Pastor & Author

Shawn Reinsel

About Simple Grace

The Question That Changed Everything

I was 18 years old, standing in front of a Bible study I was leading, doing what I thought a good Christian teacher was supposed to do. I was walking people through the Law, stacking up all the commands, all the standards, all the things God expected of them. I believed every word of it.

Then a young lady raised her hand and asked, “That sounds great, Shawn, but how do we do it?”

I stood there with nothing to say. Because the only answer I had was the one I truly believed: you just try as hard as you can.

That moment haunted me. I didn’t know it yet, but I was already burned out. I was already a Pharisee. I was 18.

The News That Changed My Life

The next year I went to Calvary Chapel Bible College. On the very first day, a pastor named Bob Hoekstra stood in front of the room and said something I’ll never forget: “If you think being a Christian is about how hard you’re trying, I have really wonderful news for you.”

He went on to explain the New Covenant of grace.

For the first time, I understood that the Christian life is not about my effort. It’s about Christ’s life in me. The burden I had been carrying, and loading onto others, was never supposed to be there. The relief was overwhelming. I had been saved at twelve years old and felt called to ministry from a young age, but this was the moment the gospel finally made sense to me as a way of life, not just a way of getting saved.

Grace from My Head to My Heart

After college, I married and began serving in ministry. We had two boys, then a third. Life looked like what it was supposed to look like.

Then it fell apart. My first wife chose to have an affair and eventually abandoned me and our three sons. I was a young pastor and a single father, and I was shattered.

This was the season when grace moved from my head down into my heart. Everything I had learned under Bob Hoekstra was tested in the most painful way imaginable. And it held. I learned to love through Christ’s life and not my own. I learned to forgive, not because I was strong enough, but because His grace was sufficient.

In time, the Lord brought a new wife into my life. She also had three boys. We married and became a family of six sons under seven years old. If you want to know where my theology of grace gets its edge, it was forged in that season. Suffering has a way of stripping away everything that is not real, and what was left standing was the grace of Jesus.

From One Living Room to 500 Pastors

I planted a church in 2013 and spent the next decade developing the discipleship material that would eventually become my book, Simple Grace: A Handbook for New Covenant Living, published in 2022.

The discipleship work started small, just conversations with friends in ministry who were burning out the same way I had. One pastor at a time, I would walk them through the New Covenant, watch the same burden lift off their shoulders, and see their ministry come alive again.

That small beginning has grown into something only God could do. Over the past twenty years, we’ve discipled more than 500 pastors across the United States, Nepal, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Costa Rica, Pakistan, and India. We’ve held grace conferences for churches and leadership teams. And the doors keep opening.

In 2025, I moved to South Texas to pastor One Two Church and continue expanding the Simple Grace ministry. I’m currently writing the Simple Grace Commentary Series, walking through the Bible book by book to help the Church see the New Covenant on every page. Simple Grace in Genesis and Simple Grace in Exodus are already available, with more on the way.

What Simple Grace Offers

For Pastors and Church Leaders: We offer one-on-one coaching, leadership team training, and grace conferences designed to help your people understand and walk in the New Covenant. Our goal is to do this at no cost to the churches we serve.

For Individual Believers: Start with the book. Simple Grace: A Handbook for New Covenant Living is available on Amazon and as a free download in English and Hindi right here on this site.

For the Global Church: Through our international partnerships, we are training and equipping pastors across Nepal, Pakistan, and India with the same message of grace that set me free at seventeen years old.

Let’s Connect

Whether you’re a burned-out pastor who needs someone to talk to, a church leader looking for a conference speaker, or a believer who wants to understand grace for the first time, I’d love to hear from you.

For a closer look at what God has done in Shawn’s life, check out this old video of his testimony below… 
(Grab a box of tissues, fair warning)