In 1998, I was assigned by Young Life to work for a month at their camp in Northwest Minnesota. There had been a new development in staffing the camps—a professional musician was going to be part of the team. I was highly skeptical, feeling the last thing we needed was some narcissistic guitar hero strutting around on stage. As a result, I skipped out of the meeting room the first night the musician played.

“He’s fantastic,” my family members told me later. “We love him.”

I stayed in the room the next night. My family was right—he was fantastic. Besides his obvious talent, what made him fantastic was his humility. As the month went on, I learned a bit of his story. He had been an attorney for a dozen years in his home state of Georgia, and then left that profession to earn a masters in literature in Edinburgh. Then he became an independent singer/songwriter. His name was Allen Levi.

There was more to Allen than music. I watched him over the course of the month as he voluntarily worked alongside those doing the most menial jobs in camp. One morning he’d be cleaning bathrooms, another he’d be hauling rocks, and on another he’d be scrubbing pots and pans in the dish pits. There was no expectation that the camp musician do any of this. He wrote new songs while we were there—I remember a song about the miracles being done by the camp gardener, calling attention to someone the rest of us took for granted. His songs often had a lot of humor in them—I became partial to one that mused about the prayers of dogs being answered, which had something in it about bones raining from the sky and street corners being covered with T-bones and hors d’oeuvres, while “masters who have neutered us got what they deserved.”  

Once the month was over, I kept bringing Allen to Michigan, most often for conferences or fundraising events. He always exceeded expectations. He stayed in our home on multiple occasions (saying he’d rather stay in a home with a family than by himself in a hotel) and endeared himself to my children by leaving money on their pillows as his room rent. He was with our family the day Frederick Buechner preached at our church in Grand Rapids and he doubled over laughing when my adolescent son wrote “Barry Manilow” on the friendship pad as it passed.

I had an idea one year that I wanted to do something special at Christmas for the staff folks and spouses in our region. I arranged to have a very nice dinner in a spacious home and asked Allen if he might be willing to come and do a house concert for our group—about 25 or 30 people. “In a heartbeat,” he said.

“How much do I need to pay you?” I asked.

“Brother, for you it’s nothing. Plus, I have so many airline miles I’ll buy my own ticket.”

I could spend the rest of my space here writing about only this. Let me just say the night was beyond magical. He didn’t entertain, he ministered.

After a decade or so of close association, I took a new position with Young Life in Europe and lost track of Allen. I heard through the grapevine that he’d left the road and was staying at home caring for his older brother, who was dying. A few years later, when I was working at Western Theological Seminary, I heard that Allen had gone back to the law and was serving as a probate judge. Life went on and for years I didn’t hear anything about him.

That changed last month, when the Washington Post published an article with the headline “How a nearly 70-year-old debut novelist published 2025’s breakout hit.” The subtitle said, “With virtually no marketing or social media presence, ‘Theo of Golden’ became a blockbuster.” There was a picture of Allen Levi below that.

He wrote the book as a challenge to himself, to see if he could do it. He planned to stick it in a drawer until friends persuaded him to share it with the world. He self-published it in 2023 and sold 3000 copies, which is strong for a self-published book. Then in 2024, the book began selling a thousand copies a month. That caught the attention of mainstream publishers. After turning down Christian publishers because he didn’t want the book to be pigeonholed, Allen signed a deal with Simon and Schuster, who brought it out in the fall of 2025. The book has now sold over 300,000 copies and is on all sorts of best-seller lists.

I am sure Allen would never say this, but Theo of Golden is fiercely political. Now don’t get me wrong, there isn’t a partisan word in it. But I am convinced the book’s popularity comes because It gently instructs us in how we are supposed to act towards each other. During an era of national cruelty, it is a book about kindness, generosity, meekness, humility, and gentleness. It’s a book about good manners. It’s a book about love. It is a book about what the Sermon on the Mount in action looks like.

It reminds me of Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe, but more than that, Theo of Golden has a lot in common with Ted Lasso. The storylines couldn’t be more different, but both Ted and Theo act with humanity, compassion, and empathy. Both listen. Both care. Both can’t help but create community around them.

I don’t want to give any plot spoilers, so I won’t go into the storyline. But know this—Theo starts slowly for a reason. The pace is deliberately countercultural because our phone-addicted society needs to be slowed down. I’d read, pause, and think. Then, towards the end, I stayed up into the wee hours one morning because I couldn’t put the book down. I had to see how it ended. And yes, like so many other readers, my eyes got a bit wet when I reached the book’s climax.

I recently saw this clip of Oprah quoting the book. Oprah. The Washington Post. Allen is in a new stratosphere. I cannot think of anyone better equipped to handle sudden literary fame than Allen Levi. I’m not being tongue-in-cheek when I say that. There’s not much difference between Allen and the book he’s written. Both are very, very good.