About Surely There
Some years ago at church, my son leaned over during a sermon on Genesis 12 and whispered: "You've been to Haran, right Dad?" I had. And in that moment I understood something I hadn't been able to articulate before.
When my sons encounter the Bible, there is no question in their minds that we are talking about a real God working in real people in real places. It couldn't possibly be fantasy, nor is it abstract. We are talking about places their father has been. And that is the real God we encounter today.
That is the conviction behind Surely There. The Christian faith is not a set of ideas floating free of time and space. It happened — in Haran, in Ephesus, in Corinth, in Nicea — among specific people, in specific places, across real history. And the church today is the living continuation of that story, planted in its own place and time by the same God.
Surely There exists to resource the church in that conviction — through theological content, through gathered events at historically significant places, and through immersive travel experiences that put believers in the places where the church's story was forged. We believe that recovering a sense of historical and geographical continuity is not an academic exercise. It is part of what it means for the church to know who it is, where it comes from, and what it has been called to carry forward.
In October 2025, Surely There convened the Nicea Conference in Istanbul, Turkey — gathering theologians and church leaders from across the world at the site of the First Council of Nicea, 1,700 years after the creed was written. The conference is the first expression of what Surely There does when the moment calls for it: bringing the church to the places where its story was lived, so that it remembers what it has received.
The resource library — essays, videos, and place articles from theologians and scholars — is the ongoing work. The Nicea book is coming in 2026. And Enjoy Tours continues as the experiential extension of the conviction: standing in the places where the Bible happened, so that you return to your own place differently.
The conviction
Our God is a God of history, of real place and real time. Jesus Christ, who came into history, remains Lord of this heaven and this earth — and one day will wrap up all history into glory.
Michael Reeves — Ligonier Teaching Fellow · Union School of Theology
The experiential extension
These places still exist.
Enjoy Tours puts you in them.
Surely There makes the theological case. Enjoy Tours is where the conviction becomes embodied — standing in the places where the church's story was lived, so that you return to your own place differently.
