Hi. Mason here with a post-writing edit. Just want to quickly acknowledge that this post and its contents are written and approved by only me and the thoughts are explicitly my own. It's funny to see how life works, to sit back and look at where I am and where Riley is after the years this blog has been up and running. He's a preaching minister and co-ministers with his wife for a church that is doing great things and I support him fully. I'm now a bum in Colorado working at a ski shop. I can't speak for Riley and never will, that man is too intelligent for me to pretend I could. Okay. Hopefully that makes sense. Enjoy the blog. ~m
preface
It’s been about eighteen months since I started this blog, and I’ve thought about it at least once a week since. I’ve moved 6 times across 3 states. I’ve traveled by myself close to 20,000 miles for leisure, 25,000 for other reasons (at least according to my guesstimations and the odometer on the vehicles I’ve owned and used). In my entire life I don’t think I have ever spent more time alone than I have over the last two years. I guess that’s what dropping out of college with 30 credit hours left in a degree, changing careers 4 times, and struggling through 2 years of a pandemic will get you: lots of time to think. I’m beginning the organized and (hopefully) cohesive part of this blog in a coffee shop located in Golden, Colorado. While working on this it’s been below freezing outside, 90 degrees outside, and pretty much everywhere in between. I live one town over from this coffee shop now (update: now I'm moving into a camper-converted ambulance. Life comes at you fast, I guess), which is something I could only have dreamed about two months ago. I’ve done a lot of dreaming, a lot of doing, a lot of struggling, and a lot of searching over 18 months. I have consistently felt guilty, liberated, heartbroken, lonely, comforted, and confused simultaneously about this one topic. It's my hope that getting this on paper will release at least a part of my mind from this…burden.
writer's block
The aforementioned list of my experiences is really important to the context of my following words. As I said, I have thought about the idea behind this blog with alarming consistency while experiencing life at a faster-than-seemingly-possible rate. I’ve wanted to move on. Desperately I have. I’ve asked for clarity from God and from others, I’ve done my best to convince myself that my mentality is a phase that I will snap out of one day. I’ve wanted to move on to writing creatively – bring some of my Enneagram 4-style, romantically deep feelings to life through the experience of words on a page. But I seem to have a proverbial case of writer’s block. Proverbial in the sense that it goes deeper than just a topic of another blog. It’s an entire chapter of my life that I’ve done my best to avoid at all costs. I’ve bitten my tongue in settings that used to be my home, I’ve solidified my title as an Expert in the Numbing Process, and I’ve put seemingly everything I once held dear on hold in hopes that I’ll get better. For someone with a tattoo on his arm that literally symbolizes “Run Toward the Roar, face the thing that scares you,” I’ve done a great job at doing the complete opposite.
In case it’s hard to tell, the process of writing this blog has been and is quite grueling. It’s very hard. I’d be lying if I told you that I haven’t shed tears, punched pillows, and had nights crying out for answers. What makes a resolution to it difficult is that I don’t need the answers that come from words, or an explanation from a wise figure that will quell my doubts. I want peace in my soul, and the ability to fall asleep at night knowing I’m doing what I’m supposed to.
I’ve written this intro, deleted it, re-written it, and repeated this process many times. Then, I've repeated this process for the entire blog. So if I made a grammatical error or spelled something wrong please don’t tell me. I fear that would just be too much to bear. I swear I've read this a thousand times. I’ve taken careful steps in this blog to attempt to effectively communicate what I’m trying to say, though I know that words on a page can only say so much. I’ve put thought into every word.
Something new for this blog is that I have purposely not included scripture. I’ve tried to talk as a human and avoid as much weaponization of scripture as possible. I’ve seen too much of it recently.
Now to the point. In this collection of words, I’ll do my best to outline the zoomed-out picture of my struggles. There are specific topics I’ve been working through that could each take up a chapter of a book at this point. I’ll mention sparks as the source of these fires, but I’ll do my best to not go into heavy detail pertaining to the dissection of any specific spark. My goal is to publicly go over the process of losing my faith, mourning it, and trying to pick up the pieces. Losing faith, that is, in institutions that were once my home while simultaneously shunning those who didn’t look or act or think like me. Losing faith in processes and interpretations of a book that I used to believe was to be taken exactly the way it’s been transcribed into English. And finally, losing faith in the God I knew as my father but who, deep down, I thought was selective about who could be accepted as his children based on their beliefs, who could benefit from his grace, and who deserves the physical benefits our country is built around.
It is also my hope to contribute in any way, however small, to letting someone else know that they’re not alone. This is a brutal process to go through alone, and I’m thankful for the blogs, videos, and books I’ve read that have helped me feel seen, even a little bit.
Thanks in advance for reading this part of my soul laid bare.
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“We can know a person for decades, share a pew with them in church every Sunday, without ever knowing their testimonies, without ever asking them, ‘Hey, why Christian?’ We can spend a lifetime singing hymns and reading the Bible without honestly answering that question for ourselves.” -Rachel Held Evans, Inspired
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part one. show me your friends.
If I learned anything from my upbringing, it’s that you become like those with whom you surround yourself. I remember playing basketball in a church gym with “show me your friends and I will show you your future” painted in bold letters on the wall. From a young age this mentality quickly skyrocketed into a top position on my life's list of priorities. In the world of “spiritual warfare,” the right and only personally beneficial people to hang out with are the people “on your team.” The ones that would help “your team” win. Anything else was an act of Mission, a drain and potential danger to living and believing the “correct” things. The right people to hang out with are not just the people who believe in the same higher power, but the people who believe the “correct” certain things this about said higher power. Still with me? For example: the debate over water baptism isn’t something a non-Christian would even know how to define. But give me 30 seconds and I guarantee I could find a 45-minute Instagram video put together by some guy I went to college with explaining that the only way to be “saved” is to be fully immersed in water, by a biological male, with at least one other person watching. This is one point of agreement that was vital to my view of Christianity and, whether it was explicitly stated or not, someone with a differing view was seen as a project, needing to change to become a member of the “one true Church.” This is one example of quite literally thousands that Christians spend time debating in Twitter and Facebook threads, at conferences, and from the pulpit.
I was okay with these debates for a long time, and maybe I still am. These debates are found in thorough research of leaders and writers of pivotal texts in the Bible. These debates have given people jobs, brought people closer to their idea of spiritual perfection, and brought people closer together. I realized that these debates, however, have also overflowed from the church and begun to stain the very culture of our world. This realization of mine was sparked in my college years, became an ember in the back of my head for a while, and then was fanned into flame in 2019 and 2020 by the ugly, ugly US election. Let’s skip over the details of that one, though. Selfishly, that’s a dark place to which I don’t want to go again. I’d rather talk about what was revealed to me by my deep dives into the core of my beliefs. I’d rather talk about my discovery of the fact that the Bible is interpreted wrong in many circumstances and the ways that that has affected and still affects the seams of my reality.
😧
Potentially the biggest shock to my reality came in the form of the trajectory of Social Justice movements over the past few years. Again, I’m trying not to dive deep into a lot of topics that deserve their own research and attention, and I’m not pretending to be an expert on any of these subjects. Human rights fights in recent history have shown me that these debates mentioned in the last paragraph didn’t just recently start to spill into society. Christianity has impacted the very building blocks of the United States, or at least most peoples’ views of it. A conversation recently revealed to me that, from the perspective of a majority of Christian worldviews, a large goal is to “get this nation back on the Christian ideals track it was formed on.” Not to make it a Christian nation, but to have a guiding moral compass based in Christianity and on the Bible. The way this was spelled out to me caused me to be so much more confused. It confused me because the more research I’ve done on the Bible - the Christian code, the Christian moral compass in the form of words, the book that some believe is the physical embodiment of the Holy Spirit, the more I’ve realized that Christians as a whole disagree on some pretty fundamental subjects. If “getting back to our root ideals” means getting back to Biblical principles, I don’t see enough justification in the Bible for the main Christian agendas that are being pushed right now. All I see are cases for giving to the poor, empire busting, and loving people who can't take care of themselves over everything else. Interpretations of the Bible have always been subjective, which is something that I wish I would have realized sooner. I have, however, noticed a theme in the largest and loudest interpretations. I’ve experienced these interpretations firsthand on both ends, benefitting from and being harmed by them, which I think gives me some validity to speak to them. It seems like the wrong people think they're being persecuted, though.
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At every turn, it feels like most “Christian vs. the World” debates are a power struggle controlled by one force that’s been in power for so long that they’ve tainted and stained their interpretations of a book that, at its core, prioritizes the denying of self in order to uplift outcasts, those whom the world has rejected. What I wish more Christians would realize is that, speaking as a Christian here, we are part of the world and our rejection of people we don’t agree with creates outcasts. Seems pretty counterintuitive.
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“No hate like Christian love” is usually the top comment on videos like this clip of Greg Locke on the internet. The words I’d like to point out here are “get out in the name of Jesus,” followed by hundreds of cheers in the auditorium and thousands of cheers online. Let me tell you, nothing rocks your world like waking up and realizing you may not be the good guy, the hero of the situation. I've had this realization more than once. If you’ve posted “the best democrat is a dead democrat” online, told someone they’re going to hell because of their political beliefs, or told someone they’ll go to hell if they entertain marrying someone they love, you’re partially correct. You’ve already done your part to create hell on earth for people who think differently than you. All three of these examples are actual scenarios that I have seen from people who confided in me thinking I’m “on their team.” These are the scenarios that make me want to publicly burn that team’s jersey.
some real-world examples
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"The axe forgets but the tree remembers." -Akhen Osei
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I thought I was finished with section 1, but I realized I hadn’t even touched on abuse of power within the church. I’ll dive more into this specific subject in the next section, but let me quickly touch on my firsthand and immediate circle experiences of the biggest get-out-of-jail-free cards to ever exist: being a church leader. Not even necessarily a paid one.
When I was just entering ministry, a woman very close to me was going through a divorce in order to escape 24 years of verbal and mental abuse including gaslighting, cheating (unproven, but a subject not pursued by a woman afraid to lose her family with a 3 and 5 year-old at home at the time), and further manipulation. Her husband refused couples counseling, while at the same time continuing to lead corners of the church including communion devotionals, worship, and public prayers. She brought her concerns to the lead minister of her church. After sharing her 24-year-old secrets that she had kept to protect her family, talking about the times she had followed her husband’s hateful words to their children with affirmations of their worth as special human beings with no one to affirm her, her words settled in the office. Over two decades of quiet strength and resilience through heartbreak sat before the minister in the form of a woman who had just recently found her voice. His chair creaked as he leaned back into it, crossed his arms, and sighed. “Thank you for sharing this. I know it was difficult for you, but one thing just keeps echoing in my mind: God hates divorce.”
Here’s an interpretation of his response, put into words that I want to be very clear were not technically spoken: “You have put yourself on the line for defenseless people. Your personal fears came second to protecting the unit of family that you believed was godly with no agenda other than love. This man who abused you is a public leader of classes, a servant who’s in front of people all the time. It took courage for you to speak to me. The family unit, however, should remain together with no question other than proven adultery. The abuse you endured can and should be endured for the sake of what I believe God said was important, no questions asked. Stay together, don’t bring allegations against the leader of your family again, and continue to submit. No further action is needed.”
The divorce went through, thankfully, and an elder came to her privately to affirm her how he could, and her ex husband remained a leader with no questions asked. She eventually was overwhelmed with the stares, the refusal of the lead minister to speak to her any further on the subject, and having to coordinate her worship time with when the man who had abused her wouldn't be there.
She left that church.
Here’s one more true story, to drive my point home.
I’d like to include a warning to people who may have been affected personally by this one. If you’re a victim here, you’ll know what I’m talking about and can choose whether or not you want to read this section. It certainly hasn’t been easy for me to work through, and I can only imagine the difficulty that the multiple victims have had working through it in their own ways. If you were impacted, my prayers have been with you and I promise I’ve done my absolute best to help, but this section is hard to write and will probably be harder to read. No names are mentioned and I’m doing my best to be as vague as possible in order to protect those who desire anonymity. If you’re someone sensitive to victim-blaming and power dynamics of a sexual nature, please feel free to skip this section as well.
I loved my college campus ministry. My friends there were like my siblings. We were on the same page about our beliefs, and it was a place in which I could truly thrive. I had leadership opportunities galore. There were a lot of girls looking for a hot, passionate young man with drive such as myself, and there were plenty of guys to bro out with and pursue Jesus. As I dated and developed friendships with women in my circles through college, something kept coming up with a common denominator. The girls didn't want to come to my campus ministry with me. Many of them had had similar experiences with one person: the son of a prominent and paid church leader that attended and was a pivotal part of this ministry. The women viewed themselves as having committed huge “sins,” on timelines that I discovered overlapped heavily, with this smooth-talking senior that everyone seemed to love. His words to them in their most vulnerable times were always similar, but always very effective. He lied in ways that couldn’t be tracked, always met up in secret with girls who had, until then, never found a reason to be wary of a charismatic church leader, and he did pretty much whatever he wanted to do with them. While technically all consensual, it was something different. He used shame and the protection of public innocence as cover to hide and acquire more of what he wanted. He was unaffected publicly by the shame and in his mind it was seemingly just…a normal thing. I discovered that his sexual encounters with young women, sometimes freshmen in their first semester of Christian college (but almost always younger than him), were much more sadistic than I had heard of before, which was part of what genuinely terrified the women who had interacted with him into silence. With permission to share from some, I interacted with other women who had been harmed in similar ways and who sobbed with relief knowing they weren’t the only ones. When I discovered a specific timeline that overlapped, I had grounds in my mind to bring this to him in private as a brother in Christ, as others had done before me. He immediately admitted to huge fault. It was something he said he was working on, and he asked me not to share it with people so that he could continue to work on it. Like an idiot, I agreed and wanted to give him a chance to redeem himself. After all, God’s a God of second chances, right? Who was I to pass judgement? I made it clear to him that if I ever heard of something like this deceit at the expense of people in a manipulated state happening again, it would be more than just a me and him issue. He vehemently agreed, and from there I tried to forget about the whole thing. A year or so later, I heard of similar happenings with him as the culprit. I skipped a conversation with him and immediately called someone who had had a similar conversation with him as me, and we decided together that his father, the paid minister, should know. What followed was an hours-long meeting, totally taking his father off guard (or so I thought), and a hopeful resolution in next steps to be taken by the family. The resolution ended up being a couple weeks of "intense" therapy before he left on an international trip. This didn’t feel like enough, but I didn’t know what to do other than try and follow him around everywhere, warning people, which I couldn’t do. There were no legal grounds for anything to be done, and the damage had all been done. He would go on to continue to be allowed to lead worship, prayers, devotionals, and small groups as if nothing had happened. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have permission from his victims to publicly allege anything against him to church leadership other than his father. His parents spoke harshly to victims and their partners, his sister called one a liar, and their family unit carried on taking any allegation as an assault on their family. I was stuck with the burden of knowing who he was (and is) and not being able to do anything about it. The nights of sleep I lost trying to figure out what to do are in the dozens, and there was no one I could talk to. I couldn't vent to the victims, my friends, and I didn't have permission to share with anyone else. All I could do was pray. I witnessed the pain of a power dynamic that I had no control over and that the victims would never be able to resolve. I hesitate to even post this. It’s hard to write and go back to that place in my mind, and frankly I’m scared of the repercussions, if anyone reads this. But it’s vital to my story and I need it to be heard and understood. There’s a lot more I could go into here, but I don’t want to dive into it too deeply, or deeper than I already have. I just want to get to this part:
I discovered later that this was not a new topic for their family. I don’t have permission to quote my source on this, but rules had been changed in the youth group that this guy grew up in, one that I ended up working for, because of what he had done to multiple girls also younger than him in his later high school years. His family was informed, rules were changed because of it, and he was unaffected by his actions. He continued to be a "dreamy mystery" throughout college with leadership in his ministry. Somehow his family was always the “victim,” which makes me sick to my stomach years later. The fault here lies not only in his terrible actions, but the refusal of the church and his family to remove him from leadership. The public blame always ended up in the hands of the girls for being alone with him, for not being careful, and for not standing up for themselves. The number of young women who ended up walking around my college campus questioning everything about their self worth, their validity as members of a church, and what a relationship actually looks like is so, so much higher than it had to be. The number of girls he pushed into corners and stole choices from is so much higher than it had to be.
This true story has no happy ending.
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“People who aren’t suffering can take their time. Those who suffer cannot” -David Hayward, AKA nakedpastor
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Show me your friends and I will show you your future.
Show me your abuse-enabling friends, your Christian church leader friends that take sexual assault accountability attempts against their sons as an attack on their parenting, your hyper-political, Bible-manipulating friends, and I’ll show you your future of abuse-enabling, victim-dismissing, and oppressive system building.
Show me your friends and I’ll show you your priorities.
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I found God, truly found him, by myself one night in the middle of youth group. I was a junior in high school.
I had grown up in multiple churches of the same denomination, never more than 300 members strong. I don’t think I have a story much different than many others who had that “Jesus moment.” I was selected and encouraged to be a leader in youth group from a young age. I specifically worked on my charisma, my leadership, and connecting with people with the underlying goal of setting up the big future promised me in casual conversations with adults that I respected. There was something different that I felt in the tone of people older than me that said “Mason, you’re special. You’ll do big things someday.” I felt genuine belief in their words, and I also felt a rush of purpose when I stuck out in maturity from my peers. There really wasn’t anything I tried to do harder in life than to continue down this path. I strove to create an image of myself that was more than skin deep. Without getting too wordy about it, I succeeded in becoming what I wanted to be: someone on whom people could depend to lead, set a good example, and follow the Word of God closely.
It became more than a routine and goal for me one day at youth group. I was in a trial like no other I had ever experienced. The family that I had grown up a member of was falling apart. At 17, I said goodbye to the childhood I thought I had, along with my childhood home. In an effort to not spill too much tea and make my corner of the internet messy (I’m more than happy to tell you my story personally), I’ll leave it at the fact that in the fall of my Junior year of high school I could no longer live at my home. I couch hopped with some friends for a while, and ended up living with a friend that had some extra room in his house and with his family for 3 months.
It was during this 3 months, about 3/4ths of the way through, that I was asked to lead a prayer in the middle of a youth group night. Nothing special, this was a regular routine. Nobody really knew what was going on with my family and me. It just wasn’t something that was talked about at church, I guess. At least not with us. Another family had gone through something similar fairly recently before this, and that also simply wasn’t talked about so this was normal to me. I was still a functioning leader at youth events, and my outward Christianity was more important to me than almost anything else in the world, second only to my personal relationship with God. This particular night, the night I was asked to lead a prayer, was when it hit me that my schoolwork was really suffering, my arm was in a padded sling from a recent shoulder surgery, and I was just…a shell. My childhood taught me that my actions had an impact on others, and that I always was to impact others positively. “It’s okay to ask for help” was not something I heard until college, so I didn’t. After my prayer I excused myself to the bathroom. My bathroom trip was actually a trip to a nearby empty classroom, where as my limbs started to tingle I closed the door behind me. I became aware of my lungs, inside my tingling chest, that were fighting for air for some reason. As I collapsed to the floor and curled up on my left side (I couldn’t curl up on my right side, my arm was in a sling), I began my real, come-to-Jesus prayer. First for breath. That I would eventually be able to stand up, walk out of this classroom, and breathe. The next part of my prayer was for help in my helpless situation. I had withdrawn from my friends, it felt like I had no family, I didn’t have a right arm, and it felt like my entire body just couldn’t go on. “If you help me out of this I’ll devote my life to you, you’re all I have left” were the words I uttered to God. I had never felt the circumstances of my life in such a physical way. I had never felt like I couldn’t get out before. After about 10 minutes, the tingling throughout my body stopped. I got up, practiced a smile, and joined a game of volleyball in the gym with the youth group. Nobody asked where I had been.
What I later, years later, would realize is that I had a panic attack. The physical feeling of restoration I got after had just been oxygen in my blood returning to my limbs. If any 17-year-old on planet earth deserved to have a panic attack, I think it was me in that moment. Mental health wasn’t something I knew about, anxiety and depression were "symptoms of not trusting God enough," and anything not physical was purely spiritual. Ironically, after acknowledging to myself that my life was difficult and I couldn’t do it on my own, I felt renewed. I began to restore my connections with friends, establish plans to get my life back on track, and devote myself to my future in ministry even deeper. That release of control was the big boost I needed to get through, propel myself into a Christian college, and renew my purpose. I was all in on learning about the One who loved me enough to save me, and all I wanted to do was share this restoration with the world. I was truly, madly, deeply in love with God, in love with the friendships that blossomed because of his work in my life, and in love with my future of sharing the truly good news with everyone I possibly could. I couldn’t understand why people were so anti-God. I heard his word from preachers that I trusted as much as I trusted God. The wisdom of my elders was as sweet as the love I had found, and without question I followed those elders and their policies: John Piper, Matt Chandler, Levi Lusko, and countless others who dictated my theology.
I lived in utter bliss for years, excited about the purpose in my life until I ended up on the ground, practicing ministry semi-professionally. My first ministry job, as an intern for a youth group in Texas, was everything I dreamed it would be. I got every leadership and example-setting opportunity I could have asked for. Lunch with students, Cry Night at camp, and curriculum designed and presented by me. This was cool until I looked outward from myself. I saw some women in leadership positions that weren’t allowed to do the things I did and lead as freely as I could. What struck me was their desire to lead in the way I did, as they had had similar encounters with God and wanted to share in similar ways as me. I had read the passages in the bible that instructed on these gender-assigned subjects, and through my own research I couldn’t find adequate evidence (other than word of mouth and tradition from elders and leaders) that women couldn’t lead groups of people (see my blog “The Sound of Silence: Women in the Church”). When I asked the leaders of my internships about it, I always got the same answer: “yes, we just have some old fashioned people in the church. Once they die off it’ll get better” and it was always left at that. Until the old people died off, it would be my job to stand up on stage to escort women who had the same things to say as I did in order to assert authority, and it was also my job to present things written by my co-intern to a group of students like it was my own.
That’s just how it would be.
part two. deconstruction.
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Can you see them now?Can you see the people Jesus sought first? Can you see that your indifference to the oppressed is harming the poor in spirit?
Can you see that other people care about their lives and their families’ lives just as much as you care about your own?Can you see that it is up to the protected to protect, or will you hoard the grace like it’s limited?I fear that we see. I fear we see our own high standing but the cries of the oppressed (who are our equals) are too unpleasant for us to acknowledge other than to say “life isn’t fair for me either.”Apart from politics, apart from backgrounds, apart from sides. Will you consider what you have plenty of and what your brother is asking of you to share out of your abundance?The rich man went down in history nameless, but Lazarus lives on, with Abraham:“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’”Luke 16:25-26 NIV-me, May 2020, on facebook
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This quote was me, crying out desperately to change what I thought was an unfortunate direction change in the church. Almost immediately after George Floyd’s murder, as police corruption and abuse of power was being brought to light more than it ever had, when the phrase “Black Lives Matter” burst on the scene with force, I saw my friends, family, and former leaders strongly opposing this obvious cry for support in hopes of accountability from and for people of color. The dismissal of the fact that all lives don’t matter until black lives matter was just…confusing to me. I wanted to give my friends and family the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to give my leaders a chance to sit down and think about what they were saying. I thought the church was just on the wrong side of this one, quick to emotionally react in a very difficult time in our nation. I just couldn’t believe that my friends, leaders, and family could be so hateful. This, unfortunately, was the final heavy straw for the resilient back of mine that had not yet broken. Was this actually institutional? If I can’t rely on my leaders in such a pivotal time, how much of…all of it was legit?
“My heart just aches today. Like, how is this my life? How did I go from spending every free moment either in church or inviting someone to church to being physically triggered if I drive by the building? I knew all the answers or someone that did. And now I question everything.” - @laurchastain22 on Twitter
“Deconstruction” has become a cringey word in Christian circles. It’s a convenient word of choice for many, including people who are trying to put words to their loss of faith in institutions, loss of faith in general, and their loss of a previous reality. It’s also a word used by leaders who strongly oppose the questioning of beliefs. They'll say that it isn't a denial of doubts, but I've found it's just a denial of doubts they're not comfortable addressing. For me, deconstruction is a word that could be interchangeable with “nuke.” It feels like a bomb went off in the Lego house that was my faith, and pieces of my faith house went flying into the stratosphere. My Lego house will never be the same. In early 2020, I dove into a discipleship podcast that retold the Bible not as I had learned it, but in the Eastern way that it was written. I learned Hebrew literary devices used to communicate priorities that had been glazed over in my upbringing. The purpose of the podcast is to bring people closer to God and the writers of the Bible, but it felt like the closer I got to them the farther I got from the faith that I had known. If I can’t trust my leaders to communicate truth to me, who can I trust? It felt and feels like everything I had learned was doubtful. I, someone who has devoted years of my life to ministry, countless nights to staying up late with students, talking about how to give their doubts to God and trust their leaders to lead them, am now completely lost. I’ve slowly lost faith in every institution of faith that has molded me, and when people ask me what I believe I have no honest answer. My faith has built to this moment for years, and it feels like I’m at a dead end.
Deconstruction deniers
Ever since this bomb went off, I’ve been semi-publicly critical of the systems I’ve lost faith in. I’ve had my fair share of concerned looks from friends who aren’t on the same page as me. I’ve also had my fair share of the “hey man, let’s get some coffee!” or if I’m lucky I get some free dinner out of the concerned conversations. One question that’s stuck with me since the beginning was “hey, have you tried forgiveness? That’s what Jesus is all about. Forgive the church.” On the other side of this coin, my best friend and brother by choice said the following words, that I’ve also remembered word-for-word since he said it: “I don’t know if this means anything to you, but I’m praying for you. Every day.” This brought and brings me back to the community in Christ that I hold so dear. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about those words means the world to me.
I've already mentioned Matt Chandler as a church leader who heavily impacted my college years. He wrote books used in my ministry classes, he led conferences that I only dreamed of going to, and he leads multiple churches that have impacted hundreds of thousands of people. His intelligence and influencing power is undeniable, which is why this clip hurt so badly to watch. Chandler, after realizing what he said, later followed this up with a quick “but if you’re in this stage I will love and care for you and we can get through it together” (NOT an exact quote, just my understanding a summary of his follow-up statements).
I’d be lying if I said that at one point in my life I didn't wholeheartedly agree with Chandler here and contributed to the reductionism. “If you only knew the beauty, the power, and the true love that comes from Christ Jesus you’d understand. If you follow this sexy trend of disbelief you never really were a Christian.” The disconnect here is obvious to me now, but it’s hard to be in the shoes of deconstruction until it slaps you in the face.
“a few bad apples”
I think the main contributing factor in what took me so long in coming to these realizations was the “not all churches” mentality. In the same way that not all men are guilty of sexual assault, not even close to all churches and leaders are guilty of unchecked abuse and unhealthy power dynamics. Is it an unfortunate reality that a woman in a room alone with a man who she doesn’t know would cause her stress, however? I’d say the answer is yes. Let me defer to a quote with an unknown author here:
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“If someone gets food poisoning from a chef’s cooking at a restaurant once, they’ll most likely hesitate to go back to that restaurant but blame it on the chef. If they share their experience in confidence and realize that thousands of people have gotten this exact food poisoning from multiple branches of that restaurant, a call to action will be in order. How is Christianity immune to this?”
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I’m writing this section the day after Matt Chandler, mentioned above, was asked by the elders of his church to step down temporarily to focus on his family after using social media to inappropriately messaging a woman that was not his wife. I have no idea how legitimate or serious the claims are. All I know is that he stepped down. This article was released after the death of Ravi Zacharias, one of the most seemingly intelligent men I’ve ever heard speak and who I saw in person at Passion Conference 2020. It outlines the fact that he was found to have “leveraged his reputation as a world-famous Christian apologist to abuse massage therapists in the United States and abroad over more than a decade while the ministry led by his family members and loyal allies failed to hold him accountable.” Brian Houston, leader and son of the founder of Hillsong Church (the church that brought us some of the largest Christian conferences and most recognizable Christian music), is outlined in this article as stepping down after aggressively defending the alleged (but let’s be real, any research shows vast amounts of truth to the allegations) sexual abuse of children by his father. Sick, twisted abuse. The entire Southern Baptist Church is under federal investigation currently for the known cover-ups of the sexual abuse of hundreds, if not thousands, of women and children for decades. Do I need to mention the reputation of the Catholic Church? If you want to see how quickly a maniacal and abusive leader can rise to power, listen to the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. It’s…wild.
“When asked in 2010 about Joshua's conquest of Canaan, Reformed pastor and theologian John Piper declared, without hesitation, ‘It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.’” Rachel Held Evans, Inspired.
It’s tough for me to read that quote and expect anything other than a culture that plays favorites and genuinely thinks one group is better than another, because of fortune. I understand that this quote is a rather Calvinistic take, and I promise that I've considered as many theological views as I could here. It's also tough for me to believe that a leader in this culture's church can't easily cross a line and believe he is completely in the right, because of favor with God. An advertisement for an upcoming Christian conference in Denver featuring Willie Robertson, Tim Tebow, and some other huge evangelical names says "Poverty is not God's plan for your life. Wealth is not a curse; it is provision in the hands of the child of God." That statement and the fact that it was signed off by such leaders is also just...wild. Not only is it a disconnect from the reality of the country and world we live in, it's just a couple steps away from abuse and after seeing it time and time again, I can't believe otherwise.
Even after knowing about these scandals and quotes for years, it really hurts me to see them together and on paper, with Christian culture as their one common denominator. Even though it hurts, my heart won’t allow me to be a part of this any longer, or to contribute to a system that makes it so easy for predators to be celebrated while their prey wonders if life is worth living. In the same breath, I can’t help but think of a quote from Starlight, a character in the tv show The Boys: “…If you jump ship and let the assholes steer, you’re part of the problem.” Honestly, this is a tough one. I’ve done my best to fight back and I have friends who are still in ministry while acknowledging most of these problems. But I simply can’t fight back or associate myself with it anymore. I’ve found some hope in the words of the late Rachel Held Evans, author of Inspired, which is a book quoted multiple times in this blog. I’ve also found hope in David Hayward, AKA nakedpastor on social medias, who is also quoted in this blog. He's a former pastor who has quite the knack for visually communicating problems that are almost only felt. Other than a tweet here and there, or an “exvangelical” or two on TikTok, it’s been hard to feel anything but alone after I jumped ship.
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I woke up this morning to a text from a friend that simply read, “do you still believe in God?” I didn’t know how to respond. Fortunately, I’ve been able to find enough pieces of my Lego house to have this to say: “I’m gonna go with yes, but the extent is currently uncertain. I vehemently do not believe in the systems or bible that we’ve created for Christianity.”
part three. mourning
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“Rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is a connection.” -Brene Browne, The Gift of Imperfection”
“We cannot selectively numb.” -Also Brene Brown, also The Gift of Imperfection
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I haven’t been to a church in many months. I’ve stopped going. 4/5ths of my way through a degree with a minor in Ministry. After 23 years spent in church 3 times a week, leading younger and older people than me to Jesus. Baptizing people. After spending years being employed by some churches and volunteering for many others. I’ve been slowly backing away from my certainty in these institutions and their interpretation of their book of standards, noticing more and more things that just…can’t be right, and having conversations with new friends that have different futures than I’ve ever been exposed to.
There is a depth to the life I've felt that I can’t express in words on a page which took years to form. Countless hours of reading, listening, and observing my former self and institutions. I’ve been watching critically, doing my best to put myself in the shoes of someone who didn’t grow up in church like I did. Part of me dreads hitting the “post” button on this blog because of how many people will feel personally attacked by my words. Part of me is excited to see who thinks I’m talking about them when they most likely didn’t even cross my mind to use as an example. Some things that have given me both some chuckles and some worry have been the times when I’ve posted a retort to an absolutely dismal take or a response to someone’s groupthink, holier-than-thou and not-even-backed-by-scripture post and the original posters have taken my response as an insult to their character. To be honest, those responses are more telling to one’s character than a misinformed post. So much of what I see now reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Evans in Inspired:
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“It seems as though since the Bible is an advocate for the oppressed, there’s a battle going on to win the 'I’m more oppressed than you' competition so we can earn the application of God’s favor. We want to read ourselves into the pages so we can be justified in having a leg up on others.”
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Frankly I’m embarrassed for but not surprised about the church’s reaction as a whole to topics such as student debt forgiveness. I definitely think Jesus would be right alongside you if he was an American citizen with Facebook, saying “where’s my $10,000? I paid my loans already and I didn’t get a gender studies degree.” The idea that Jesus would post something like that is sarcasm, if it wasn’t disgustingly obvious. However, I saw someone who spoke a lot of life into me as a kid, A PASTOR post those words in the last week almost verbatim. In the words of Ben Marsh, some other random pastor I just followed on Twitter:
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“Everyone thinks they’re the Prodigal.No one thinks they’re the Older Brother.Which is the point.”
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Speaking as honestly as I feel convicted to, these are posts and reflections that people should be ashamed of, and I hope they’re looked back upon with regret someday soon. These are posts and reflections that leave me, someone who mourns the loss of my desire to share the good news as part of this culture, with a terrible taste in my mouth and a “good riddance” in my heart. There were times when I felt I was truly struggling through this alone that I went to the social media pages of leaders I followed and once respected, in search of some kind of hope and interpretation of God’s word that would give me any kind of inspiration. All I got, however, were posts as long as their testimonies about how glad they were that their children didn’t have to wear a “tyrannical” mask to school anymore, and the fact that this brought them to tears. All I got were posts about the “correct” sides taken by the “righteous.” All I got were the “do it our way or be damned” paragraphs that were applauded and cheered on by people I used to applaud and cheer alongside. How can I exist in a circle where my beliefs and studied convictions no longer make me welcome if I say them?
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Were the hot takes worth it? Was it worth it to choose to be “right” over choosing to love and protect? Was it worth the dismissal of hurting and oppressed people in order to stay in your bubble, you who are called to not have a bubble? And to those who said nothing, changed the youth group rules to avoid facing the difficulty of losing a leader, those who decided the unit of marriage was more sacred than fleeing abuse, was it worth it to allow this to happen in your churches? Was it worth your perceived peace to leave the grey areas grey in hopes that your old people would die off, as has been anticipated for hundreds of old-fashioned years?In a similar breath, when did Jesus’s message change? When did it become about domination as a world power, a physical fight of good versus evil, and a star-spangled promised land? And when did Jesus’s message become about timidity, to cower and allow the loud racist grandpa to hold the microphone instead of the woman who had waited her whole life to speak? I see 21st Century Pharisees. I don’t see my brothers and sisters.
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At this point, I’ve lost the thing that was more important to me than romantic relationships, more important to me than my mental health, more important to me than any physical human, and more important to me than myself.
I have lost an entire reality that I couldn’t go back to if I tried, and believe me. I’ve tried. I’ve lost faith in American Christianity as I knew it, and the hole in my heart was built over the span of two decades. I can’t align myself with such a painful experience for people who don’t look, act, and think like me.
I haven't know what to do, honestly. I don’t know where to turn, and I don’t know what’s real and what’s a fabrication anymore. A question pangs in my mind: which, if any, of my experiences were legitimate? How many times was my impressionable mind used in order to get a response that would keep me invested? Even more jarring, how many times did I, in ministry, subconsciously use the fact that I was working with impressionable youth in order to justify an agenda that harmed those same youth? Was Matt Chandler right? Was I never a Christian at all, did I care about my own experience and "moral code" more than the people I served? There is nowhere to turn. I’m not angry, though I feign it to make my emotions make sense sometimes. I’m heartbroken at the loss of my reality, and I can’t describe it in any way other than mourning. The mold that formed me has shattered, and it feels like I also have shattered along with it. How am I to carry on?
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I feel like I just woke up from one of those dreams that feels so real that you get sad when you wake up, because you were so invested. But, like, times one thousand. I can honestly say that I’m mourning. I'm grieving. The hole of grief for my Christianity hasn't gone away, but I've at least grown around it enough to write about it.
a short conclusion
Not that it’s my responsibility to say this, but I want to go into what this means for my personal walk with God, and what's next for me. It's with great difficulty that I've come to this point in my life, and there is a certain high value that I've placed on the result of my struggles. Pride, if you will. If I know anything about God, it's that he follows us around with an eraser to delete the boxes we make for ourselves. This concept is captured perfectly here by David Hayward.
I don't think there is much more to say here, other than the fact that I will continue to devote myself to hearing everyone out, I'll devote myself to continued learning, and I'll devote myself to that of which I am certain: God is Love. I think hell, or Gahenna as Jesus references, is so much more physical than we've been led to believe. I will continue to flee from the death which comes from selfishness, corruption, and greed. I think C.S. Lewis captures a superb vision of hell and those who occupy it in his book The Great Divorce. It's an amazing collection of words that while not fully based in known facts (what literature about hell truly can be based in facts, at the end of the day?), paints a perfect picture of a "where is my $10,000" population that is very prevalent in American Christianity.
I've found a scattered and broken community of people with no home, and I've found hope in their words. Scrolling through the Facebook of a former guest speaker in one of my ministry classes the other day, I found this beautiful quote:
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“...Evangelicalism is failing to be known for love. It's failing to be known for progress. It's simply failing. I don't think that's a recent trend, and I feel naive in some ways for only seeing it the last decade, but it does still feel like grief. I feel like I'm continually grieving the loss of that grand project. But I'm also discovering that love was never so bound to a particular project, and that's giving me hope and life again." -Spenser Wilson Bolte
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I could go on for pages and for days, and I'll probably want to revise this blog more than the hundreds of times that I already have. But I think I've said my piece. I'm ready to move on into a reality which I'm allowed to fully take responsibility for, one where I continue to be a student in hopes that I can contribute to our society in a positive way. I'm excited for my creativity to take hold in my life, combining what I've learned about myself with what I've learned about others. This blog has taken me on a deep dive into a darkness of life that I never want to go through again. Whether I come out of the fog as a church-attending Christian or something else entirely, I trust that I'll be guided to the exact place that I need to be. I would appreciate prayers, as always. I also would appreciate conversations. This process, while I think I'm done writing about it, is just beginning. This isn't an arrogant post about the questions I've found answers to. Quite the opposite, actually. This is a public acknowledgment that I'm just beginning to realize that I don't have the first thing about life, death, or the hereafter figured out. It's funny to read these words as I write them, realizing that after all of the struggling, pain, and tears, I've come to the exact place many before me have been. I'm thankful for those who have written songs (check out music and blogs by Andrew Blooms), made videos, and have been patient enough with me to recommend books and have conversations with me about my doubts and my wanderings.
This will be the last time I post on this blog. With that in mind, I can't even begin to express my appreciation for you, reader. Even if you started this marathon of a post and didn't finish it, I am thankful for your willingness to let me speak to you. Even if you've only read one word of any blog I've ever posted, I appreciate you so much. It's the promise of my friends and family to hear me out and read what I have to say that's gotten me through many times where I've wanted to give up and not pursue my heart's callings. I'm finishing this blog on a dreary late-summer day, close to 20 months after beginning its construction in my mind.
Dreary days are not only perfect for endings, they're perfect for new beginnings.
~mason
