Pastor Long was born in California in 1961. While raised in a nominally Christian household, he didn't find a church home until he encountered the Lutheran Campus ministry when he was an undergraduate at MIT (originally intending to major in Physics). Although he transfered to UC Berkeley to finish his degree as an English major (Class of 1983), his first job out of college found him teaching Mathematics and World History at Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena, California.

After two years of wrestling with his vocation, Pastor Long enrolled in the Master of Divinity program at the Yale Divinity School. He graduated in 1988, completed a unit of hospital chaplaincy in Seattle, Washington, and then did an internship (vicarage) at Immanuel Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Los Altos, California.

Following that year, he did a year of graduate work in Philosophy at the University of Illinois, and then finished his requirements for ordination by completing a year of studies at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. He was called to St. Timothy Lutheran Church (ELCA), Wyoming, Illinois, and ordained in 1991. By 1997, however, he found himself conscience-bound to leave the ELCA due to profound theological and Biblical objections to its teachings and practices. He was received into the LC-MS by colloquy the same year, and began serving Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church as its interim pastor in November of 1997. The congregation formally called him as pastor in the Spring of 1998.

Pastor Long was blessed to be joined to his wife, Sherri, in holy matrimony in 2001. In 2007, Pastor and Sherri were blessed with the birth of their first child, Sarah Helen.

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