James Harleman is the Campus Pastor of the Mars Hill Church | Lake City Campus. He and his wife Kathryn have been part of Mars Hill Church since 1998. Check out his video interview with Pastor Mark Driscoll.

Pastor James: My story begins as a fetus in Burien. My mom had health complications and almost died in childbirth. She’d been forewarned that having a second child would be risky, and Roe Vs. Wade had been decided in January, 1973. I thank God my parents loved Jesus, had a godly heart for children and felt called to bring me into the world. I was born in downtown Seattle.

My Dad taught Social Studies for Seattle Public Schools. Living on a tight single income, he bought us a home in Kent, cleaned out all the heroin needles left in the house by the previous owner, and moved the family in. Somehow my folks managed to send my brother and I to private school, so I got a solid Christian education up until high school. By then, we’d moved from Kent (suburban hicks) to Orting, WA (full-on Mayberry hicks) and I graduated Valedictorian from Orting High School. My dad was the Pastor of the Orting Christian Church.

When I was 18 I moved to “North Kent” (Lynnwood) and screwed up my life as best I could. I’d been exposed to the gospel all my life, surrounded by godly examples, and could play the game pretty well on the outside, but it had never really penetrated my heart. I met a sweet, cute gal named Kathryn and we started dating in mid ‘95, but we were committed Seattlites: double income, never wanted to have children, and lacking any deep commitment.

In 1998, I heard about this strange “tattoo, body-piercing church” in Seattle – Mars Hill Church. I figured it was a liberal, unbiblical freak-show and found myself curious, so I attended a service in Laurelhurst… and met Jesus again for the first time. To my surprise, Mars Hill was totally biblically based when it came to Jesus and the gospel, yet free in Christ to be culturally contextual in the city and season in which we live. I’d never experienced a church like this before… and never truly believed that Jesus was real, that He was God, that He spoke the universe into existence, that He came and paid the price for my sin, and that He continues to sustain everything by the power of His Word… both the Storyteller of the ultimate narrative and the singular, pivotal protagonist that offers salvation and reconciled relationship with God.

Then I freaked out, because I was dating a gal who wasn’t a Christian… and didn’t know what to do.

Kathryn: My tale begins at the other corner of the country – Orlando, Florida in 1972. I’m pretty sure the last time I had a tan was when we left Florida in ‘75. We moved to Kent, Washington shortly thereafter when my dad got an engineering  job at Boeing.  My mother found work as an LPN; I remember many days spent with her getting to know residents of the nursing home where she lovingly cared for her charges.

We attended church as long as I can remember, although very little theology stuck with me.  I was blessed with a singing talent and I used the church as a vehicle to get in solo performance practice.  My parents cultivated this talent by driving me all over the western half of Washington for auditions, choir practices and show rehearsals. I was a true drama geek and only felt comfortable on a stage pretending to be someone else. My parents raised me with ‘good values’ and a hospitable nature, but I never connected it to anything deeper than general social niceties.

Ultimately, I chickened out of auditioning for the Boston Conservatory and ended up at Shoreline Community College.  Ahhh, the college years…. I sought my identity in any number of things and people that were not Jesus.  I started dating a great guy named James in 1995, but as he said above, we were committed to ourselves and the relationship was not all it should have been.

James and I would occasionally check out neighborhood churches in some undefinable search. Mostly it was to keep our mothers off our backs: In early 1998, James came to me with some sermon notes from some church he had visited.  His excitement was palpable.  I wasn’t super interested in attending, but loved listening to him expound on any subject… so he started walking me through each week’s notes.  I found myself intrigued as we went through notes detailing how Jesus was present throughout the old testament, how God planned redemption from Genesis, and how God was imminent and awe inspiring: not some far off old guy with a scale to measure my good and bad deeds (and as long as my good deeds outweighed my bad deeds we were copacetic). I started attending Mars Hill, met the one true Savior, and began to reorganize my life around Him. Both James and I were baptized in the summer of 1998.

Pastor James: Shortly after getting saved, God gave me a pair and I finally proposed to Kathryn; she became my wife in October of the next year and we partied like it was 1999 (because – well – it WAS 1999). After the world ended in Y2K, God called me to ministry with Mars Hill Church, first as a deacon in 2001 and then as a Pastor in January 2005. My father attended my ordination in 2005, seeing the pastoral torch pass to his youngest son; after spending Thanksgiving together as a big family, he went to be with Jesus in December.

It’s been my pleasure to play many roles at Mars Hill Church: working on our publications, cultivating cultural engaging ministries like Film and Theology, helping run the operations of the church as Administrative Pastor, and driving our writing content for our websites and the Vox Pop. In mid-2007, he called me to become a Campus Pastor. Kathryn continued to work part time for several years, but by God’s grace no longer has a job outside the home and we’re working on starting a family. We were also blessed to visit Greece and walk in the apostle Paul’s footsteps together; I even got to preach on the historic Mars Hill in Athens. By God’s grace, we were also blessed to visit Israel to see where Jesus walked, lived, died and rose again.

A typical week for the Harlemans includes daily prayer, scripture reading, hard work, a good sci-fi or horror movie, a good steak, a meal with friends, a game of pool, a questionably healthy amount of coffee (Chai tea for the lady), a comic book or two, The Colbert Report, a good beer or mixed drink, referencing Bruce Campbell, feeding the cat (Edgar), and listening to Linkin Park or Our Lady Peace on the I-Pod… amidst conversations about how all of it relates to Jesus.

“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.“
- 1 Corinthians 10:31.

It is truly a profound joy to toil and celebrate and laugh and cry in the mission God has set before us and we trust in Him to greet us each day with new challenges and ways to glorify Jesus and see lives transformed by His love.