordinary day, Warren explores practicing God’s presence through the routine and mundane—even little moments like making the bed, brushing her teeth, or losing her keys. Warren discusses finding God in these often overlooked moments, finding sacred moments with our creator through the practical theology of the everyday.

Little Prayers for Ordinary Days. Warren co-authored this children’s book with Katy Browser Hutson and Flo Paris Oakes. They share how each day provides little opportunities to engage with God. The book contains short prayers for children to pray as they go about their day, from when they get up until they go to bed. These simple prayers are delightfully illustrated and intended as a discipleship tool for Christian families to know the nearness of God.

Warren also writes about cultural and social issues affecting the church through A Drink of Light, her Christianity Today column. Her New York Times column discusses faith in other contexts—its place in private life and public discourse.

Who Are Some of Tish Harrison Warren’s Influences?

The influences of Tish Harrison Warren have extended across Christian denominations, traditions, and expressions of the faith. She grew up in Southern Baptist Churches, joined a Presbyterian Church in America after college, attended an evangelical seminary, and currently pastors an Anglican church. 

As a young person, Warren lived in intentional Christian communities and was a part of the New Monastic movement, a small movement of people intentionally living in and ministering among impoverished communities. She was attracted to the writings and teachings of Dorothy Day, an American Catholic and political radical. Warren has worked with impoverished populations in the U.S. and abroad.

While a campus pastor at Vanderbilt with InnerVarsity, Warren was very much involved in the debate of whether or not Christian organizations on campus should allow as leaders people from conflicting faiths. If not, they would forfeit school funding and have to move off campus.

Warren kept a complementarian perspective on women’s role in the church and the home for much of her life. This belief states that women, although created equal to men, have more of a support role to male pastors and husbands. However, while in seminary, her husband altered his views on women’s ordination and eventually convinced her to pursue ordination in the church.

While she wrote Liturgy of the Ordinary, Calvin University’s James K.A. Smith influenced Warren to take a liturgical approach to culture and apply it to every individual’s life and every family’s experiences.

What Are Tish Harrison Warren’s Key Ideas?

In Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren addresses the need for Christians to steward their body well because God’s Word values and honors the body. Christ stewarded his body well and, when He created humanity, said it was very good. Warren stresses that how we see and experience our bodies can be an act of worship—that our bodies are sacred, a type of ancient cathedral.

In her Christianity Today column, Warren appeals to Christians to steward all creation, not just the body. She writes that when the world destroys creation, humanity becomes less capable of experiencing the awe and wonder of God’s beauty. To conserve the earth is an act of worship to the creator and an opportunity to engage with Him more deeply and profoundly.

Her New York Times column examines many cultural issues through a Christian lens. She writes on race, justice, the current state of the church, art, and politics—to name just a few.

Warren often writes on prayer, as she has published two books on it. She sees prayer as a mode of reflection, a sacred daily rhythm. She recognizes that praying can be hard and provides prayers to help in different circumstances. There is nothing, she writes, that we can’t talk to God about. 

10 Tish Harrison Warren Quotes

1. “It was this practice that gave me words for my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter doctrines of the church—the church’s claims about reality—not as rational, tidy little antidotes for pain but as a light in darkness, as good news.” — Prayer in the Night

2. “Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed with bodies, focusing all our attention on policing sexual conduct and denigrating the body as a dirty source of evil. In certain communities at certain moments in history these accusations may have been legitimate. But the Christianity we find in Scripture values and honors the body.” — Liturgy of the Ordinary

3. “If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will. If we don’t learn to live the Christian life as embodied beings, worshiping God and stewarding the good gift of our bodies, we will learn a false gospel, an alternative liturgy of the body. Instead of temples of the Holy Spirit, we will come to see our bodies primarily as a tool for meeting our needs and desires”. — Liturgy of the Ordinary

4. “When we destroy God’s creation, we can no longer hear its call to awe.” — “Why Environmental Destruction Is Bad for Worship,” ChristianityToday.com

5. “Faith, I’ve come to believe, is more craft than feeling. And prayer is our chief practice in that craft.” — Prayer In the Night 

6. “For Waking Up—Dear God who made this morning. Everyday, you tell the sun to wake up. Everyday, you come close to us. Again and again, you love us. Thank you for this new day.” — Little Prayers for Ordinary Days

7. “The joke is that eventually I finally submitted to my husband and got ordained.” — Religious News Service

8. “When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed.” — Liturgy of the Ordinary

9. “In the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. In my small chaos, I made small order.” — Liturgy of the Ordinary

10. “Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.” — Liturgy of the Ordinary

Photo Credit: Gabriel Connor Salter/Unsplash


Nate Van Noord is from Detroit, MI, a graduate of Calvin University, and has taught high school history for many years. He loves to bike, run, and play pickleball, has been to about 30 countries, and is a three time winner of NPR's Moth Detroit StorySlam competitions.


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