YOUR PASTOR IS FULL OF IT.
October 2012
NOTE: I originally wrote this about 15 years ago. It later became part of a book called Wreck Your Self. I'm reposting these essays here alongside my current writing. They've held up pretty well- although I've come out the other side with a lot less anger and a lot more peace. I regret none of it.
Growing up I thought my church existed to preserve, protect, and promote the “good news” of the gospel to a lost world.
The problem with a heavy-handed focus on passing our faith to others is that we can forget to make that faith our own first. We can become so obsessed with information transmission that we forget this whole “God’s love thing” isn’t about information at all.
Information transmission depicts the Gospel as an answer to a cosmic riddle necessary for unlocking the gates of heaven for those who properly preserve, protect, and promote the correct gospel. It requires us to know the precise password in the correct sequential order and to do everything possible to share the correctly preserved password with others.
A theology made up of linear, sequential, and formulaic thinking sets the tone for constantly being afraid that we might not know the correct information in the correct order, presented in the correct manner.
It creates a culture of Christianity that is preoccupied with behaving well and emphasizes connecting with God later instead of now.
It uses fear, anxiety, and shame to perpetuate a performance-based, behavior-centric self-righteousness designed to control the human spirit and rob us of being with God in the present moment.
Sunday school taught me that if I didn’t believe in the right things I would spend forever in hell, separated from (a loving) God with no chance or hope of redemption.
WTF?
Isn’t the gospel meant to be good news?
What’s so good about a God who wants to save us but can’t?
Was Jesus sent to save the world or to give it his best shot?
How is this pseudo-salvation anything more than trading the self-righteousness of obeying the right things for the self-righteousness of believing the right things?
Is there really a new covenant between God and humanity? Or are we just polishing up the old covenant and calling it version 2.0?
God loves us so much he’ll let us choose to go to hell? Are these really our options? Love God or go to hell?
Using fear, manipulation, and intimidation to share God’s love is like dating at gunpoint.
It forces a high-stakes logical decision of not wanting to burn in hell more than it invites us into daring to know ourselves as loved and valued and enough.
Although I’m scared of it, I’m holding out for a love that stands in violent opposition to my performance-based self-righteousness and offers a radical new possibility for something truly scandalous and worthy of being called the good news.
If you think your pastor’s, priest’s, or minister’s role in your life is to hear God on your behalf and tell you what to think or believe, you will likely pay a price. Letting them dish out answers can deprive you of the process of entering into the mystery of God’s love for yourself.
These answers often try to explain God’s love at the expense of letting you actually experience it.
If I’m dissatisfied with the answers I get in church, I can point the finger back at myself because I’m just as much to blame for creating a demand for answers within community as any leader who pretends to have them.
Answers feed a brand of spiritual consumerism that devours and discards. It conditions us to crave biased sound bites and predetermined programming that reinforces what we want to hear instead of encouraging us to vulnerably engage in raw communal experiences that unleash the power of discovering whom and whose we are.
Before I become disgruntled with incorrect answers, a leader who can’t live up to their promises, or the dull sound of correctness in my ears, I need to take a good look in the mirror to see the person I’m most upset with.
Because getting upset with a church or minister for letting me down can be like getting upset with a prostitute for giving me cheap, meaningless sex.
It’s too easy to complain about Christian culture, throwing stones as we protest (protest-antism) for what we think community could or should be.
It’s too easy to point out the flaws and mistakes, insisting that if only we had more of this or less of that we’d be okay.
And it’s too easy to distract ourselves from the present moment, missing the presence of God by requiring others to be perfect when I am just as full of it as they are.
If you’re part of a church community whose leader is creating a culture of correct answers, maybe it doesn’t have to be your cue to leave (and maybe it does). It might be an invitation to engage further by taking them off the pedestal of correctness you’ve mutually constructed and allowing yourself to love them—just as you’re learning to love yourself.
Because at the end of the day, Christian leaders are full of shit.
And they’re a gift from God.
Reminding us that we, too, bring hope and heresy to the table of community.
Giving us permission to disagree and accept instead of disagreeing and discarding others based on their beliefs or behavior.
Showmanship, organization, and efficiency make running a church more comfortable, profitable, and fun—but it’s probably the brokenness, messiness, and incompetence that leave room for God to do His best work in us.
So instead of positioning ourselves in the world as people who have it all together, maybe we could try owning up to the fact that we don’t have it all together—and that we’re loved and celebrated by God just the same.
May we not miss the miracle of a loving God who continues to reveal Himself to us through bad theology, dysfunctional Christian community, and flawed human leadership.
— October 2012
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