Jason Cruise has spent a career pursuing the kind of man often overlooked and misunderstood by American evangelicalism.

There is a kind of man the American church misplaced somewhere in the last forty years — a whole genre of them — and Jason found them where the church had quit looking. In the deer stand before light. On the cold seam of the Madison in Montana where the trout hold. In the truck cab on the long drive home, where a man will finally tell you the truth because he doesn’t have to look you in the eye to do it.

Not lost men. Men handed half a story about what they were for, and then handed a faith that spoke to none of the half they were missing.

He is from Tennessee, raised in the part of the country that hands a man his faith and his shotgun in the same breath — and then, somewhere down the line, hands him a version of God too small to hold either one.

He kept the faith.

He spent the rest of his life rebuilding the picture.

Here is a man with a doctorate and a turkey vest who is not embarrassed by either — who took the schooling that normally pursues a pulpit, a master’s from Southwestern and a doctorate from Fuller, and carried it out the steeple door into the gun oil and the river silt, because the men he was built to reach were never going to walk through the church doors anyway.

He has written books. He helped build a Bible — the NIV Outdoorsman’s edition by Zondervan, Scripture sitting easy beside the smell of powder and pine.

He founded the Outdoor Ministry Network and later on Wild & Kingdom out of little more than a conviction and a list of names.

For Mossberg he’s produced the most-watched series the company has ever carried.

None of it is the number he keeps close. It’s about the man not the numbers.

Here is what most church leaders get it wrong: they think hunting is a hobby. They think it competes with Sunday morning attendance, one more thing pulling a man out of the pew.

But for the outdoorsman it was never a hobby and it never competed with anything. It sits closer to the bone than that — near the dead center of who he is.

Jason has spent his life on the work almost no one in the church was willing to do: handing these men a picture of God who is not threatened by the thing they love, but who has been waiting for them inside it the whole time. The smell of woods. The river at first light. That is the language they actually speak. And God made it.

They were never leaving God.

They were leaving a version of Him that never once rang true.

Jason’s whole life has been about giving them the real tools to dicover the God that made the dirt under their boots.