Our Story
A Pilgrimage of Grace
“Influence is not built by being seen—but by becoming someone who truly sees.”
Welcome. We’re Michael and Terri Sullivant.
We have spent a lifetime discovering that some of God’s deepest work in us has happened not through performing well, but through learning to receive love—and learning how to give it away.
Since 1977, we have shared a journey of marriage, family, ministry, friendship, joy, disappointment, failure, healing, and hope. We have known seasons when faith felt wonderfully alive and seasons when nearly everything we thought we understood was tested.
“We spent years learning how to stay loved by performing. Jesus has been teaching us how to simply be loved.”
Looking back, we can see how often fear quietly shaped the ways we tried to stay loved—and how patiently God kept leading us back to joy. That journey has become one of the central themes of our lives: fear makes us protect ourselves; joy teaches us that we are safe enough in love to become fully alive.
We do not tell our story as experts who finally arrived. We tell it as fellow pilgrims who have been loved, corrected, humbled, healed, and invited to keep growing.
Theology, neuroscience, relational discipleship, and spiritual formation became important to us because our own lives needed them. We weren’t looking merely for better ideas about God. We needed the living Christ to meet us in our actual human lives.
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience… And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”— Colossians 3:12, 14
Four Seasons of Our Journey
Every season has given us something—and taken something from us. There have been awakenings, years of building, seasons of breaking, and the quieter grace of becoming elders. We tell these parts of our story because we have come to believe that God often does some of His deepest forming work in the places we would never have chosen.
The Awakening
God Found Us
Both of us came to Christ during the remarkable years of the Jesus Movement in the early 1970s—Michael in Michigan and Terri in Ohio.
Michael’s journey began in 1973 with a wonderfully unsophisticated prayer: “I give up. You got me.” What followed were encounters with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that permanently changed the direction of his life.
Terri encountered Jesus and His good news while attending Miami University, where the Spirit was drawing many young people into a living relationship with God. Even earlier, at eight years old, she had experienced the Father speaking to her heart—an early seed of the belonging she would spend a lifetime learning more deeply.
We discovered that God was real, present, personal, and wonderfully alive.
We would eventually discover something else: extraordinary encounters may awaken us, but a life with God is learned over years of remaining with Him in ordinary life.
The Building
God Taught Us
As our family and ministry grew, so did our opportunities to serve. We planted churches, led ministries, studied theology, taught, traveled, and gave ourselves wholeheartedly to what we believed God had asked us to build.
Those were fruitful years, and we remain grateful for them.
But God was teaching us something beneath the visible ministry: It is possible to know more and more about God while becoming less and less present with Him—and with ourselves and the people we love.
Terri, in particular, began sensing that some of what needed healing in Christian culture could not be repaired merely by better structures, stronger teaching, or more successful ministries. Something deeper in the human heart needed attention.
We did not yet know how personally we would have to learn that lesson.
The Breaking
God Humbled and Healed Us
In the mid-2000s, our world changed.
A painful public crisis in our mega-church exposed serious fault lines in leadership and brought Michael to a needed breaking point. At nearly the same time, Terri entered a devastating battle with trigeminal neuralgia that eventually required brain surgery. Michael stepped away from vocational ministry and worked in business for several years.
These were not abstract lessons in humility. We lost things. We grieved. We faced ourselves. Some illusions about ministry, leadership, strength, and spiritual maturity had to die.
And yet, what initially felt only like loss slowly became mercy.
We began discovering what Michael sometimes calls “the way of the basement.” Humility is not humiliation. It is the invitation to come down from the exhausting climb of self-importance, self-protection, and self-reliance and rediscover the solid ground of God’s steadfast love.
During one of Terri’s weakest seasons, she sensed the Spirit saying:
“The only way to heal a broken heart is to fall in love again.”
That became more than a beautiful sentence. It became a direction for our lives.
We began falling in love again—with Jesus, with one another, with truth, with ordinary people, and with a quieter way of being human.
The Eldering
God Entrusts Us with Others
We no longer feel compelled to build the largest thing we can build.
We want to help cultivate people who are deeply rooted in God, increasingly whole, emotionally and relationally mature, alive to the Holy Spirit, less governed by fear and increasingly able to live from joy, and able to become a life-giving presence for others.
Michael continues bringing together biblical theology, spiritual formation, and relational neuroscience. Terri continues helping people discover that they are deeply known, loved, and welcomed by God. Together, through Radius Ministries, spiritual-life mentoring, writing, teaching, friendship, and our work as Life Model Ambassadors, we hope to pass along what has been entrusted to us.
501(c)(3) Non-Profit
Formed through life together, serving the wider Body of Christ
Radius Ministries operates as an approved 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to relational discipleship, spiritual formation, and helping leaders and pilgrims dwell in the joyful presence of the Triune God.
We sometimes describe this integrated vision as The Whole Dove—a life in Christ where biblical truth, authentic love, relational maturity, secure attachment, and the full-range ministry of the Holy Spirit belong together rather than competing with one another.
These days, we measure fruit somewhat differently:
• Not simply by how many people gather, but by what kind of people we are becoming.
• Not merely by the size of a ministry, but by the quality of the relationships it leaves behind.
• Not by being impressive, but by becoming increasingly capable of receiving and giving love.
That is the kind of eldership we hope to grow into for whatever years God gives us.
Michael and Terri with their beloved grandchildren—one of the sweetest fruits of a long journey of covenant love.
Perhaps that is the simplest way we know to tell our story: God has been patiently teaching us to live less from fear and more from love, joy, and secure belonging in Him.
A Refuge for the Weary
If you have grown weary of performing…
If hurried Christianity has left you bruised…
If you love Jesus but know there are still places in you that need healing…
If you long for a faith spacious enough for truth and tenderness, Scripture and Spirit, joy and grief, courage and rest…
Welcome.
There is no finish line here for proving that you have finally become spiritual enough.
There is a table.
There is grace.
There are companions.
And there is a faithful God who is still forming us.
We would be glad to be with you on this pilgrimage.
Grace and peace,
Michael & Terri Sullivant
Founders of Radius Ministries • Life Model Ambassadors • Spiritual-Life Coaches