by Nancy Huffine

“Somewhere there's a picture of me holding a little pine sapling and reading my essay.”

Dr. Heather Holleman’s gift with words—which she will share as a featured speaker at Founder’s Week 2024 on Moody Bible Institute’s campus in Chicago—has its roots in Arbor Day in 1980. Literally. “In first grade, I won an Arbor Day essay contest at my school. The question was ‘Why do you love trees?’ I wrote an essay, and I won! I got to meet the governor of Virginia. It was a big deal,” she says.

Awards and accolades aside, a very young Heather realized something about herself. “Even as a first grader, I just loved writing sentences and the beauty of arranging words on the page. I’m someone who reads grammar books for fun!” she laughs.

Led to the joy of teaching

After Heather completed her PhD at the University of Michigan, she and her husband, Ashley, joined the staff of CRU (Campus Crusade for Christ). “We were working with professors and graduate students,” Heather says, “but God never removed from my heart the joy of teaching and my passion for teaching at the college level.”

When Ashley became CRU’s director of graduate student ministry at Penn State in 2015, the couple moved to State College, Pennsylvania. “My daughter entered kindergarten here,” Heather says, “and I called the Penn State English department and said, ‘I have a PhD from Michigan. I love teaching rhetoric and composition. Is there any way I can serve the English department?’ They said, ‘When can you come, and how many classes can you teach?’  

“Unfortunately, people do not really want to teach those classes, but I do! Right now, I’m teaching Advanced Writing for the Schreyer Honors College. I am an associate teaching professor, and I have a lot of responsibility training faculty and being involved in the development of good teachers. I see it as a ministry opportunity and a chance to be in the world of higher education.”

Fascinated with connection and belonging

With nine authored books that include The Six Conversations, Sent, Seated with Christ, and the newly released This Seat’s Saved (debuting September 30), it’s no coincidence that conversation and connection are strong themes in Heather’s work.

“I've always been fascinated by the power of connection and belonging,” Heather says. “I think that goes back to having a military upbringing and moving every two years. I’m someone that was a really lonely child who longed for connection, and I couldn't figure out how that worked.”

As a college educator, Heather became particularly concerned about the epidemic of loneliness on college campuses, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“God made us for connection. I was just reading a book about our nervous system and the neuroscience behind ‘attuning’ to someone else—how joyful it is for your entire body to have a warm connection with someone in conversation. God is relational, and we reflect His very being when we are connecting with other people.”

Heather’s books The Six Conversations and Sent were borne out of Heather and Ashley’s passion for evangelism and the need to live a life that invites others to a relationship with Jesus. “We would hold evangelism trainings and get people really excited about the mindset you need in order to live a sent life,” Heather says. “But people would say ‘We're ready to do this, but you have to go back a step. We haven’t been taught how to even have a conversation in general, much less an evangelism conversation.’”

Developing a teaching plan for how to have meaningful conversations required extensive research. “I used whatever resources I could to figure this out,” Heather says. “How do you have a connection with someone? What are the things you need to have a loving conversation? What does the social science research say?”

An exciting discovery

In conducting this research, Heather was delighted to find out that the results of social science closely align with the principles the Bible teaches in Philippians 2, Romans 12, and Galatians 6.

“It's all there. The social science research is finally catching up to what the Bible has taught us all along,” Heather says. “We learn from the social science research how good it is to take an interest in others, to believe the best about them, to carry their burdens, and share our lives; all of these mindsets come out of Philippians 2, for example.”

Engaging with someone through genuine conversation can often lead to another level of interaction: a gospel conversation. But Heather doesn’t believe in forcing conversations ahead by leaps and bounds while skipping over the chance for a natural, unforced connection to be made.

“As Christians, we sometimes feel that internal pressure that we have to turn a conversation so that it goes someplace gospel,” Heather says. “Remove the pressure and make it a joyful kind of adventure! You never know where the conversation will go if you just start. It’s not a pivot. It’s not pressure. It’s just saying, ‘God, You’re here. Is there any way You can enter into this opportunity?’”

For Heather, the confidence to pursue human connections flows from the confidence believers have in knowing that we are seated with Christ. “That is my core life message,” Heather says. “If you don't believe you are seated with Him, you’re going to do everything you can to fight for a seat at the table. Your whole life is going to be about the three A's: achievement, affluence, and appearance.

“But once you know you're seated with Jesus—think of the intimacy! Think about how relaxing that is. That image of having a seat at the table means that you are free to not have to think about any other kind of identity for yourself, because the most important thing has already been declared about you.”

‘You are just radiating’

Heather believes that knowing you’re seated at the table with Christ brings the freedom of three very different words: adoring, accessing, and abiding. “You adore Jesus and radiate the beauty of the King. You're not worried about your appearance or your physical body. You are just radiating,” Heather says.

“You are accessing all the riches of God's kingdom, so you're not worried about affluence or the pursuit of wealth. You are abiding instead of achieving. And when you do those three things— adoring, accessing, and abiding—it shapes your entire life. Then you're not so frantic for meaning or for a sense of who you are. You can say, ‘I'm seated with Christ, and now I'm on this adventure with Him.’”

Though she has spoken on the campus at Moody several times, Heather is excited that this October will be her first Founder’s Week experience. She’s still working on the details of what she will share, but she says, “I’m sure a lot of the people who will attend Founder’s Week are probably secure in their identity in Christ. But most Christians I meet always feel guilty that they don't share their faith.”

The subtitle of the Sent book brings it all into focus: Living a Life that Invites Others to Jesus. Heather says, “Sharing the message of Sent removes that guilt. It reminds us of what God is doing, and the greatest thing God is doing is building a kingdom for Himself. It's not about guilt or shame or duty. It helps us say, ‘Okay, God, this is what You're doing. I'm available!’”