Meet Aaron
“May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.”
It’s an ancient blessing for a talmid — a disciple close enough to their teacher to walk in his footsteps, kicking up the same dust. I think about that with my own children more than anything else I’ve written.
I’m a father before I’m anything else this movement might call me. Talmid isn’t a platform. It’s an answer I’m building for my own children — and for anyone carrying the same holy discontent.
Field Notes
M.Div.
ordained minister
commissioned to plant churches
american pastor
living in real communities
a decade of farm, retreat, Event management
travel/living on five continents
entrepreneur & trades skills
healing
The Road Here
My earliest memories are an old southern plantation house amid forested hills and farmland — thirty minutes from the nearest grocery, visitors rare, grandparents I never knew, and a family that split midway through my childhood, like half the families around us. In many ways, nothing about it was unusual. That was the problem.
So I went looking. A college campus in East Asia, worshiping with every tongue, tribe, and nation. Then L’Abri, an intentional community in Switzerland, where for the first time in my life my ego quietly slipped into the background — and my calling as an ambassador of the beth ab was cemented. There would be no going back.
I spent the first decade of my adulthood living almost exclusively in community, not just in America but around the world — then pastored in the American church and was commissioned to plant churches. I spent nearly another decade managing a farm and retreat center, learning that hospitality isn’t a program you run. It’s a table you keep.
Even so, here is what I couldn’t unsee: I didn’t have a beth ab. Not really. Not yet.
The Wrestling Mats
My house. My job of eight years. My car. Even many of my relationships — all in one fell swoop, with two toddlers in tow. I bought a used SUV and a trailer less than a week before we moved out, and a two-week rental became seven long, unpredictable months of bouncing between unfamiliar places — not as beloved family in the caring community of a beth ab, but as paying customers to total strangers.
I stepped away from everything — business, ministry, momentum, the version of myself that had it together.
Aaron Little
I didn’t come out of that season with a plan. I came out with a conviction: healing, community, and discipleship aren’t relics of the early church we admire from a distance. They’re paradigms we lost — and they’re recoverable.
I don’t lead from a stage. I lead from those mats — and I walk with the limp to prove it.
What I Saw
I was still creating spiritual orphans instead of sons and daughters of a good Father. He also gave me a word I couldn’t shake: we talk about being “used” by God — but what parent talks about their children that way? God doesn’t use us. He withs us.
That undid something in me. I realized the Church isn’t immune to the exhaustion of our culture. We’re not more whole than the world around us — often just as afraid, just as anxious, just as alone.
And this isn’t theoretical for me. It’s personal:
I know what it’s like to feel the foul breath of the Enemy on my face, with no weapon to fight back. To live with fear and pain for years on end. To feel defeated.
To turn over a thousand stones for even a hint of relief — and then to find none.
But I also know the grace of intervention: being thrown over a brother’s shoulders to do what I could not do myself.
For all we’ve gained in comfort and knowledge, we’ve spent down a currency of relationship and spirituality we can’t easily rebuild. I didn’t want to write another book about that problem.
I wanted to help build the answer.
Why I Wrote the Book
Everything in that book — and everything Talmid is becoming — started as a question I couldn’t shake: what kind of beth ab am I actually leaving them? What kind of family, what kind of home, what kind of faith?
It became an invitation to fellow Believers along the way to help reclaim the radical, living Church. But if you want to know the heart of it, that’s it. A father, writing a humble guiding light for his children.
Where This Is Headed
My focus is now turned outward — resurrecting healing, community, and discipleship not as ideas, but as a way of life. That’s the beth ab. That’s a rabbi and a talmid walking together daily, the way it used to be over 1,900 years ago. That’s Talmid.
I don’t have it all built. But I have a fire in my bones, and there is a remnant being gathered. Join us.
Walk With Me
A short series of emails over two weeks — selected chapters of Don’t Tread On Jesus among them — then Dust, our regular newsletter. Because of Jesus — with you and for you.