Rodney Aist

Pastor, author, and pilgrimage scholar, Rodney Aist has an expertise in multicultural ministry and the spirituality of pilgrimage. As a young clergy, Rodney set out on an around-the-world pilgrimage, visiting global Christians and ecumenical communities on five continents. A United Methodist clergy, he has served Christian communities in Arkansas, Scotland, Italy, Jerusalem, and the Navajo Nation. A scholar of Christian pilgrimage past and present, Rodney is presently the course director at St George’s College, Jerusalem, where he leads study pilgrimages for lay and clergy from around the world.

Rodney is a graduate of Southern Methodist University (BA), Duke Divinity School (MDiv), and has a MA in Celtic Christianity and a PhD in theology from the University of Wales, Lampeter with a research focus on Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem before the Crusades. His academic books include The Christian Topography of Early Islamic Jerusalem: The Evidence of Willibald of Eichstätt (700-787) and From Topography to Text: The Image of Jerusalem in the Writings of Eucherius, Adomnán, and Bede. He has been the cohort leader for a DMin in pilgrimage and spirituality at Drew Theological School (New Jersey).

Advocating a pilgrim-themed spirituality for Christian formation (the theological tools of pilgrimage), his resources for general Christian readers include Pilgrim Spirituality: Defining Pilgrimage Again for the First Time (2022), Mission Bound: Short-Term Mission as Pilgrimage (2023), Jerusalem Bound: How to be a Pilgrim in the Holy Land (2020), and Walking the Jerusalem Circuit: In the Footsteps of Pilgrims before the Crusades (2025). His current projects include: worship as pilgrimage, congregational life as pilgrimage, the social applications of pilgrimage—and a nascent YouTube channel, Let’s Talk Pilgrimage. An associate member of the Iona Community, Rodney is a contributing writer for Wild Goose Publications (Iona Books). An expert of religious travel and short-term Christian community, he is a veteran of the Camino de Santiago, church camps and retreats, and mission partnerships.

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