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 was born 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 my 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.