Hi there, thanks for stopping in!
My name is Luke Finley and I write about how the gospel influences the everyday lives of young people. I love to study human nature, other cultures, and how God’s truth reshapes our lives.
I’m originally from Winchester, Kansas, a small town with 500 people and zero stoplights. I grew up there with my parents and four brothers, two older and two younger, enjoying a classic small-town childhood.
When I was fourteen, my sister Faith was born. She was soon diagnosed with a rare genetic condition called Prader-Willi Syndrome. Her addition to my family has brought both major challenges and lots of joy.
She’s now 23 and is living in a home in Minnesota dedicated to caring for people with her condition. She’s had an incredible impact on my life and perspective towards other people.
After I studied rhetoric at Kansas State University (thinking I was going to go to law school), I had an internship in Washington D.C., which showed me I didn’t want to be a lawyer! So on a whim, I decided to change directions and attend seminary in Pittsburgh for a year. God used that year to challenge me and change so much in me, so I ended up staying for another two years, getting my Master of Divinity. During seminary, I became interested in discipleship, missions, and apologetics.
When I graduated from seminary, I wasn’t that interested in church ministry, but had the opportunity to serve as a missionary in South Sudan. So I moved to South Sudan for a year, where I worked alongside other missionaries to help train and disciple local pastors and church leaders.
While I learned so much during my time in South Sudan, I realized that it wasn’t the mission field that God was calling me to long-term. Through different events, I felt like God was calling me to be a missionary in my own culture, specifically New York City, and not East Africa.
While “missionary” is a loaded term, both postively and negatively, I think of a missionary as someone who studies a culture’s story and shows how the gospel answers the longings of a certain type of people.
So after moving back home to Kansas, I saved up my money for a years and made the move to New York City. I didn’t know anyone in NYC or have any job prospects, so I decided to open up an apartment cleaning business in Brooklyn named Luke’s Cleaning.
The cleaning business was hard work but all in all it went really well. After 9 months of steady growth, I actually hired my first employee. Running a business (with taxes and unemployment insurance and such) was more than my meager administrative skills could handle, so I decided to switch directions and work at a large Presbyterian church in Manhattan.
I worked at the church for a year, helping with the community group ministry, but it never really felt like a good fit for me. I wanted to be outside of the church office, interacting with normal people, not having coffee with Christians and asking them how their week was going (good ministry, but just not for me).
It became clear that the type of ministry that I’m most suited for isn’t pastoring/shepherding, but rather interacting with people out in real life. During this time, I realized that my gifts lay in writing about and explaining the gospel to people, more so than in direct pastoral work.
So I started to write essays about the gospel to share how my ideas and insights about life. I love showing how Christianity impacts and solves the biggest questions and uncertainties of everyday life.
I had kept my cleaning business going even while working at the church, so I transitioned back to cleaning so that I could afford to live in NYC and focus on writing.
During this time, I printed out and bound a zine together to give away to my readers. It was fun to see the zine go out to almost 40 states and 15 countries! This experience showed me the power of self-publishing and looking for creative ways to get your ideas out there.
To help keep costs low in NYC so that I could continue to pursue writing, I bought a Volkswagen Eurovan in 2019 from a family in Utah. I then flew out to Salt Lake City and drove it back to Kansas, where I slowly converted the back of it into a home.
While living in a van had its challenges (most notably the heat!), it gave me the freedom to live basically rent free in NYC and work on my book when I wasn’t cleaning.
I closed my cleaning business when the pandemic happened (most of my customers moved out of NYC) and started to write for a Christian college in NYC. This job allowed me to work remotely, so I took advantage of that (along with my van home) to spend extended amounts of time (1-3 months) living in places like the Mississippi Delta, small-town Georgia, the Pacific Northwest, Austin, Texas, and Oaxaca, Mexico, in addition to New York City.
Over the last year I’ve moved back into an apartment in NYC, using the money I was able to save by living in the van to give me the time to complete my first book, Solving Social Media, which you can learn more about or purchase here.
