Chris Carter is the author of A Three Days’ Journey: The Distance Between Egypt and Glory and the voice behind the Holy Defiance series — the book, the weekly blog, and the podcast built around it.
Chris was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1973, the son of an evangelical minister — raised in a home where, as he puts it, “the gospel and ordinary life were not kept in separate rooms.” That upbringing is the seedbed for everything he’s written since, including A Three Days’ Journey: the conviction that much of modern American Christianity has absorbed the values of the surrounding culture without noticing, and that most of the hardest work of following Christ doesn’t happen on a Sunday morning.
He studied music at Henderson State University before training for ministry at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and in theology and pulpit communication at Trinity College and Theological Seminary. Since 1999, he has served as a senior pastor in congregations across Mississippi, and he currently shepherds a congregation in Tupelo, Mississippi. Alongside pastoral ministry, he also works as a Logistics Manager of Safety and Compliance for a Christian family-owned building-products manufacturer — two vocations that, in his words, keep him standing in the same “Egypt” he writes about, Monday through Saturday.
Chris and his wife, Denise, have been married since 1994. They’ve raised two children together (both now grown and married), welcomed foster daughters into their home along the way, and recently became grandparents. He’s based in Saltillo, Mississippi.
How he writes and teaches
Pastor Chris preaches and writes primarily from the New King James Version and New American Standard Bible, and leans on the English Standard Version for the weekly devotional blog. His style is direct, conversational, and unapologetically Southern in its color — Scripture opened plainly, applied personally, and delivered with equal parts conviction and humor. Readers of the blog will notice a consistent shape: a text opened cold, a real story from ordinary life, and a hard question the reader is invited to sit with rather than escape.
The same conviction that shapes his weekly devotional site, Grace in Everyday Relationships — that most of the hardest work of the Christian life doesn’t happen on Sunday morning — is what drives A Three Days’ Journey: the call to walk all the way out of Egypt, not just far enough to feel better about staying.
Connect with Pastor Chris
You can follow along with the weekly blog and the Holy Defiance podcast [link/launch details to follow] right here at athreedaysjourney.com, find him on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn, or invite him to speak at your church, conference, or small group event.