John Lee Bishop to Release the Unbelievable True Story, the Church of Living Dangerously, With Harper Horizon on March 25, 2025

February 03, 2025 at 10:00 AM EST

A harrowing ride filled with guns, drugs, tigers, bare-knuckle boxing matches, and prison riots from a former megachurch pastor who ended up running drugs for the Sinaloa Cartel.

Harper Horizon will publish the highly anticipated and unbelievable upcoming true story from John Lee Bishop, The Church of Living Dangerously: Tales of a Drug-Running Megachurch Pastor, on March 25, 2025.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250203283628/en/

Courtesy of Harper Horizon, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus. (Graphic: Business Wire)

For thirty years, John Bishop was a pastor. Along the way, he learned that everyone does stupid things. We lie to our families. We lie to ourselves. We take long lunch breaks and sneak cigarettes when we said we’d quit. Sometimes, we take a sabbatical from our nice, comfortable life as a pastor and start running drugs for the Sinaloa Cartel, then get caught and spend five years in federal prison.

Okay, that last one might just apply to John. But it does make for one hell of a story.

In The Church of Living Dangerously, John tells that story in full for the first time—and you don’t know the half of it. Along the way, he brings readers along for the harrowing ride from the rough small town in Washington where he grew up all the way to the dirty villages in Mexico where he fell in with some of the most dangerous criminals on the planet. There are backyard fight clubs where John learned to take a punch, the abandoned K-Mart where he used to preach every Sunday (sometimes with the help of wild animals), and the drug dens where he almost lost his life ten times over. It’s a story that seems too wild to be true.

But it is true—and John has the scars, both literal and figurative, to prove it.

Ride along with John as he gets arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border and learn the story of his life in all its rough, stupid glory of guns, drugs, tigers, bare-knuckle boxing matches, and prison riots. John has learned a lot of important lessons about hardship and redemption and family, and what it means to live dangerously—and to experience another chance at life.

“When I first heard John’s story, I thought it was one of the craziest things that I’d ever heard. And after meeting him, I thought he was one of the kindest, most amazing people I’d ever met. Can those two go hand in hand? A pastor becoming a drug-runner for a cartel? All of us are just one or two steps away from doing something we never imagined we’d do, then crawling back to the surface anew. This is publishing at its best. The story really is that wild and John really is that amazing. A fascinating tale and a deeper learning experience,” said Matt Baugher, SVP at HarperCollins and Publisher of Harper Horizon.

The Church of Living Dangerously will be available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook with John narrating. You can pre-order today at: https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/harper-horizon/church-of-living-dangerously/.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John Bishop is the Senior Pastor at New Life Friends Church. He was born in San Francisco and earned a Masters of Arts in Evangelism and Transformational Leadership from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife, Michelle, live in Vancouver, Washington. They have three children and eight grandchildren.

ABOUT HARPER HORIZON:

Harper Horizon is a Nashville-based imprint of HarperCollins Focus focused on the stories, values and diverse voices of Americana and beyond, publishing authors such as Shea McGee, Penn & Kim Holderness, Willie Nelson, Luke Russert, and more. For more information, please visit www.harpercollinsfocus.com/Harper-Horizon.