If you grew up in an evangelical setting, you must have heard of white American globe-trotting evangelist Billy Graham. If you are unchurched but alive today, chances are, you’ve heard of Billy Graham. Graham was for the white American evangelical world what Elvis Presley was for white American Rock n Roll in the 50s. A myth, a legend, a star, and also, many forget, human.
Billy Graham traveled the world over speaking about the restorative and redemptive work of Jesus Christ and preaching a gospel of personal transformation. You too, he would say, can be born again. Your sins will be forgiven if you will accept Jesus into your heart.
“Come as you are.” Was quite the famous line in his crusade. Always a welcoming environment for people seeking change, seeking religious reformation.
A very personal gospel message that beckoned the individual to turn her life over to Christ for eternal security and reconciliation between the person and God.
Graham’s sermons were beautiful and if you listen to them today you’ll find they are just as convincing and powerful as they were then. If the man had anything he had conviction.
Thankfully, I am not here to discuss Graham’s gospel preaching or his evangelistic efforts. For that, the man deserves credit because his ministry has produced a plethora of testimonies, many of which, we shall only understand and rejoice over in Glory.
But I am here to discuss how white American culture, more so, how white American 1950s and 1960s culture and its understanding of gender norms and expectations formed a set of social rules then that impact us in the evangelical sphere to this day — negatively so. Around the same time, Billy Graham and his team, assisted by Cliff Barrows, George Beverly Shea, and Grady Wilson, met in Modesto, California to develop a ministry morals standard for themselves and other evangelists and leaders in their vocation. This was put together to reduce the number of scandals in the evangelical world and produce an inner and outer appearance of moral rectitude, which had been missing or compromised by felled religious leaders of the day.
Now, considering the acceleration of Christian circle scandals that riddled the news, it seemed appropriate for a group of believers to come together with a better understanding of what is required of them in modern times throughout their ministerial undertakings and personal responsibilities. And in this meeting, the men came up with four ideas or metrics by which to judge the health of their ethics and ministry.
The Modesto Manifesto
The first was financial transparency in an age of Christian greed; the second, sexual purity in an age of sexual liberation; the third, ecumenical efforts in an age of fundamentalist tribalism; and the fourth, the accuracy of events, numbers, and credentials in an age of duplicity, lying, and dishonesty for popularity’s sake.
Again, these are honorable efforts put forth by the group to make sure that their ministries, and their personal lives, were above scrutiny, as the Bible demands of followers of Christ.
But sometimes, not always, sometimes, certain corrections, without nuance or clarification, when they generalize and offer little explanation as to how those corrections were formed over cultural and traditional, national and racial lines, can become over-corrections, thus, creating even more problems for those who adhere to them.
The second rule in Graham’s Modesto Manifesto deals with sexual morality, or rather, one that grapples with the temptation of sexual immorality. It is the rule that this entire segment became known for, a rule Billy Graham followed to the very end, if it was up to him, while he was in control of his mind. This rule would be followed by numerous evangelical leaders and ultimately make national headlines again when Donald Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, would celebrate it from the White House.
“We all knew of evangelists who had fallen into immorality while separated from their families by travel. We pledged among ourselves to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. From that day on, I did not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife. We determined that the Apostle Paul’s mandate to the young pastor Timothy would be ours as well: “Flee … youthful lusts” (2 Timothy 1:22, KJV).”
It’s interesting to note that from that day forward, Graham did not travel, meet, nor did he, according to him, eat alone with a woman other than his wife ever again. This is revealing, one, because of the level of commitment, it takes a man to avoid being alone in a room with someone of the opposite sex, whose sex estimates well over three billion people on the planet. There being three billion of anything is cause enough for awareness, but isolation and separation? Impossible.
Graham’s second rule, where a man is not to be alone with a woman other than his wife, is ripe with condemnation without even knowing it.
Here’s why.
One, this rule generalizes women as sexual deviants who, left alone with a man in a room, no matter the room or the setting, work, campaign trail, lunch meeting, or as a nurse in a doctor’s office, will, without that man’s consent, ravage him. This notion is asinine because it portrays women as agents lacking self-control, moved by licentious desires, unashamedly promiscuous, according to those who adhere to Graham’s line of reasoning.
Women are not vessels of unrestrained lusts. Women are entirely in control of their thoughts, actions, compulsions, and desires. They’re not animalistic brutes who descend to sensual madness at the opportunity of being alone in a room with a member of the opposite sex.
What a farce.
Two, this rule, again, places the blame on women. This is age-old escapist nonsense men have plagued women with for centuries, if not millennia. If something does occur between the two individuals who are left alone in a room, it must have been the woman’s fault. As the only one able to consent or resist — because men are unable to restrain their boyish desires — if they fail to scream out for help or fail to stop things from progressing, they are solely at fault.
Once the ministry leader’s sexual scandal makes the airwaves, he’ll peg the woman as a “seductress” whose “promiscuous” advances were too powerful for him to resist. Resembling the work of a “she-devil” she entrapped him, grabbing him by the “unmentionable,” and from there, it was all history. And that’s why we are taught to forgive the man because he’s the victim here, his assailant, a 110 lbs sex witch that caught him alone in the lunchroom and proceeded to violate him while he sipped his tea and read his Bible.
It’s nonsense. I’m using sarcasm and humor here because blaming women for men’s inability to control themselves is a sad and resilient virus that refuses to die in our culture. So to cope, I make light of a grave and grievous situation.
Three, a man ought to be in control of his moral compass. In control of his faculties. If a man, especially a man of the cloth, cannot control himself when alone with a member of the opposite sex, then, by God, he ought not to be in ministry. He should not be in a position of influence, power, or authority ever again. He’s a predator in the making.
I cannot imagine Jesus, meeting the Samaritan woman at the well and thinking to himself, “Maybe I should wait for my apostles to get back before conversing with this woman. I mean, she might trip on that bucket l and land in my arms, where we kiss, romance, wed, make dozens of babies, until, the next woman I meet at the well comes around and trips on something else.”
That’s so stupid. No, I’m not sorry.
Jesus met with that woman alone because He had integrity, even if, EVEN IF she did not, He would have remained integral. And I’m not suggesting she was a sexual deviant or a saint, she could have been one or the other, it would not have changed Jesus’ posture toward her while the two sat and conversed by the well about faith, God, life, water, worship, and relationships. Jesus upheld His part of the ethical bargain, independent of the same being reciprocated or not.
Therefore… therefore… there… fore…
As I conversed with a friend via Instagram about the Billy Graham Rule, specifically rule number two, we got into discussing that the rule would have been more helpful and wise if it required individual integrity over distanced suspicion and isolation.
You see, when someone is integral, they’re complete, whole, satisfied, undivided in their attentiveness to honoring people made in the Image of God. They’re honoring, just, and kind, in the face of someone else’s vulnerability.
Dr. Diane Langberg, a psychologist and author, wrote an eye-opening book, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church. In this book, she mentions a question she lays before the countless ministers she has counseled over the years. And I’ll paraphrase her quandary.
“If you, being a pastor, are counseling a woman who is experiencing a great deal of trouble in life and in the middle of a counseling session she stands, begins to undress, is nude and vulnerable before you, and the two of you are alone, where does your mind go? Where does your heart go?”
The question, I admit, is answered in two different places.
One, we answer this question publicly and openly, “I would tell her to dress up and get out of my office! That temptress! Damn her!”
The other, we answer in our hearts, in the place no one but us and God can see, and God knows what our answers tend to be. Too often, we have read reports, cover-ups, and lawsuits concerning what happens in these situations. Men in power, men with influence, men with authority, instead of portraying the likeness of Christ in the presence of the vulnerable, become the devil, ravaging and devouring people looking for help.
“Come to me,” Says the morally complicit pastor counseling the vulnerable woman. “And I will give you rest. But keep this between the two of us or else…”
So we must admit that Billy Graham’s Rule is problematic. It’s an over-correction, not a solution. It’s an escape, not a confrontation. It displaces blame, shifts blame, and generalizes women as sexual deviants, who, as I said earlier, given the opportunity, according to Graham’s rule, will devour men whenever alone with them.
There is, of course, wisdom in not placing oneself in a situation where, without a doubt, it seems suspicious.
Houston, We Have A Liquor Problem
Hillsong’s main pastor, Brian Houston, has been caught in hot water because he attended a meeting of some sort and after this meeting, he went for drinks and after drinking himself nearly blind, he went up to his hotel room for the night. Once there, he either misplaced his room keycard or was unable to properly use the keycard he had in hand to access his room. Under this fog of inebriation, Houston proceeds to a church colleague’s room, a woman, knocks on her door and then enters. There they remain alone for more than forty minutes. Both denied anything happened. And we have no evidence of anything having happened, because, no evidence was ever produced. Nor has the woman admitted or come forward with the fact that the two engaged in anything even remotely sexual.
But this scene, of course, is the extreme any married AND single person has to avoid because it does create an aura of suspicion. I mean, considering our current hook-up culture and the history of evangelical sex scandals, Houston should have known better. It is without a doubt that it was possible, in those forty minutes, that one’s moral compass could have wavered, their ability to resist temptation, dissipated, and there, a sexual act or several, could have taken place. And the truth, no one knows.
Brian admitted to the idiocy of his choices that night, having drunk too much, and then mixing sleeping or anxiety pills with his liquor, before proceeding to his coworkers’ hotel room. The two of them alone. His wife was nowhere in sight.
The curiosity here, and I’m being frank, not critical, even if I do end up sounding critical, for that I apologize, because there are certain things I do not understand and that’s fine because my intelligence is limited and finite. But here’s the thing, why blame moral failings on alcohol, drugs, anxiety, mental illness, and the opportunity of that woman being there.
Listen, Dr. Wade Mullen goes into detail on how men (and women, sometimes) use certain tactics to divest themselves of responsibility once they commit a predatory crime. In his book, Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse–And Freeing Yourself from Its Power, he offers insight into why abusers, predators, malcontent power-hungry, sex-crazed, and responsibility-for-wrongs-committed-averse leaders give us such excuses.
“Abusers and abusive organizations may concede the basic reality of the wrong—“Yes, this happened”—but quickly add statements that either soften their responsibility or promote their integrity: “We value all people and only want what is best for everyone involved.” If these concessions do their job, the accused will stay in power, stay in favor with the community, and stay far from the shame their actions deserve.”
And listen, I’m not here to say that people are beyond redemption and reconciliation, but we must better understand what those things mean when people fail, morally, I mean.
One, take responsibility for your failings, instead of, say, blaming some agent or narcotic. Or worse, blaming your victim.
Here’s a healthy, albeit imperfect example I’ve come up with in my mind:
“Listen, everyone, I was sexually repressed or sexually uncontrolled and I enticed my coworker (or classmate, students, etc), under the guise of trust, bypassing the reality of our power-dynamic relationship, and I engaged in what I now understand as a non-consensual act with her. I am now resigning from my position to seek counsel, professional counsel, and I do not look forward to returning to leadership, but to fellowship, in God’s time. I’m sorry to all, and most all, I apologize to the victim of my uncontrolled passions. You did nothing to deserve this. It was my fault.”
Now, that sounds dreamy, almost, to consider someone admitting to the reality of their intentions and the gravity of their actions with such brevity and transparency, and that would do wonders for us instead of covering our mistakes over with alcohol, Ambien, seductresses, etc.
Graham’s Rule would and could be revised to state:
“No matter what situation you are in and who you are with, for however long, you must reflect the character of Christ in that environment. If the person you are with fails to live up to Christ’s calling, more so, His admonishments on sexual ethics, that is not an excuse, nor a vote of confidence, for you to forego your integrity. In every situation, interaction, relationship, friendship, and meeting, whomever you are with, man, woman, or child, reflect Jesus.”
That seems more prudent. More wholesome. That way, whenever someone does step out of line, should they ever, it will not be a woman’s fault or society’s healthy understanding of social interactions’ fault.
Every woman we meet, no matter the situation, deserves to see Christ reflected in us. And this does not mean we proselytize or evangelize every woman we meet, say, a woman stopping by a vending machine for grape soda only to have Mr. Jenkins show up to ask her if she has sipped from the fountain of life yet or not.
No. That’s creepy.
It means we reflect Christ’s integrity in every interaction. We befriend, we respect, we listen, we learn, and we… well… we act like normal people. There’s no need to sexualize everything in the world, conversations with co-workers, colleagues, classmates, and strangers of the opposite sex.
Closing Thoughts
If you’re afraid that any or most interactions with a member of the opposite sex will devolve into a sexual act, then, my friend, the issue here is within your heart, not with socially acceptable interactions and meetings between two people of the opposite sex.
You need professional counseling and spiritual advice to help you determine why you see women (or men) as sexual objects to be perverted and abused by you. From there, professionals will guide you further toward recovery.
And we must, at all costs, as Dr. Diane Langberg states, combat the notion that we must return flawed characters to power. We must strive and strain to hold wrongs and sins accountable in hopes of restoring that person to fellowship, not power.
We’re often plagued by this lust for power and results that once our most talented advocate succumbs to a scandal we want nothing more than to see them forgiven, celebrated, and restored to their position of mass production. It’s the temptation of the evangelical industrial complex.
But that is unbiblical and to be honest, it fails to bring that person to a state of true repentance and change. They’re just re-platformed and given a new license through which they will abuse and tarnish the sheep again.
In all, allow Christ to be in your heart and mind when with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Do not, under any circumstance, use that situation as an excuse to compromise your morals, ethics, and faith, for the sake of fleeting passions, only to then blame a substance or a woman for your very personal and spiritually compromised decisions.
“Don’t rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and the younger women as sisters with all purity.” 1 Timothy 5:1-2
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
“One of the most influential books of the last 20 years.” — Chronicle of Higher Educatio
“A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.” — MIT Press
“The Nazis were not the first to burn children. God’s people did so long before.” – Dr. Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power
“Then the Lord said to me: ‘Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before me, my heart would not go out to this people. Send them away from my presence! Let them go! And if they ask you, ‘Where shall we go?’ tell them, ‘This is what the Lord says:
‘Those destined for death, to death; those for the sword, to the sword; those for starvation, to starvation; those for captivity, to captivity.’
‘I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,’ declares the Lord, ‘the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds and the wild animals to devour and destroy. I will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah did in Jerusalem.’” Jeremiah 15:1-4
Those of us familiar with Old Testament literature understand the tragic history surrounding Jewish monarchs who ascended to power only to squander their name, leadership, and faith in hopes of attaining favor with local sovereignties or in pursuit of fleeting pleasures.
King Manasseh began his rule over Judah at the age of twelve. A boy, an adolescent, with the keys to the kingdom. The son of a popular and well-liked king Hezekiah, whose honorable religious reforms had spread throughout Judah had died and left the young boy-king with large shoes to fill. Set on leaving behind his distinct legacy, Manasseh set off to accomplish the necessary tasks required of every Jewish king since David. Love God, learn God’s laws and commandments, observe those laws, protect God’s people, the Israelites, more so, those belonging to the southern kingdom of Judah (and Benjamin), and under no circumstance break any of the edicts listed under the Ten Commandments.
When Manasseh began to instill the opposite of everything required of a Jewish king, his legacy would be riddled with wickedness. He incensed the people’s desire for idols, gods, and spirits that other nations worshipped and sacrificed grain and animals to for the continuance of blessings over land, wealth, and fertility. The young king went on to rebuild the “high places” his father, Hezekiah, had torn down during his reign. These hills, mountain tops, and cliffs served as prominent places of worship, where people would visit them, build structures, and serve at their altars and the feet of obelisks erected for Semitic deities, Baal and Asheroth. They worshipped the “host of heaven,” more firmly, they worshipped spiritual entities, celestial beings, spirits, and wraiths, serving them however the spirits influenced them.
Understanding Jewish theology, you must remember that the only place in which the Jews were allowed to worship God or at least offer sacrifices to the Creator God was in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Anyone who dared worship anywhere else was considered an outcast, a heretic, a pagan. So the fires that littered the horizon of Judah; abhorrent symbols of worship and service to other gods in the land of monotheism, were an affront to everything the Abrahamic faith and Mosaic laws stood for.
Manasseh went on to further incense the pious clerics he was sworn to revere by erecting altars for the “host of heaven” in the two courts in the Solomon’s Temple, where sacrifices and worship were offered to the omnipotent Yahweh. A sacrilegious act, forced upon the people of Judea at the hands of their king. Unchallenged and relentless, the young king would not listen to his pious counselors, nor the priests in the temple they ministered in.
What came next was, at the time, previously unheard of, even for a morally compromised Judean king.
Manasseh, the young king, would grow, would wed, and father many children. A number of these, the Bible does not state how many, were offered as a sacrifice in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom. Although historians question the explicit meaning of “offering one’s children to the fire” we can understand that whatever process that ensued was not for the benefit of Manasseh’s children. Other historians dictate that a particular sect in that region would start a fire in a pit, and at the mouth of the pit stood a bronze bull or a statue with its arms extended over the fire. Once its extended arms turned red hot from the heat emitted by the flames, a child was tossed on them, burned, and then rolled into the pit as a sacrifice to the deity in question. This process, the barbarity with which religious zealots killed their children seems a bit far-fetched if we didn’t have evidence of similar grotesque sacrifice rituals taking place in other, more recent cultures as well.
It seems inconceivable that the leader of Judah, the people after God’s heart, selected from the many, reduced to such a small, albeit very powerful and geographically strategic location in Palestine, could be known for worshipping the God of deliverance and protector of life whilst sacrificing children in the fires of paganism in the valley of death.
Manasseh went on to seek seers, fortune tellers, omens, sorcerers, and mystics as if there were no prophet of God in the land, nor words etched in stone by the fingers of God for guidance and encouragement.
The young king sought the spiritual advice of mediums and necromancers, people who delved into the dark arts, the mysterious aspect of conversing with the dead to gain influence over the living. A practice punishable by death in some cultures, the Jewish one included. But who could challenge the young king? Who would dare speak up against the monarch whose power and influence was unmatched and rarely questioned?
If he was willing to throw his children into the fire what then could he do with a serf? A peasant? A religious cleric?
The last knowable defilement Manasseh brought to his name and his people was instilling a carved image of an idol in the temple of God. Previously, he had left some altars, however large or small, in the outer courts of the temple, but here, he progressed, not just in depravity by killing his children, but also killing his spiritual well-being but outing Yahweh from the throne of his heart and substituting the Divine with something less, something mundane, handmade to suit his desires.
Again, Dr. Langberg’s quote rings true in history and haunts us in the present.
“The Nazis were not the first to burn children. God’s people did so long before.”
Those of us who are students of history, however amateur our endeavors may be in the science, understand that what Nazi Germany accomplished via the Holocaust will stick with humanity for eons, until, that is, something more nefarious and systemic replaces it in our history books.
Is it too difficult to believe that what happened under the Nazi regime will never happen again under a different regime? Are we so blind to our humanity to believe that we are beyond that level of hatred for a neighbor today?
We want to believe that what the Nazis did was unique to Germany in the 1930s-1940s. No other civilized group has ever devolved to such a horrendous sequence of murders to that scale. But to understand human beings we must understand the perpetual human potential for violence and that it is never beneath us to devolve or perhaps evolve to that level of violence again.
Dr. Langberg makes an accurate observation that we want to avoid at all costs.
“God’s people did so long before.”
The people of God would never!
We always say.
They would never harm children! But they offered them as a sacrifice in the fire to Baal.
They would never harm the poor! But they exploited them for the sake of wealth.
They would never harm women! But they raped them, in the village, in front of a house, in the king’s palace.
They would never harm someone of another faith! But the European crusades.
They would never harm someone who believed differently! And the Catholic inquisitions.
They would never harm a mystic! But they burned them at the stake, drowned them, threw them from buildings, and stabbed them where they fell.
They would never discriminate based on race or ethnicity! Sir, have you not studied the doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, chattel slavery, Reconstruction, or Jim Crow? Better yet, have you not studied the last four to five hundred years of European imperialism and Western colonialism?
They would never harm women! What of the hundreds, if not thousands of years of sexist traditionalism that has become canon in the church? The numerous cases of protecting wife beaters by not believing women when they come forward with the stories of their abuse?
They would never harm children! Have you not studied the abuses of the Catholic church? The Houston Chronicle’s investigative report on the Southern Baptist Convention’s willingness to hide, protect, and platform predators? Have there not been volumes upon volumes of lawsuits against religious institutions for hiding the criminal conduct of sexual predators against children?
The Legacy of Burning Children at the Altar
Yes, Manasseh’s series of depravities indeed forced God’s hand into destroying Jerusalem. He used the Assyrian kingdom to lay waste to the ten kingdoms of the north, known as Israel. And then he used Nebuchadnezzar and his nearly indomitable Babylonian army to decimate the two kingdoms to the south, Judah and Benjamin, and take their remaining survivors into captivity for seventy years. One king’s efforts, his collective influence, Judah’s gullibility, and their religious clerics’ lack of integrity, and the overall national embarrassment of being known as God’s chosen people only to behave as the opposite would be the legacy Manasseh left behind.
God’s people were people who burned children alive.
But we burn people on the altar too.
Fair, we aren’t bowing before beasts made of bronze, silver, or gold. Those are the idols of the ancient world. No. Today our fires burn in the pits of systems, institutions, and celebrities. We sacrifice our women at the altar of male leadership, our children at the altar of predatory youth ministers, our corporate integrity at the altar of political syncretism, and our evangelistic outreach at the altar of doctrines formed by culture and geo-political events.
Like the young Jewish king, we seek the advice of mediums and necromancers, but we don’t use those names, we call them secular humanist life coaches spewing pantheistic teachings for gain and astrologists keeping the masses idiotized by looking up instead of forward, whose varied advices usher us toward a search for meaning and purpose in a finite universe with nihilistic philosophies.
In her book, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church, Dr. Diane Langberg mentions the sad events of the Rwandan genocide. She visited Rwanda to help, assist, and be part of the recovery process which followed the nightmare situation that unfolded in Rwanda as nearly a million people were slaughtered in less than one hundred days.
The world stood by and did nothing as thousands were hounded, rounded up, and massacred, at times, in front of cameras.
She mentions how churches opened their doors to victims only for those refugees to be slaughtered inside. The church, the safest place in a community, second only to a police station or a healthy home environment, became a tomb for people seeking refuge from bloodthirsty machete-wielding mobs. Church leaders considered the victims subhuman (cockroaches) and an unworthy, filthy ethnic group that deserved annihilation. Clergy and laity sanctioned the killings while others participated, some in their churches, lifting axes and machetes or whatever sharp utensils turned to weapons they could get their hands on to destroy the lives of innocent neighbors whose only crime was being born a Tutsi.
The church became a slaughterhouse and not just one church in an isolated event. Throughout the one hundred-day massacre, multiple church sites were used as entrapment areas to lure people seeking safety to their doors only to kill them when they arrived. If machetes did kill them from within, up close and personal, a barrage of bullets would pepper them from without, at a distance.
The sanctuary was a place where men, women, and children were offered up to the fire.
What I want us to be aware of is the ease with which we can offer our neighbors to the fire today.
Manasseh sacrificed his children to Molech, Baal, Asherah, or the host of heaven. He stood and watched as his offspring, the babies made of bone, flesh, blood, and life, filled with potential and a future, body covered with nerves and skin, perfect in their development and their progress, thrown in a pit of flames, its yelps and screams swallowed by scorching flames.
A man responsible for overseeing the nation God, this man, this leader, in the most influential position of the land descended to the darkest stretch of Jewish history for the sake of religious blessings. False religion to be exact.
So what makes us believe that we are not just as capable of committing such atrocities within our circles? We have created our fiefdoms with our varied denominations. We have gatekeepers watching for who is in and who is out depending on how one interprets a select passage of scripture. Others use ex-communication as if it were the only tool in the box of church disciplinary action.
The church is ripe with abuse of power and new idols.
Systems that invoke power, influence, dominance, and control. Systems that were produced initially to benefit some have been used to exploit others. Church bodies become oppressors instead of siding with the oppressed, just to get a piece of the power pie. To challenge political systems, policies, and concepts is to challenge the very church because the line between the two systems is non-existent now. Those who speak up are called anti-this or contra-that. Iconoclasts and disgruntled apostates. Not realizing that the very existence of the system-hungry church is apostate in theory and practice.
Institutions, colleges, seminars, faculties, and colleges that do no wrong. Teachings and teachers who hold on to their traditions and doctrines formed in one region of Europe are held as the only sound method of interpreting and understanding theology, killing anyone on the altar who dares challenge those precepts. The killing, here, isn’t done with sword or gun, it is done with derogatory statements, degrading comments, dismissive tones, and mockery.
Celebrities, in form and habit, take center stage, their victims not far behind. Bodies pile up beneath the altar, as worship bands play louder, smoke machines work in overdrive, and song bridges are repeated ad nauseam to dampen the lucidity of the sheep. Churches are plagued with the idolization of talented men and gifted women. Favoring the results-driven ministries over those focused on discipleship and integrity. Number build churches into megachurches, and megachurches become empires in their cities and states. Buildings and churches are made in the image of their teachers, following their every word as if it were the words of God. And when the truth of their misconduct, their wrongdoing, their coverup comes to light we cover for them because their giftedness supersedes their flaws.
In the same breath, we are more willing to restore broken men and women to power than we are to restore them to fellowship.
Damned, be power. It corrupts. Those who are corrupt already and take on the mantle of leadership further corrupt everyone around them.
The churches they lead become mass graves, spiritual mass graves as abuse runs rampant behind celebrity leaders.
From apologists to hipster Manhattanites to Quiverfull proselytes and televangelists hucksters, the cult of personality, celebrity status pastors and teachers, the Jesus 2.0 apostles, are surrounded by corpses.
They stand knee-deep in the blood, suffering, and spiritual disillusionment of the people they were called to serve but who they have delivered to the fires for the sake of power, influence, network time, conference seats, book deals, and front-page newspaper exposure.
What is a celebrity leader without a scandal? Who is the celebrity leader without a very public failure by which to round up the most ardent and loyal disciples around him? If failure will not unite the corrupt, success will. And a redemption story rakes in cash and new friends does it not?
Rwandan churches had compromised their integrity for political and cultural gain, but what is to be said of the German church that existed comfortably throughout the Nazi regime’s reign of terror?
What is to be said of the church in Germany where Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, wanderers, and those struggling with mental illnesses sought refuge in the church only to be loaded into train carts instead by clergy and laity?
The connection between the German church and the Nazi party was so well established that many avoided the church for fear of being apprehended by clergymen with ties to the Nazi regime.
Can you imagine men and women fleeing the church because it represented capture, imprisonment, torture, deportation, and extermination?
I can.
Before Hitler asked that children be burned in the fire, God’s people were burning people in the fire.
Things have yet to change, except, how we kill one another has advanced to the point of perfection. Our hands are often absent of ash and blood but still, the trail of bodies stretches behind us.
The young girl who was subjected to volleys of sexual assault by the talented youth leader is told to keep quiet because she probably deserved and enjoyed the “interaction” between them. The youth leader will be protected from law enforcement, vindicated by the church board, and later re-platformed as a champion of Christian ethics because look at the spiritual assault here endured! Consider how the youth program has swelled with new and fresh faces over the years! Should we now hamper this progress?
Consider the young woman who is the victim of constant battering and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, a choir director at their church, who will come forward with her abuse and be thoroughly silenced by the church board. How dare she go against her husband so publicly. Plus, the bruises she incurred were probably self-inflicted. Who are we to believe? The successful and charismatic choir director or the reclusive and embittered wife who seldom attends church anymore? The church will side with the husband when the wife contacts law enforcement, the church will even pay for his lawyer fees and bail. The church is here to care for those behind bars is it not? So it will financially support the wife-beater, pray for his soul, pray against his disgruntled wife, shame her from the pulpit before the congregation, and finally excommunicate her for not forgiving her husband as a godly wife is expected to.
Consider the young black minority member in the church, who, after enduring years of overt and covert racial animosity from fellow church members, is asked to leave the church or shut up about racial inequities in the world. The church does not condone such divisive talk. Anything that references racism is most likely a Marxist ploy to undermine the church anyway. Therefore, that member will be ostracized and blamed for the racial uproar in the church, although their only sin was believing a church-run by racists was capable of repenting of its hatred. Racist church members will grow fat with hubris as they pat one another on the back, explaining to everyone how there isn’t a racist bone in their body, nor one of racial animosity toward any member of a minority group. They say these and other things, of course, from the comfort and safety of their racially monochromatic church body. White pastors, white teachers, white choir directors, white board members, white worship band members who sing worship songs written, produced, and recorded by white people who live in white people’s havens. They will claim ignorance because they are ignorant and damned be the colored person who dares accuse them of racial awareness. To them, being color-blind, blind even to their race, is their safest bet in the world. Should anyone point it out, they will have to deal with the reality of their surroundings and the many people they have kept away from their church.
The bodies pile up. Their scent festers. Their rot is laid bare for the world to see.
Is this what the church does to people? Is this what God’s people are capable of, in the name of Jesus?
What To Do With The Bodies
The church sites in Germany where many were carted away from, led, usually, under the threat of corporal punishment if not death, were either destroyed by allied forces firebombs or demolished after the war. Those that survived the war were rebuilt and remodeled. Some that were razed to the ground were rebuilt. There is seldom a memory of the horrors that occurred within them because those sites are either home to new churches that have different goals or they have become visitor centers where services to God are seldom held but tourism and picture taking are welcome. A sitting priest or cleric welcomes all in, to gaze at the marvels of ancient cathedrals, walking to and fro, from stainless glass window to spire, in awe of a structure that once represented lofty piety and later horror and now ambivalence and distant memories.
German churches have moved on from their horrid complicity of yesteryear.
Church sites in Rwanda, however, have remained mostly untouched. Some of them house pyramids of skulls within. Bones of the deceased litter the inside of the church, piled up, some, five bodies high.
Their gaunt, skinless, lifeless structures gaze back at us as we look at them. We, of course, walk into the church, watch them watching us, and we leave, minding our next destination, not caring much for the gravity of the mass grave found within the church.
It’s easy, is it not, for us to move on from such a sight. How we look on, our minds barely touching the surface of the screams, the blood, the severed limbs, ruptured skulls, and crushed bones. Did boots stomp on those tiny skulls to deform them? Were those tiny skulls deformed before they died? How about the bones that are split in half. Did that violent act take place before that poor soul expired or after? What about the bullet holes found in the back of skulls? Were those mercy killings, to save the person from the horrors of rape that often took place before the altar? Did that bullet, hurling faster than the speed of sound, fired from no more than several feet away from the victim’s head, travel across that bridge of space and time in an act of love? Bullets travel with love too, you know. Love of country, family, race, and political party. They travel to stop the evil-doer next door. Evil with a name and a face, a family, and a future. Evil, of course, is a minor ethnic difference, in this case. One that doesn’t elevate nor diminish, it is something, well, determined merely by local leaders and national politicians. A whim. They determined who was evil and who deserved a hug from the projectiles launched from their guns over several days.
What do we say in the presence of such horror? More so, what does such horror say in the presence of God?
If one looks to the walls in these churches they will see pictures of saints, crosses hanging from nails, and the occasional scripture etched into them but in the center of the room you find bodies, dead, long dead, but still speaking.
Who will speak for us? If not God’s people then who?
If fact, I ask the same. If God’s people, the ones who have been ushered into the world with a message of hope, love, restitution, conciliation, redemption, and more, fail to live up to those admirable virtues only to turn on them, taking up instead, the mantles of hate, violence, power, oppression, armaments, machetes, and rape, what then?
If the children of the light are more depraved than the children of darkness, what hope has the world?
If the church, a symbol of hope, of love, of Christlikeness is hellbent on murder, rape, assault, abuse, and coverup, where are we headed?
Where Will God Go?
I’m reminded of the sequence of events in the Old Testament where Israel’s perpetual backsliding leads God’s Spirit to exit the sanctuary because God would not tolerate the worship of a wayward and corrupt people. He would not sit idly by, sanctioning intrepid idolatry, male prostitutes offering their services from the temple grounds, the poor growing poorer, the wealthy growing fatter at the poor’s expense, the Laws of Guidance and Fruition serving no other purpose than enslaving the masses and empowering religious autocrats.
It is to our benefit that God distances himself from the corruption of the soul.
He will either annihilate us all or distance Himself from us for a time, for our benefit.
Hope In The Face of Desolation
A strange thing happens in the life of the young king. Toward the end of his misery, the life of wickedness no longer suits him. The sin that festered in him began to chip gnaw at his soul.
After living with such depravity for so long, a person learns that there is no glory, no fame, no existential fulfillment at the end of it. The seeking after the wind, pursuance of sounds in the shadows, and the hope that the dead speak back to us are all, in the end, futile ventures.
Manasseh had sold his soul and his children to Mesopotamian spirits, searching after something only Yahweh could provide: rest for a weary soul.
He prays a prayer we have no record of, recorded only in the “records of the seers” and some presume the recorded prayers that have withstood the test of time are apocryphal, thereby not authentic and extra-biblical.
We have no resolute and accurate idea of the prayer but attempting to reach his mind in that state of repentance, we can come up with an idea of what his prayer might have sounded like.
What Have I Done? – A Prayer by Manasseh
“O, God, my God, Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Creator and Deliverer, Life-Giver, Rescuer of my soul. How I have sinned against you, My misery fills the air around me, Wickedness chokes the joy from me. Where will I go to find relief? Who will hear the complaint of a murderer? I have sought the death of my children for gain, And have lost more than I ever dared and wanted. I sought the council of witches, seers, and the dead. I have yet to hear the truth. I have yet to see light. O, God, my God, What have I done? Is there forgiveness left for me? Am I destined for the end I surely deserve? No matter how harsh, how grim, how destructive, I have merited it, and more! Destroy in me the me who sought after idols, Those of stone, wood, silver, gold; Of jade, ruby, and pleasure. Burn up from within me the lust for power, The greed for control, the haste for disobedience. My children, my children; How I wish I could join you in that fire, That the flames would consume me and deliver you, How I long to be by your side and you by mine. Will there be an end to my suffering, Lord? I hope not, for I surely deserve more. Forgiveness, I need it, but I am undeserving of it. Hear the rending of my heart, the failing of my soul, And relieve me, O, Lord, of the burden of life itself. From you, from all, I deserve woe. I deserve woe.”
We know not what it was Manasseh said but prayers, however intelligible or not, lucid or mumbling about, baby-like, are heard by God. He seeks and searches the depths of a man’s heart; He understands the wallows, fright, and desperation found in a woman’s heart; He comprehends the unspoken-ness of brokenness derived from sin and He bends down toward us and heals.
Where God finds it in His being to forgive such ills, I do not know. I cannot know for I am not God but I know that I seek this love, this selflessness, this giving of liberation, daily in my life.
God restored Manasseh to glory, respect, and honor. Not without temporal consequences, of course.
And God can restore the church too, you know.
The residence of bones and dried blood can be a residence of restoration and hope, again.
The structure where babies were massacred can be revitalized as a place where babies are saved and protected.
They can, yes, they can, if we dare, if we will, if we decide to return to God.
And this isn’t a televangelists’ call to open air-tent preaching with hell-fire and brimstone invective.
This is an opportunity to see the church be that which we all expect of it. To behave as the world demands it. As Christ commanded it.
Outside of this, outside of this hope, namely, Christ’s love reflected on His people, we will see nothing more, nothing less, than bones and death in the church of “god.”
Not Yahweh the Deliverer, the I AM, but the god of death.
If we change not, we will be servants in the slaughterhouse of god.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
“[A] book that’s ignited an enormous amount of argument and debate across the length and breadth of the Christian intelligentsia . . . Du Mez meticulously documents how–time and again–Christian institutions have indulged and often valorized aggressive hyper-masculine male leaders who proved to be corrupt, exploitive, and abusive. They weren’t protectors. They were predators.” — David French, The Dispatch
“A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.” — MIT Press
Someone needs to hear this: God is love and God loves you.
Some of you were taught otherwise and it shows. The myopic view of God as a spiteful, rage-filled deity has discouraged many from seeking God.
Many of us grew up in faith communities that spoke bounteously about God’s punitive justice (abatement of evil) and sparingly about God’s reparative justice (restoration of good(s) lost in the sinful state).
And God’s justice is not punitive alone as many of you have been taught to believe. (Hellfire and brimstone preaching, anyone?)
Here is Timothy Keller on Herman Bavinck’s interpretation of divine justice:
“In his magisterial work on God’s attributes, Herman Bavinck argues that in the Bible, God’s justice is both retributive and reparative. It not only punishes evildoing, but it restores those who are victims of injustice. Yet interestingly, “God’s remunerative [restorative] justice is far more prominent in Scripture than his retributive justice.” God stands against “perverting the justice due the poor… slaying the innocent and righteous… accepting bribes…. oppressing the alien, the widow, and the orphan…” God “raises them to a position of honor and well-being… Doing justice with an eye to the needy becomes an act [also] of grace and mercy.” And therefore, God’s restorative justice “is not, like his anger, opposed to his steadfast love but is closely akin and synonymous with it.” His justice is “simultaneously the manifestation of his grace (Psalm 97:11-12; 112:3-6; 116:5; 118:15-19).”
One of the reasons why some of us hold hostile notions toward organized religion and suspicious sentiments toward communities of faith is because our understanding of God’s love and justice was twisted by nescient individuals within these institutions whose goal was to enslave us, not liberate us with the gospel message.
Our receptivity of God’s love for us is either amplified by a healthy understanding of God and His word or crushed by men (and women) who improperly use that same word to control people.
God reassures us that justice is a great thing. Especially when that justice is meted out to thwart and abate evil. God’s justice is also reparative in the sense that it is necessary to restore dilapidated souls, relationships, families, and communities.
God is not only in the business of neutralizing evil in the human heart. It is just of Him to stop evil. We need God to stop evil ‘out there’ in the world, physical and metaphysical, and, His grace allowing, ‘in here’ in reference to our community and also to the human heart.
God is love and this love demands that justice must exist and that it must be effective in a fallen world. We’re taught that sin breeds evil and that sin is entrenched in every heart thus postulating that every person has the propensity for evil.
Justice demands that sin be excised and abolished because its ramifications if left unchecked, spreads in the heart of the individual and in his community thus producing sinful structures.
Sin is destructive to the self and it creates systemic evils.
God’s punitive justice demands the sin in us be abolished but that sin is so engraved in our nature that to destroy sin God would have to destroy us. That’s normally what many of us know about the gospel and about redemption. Outside of the substitution of the cross, we are left on this earth as the receptacles of the full weight of God’s punitive justice; deservedly so.
That’s all some of us know. That’s all some of us were ever taught.
Divine Justice = Punishment.
Divine Justice = Punishment.
Divine Justice = Punishment.
Learning about God must entail we learn as much as has been made available to us about God, meaning, learning more about divine justice being both retributive and reparative.
Meaning, God’s justice is set in motion not only to confront evil, which is actually an amazing thing, but also to restore that which was lost, stolen, hijacked, kidnapped, and ruined in us by sin.
Imagine a court is set in motion to hold criminals accountable for their crimes, which is a necessary aspect of a civilized society. But we must also remember that the judicial system exists to restore that which was stolen, pay back that which was sifted, repair that which was broken, remunerate where and when possible in accordance with the law.
Our earthly courts have demonstrated just how problematic it can be to only exhibit one form of justice whilst ignoring the other.
Take, for example, an innocent man wrongly convicted and forced to serve a twenty-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. Someone falsely accused him of something, his public defender was too over-encumbered with other cases to take him seriously, he was offered a plea deal to lighten the time spent behind bars, evidence was falsified against him by law enforcement, and the jury was biased against him because of the color of his skin.
Imagine fifteen years into his sentence he is exonerated. His name is cleared by his initial accuser, who still walks about free. The court does not apologize for its missteps. His public defender abandoned him years earlier. The police officers who falsified his confession have since retired with hearty pensions, without consequence. And this exonerated soul is set free into a different world from the one he left once he was incarcerated and he has no money or land to his name.
The courts did right by punishing evil (or at least it thought it did by punishing someone for a crime) but it failed to restore and repair that which was broken once the truth came out.
Justice must punish wrongdoing and at the same time, it must repair the breach the initial wrong caused.
Divine Justice is equally retributive and reparative.
What would make this case end on a brighter note is to imagine the man exonerated, his accusers jailed and tried for falsifying evidence, statements, perjury, and fraud. And also, that the court apologizes for its initial mistake and then repays the man the millions and millions of dollars owed to him for the harms he suffered behind bars all those years and as a means by which he can restart his life with something rather than nothing to his name.
The police officers involved must then lose their pensions for falsifying evidence. This seems extreme but perjury is a crime that deserves a consequence.
Justice is set in motion to hold wrongdoing accountable and deliver the victim of these wrongs into a place, a state of being, an identification of being restored by the systems set in place to restore righteousness to the land.
Justice is righteous, you know.
The cross is where punitive and reparative justice intersects to benefit us spiritually and physically.
Christ is punished for our sins and Christ is also the avenue by which we are restored not only to God but also to one another.
“Behold, I am making all things new.” Revelations 21:5 is not indicative of just the new heavens and the new earth, but of a new people, transformed into the likeness of Jesus, living, breathing, operating, and working to live as He did on earth.
So, in light of this renewal, this indwelling, this transformative Person guiding us through life, we must walk as He did, restoring, repairing, and restituting wherever possible.
This is hope-inspiring for victims of abuse, mistreatment, violence, terror, and all categories of wrongs. It is refreshing to know that God is bent toward justice and He seeks not only to obstruct evil but also the infrastructure created by sin on which evil travels.
God’s justice abates evil and repairs brokenness.
If you are a victim, a destitute soul who has been harmed by a sinful world, seek God’s justice, not just in this life but the next.
To rectify wrongs and heal wounds.
Thank God we can seek both.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
What am I to you, World, but a passing stranger? A vagabond hitchhiking through your darkest corridors, going about shining the light of my Master. What have I to offer you World? A corpse. That’s all. Have I brought gifts; absolutely. Invitations really, to the greatest of all festivities, the grandest of all banquets; yes, even the largest supper you’ve ever witnessed, dear World. But, the truth is you will not accept this invitation from above, no, you will willingly crumble under the sins of past and present; oh yes, even the sins yet to be committed. Tell you what, soon to be destroyed World, the Lord is gracious and has promised to make you new as well. Did you really think the Creator would only focus on us humans? Absolutely not! Yes, your hopes are up even though you endure intense pains. Despair not World, for as a flower is crushed a perfume is made. With your death and destruction, a new place will be made and you will be new just like in the beginning. I cannot wait to meet you then and enjoy your beauty.
I launched this blog one year ago today. It began as a medium by which to better understand a craft, understand how I think and how those thoughts come out on paper (or on-screen), to better develop my prose, and practice just enough to the point where I don’t feel miserable when writing my first book.
By the way, I’m almost halfway through that first book. More to come about that in the future.
Looking back I am so happy that I started this page. It helps me think and perhaps it confuses me even more. Tackling history, church history, theology, faith, and relationships often lead the inquirer to more questions than answers.
And from time to time, that’s okay.
We were never to have all the answers all to ourselves. We learn best in a community and we grow better in a healthy community. And this blog is one of many communities.
I hope to improve my craft not only for myself but for you, dear reader, as well. Stories shape us. Great stories encourage and inspire us. I hope to inspire not just you but my girls. So that one day, when they decide to read their dad’s shenanigans they can understand the man I am, the man I was, and the man I aspire to be, through my writings.
108 posts down. Here are some of my favorite ones since Olivet Theory officially launched one year ago today!
The “Gospel+” Movement: Why Simplicity Matters
“The simpler the gospel becomes the closer we are to it. Whenever we add an idea, belief systems, a depraved ideology or rules by which to attain that which Christ has already accomplished we are lightyears away from the truth.”
MTD vs Christianity Proper
“MTD isn’t a religion, like Islam or Judaism. It is more of a disintegration of one particular faith, namely Christianity, that melts into ideals that have been spiritualized and inculcated into American religious circles.”
Marital Advice for the Uninitiated
“Far too many problems arise in marriage because people want so much to live like, behave like, be empowered by, attain the same level of status like, promote a sense of stability like and be unimaginatively in love like power couples they see on social media or in their community.”
How “Policy Over Character” Destroys Our Christian Witness
“White evangelicals within the United States have lost their witness to the world by voting for a vile and abusive bully who paid a porn star hush money to keep his affair a secret.”
Avoiding Extremes: A Word of Caution From a Former Fundamentalist
“Therefore, an extreme effort was undertaken by the male-led authoritarian ministers’ caste to shame, denounce, vilify, and destroy people into submission to modes and methods to separate the church from the world.”
Giftedness vs Fruitfulness: The Hidden Dangers of Following Gifted Church Leaders
“Check and see if what you seek, who you follow, and what you promote is reflective of the biblical Christ or if it is but a dim and dreary shadow of our savior poorly illustrated by gifted leaders.”
My Top Ten Rules for Girl Dads
“Love, be patient, listen, play, and yes, mess up from time to time so that she can see that dad is human and that dad knows how to humble himself enough and apologize for his mistakes.”
Ravi Zacharias
“We cannot allow truth to die in darkness for fear of losing influence and money. That was lost the day we decided to trust in the influence and giftedness of man over the eternally restorative and transformative power of Christ.”
A Painful Rediscovery: A Look Into Where My Heart & Mind Are Today
“Mumbling some sort of prayer up to God, not sure if I asked for forgiveness for my feelings, my words, my rage, or if what I felt was a fear of these words making their way on to the screens of the very people who had hurt me. In my fear I wanted to avoid offending them, for having offended me.”
The Burden of History & The Curse of Heritage
“It is easier to remove a commandment from the law of God than it is to distance Southern Baptists from their southern heritage of racism, hate, and evil.”
Olivet Theory’s Bad Advice Series: Chapter 3 – How to Talk About Race and Racism
“Disregard those notions. Go ahead and say what you have to say however you want to say it. Interrupt their conversation and speak as loud as possible. Do it all without the slightest urge to listen to anything they might have to add to this discussion.”
I Am A Neo-Evangelical
“I am a neo-evangelical and God has rescued me from fundamentalism and delivered me from stagnant middle-stance, middle-class centric Christianity that accomplishes much while it accomplishes nothing in mainline evangelicalism.”
Here Is Why We Left Mill Creek Christian Assembly
“t would be foolish to think that racism was the sole reason behind my family leaving a white church. It was a lack of compassion that led me to an irrevocable decision. A decision that brought me angst.”
Here’s to another year of blogging, story-telling, craft-development, book reviewing, and trouble-making!
Note: 408 days have passed since we left Mill Creek Christian Assembly. Our last day as members of that community was July 26, 2020, I first wrote this post on February 7, 2021, and I am publishing it today. It grew like a balloon in my heart, swelling with time, and today is the day I set it free.
Why write about it if it ain’t pretty?
One: It’s the truth. We left in haste and without a word so as not to tarnish a fragile structure. Many wondered why, some assumed, others spread rumors, all, in ignorance, of course. The Truth sets us free and the truth with a lower case ‘t’ helps clear the air. So get your stories straight.
Two: Racism is still a big problem in the Church. Racism is still a problem at the MCCA church. If racism is not confronted and excised from a Christian community it tarnishes that community’s Christian witness. Now that the issue of racism has been raised it is my hope that this community will venture to rectify that which went wrong. Not with me but with its own history.
Three: Start more conversations about history. Not just white-washed history that you learned in grammar school but comprehensive history. Especially the history of how the Church helped destroy so much, kill so many, enslave so many more, and has now decided to remain silent about its participation in the horrors of the past. If we cannot discuss these issues with love, empathy, and lament in the church, then they will be discussed without love, empathy, and lament, outside the church.
We cherish the MCCA community. We love its youth community which we helped rebuild and reform by God’s grace. And please understand that we harbor no grudge against this community and its members; not even toward the ones whose behaviors and comments persuaded us to leave in the first place. This is why I have redacted snippets of information from this post to protect their identity and their safety.
Olivet Theory
Curiosity, Masked Suspicion, and Possible Animosity
It would be foolish to think that racism was the sole reason behind my family leaving a white church. It was a lack of compassion that led me to an irrevocable decision. A decision that brought me angst.
“We have the privilege of having a dark handsome brother with us today.”
Those were words the assistant pastor said from the pulpit my first time in attendance.
Oh my God! Did he single me out because of the color of my skin? In front of everyone?
I did what any black person in the same situation would have in a moment of unimaginable shame, I laughed it off. I mean, it’s funny to identify your visitors by the color of their skin, isn’t it? If they’re offended by this amicable jest then they’re snowflakes.
Service came to an end, we were glad to be on our way out when the same assistant pastor greeted us at the exit.
“It’s so nice to finally have some color in this church. We’re happy to have you here.”
He was so enthused by my presence that I couldn’t help but reciprocate the same energy. I’ve never met a white brother who seemed so excited to meet a black man.
What I presumed to be an anomaly turned out to be a precedent of dated buffoonery worthy of contempt. I would endure an intermittent barrage of racially insensitive comments and gestures like these for the next three and a half years.
Interactions
The Deflection
I sparked up a conversation with a member of the praise and worship team about race, politics, and life in Canada. Here we discussed the brokenness of the world we lived in. We unraveled the polarizing effect social media has on the masses. I shared a harmful experience from my past with him. A horrible situation where a county clerk told me to return to my country. The reason for my visit to the DMV that day was to inquire about why my driver’s license was taking so long to arrive. She advised me that it was better to wait for my documents while living in the United States of America. Or I could complain from the comfort of whatever country I was from.
This gentleman’s response to this event was as ignorant as they come.
“Well, I have friends of color who haven’t experienced any form of racism in Canada.”
His deflection from the topic we were discussing was so evident I blurred out his next few sentences. It’s as if the absence of racial injustice in one part thus erases its existence elsewhere.
Lazy. Dirty. Leeches.
“They’re lazy, dirty people who love to leech off of white people.”
Those were the words out of the mouth of another brother who had returned from the Bahamas. He was none too bothered by the comment. There was an air of pride under his statement. I wanted only to greet him, ask about his trip to the tropics, and welcome him back to the fold. My curiosity about his trip was innocent and hopeful. I’ve yet to have the privilege of visiting this Caribbean paradise so I wanted to hear from him, first hand, about it.
“It was good. We got a tan. Now I almost look like you.” Nervous laughter. These belittling comments were a customary form of conversation with this particular brother. I asked him about the locals, their warm and receptive character to which he replies.
“They’re lazy, dirty people who love to leech off of white people.”
This happened right after a Sunday morning service. We were waiting in line for complimentary snacks.
Conversations
George Floyd’s lynching rekindled the fight against police brutality. Later that same year, Breonna Taylor’s murder accentuated this first cause. It was impossible to avoid public demonstrations that took root around the world. Conversations about racial injustice were unavoidable. I took the initiative to share several links on my personal social media account. Links about police reform. Stories of racial profiling. Black history through the lens of black Americans. History stemming from 1619 through to 2020. These posts allowed for restorative conversations with friends across the world. We understood each other’s pain and vowed to honor this cause.
These interactions were all helpful. Refreshing. Discussing race and injustice with friends was so therapeutic. And then June 5th hit and I checked my Facebook messages.
“I’m pretty sure that black people would have treated white people the same way as white(s) treated black (people) had they been in a position to do so.” Said one church brother who I respected.
“I’ve always thought that in Canada racism is not that much of an issue.” He continued. “At least I’ve never encountered one (issue of racism) myself.”
“I’ve been enjoying your ministry in our predominantly white church.” At which point I knew where these comments had come from. “I’ve never heard once of a single issue with racism in our church in [redacted] years I’ve been there. I guess you have brought this race-based division to us now.”
Being one of two black attendees of that church I wasn’t shocked. And I was a member of this ministry whereas the other POC was comfortable as a recurring guest. The race issue had taken a backseat in monochromatic churches for centuries. For our church, it was never a topic because it hadn’t been integrated. But here we were. Two colored persons attending a “predominantly white” church and we have race-based division.
But none of this prepared me for the statement that would come next. Sentiments that brewed underneath the surface of this church community for decades went on seemingly untouched. Unmentioned. Words that I read again, again, and again with mouth agape. Unwilling to accept that I had survived so long within a body of believers that saw my people in such a dim light.
“As to [the] hair incident or other negative emotional encounters you’ve described, knowing [the] East European culture, I can hardly see them as manifestations of racism but rather a lack of manners and insensitivity. What if I walked in a predominantly black church? Wouldn’t people stare at me with curiosity, masked suspicion, and possible animosity?”
It is convenient to reduce my hurtful experiences to a lack of manners and insensitivity. To know that the elder who pawed my hair twice was being insensitive. How a brother told me that brown people migrating into Europe would be the end of European society. When asked to elaborate he walked away. How another brother told me Obama and Muslims are what’s wrong with the United States of America. When asked for his source of information he said, “Fox News, where else?” That Bahamians are lazy, dirty, and love to leech off of white people is but lack of manners?
His concluding thought was revelatory. I’ve been a member of diverse church communities for decades. Black, white, brown, yellow, and red. I’ve been a part of well-integrated communities from birth. I’ve never looked at a person from another race with ‘curiosity, masked suspicion, and possible animosity.’ I can speak for my many communities. Confidently so. His perspective of colored people was detrimental to my well-being. It shattered my peace within this community.
Another brother contacted me in hopes of broadening my perspective.
“Police have a lot less reason to profile you here [Canada] for the same reasons why police in the USA [has] a higher legitimate reason to profile you there.”
Reassuring for sure.
I watched as another brother interacted with a popular social media activist. He was responding to a public Instagram post.
“Disappointed with all the famous Christians, pastors and worship leaders who have no idea who #BlackLivesMatter is!”
And his response.
“I’ve traveled to [redacted African nation] [a] few months ago, to love, serve, help and pray for black people…. But not falling for this insanity today. Thank you for speaking up!!!”
This person was a prominent member of our church. A board member of our church. It’s sad that traveling across the world to love, serve, help, and pray for black people was enough to appease his conscience. Enough to discredit hundreds of years of injustice on a local, national, and global scale. Enough to dismiss the calls for racial equality. Enough to discredit our cause. Enough to silence the only two persons of color within his community who dared speak about racial injustice.
His response to this statement was in keeping with how our church thought. I would find this out the following week.
Board Meeting and Final Decision
Our province dealt with the Coronavirus pandemic in an adequate manner. We experienced shutdowns, closures, and canceled services like everyone else. Restrictions had prohibited indoor gatherings in March but were eased in mid-June. Our church leadership and board scheduled a meeting to discuss our safe return to church initiative. We were to discuss safety measures, attendance numbers, sanitation, and other health-related topics. I was not a member of the board but my pastor invited me to take part because I was the youth leader. Our meetings would return to normal as well so I thought it would be prudent to attend.
Our pastor began the meeting with prayer and went into his introduction.
“Brothers, thank you for being here. Before we start I want to advise our church members who are posting about Black Lives Matter on social media to desist. There are brothers complaining about it and we want to avoid unrest. Thank you. Now let’s discuss our return to church packet.”
You can imagine my shock. One of two black people in the church. The only black person in that meeting. The only person who was discussing racial justice on social media. And personally invited to take part in this board meeting. This was how the meeting began? These were the first words out of my leader’s mouth? Now?
This meeting is about how coronavirus has affected our church gatherings. It is about how we can protect our church members who opt for in-person services. A meeting to proactively protect our vulnerable and elderly members. How to best follow provincial and federal guidelines.
But the meeting becomes a point from which our church denounces Black Lives Matter. A podium from which we halt any discussion about race on our personal social media platforms. An institution that silences the only two black voices it has left. George Floyd’s death? Silence. Breonna Taylor’s murder? Silence. The cries of my fellow colored brothers and sisters? A leftist liberal plot to take over the world.
My mind was a blur for the next thirty minutes. I felt sick to my stomach. The way the meeting started to have an effect on the members of the board. Eyes hovered my way and sat over my presence. I cannot recall what was said about safety, cleaning, limited attendance, and other topics. I cannot recall what happened next. But for thirty minutes I sat and simmered.
I have to leave this place. I no longer feel welcome here. My peace is gone.
I excused myself, got up from my chair, and walked out. That day it was decided for me that I no longer belonged there. I agreed.
Exit
A month after this meeting I had the opportunity to preach, which I did, with all my heart. After service, I handed my pastor my letter of leave. I handed a similar letter to my fellow youth leaders. I hugged them goodbye and left.
My pastor then invited me for a sit-down where we discussed these interactions, private discussions, and his meeting opener. He was sad that my family decided to leave. Sad that we felt the way we did. He didn’t believe race was the issue. He even invited me to come back and hold an open forum on race which I declined.
“Pastor, the other black member of our church is a trained professional who knows how to discuss these issues professionally. Invite him to speak and teach the church.”
He shrugged. He didn’t believe the church would listen to that individual. Mind you, that individual is a university professor, holds a doctorate in sociology, and is a published author.
When I pressed him again about how our church had a race problem he again distanced himself from the idea. That the gospel should be the focus of our efforts, not social issues.
We finished our coffee. My mind was made. He again pressed for me to stay, “What about the youth?”
I knew tactics like these were used to guilt people into staying in environments where they continue to suffer abuse.
“Christ began the work. Christ will complete the work, pastor.”
I’ve witnessed four of the fifteen youth members I served walk down the waters of baptism. Two before my leave. Two after I left. Christ will guide their faith. I believe this to be so.
Once news of us leaving the church became public I received another Facebook message.
“News broke that you are leaving MCCA. I hope the reason you’re leaving is not rooted in the theme of our above conversation. Whatever it might be, it is always sad to see a member of [the] church leave, especially a valuable one. It’s been nice to have. Your ministry has been a blessing to my family and myself. May God bless you on your spiritual journey!”
This being the same brother I respect who also said:
“The biggest enemy of [the] black community is their victim mentality and bitterness, which does breed the culture of violence. […] In my opinion, the more you raise in [a] judgemental manner the topic of racism, the more ruin, and division you’ll bring to our community. It is as offensive to us, white people, to be branded racists, as for black people to be called slaves. People will go into defensive mode, they’ll become more distant and hostile. […] When you think we mistreat you in MCCA, think about the fact [of] how quickly you rose to [a] position of respect and leadership. You preach on Sundays, you lead and teach our youth, the doors of P&W [praise and worship] group are wide open to you too. Isn’t that the manifestation of the highest degree of trust and respect our predominantly white church has shown to you? Man, I’ve been in our congregation for [REDACTED] years and I haven’t achieved half of your success.”
Progress
Seven months have passed since this last meeting. My family has found a new church family that understands the wrongs of the world around it. It doesn’t distance itself from pain. It doesn’t hide behind the Bible. Behind gospel-onlyism. It confronts individual and collective sin. It loves expository preaching. It loves social efforts. It lives for Christ.
The other person of color within the church, the professor, had a conversation with the pastor. He was more than willing to start an open forum on race. He was willing to lead this restorative discussion in hopes of mending the racial gap within the church. He was then dismissed by the leadership. His efforts were not accepted. His intellectual expertise on the subject was dismissed. A professor, nonetheless, dismissed.
He phoned me after to share with me his many run-ins with members who suffer from a lack of manners and insensitivity. Members who suffer from diarrhea of the mouth. His words. We mourned. We felt ashamed. Pain. He said he would never set foot in that place again.
I don’t blame him.
“This church is struggling with a hardness [of heart] that might stem from past trauma. National trauma that was left unresolved. It has made it hard for them to empathize with our pain.”
To which I agreed, wholeheartedly. The world struggled with the coronavirus pandemic. Our church struggled with the endemic evil of racism. An evil ignored.
I feel like I can breathe, again. As if I can be myself, again. I no longer have to repress emotions because someone reaches for my hair. No one reaches for my hair anymore. We don’t have nativist sentiments. We don’t harbor a hidden hatred for immigrants. Especially those of brown skin. We don’t harbor hatred for Muslims. Or anyone of a different faith.
My wife isn’t approached by church members inquiring about when she got pregnant. When we got married. Members who are surprised that she and I share the same faith. She isn’t approached by church members who feign shock at how dark my girls look.
My wife is white. She was born in Germany. Yes, that white. My girls are mixed. To no one’s surprise wife is more comfortable in our new diverse church community than this previous one. She is a sister in Christ. Not a lab specimen. Where her private life is subject to scrutiny because she married a black man.
Here we see people. We acknowledge their trauma. We feel their pain. We walk with them to restore that which was taken. That which was lost. We are living the way Christ called us to live again. Preaching and living the gospel.
Whoever visits our new church; no matter their skin color or walk of life, will not be a victim of curiosity, masked suspicion, and possible animosity.
“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 1:6
Thank Christ.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Growing up in a Brazilian offshoot of the Assemblies of God taught me so much about the Bible, Biblical characters, faith, prayer, church community, developed in me a fervency for social reform, the temperance movement (anti-alcohol consumption), the holiness movement (high ethical standards and separation from what is deemed sacrilegious), the pentecostal movement (continuationist belief of spiritual gifts such as, speaking in tongues [glossolalia], new revelation [prophecies], interpretation of tongues, healings, miracles, signs, wonders, gift of discernment and etc.).
I grew up in a church of diverse people groups, both wealthy and impoverished, white and black, mixed, even. Former drug and alcohol abusers and users. Former sex trafficking victims. Former wife beaters. Former battered wives. Abuse survivors, really. Former drug kingpins and cartel leaders (some from within my family). I grew up listening to the story of one of my family members exchanging gunfire with police officers, surviving the firefight, although not unscathed as some of them would show me bullet wounds. One family member still has bullets lodged in his body, deemed non removable by surgeons lest they risk his life mid-operation.
Petterson (older brother) and me, stunting. Brazil, ca. 1994-95.
Many of the drug users and criminals within my family became laypeople. Some went on to become clergy, holding pastoral roles after kicking the drugs and crime, the life of substance abuse and homicide (probably), to become emancipators and heralds of the gospel. Reaching their impoverished and crime-ridden communities for Christ. Feeding the poor and preaching a message of holiness, hope, and societal change.
JARDIM. CAMPOS ELISEOS (SEDE DO SETOR) 2.1.01. Google image capture of my church in Campina, Sao Paulo.
I witnessed various transformations in my family and it was a sure reminder that what we believed was what everyone believed. Or at least what everyone else should have believed. Who wouldn’t want drug addicts to kick drugs after attending Christian para-ministry-funded halfway homes and rehabilitation centers? Who wouldn’t want criminals to ditch the life of drug peddling and then take on honest work to support their families? Who wouldn’t want to see a community focused on caring for the poor, gifting children with toys, homes with food, and families with sustenance?
Same Assembly of God, ca. 2016. Youth Conference.
We were part of a movement that promoted pastors into politics and politicians to the pulpit. There was no divide. Pastor so-and-so would preach at our church on Sunday and after the sermon, we would give him an offering to help his political campaign. Next Sunday we would host a politician who had a Christian bark but an adulterous bite. Men who wanted votes would sweat on stage to deliver barely substantive Christian messages of hope, love, and political party lines, for the sake of political dominance in our municipality.
Honestly, it felt as if we had monopolized morality, politics, and social work. In a way, we had. At least in my mind, we had. We looked down at Baptist denominations as spiritually dead churches. We thought of the ‘Four Square’ denominations as culturally errant because they did not dress as modest as we did. We thought Presbyterians were theologically compromised because they sipped whiskey, drank beer by the barrel, and smoked Cuban cigars or any make of cigars they could get their hands on. Little mention was made of Methodist/Wesleyan and Episcopalian denominations because our beef was primarily with interdenominational Pentecostals and majority protestant groups, namely, Baptists and Presbies. Baptists because they called us heretics for speaking in tongues and beef with Presbies because they also called us heretics for speaking in tongues but they were drunk when they did so.
We chided Catholics, priests, and nuns as non-Christians because they hailed Mary, worshipped saints, and shunned the Holy Spirit’s spiritual gifts. Not just that, but because they were Catholic and were by definition a morally depraved collective for following every beck and call of the Pope and allowing the Papacy to exist for as long as it did.
We were at war with a culture that perhaps didn’t even know the church, our church, had declared war against it in the first place. Brazil at that time was predominantly religious, most adherents attributing their faith to Catholicism and later Pentecostalism, primarily to the Assemblies of God.
Hate was never named from the pulpit but it was definitely disseminated to anyone who failed to fall in line with our perception of Christianity and holiness standards.
Granted, what the Assemblies of God had in doctrinal prowess and social reform it lacked in clarity of theological thought, compassion, and common sense. I thank this denomination for existing and evangelizing Brazil at the start of the 1900s. White men coming from the North to preach Jesus to Catholics and disenfranchised addicts and impoverished blacks in the Americas. What could go wrong with a Eurocentric theology in a predominantly colored South America?
Anywho, the Assemblies of God espoused love for God, doctrine, holiness standards, and literature. Well, as long as the literature in question was not antithetical to the Bible. Our ministry, as part of the Assemblies of God, was called Assembleia de Deus, Ministerio Belém. Assembly of God, Bethlehem Ministry.
This is where I spent most of my church life. Where I studied scripture, I met pastors who wore the robes of politicians and politicians who covered themselves in sheeps wool to pass as pastors. This is where I developed a love for theology, unaware of what kind of theology it was I was falling in love with, but, nevertheless, a love for God. Here is where I met church friends who made up most if not all of my social circles for years to come.
‘Murica – We Ventured North
Once we immigrated to the United States and settled in Florida, we began to attend church six nights a week. It was community forming and community building. People helping each other out. We spoke Portuguese only because the community was made up of Brazilians with a few scattered Latinos and the rare white American soul who ventured into the building. These Anglophonic individuals came either out of curiosity produced from the loud music we played or because they were dating one of our church members.
Stunting in front of our church in Orlando. ca. 1997-98
Either way, Brazilians in America were opening up churches and ministries for Brazilians. And, the same assiduity that was so fervent in Brazil for doctrinal purity, denominational clarity, focus on spiritual gifts of glossolalia and prophecy, and holiness standards were present in the Brazilian Assemblies of God in the United States.
The small and budding community of the Brazilian Assembly of God, Bethlehem Ministry teams were spreading like wildfire in Florida, Massachusetts, California, and beyond. (As of today, there are Bethlehem Ministry churches in Dallas, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Pittsburg, Columbus, and more spread throughout the United States of America. In the Pacific, there are churches in Honolulu, Kanalui, Wahiawa, Christchurch, Queenstown, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Rockhampton. In the European continent they can be found in Madrid, Almeria, Barcelona, Paris, Orleans, Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zurich, Basel, Munich, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Rome, Bristol, Cardiff, and London. Just to name a few spots. And in the African continent, Mozambique.) Wherever Brazilian immigrants or tourists land, there, in that city, we would open a church and rotate ministers through them so as not to develop independent churches. But the pastor rotation rodeo situation a whole different post.
But in America, (North America), we did not see as many disenfranchised souls as we did in Brazil. In the US., everyone was hyper-individualistic, unlike the community-centric vibe found in the motherland. We could not see the impoverished because we rarely ventured out of the church to evangelize and minister to our communities. And ‘evangelism’ in America simply meant reaching Brazilians in America. Not white Americans. That wasn’t our focus just yet. We wanted nothing more than to grow the Bethlehem Ministry brand by finding and dragging (nicely) as many Brazilians in Orlando, Ft. Myers, Miami, Lighthouse Point, Ft. Lauderdale, Pompano, Vero Beach, Sarasota, Kissimmee, and beyond into our churches as possible.
And we did.
Churches blossomed and swelled from ten to twenty adherents in some parts and in the hundreds and hundreds of members, yes, not just attendees and participants, but members in other parts.
My family first moved to Orlando from Campinas, São Paulo. Well, my dad first moved to Boston with a pastor/politician guy to help the ministry start a church there. When the call to restart a ministry in Orlando, Florida was made, this pastor/politician fellow decided to take my multi-talented instrumentalist dad down to Florida with him. And it is here where we are to arrive to meet up with my dad. In Orlando, we partook in a ministry that grew well and because the ministry was fond of rotating pastors from one church to another they then opened another church in Naples, Florida and that’s where we went next.
The pastor/politician fella didn’t last long in this ministry and was later moved to another church, for reasons unknown or unmentioned, I don’t know because much of it was hush-hush, as is the status quo in churches these days. But my family settled in delightful old Naples, Florida and it is there where we spent most of our time in the US.
Again, evangelistic outreach was an attempt to reach Brazilians in America (North America) for Christ. English-speaking Americans were handed little pamphlets outside of bars, clubs, and large buffets where they would later use them to wipe their nose or just throw them away. We weren’t sure what to do with English speakers other than inviting them to sit through simultaneously translated sermons. Not many members of our church community were able to wield the English language well enough to bring English speakers into our community so we didn’t focus on them that much or at all. This would change but not yet. They would show up, hang out, watch our singers sing, then our worship bands worship, in Portuguese, of course. And towards the end of the service, they would sit through a poorly translated sermon where the minister half-spoke in tongues and half-ministered about hellfire and brimstone. After service, we would have our comes e bebes (coffee, tea, food, and treats; it was a fraternization period) where English speakers were adored, welcomed, and greeted, but few were the church members who actually spent time with them or time getting to know them because we barely spoke their language and they didn’t know a lick of Portuguese. There are Americans we’re talking about here. They barely spoke English well enough.
And remember, this was initially a Brazilian pentecostal ministry in America (North America) with the sole focus of evangelizing unchurched Brazilians and heresy plagued Brazilians who had run off to worship God in pagan centers like Baptist churches.
We wanted nothing but Brazilians and that’s what we got.
Again, in Brazil, evangelism was primarily focused on the poor, disenfranchised, destitute, addicts, and socially oppressed but in North America, we saw abundance, wealth, and lucre. Of course, impoverished families were everywhere but not as visibly so as in Brazil so we had to change our strategies.
As we adapted our youth (myself included) to the culture, assimilating and learning the language, the ministry began to build up new leaders to lead and pastor bilingual church services.
Our initial success paled in comparison with this second wave of evangelistic outreach as our predominantly Brazilian-led services took on Colombian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Argentine, Bolivian, Honduran, Costa Rican, Puerto Rican clergy to lead services in both Spanish and in Portuguese. Because we lived in Florida you can imagine how our Latin American ministry blew up.
The more we integrated with the surrounding culture the more people we managed to bring into the church.
But nowhere was there a higher shift in our evangelistic outreach and ministerial identity than when we focused on the American culture surrounding our churches.
It was here that the fundamentalist aspect of our ministry peaked its head high and above the rest.
You see, American Evangelicalism, in its matured stage in the 1990s and early 2000s had become hyper-political with the rise and prominence of the Moral Majority and the religious Right. Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, Bob Jones University, Jerry Falwell Sr., Liberty University, Fox News, and a plethora of conservative white evangelicals led us to believe that as we reached out to English-speaking North Americans we ought also to join in the culture wars of the land.
Are you an American evangelical?
Mind you, we were already involved in political power struggles in Brazil, hosting and supporting political candidates from the pulpit. But in the US, in the land of the American Dream, culture wars were nefarious, dangerously close, impending doom was imminent, and the end of our Christian witness and religious liberty was on assault on the daily, causing us to battle Leftist Liberals and theological liberalism anywhere we could.
We weren’t just attacking Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Catholics, Baptists, drunk Presbies, and backsliding Pentecostals. No. Now were bent on explaining to our churches (which consisted of undocumented immigrants with lapsed visas, living in the country illegally, or having entered and remained in the country illegally) that we should fight the culture wars of America.
I can recall seeing three to four flags flailing from our pulpits every single Sunday. The star-spangled banner flag was almost always center stage. Some pastors joked that if immigration officers burst through the back doors with deportation orders in hand and saw our predominantly illegal immigrant group praising the American flag then they’d turn away and leave us alone. Besides that flag, we would have the evangelical flag-waving about freely. I would later see January 6 insurrectionists bull-rushing the US Capitol waving this same flag. Little did I know, that flag was more about Christian Nationalist ideals than Christian virtues and ethics. Either way, we also carried the flag of Israel with the star of David in the middle. Being a fundamentalist meant you loved everything about Israel and hated everything Arab or Muslim. And lastly, we had the Brazilian flag. We were a Brazilian ministry in the United States of America.
Our evangelistic outreach moved from the disenfranchised people groups to political culture wars.
My evangelical development began as a neo-fundamentalist evangelical. And I was oblivious to it.
You must understand that these religious movements operate in complete invisibility to their adherents and work in frameworks that make everything outside of them or opposed to them satanic, devilish, godless, pagan, spiritually oppressive, occultic, evil, and more. This mindset in its fundamentalist rage would later help elect Donald J. Trump to office in the United States of America because he promised evangelicals religious liberty and freedom, the destruction of abortion rights, exclusive privilege in the White House, and favor toward the nation of Israel against Arab nations and Palestine. He told them he loved and served God. It was near orgasmic for North American evangelicals when Trump actually won. And also a reason for suicidal ideations when he lost. Some still think he won the 2020 election.
This same neo-fundamentalist segment of our church mentality helped the far-right Trump of the tropics, Jair Bolsonario, become the president of Brazil. He ran on the same ticket as did Trump. Hate for left and left-leaning Brazilians, he loved evangelicals and even prayed in public, attended church services. His vitriol against political opponents was unhinged in parts, making Trump sound domesticated. The man was a military lifer turned politician turned religious right hero turned president of a 211 million inhabitants nation. His downfall came through his misogynistic tropes, his islamophobia in equating Arabs with ISIS, and his disdain for liberal politics, his vitriol, and yes, just as with Trump, Covid-19. Jair Bolsonario questioned the validity of vaccines and thought they altered human DNA/mRNA thus postponing Brazil’s access to life-saving vaccines. Now that Brazil has reached well over 400,000 covid complications-related deaths, his popularity, as did Trumps, has faltered.
But how did I come to understand that I was once part of neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism?
We spent a great deal of time with the Assembly of God, Bethlehem Ministry, but once we received a recalcitrant, malcontent failed former lawyer turned pastor as a pastor of our member bleeding church, something clicked and then broke in me when the man would not stop bashing other pastors from our very denomination. Remember, bashing outsiders and apostates was acceptable but our own? It was too much even for my pharisaical heart. He had a knack for calling them monges (monks) because monks, according to him, were religious hypocrites.
He did this so often that during one of his diatribes at one of our weeknight bible studies I stopped him mid-sentence to ask him to desist from such nonsense.
I don’t believe a man of his stature and prominence had ever been confronted by a church member before. Less so a black one who was not clergy but mere laity and part-time voluntary treasurer for the ministry.
The man lambasted me for being ignorant, young, foolish, and a dunce. This all happened in front of the church. I then called him morally corrupt, immature, disqualified from ministry until he could seek reparation and reconciliation with the people he hated.
His son was present and his son said his father, the then pastor, had trouble controlling his words and tone. This poor man, the pastor’s son, even admitted that he tried time and again to correct his father’s problematic ways for years but to no avail.
This waltz of verbal assault and abuse between me and this pastor went back and forth for weeks. Every interaction we had, in front of anyone and everyone, he would call me a pejorative name and I would reciprocate. Never. Never had I had more disdain for a religious leader than I had for that man. Not because of his conduct which is normal for an unrepentant and impenitent man, but for a pastor of a holiness movement, holiness standard church to behave that way was way off for me.
Eventually, my family decided to leave the Assembly of God, Bethlehem Ministry we helped found, build, and advance in Naples, Florida.
We then joined the Assembly of God, The Vine Ministry, just a few hundred meters down the road.
Our leaving that ministry went without issue. The pastor in question and I shook hands, hugged, and said our pleasantries before parting. Whether he saw me as just another monk or not I do not know but that’s not the case here. We left as Christian brothers who knew we could not serve God in the same building anymore.
After that, none of the ministers and leaders from the Bethlehem Ministry that we had come to love, adore, and they love us and adore us ever reached out to us again.
We simply disappeared from their radar. It took nearly ten years for some of us to visit my parents place and some of them had also left the ministry.
What you have to understand is that it’s just a natural thing within the neo-fundamentalist evangelical circle to ostracize anyone who abandons not Christianity or Pentecostalism, but those who dare leave our particular ministry. Outsiders and backsliders who venture out of this Bethlehem Ministry.
So outside of this, we met new friends with The Vine Ministry, rebuilt lost or broken friendships with other Brazilian friends who had also fled the Bethlehem Ministry years earlier. People who had been traumatized by our authoritarian structure and fled for their lives. They escaped years of spiritual abuse. God bless them.
It was great to worship God and serve one another at The Vine Ministry but then my wife and I moved to Canada in search of financial stability and a future for our family.
Canada – Land of Apologies and Snow
In Canada, we joined a Slavic-Canadian pentecostal church that was stuck between modernity and early 1900s Communist Ukraine.
Having recently joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada the church had to shift its services from their regular hybrid of Ukrainian-Russian speaking services to English-speaking services only. This was great because I wanted to understand what in the world they were singing about in their songs.
This church, being outside of the Brazilian paradigm of poverty and social issues and outside of North American hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualistic, and culture wars framework was primarily focused on religious consistency and discipleship, more than anything else. Minor struggles and disagreements surrounded what style of worship songs we should sing, whether we should stick to hymns or play to the tune of Hillsong, Planetshakers, Jesus Culture, or Elevation music. Some members dawned jeans and t-shirts while others, the Slavic grandmas in particular, dawned head coverings and skirts from their motherland.
Evangelism here was inner-centric. More about preaching Jesus to former communists and people who had survived communism as Christians but still struggled with legalist understanding of the gospel.
We wanted to teach the bad Christianity out of ignorant Christians. And it was working. Our community grew. Our youth group developed from a bunch of kids who were at first scared to ask tough questions to a group of Christianized hooligans willing to think for themselves. They went on to lead worship and lead services, participate in plays, mission trips (not on my part but still, awesome incentive on their part), pursue baptism, get married, and more.
Because this Slavic community was so removed from the neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism I was raised within in Brazil and in America (North America) I was able to see my faith a little clearer.
Categorizing Evangelicalism
But before we proceed on how I went from neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism to neo-evangelicalism I must define and categorize evangelicalism as understood through the North American perspective. And because I’m not a scholar I will allow a scholar named Michael Graham, a writer for As In Heaven and the executive pastor at Orlando Grace Church to explain these categories for you.
In writing for Mere Orthodoxy, Graham states that there are six iterations or rather categories of evangelicalism so far. Here is Graham:
“The 6 Categories
As I have surveyed the evangelical landscape and discussed with pastors all around the country, evangelicalism seems to be fracturing into at least 6 different subgroups. Three of those groups (#s1-3) still have at least some connectivity to evangelicalism and the other three have cut ties (#s 4-6):
Neo-Fundamentalist Evangelical– Neo-fundamentalists are those who have deep concerns about both political and theological liberalism. There is some overlap and co-belligerency with Christian Nationalism (a syncretism of right wing nationalism and Christianity) but neo-fundamentalists do so with more theological vocabulary and rationality. Concerning threats within the church, they have deep worries with the church’s drift towards liberalism and the ways secular ideologies are finding homes in the church. Outside the church, they are concerned by the culture’s increasing hostility to Christianity, most prominently from mass media, social media, and the government.
Mainstream Evangelical – Historically this term has been Protestants who hold to the Bebbington Quadrilateral of conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. The emphasis for this group is on the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Concerning threats within the church, they share some concern for the secular right’s influence on Christinaity, including the destructive pull of Christian Nationalism, but are far more concerned by the secular left’s influence and the desire to assimilate since the world still remains so hostile. Outside the church, they are likely uncomfortable with the rhetoric Trump and other conservatives use but view this direction as the lesser of two evils.
Neo-Evangelical – People who would see themselves as “global evangelicals” and are doctrinally “Evangelicals” (w/ some philosophy of ministry differences) but no longer use the term “evangelical” in some circumstances in the American context as the term as an identifier has evolved to be more political than theological. Within the church, they are highly concerned by conservative Christianity’s acceptance of Trump and failure to engage on topics of race and sexuality in helpful ways, but they have not totally abandoned evangelical identification and likely still labor in churches with the broadest spectrum of these groups. Outside of the church, this group feels largely homeless in today’s world. There is equal concern, or slightly more either way depending on the person, at the threat the left and the right pose to Christians seeking to live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness.
Post-Evangelical – People who have fully left evangelicalism from a self-identification standpoint and reject the “evangelical” label yet are still churched and likely still agree with the Apostles Creed and Nicene Creed. They are more deconstructed than neo-evangelicals and they are more vocal in their critiques of 1s and 2s than 3s would be. Some remain firmly in Protestant circles and others have crossed over to mainline, catholic, or orthodox traditions while still holding to the basic creeds. Concerning threats within the church, they are focused on abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, Christian nationalism, and the secular right. Outside the church, they are primarily concerned with the matters of injustice, inequity, the secular right, and to a lesser extent the radical secular left. Many 4s are 4s also because their experiences with predominantly white evangelicalism have been so difficult and strained that physical distance seemed to be the only conclusion.
Note – there is likely a halfway point between 4 and 5 known as ex-vangelicals that don’t neatly fit either 4 or 5. This group is difficult to parse as the meaning that this group has taken on has evolved even this year. We did not want to exclude the group from this typology but given the evolving nature were hesitant to pin it down too precisely at this juncture. Some of these folks have actually dechurched, some have deconverted, yet some remain in the faith but are quite vocal on their critiques of the movement. In time this category might evolve and/or swallow up category 5 below or it might fizzle like other labels.
Dechurched (but with some Jesus) – People who have left the church but still hold to at least some orthodox Christian beliefs.
Dechurched and Deconverted – People who have left the church and are completely deconverted with no vestigial Christian beliefs.”
Therefore
I transitioned out of neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism in Brazil and later in the United States of America thanks to distance but I moved away from mainline evangelicalism in this Slavic community due to racism and anti-intellectualism. What do I mean? The racism I experienced in this church setting was new to me, because, remember, the Brazilian church was very racially diverse. It was ethnically one but racially, we had white ministers, black ministers, ministers with Japanese ancestry, and Latino ministers, ministers from the African continent, and so on. Racism wasn’t acceptable in our racially diverse neo-fundamentalist evangelical churches.
But racism in this mainline evangelical Slavic church? Well, what did you think would happen when a black man walked into a Euro-centric church ministry that operated in Canada… of all places?
Anywho. The racism part I am still writing about and discovering as I am still dealing with it to this day. My experiences with racism in America came from outside the church. My experience with racism in Canada came from within the church. But I’ll write more about that later.
But the anti-intellectual aspect here, and by anti-intellectual I refer to historian Mark A. Noll’s work, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind delves into a group that is hyper-aware of intellectual works concerning construction and other vocational works but when it comes to Christian intellectual works they are limited. Quite limited. The exploration of theology, expositional preaching, exegesis, Christian church history, doctrinal history, and social issues were all lacking. Knowledge surrounding biology, archeology, anthropology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, and science, in general, was lacking. No wonder there is a hyper-resistance toward vaccines and virology in the Slavic-Germanic mainline evangelical community here in Canada. Much love for God and holiness standards but a hell of a lot of ignorance surrounding the world around them. The very world God created.
During my last few weeks in membership with this mainline evangelical church, I witnessed an uptick in members spewing their support for Donald Trump. I mean, we’re in Canada, people. Canadians are too nice to support an orange man like Donald Trump. But our Slavic community tossed all brain and heart out the window and promoted pro-Trump rhetoric against immigrants, racial justice, and any issues pertaining to brown people. The irony was there but the masks had come off. I saw some of them for what they were. Racist Christians. The Christian part of their identity was debatable but their racism consumed the air around them. Around me.
It was no wonder that whenever the Black Lives Matter movement took shape in the political sphere and some accused it of Marxist ideologies our Slavic church shut its doors down on the topic. Period. There was no talking about race, racism, or harms done against black people and people of color because the unresolved trauma of Marxism was looming high and mightily in their repressed subconscious. If BLM was Marxist then everything they talked about or fought for was atheistic and diabolic. They were unwilling to consider that the fight for black equity spanned back hundreds of years. But fear triumphs over reason and they capitulated their witness on the altar of ignorance.
And short of my exit I picked up this book by professor Noll and devoured it. Strange thing is that I pulled this book from the church’s library, which no one ever frequented. I could have stolen the book and I don’t believe anyone would have noticed. But I read it, made notes, made connections between the idiocy in evangelical history to the idiocy I witnessed in my church, yes, my church because I was part of it too. And I was broken. I left not long after when the racism became too painful to deal with and far too many higher-ups from the church were spewing it for me to confront it alone.
Being one of two black people in the church stymies one’s aspirations for change, you know.
A short conversation with the pastor, an honest one, revealed just how intellectually and socially limited this environment had become or perhaps had always been.
We left and what was left behind was in fact my mainline evangelical faith.
I was comfortable there until I realized that racism and religious-political syncretism was still very much alive and well there, just not as angry as that within the neo-fundamentalist evangelical circle of my earlier years but it was still there.
Progression
I’ve since progressed to a neo-evangelical landmark. I’ve reached the precipice of evangelicalism. Behind me is a horrid trail of trauma and a history of evangelical evils and issues. And before me lies a pit of tenebrous open-theistic worldviews that have robbed Christ of His Deity.
I’m comfortable as a neo-evangelical because I’ve realized that my faith supersedes denominational lines. I can learn so much more about different philosophies without being guilted into thinking I’m a heretic for simply studying different thinkers. I appreciate the social ramifications of liberation theology and I love the fine-tuned nature of big-God/near-God orthodox theology. I love my transcendent Lord but He is also an eminent God. He strengthens my heart out of religiosity that damns the intellect and He pushes me into a wholesome religion that loves God and neighbor. I’m hostile to the idea of marrying religion and political ideologies. I hate poor theology but I love and am patient with people who are ignorant of good theology. They’re teachable you know. My most biting words are reserved for my friends who are still stuck in neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism. I’m patient with my friends who are on the wall between mainline and fundamentalist evangelicalism. You shout too loud and they’ll become extremists and if you whisper too much they’ll forever stagnate in mainline circles.
I’m comfortable being labeled a ‘global evangelical’ as I worship and serve Christ wherever I go. I’m not limited to national superpowers like the United States of America or Israel. Today I’m comfortable condemning Israeli terrorism against Palestinians. Before I would have spat at the mention of these poor souls. Today I favor a democratic society that espouses a higher ethic that values the civil rights of all people, not just Christians.
My views about abortion are the same. I’m pro-life through and through, not just pro-birth. But even there, I fall and lean on pastor Skye Jethani’s idea, preferring a world where abortion is legal but morally wrong and unwanted than a world where we repress laws and allow for the fruition of back-alley abortions to persist. A world where people risk death to seek out an abortion because birthing the child will be the end of their lives and that of the baby.
I prefer to look to the root causes in society leading women to believe they need an abortion. What leads them to that state of mind? We’re so focused on the clinical procedure, which is horrific and barbaric, but seldom do we focus on the social, financial, and mental issues that precede this decision. I’m in favor of leading a whole nation to destroy the structures that make women think they have to end their pregnancies to work, pay rent, buy groceries, be financially stable, get a job and keep it, graduate from school, apply for school, and have medical care.
Like… why aren’t pro-lifers, mainly pro-birthers from neo-fundamentalist evangelicals tackling those issues as well? They’re more in favor of a big military instead of big health care. I’ve figured that it’s because the left and left-leaning churches and groups are focusing on these issues, therefore, by affiliation, these things are wrong to even consider.
As a neo-evangelical, I still believe in the Bebbington Quadrilateral definition of evangelicalism, namely, biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionsim, and activism by which to spread the first three.
But in my biblicism, I am no longer a biblical literalist. I read the Bible with wisdom, with new tools by which to help me investigate the text, the author’s meaning, his intent, his audience, the culture it was written within, the principles, laws, and religious rules and laws of the time of writing. I consider the geo-political struggles of the time of writing, surrounding nations and their writers and philosophers. I understand metaphors, historical narrative, prophetic literature, poetic literature, wisdom literature, apocalyptic or eschatological writings, pastoral epistles, and the gospels. I rely on the Holy Spirit for clarity and trust Him when I’m told to use the many tools of study available to me. Outside of these tools, I would be a literalist and an idiot. Like the idiot I was in neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism thinking America was at the top of the world and everything around us was the Mark of the Beast and the antichrist. Putin, Hussein, Osama, North Korean dictators, and whatnot. One of them was bound to be the antichrist, I guessed.
I cursed homosexuals and chided Muslims. I damned atheists to hell and mocked them. I understood little of the difference between theistic satanism and atheistic satanism and thought they were both one and the same. This ignorance and arrogance stunted my approachability.
I’ve condemned friends to hell. I’ve ostracized friends by referencing dreams of them wallowing in hell-fire and their immediate need to convert otherwise they would be doomed for eternity. This is how conversations about faith, Jesus, and the Bible went between teenage me and my teenage friends.
I was relentless in assuming everyone’s eternal condition after five minutes of debating them online or in person. Why would I leave any room for doubt when I knew more about them than God did?
Either way, the extremist ways of neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism destroyed my intellect, heightened my fear of non-Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry Pentecostals, and ruined so many of my friendships thus tarnishing my witness of Christ.
Mainline evangelicalism taught me that so many believers can worship Jesus with their hearts, accept Him into their soul, worship Him and pray to Him in their quiet place, and then live morally duplicitous racist lives in the church and outside the church. Even the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke against moderate mainline believers who spoke so highly of Christ but turned a blind eye to Christ’s creation, namely, black people during the Civil Rights era.
But in neo-evangelicalism, I can seek Christ, preach about the cross, about death, about resurrection, about sin and redemption, and the next advent of my Lord. And in neo-evangelicalism, I can confront the plight of my neighbor, assist them in their troubles, challenge structures and systems that have been set up to oppress instead of emancipate. I can challenge local bodies, both religious and secular entities, to work together, ecumenically, to help everyone everywhere.
But if you think I’m naturally progressing through Graham’s stages of evangelicalism toward post-evangelicalism or apostasy, be assured, I am not.
I have escaped neo-fundamentalist evangelicalism and walked out of mainline evangelicalism, by God’s grace, but I am nowhere close nor am I attracted to post-evangelicalism.
I follow websites and threads written by exvangelicals, post-evangelicals, and former Christians, and depending on their motivation to deconstruct evangelicalism I have found that their results are bleak. They end up destroying their faith instead of deconstructing the cultural colonization of their Christianity. It’s sad to watch people punch holes in the boat that’ll carry them across the lake. They ought to fix their sails, not tear them to shreds. Their faith compass needs recalibration but many of them are shutting their airs and trusting fate to guide them to safer shores. Some have jumped ship altogether, having lost faith in the boat’s ability to keep them above water. And this without a safety vest.
At times I have found more people leaving evangelicalism out of hurt and trauma and in other instances because they prefer to live within an antinomian framework. A framework sapped of moral attitudes and ethics. They want Christ as God of the world but not as Lord of their lives. Meaning, everything goes as far as sinful patterns inasmuch as they can read their bibles to conform it to their momentary pleasures.
In that case, I’d say some of them have moved from monotheism in Christianity to therapeutic moralistic deism. It feels good, must be right, and God or gods is out there, in the ether, somewhere, maybe watching.
Post-evangelicalism can work if one deconstructs not from faith and Christ but from cultural Christianity. Namely, Brazilian-centric or United States of America-centric Christianity. White Christianity. Euro-centric Christianity. Pan-African Christianity. Etcetera.
But if you’re moving away from biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionsim, and activism, then what are you moving towards? I ask myself that same question from time to time. If I abandon the word, the cross, regeneration, and the work that goes into disseminating this message, then what am I moving into? What have I moved away from?
Is this not the gospel? Does the gospel supersede the Bebbington Quadrilateral of evangelicalism?
Absolutely.
But does the gospel have to be post-evangelical? It can be. It was before the term was even coined and its meaning as we understand it today solidified.
But I am comfortable utilizing my brain, my soul, God’s Holy Spirit, His Word, the beauty and horror of the cross, and my giving up of myself for my family and my community.
And listen, that community is not and does not have to be a believing community.
Loving God with all my heart, soul, and mind, and my neighbor as myself does not mean that my neighbor needs to be a conservative Right-leaning Christian for me to love, serve, and possibly even die in service for them.
I Am A…
I am a neo-evangelical and God has rescued me from fundamentalism and delivered me from stagnant middle-stance, middle-class centric Christianity that accomplishes much while it accomplishes nothing in mainline evangelicalism.
Bird watching, thinking of ways to kill them. Brazil, ca. 2016.
I am not out of the clear until I reach heaven and that’s why from time to time I converse with my pastor, interacting with him about ideas, what comes next for evangelicals, what ideas, good or bad, will be sucked into the vacuum created by the absence of evangelicalism in our cultural sphere.
What happens when we remove Eurocentric theology from our schools and vernacular? What happens when we burn slave-holding Christian theology to ash? What happens when we begin to listen to the voices that have taken a backseat in literature and theology for the last five hundred years? Who are these voices? Are they white, male, wealthy, and western? Are they French, German, English, Swedish, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, or Swiss?
Are these voices evangelical at all?
These thoughts and questions plague my mind every time I venture to read scripture for my personal development and the development of my church community.
I am comforted by the continual presence of this voice of inquiry because it was absent for most of my life. I thank God for the inquisitive pull in my heart. Not the cynic and skeptic. My faith is firm and sound on the Rock of Christ but the in-betweens that have dimmed my understanding for so long are still to be discovered and challenged.
I need these thoughts and questions to dominate my headspace otherwise I’ll recrudesce to fundamentalist fearmongering and that’ll be the death of my intellect.
This cannot happen.
I am too conservative for my liberal friends and too liberal for my conservative friends. I’m politically homeless. A political vagabond moving from one political railroad car to the next, exploring the goods, acknowledging them, sharing them, and then leaving it for the next. Wherever I find errors and wrongs I attempt to address them with Christic love and when that fails I’m booted forward or backward into another car. Whither this train travels I know not but that it travels forward is without question.
The final station is of less importance to me because no matter where this train of political ideology stops it is still flawed and filled with holes, carrying broken people from one place to another, ever full and ever empty.
I love my Lord, I love my wife, I love our girls, and I love the Church of Christ. The Catholic (universal) Church of Jesus is not held nor constrained by walls and windows and doors. Nor denominational lines.
I’ve seen so much of one but desire more of the other. I’m not sure we’ll get more of it this side of heaven.
But that’s okay. It’s okay if I don’t find these answers out because I am not the keeper of the Church.
Jesus is.
And no matter how much of a dunce I become in my pursuit of historical knowledge, movements, ideas, and whatnot, I know one thing, Christ will preserve His Church.
That’s why I am an evangelical, still, but more strictly defined, a neo-evangelical.
Because I still believe that Jesus is Christ and this Church, its genesis, and its end, are in His hands.
And I am too.
Questions to Consider:
Out of the six listed categories for evangelicalism, where do you land?
Were you even aware there were so many categories for evangelicalism?
Does your church community consist more or less of neo-fundamentalists, mainline, neo-evangelicals, or post-evangelicals?
Are you not sure where you fall on this spectrum and you want to take a quick quiz to find out, hit this link. Towards the end of the page you will find the Evangelical Assessment Tool. Share your findings!
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Because I’m in a relationship where love abounds. Now, don’t misunderstand me when I say that love abounds and nothing else. What I mean is that in this environment of love, kindness, care, appreciation, communication, and compromise, we also experience challenges induced by fatigue, lack of sleep, poor sleep, busyness, miscommunication on things as simple as: is this plate clean or where is the soundbar remote?
These trivialities are abundant within a healthy relationship. A couple that does not disagree or perhaps does not experience friction does not spend time together at all.
I am loved where I live and where I live I give love. Love can be demonstrated in various ways. It can be received and understood in many others. From gifts to affectionate gestures, time spent together, romantic or eros, philo and friendlike, paying attention to your spouse and whatnot. Too many ways and far more ways into which these methods intertwine and intersect.
Therefore, in expressing love and giving love, you must give it in as many ways as possible and be in sync with your spouse on how you best receive it. Also, how they would like to be loved.
Loveless Communion
Living in an environment where love is absent but commitment is present is a delicate and painful compromise.
What do I mean?
There are couples, married couples, who have lived together for ten, twenty, possibly, thirty years together in holy matrimony, with multiple kids (or no kids) and careers well behind them, friendships developed around them, and a community of known-ness between them and all who know them.
But… these couples lack love. What do I mean? Is not the longevity of their marriage a sign of lovingkindness and affectionate endurance?
No. But yes. But no. (Canadian expression).
It can be, but it isn’t always.
Longevity can be accomplished by simply enduring and repeating something without much thought given to it.
Also, a marriage that subsists in this environment does so out of duty. Consider religious cultures where shame rules their community and to divorce a spouse you do not love or are not compatible with is a sure sign that you will be ostracized by that community.
Shame culture is real and it is an ugly reality. If you live and move within a shame-based culture, please, for the love of your sanity, your spouse, your children, and your friends, leave it.
But people who endure their marriage, they perform certain aspects of it out of a sense of duty, almost, honorific duty so as to gloat or find pride in their suffering through this relationship.
Sorry, not a relationship, this exchange of bodily property for (x) number of years.
But living in this environment of duty and honor instead of an environment of love, commitment, and compromise can be destructive to a person’s well-being and emotional development.
The sensual aspect of this relationship is there. Granted. It doesn’t take much for a person to merely ‘enjoy’ an activity. The enjoyment is there. But the fruition from it, the connection and chemistry developed, not just on a physical level but an interpersonal and emotional level is tantamount to a healthy love-filled relationship. Couples who simply bond over this act to exchange pleasantries rather than continually build their relational affections are engaging in business matters rather than life matters.
It’s merely transactional behavior.
What I’m trying to say is that love is not a required factor for a couple to enjoy sex.
There are plenty of miserable couples out there that have better sexual encounters than we can surmise but their interpersonal connectivity and relational development are as poor as the glass cup from which Donald Trump had to use two hands to drink.
Yikes!
I know. It’s sad.
So, if you’re in a loveless relationship, be in a serious one that might lead to marriage or in a marriage that has sailed away from the docks of single-dome years ago, understand that you are not without hope.
It all starts with communication. First, communicate to yourself that you do not feel loved. Two, discover why you cannot give love. Three, you need to share these sentiments freely and fearlessly with your significant other.
If you’re afraid of being open with your significant other then by all means understand that there are more issues surrounding this love loss than anything else.
Ask yourself when it was that your love for them faded. Was there a stressful situation at work, home, in your social sphere that halted your emotional development? Are you overwhelmed by responsibilities or depressed by your unfulfilled dreams? Open up about these things. Journal about them so your thoughts are on paper and clear, clearer to you.
Ask yourself when it was that your loved one stopped or slowed in expressing their love to you. What happened in that season. Before that season. You’re not to blame unless you know 100% that you are responsible for something. Namely, cheating, gambling family funds away, cheating emotionally, lying, being emotionally repressive or oppressive, voting for Donald J. Trump, gaslighting, abuse; physical, verbal, emotional, and spiritual. But if the blame isn’t yours, don’t allow your brain to trick you into thinking it is because then you’ll both be stuck in an emotional stalemate. Discuss these things with your partner and allow them to open up to you gradually, understanding that they may not entirely understand their own feelings yet. And even if they do understand them they might have a tough time verbalizing them. So listen up to what IS said but pay attention to what is left UNSAID.
Think About It
If you are in a loveless relationship you do not have to stay in it.
But here’s the catch. I do not mean that you have to leave it either.
What I mean is that both of you can work together to make it a love-filled relationship again.
Make Relationships Love-Filled Again!
Maybe we should throw that on a hat and make it our war cry.
MTLFA!!!
Nah.
That won’t work.
But you get what I mean.
To leave a loveless relationship does not mean you leave your partner. In fact, you both leave the loveless environment together and explore what it means to love and be loved, together, again.
P.S.
This post is not meant for individuals who are in abusive relationships. If you are in an abusive relationship, please seek professional help immediately, for your safety and the safety of those in your household.
GoodTherapy. Hit that link. Click other links. Then delete your browsing history.
If your spouse or partner is abusive, contact law enforcement as soon as possible.
You are loved by a community you do not even yet know. You are more than your abuse and your hurt and your pain. You might only understand this once you leave and are free to heal, feel, and yes, be loved and love, again.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
I cannot emphasize this enough therefore I will allow the words of the King to re-emphasize it for me: “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31
Fox News opinion casters have been re-demonizing Muslims and Christians from Afghanistan because there’s an unfounded theory that undocumented brown refugees will begin to flood into the United States of America because of this Taliban crisis.
Listen.
Most of the people who watch Fox News adhere to some form of a Christian or Judeo-Christian moral framework where they believe that God exists, Jesus walked this earth, that we should live by high ethical standards, sexual standards, and respect our neighbors.
Something like that.
But at the same time, these same viewers will swallow a building-sized gnat of hatred that Fox News spews against, you named it, immigrants.
And the darker their complexion the spicier the vitriol gets.
Qorokh mountain hillsides in Kabul province of Afghanistan. (Photographer)
I don’t care if you watch Fox News to further numb the dead or dying heart inside of you. I don’t mind if your soul is so dark that the only thing that brings you warmth is watching millionaires discuss their hatred for the disenfranchised, poor, colored, and immigrants but if that’s the case I hope you’re not at the same time ascribing to a worldview that espouses love, kindness, redemption, and holiness.
The crisis in Afghanistan is so complicated and the United States of America’s participation in the formation and the financial backing of the Taliban in previous proxy wars has only made things worse. The United States does not walk out of this situation with clean hands.
I understand that this crisis is more complicated than we dare admit, collectively speaking. Some of us will blame Muslims for the bloodshed. Others will blame Russia. Others yet will blame Americans. And Americans will blame the Afghani people for not developing quickly enough to defend themselves against an insurgency like the Taliban.
The blame game works itself into a wheel spin that is hard to slow down once it’s in full steam. I’m concerned with the catalysts, yes, I’m concerned about the agencies that led this nation and its surrounding communities to such dire straits. Insurgents only become insurgents because every other way of life has been taken from them by bombs dropped by other insurgencies or government agencies.
American ones included.
It’s perfectly fine to feel overwhelmed by not knowing what to do or how to do what needs to be done in a situation as problematic as this.
We’re all on the same boat when it comes to this stalemate, this uncertainty surrounding Afghani lives still in Afghanistan, who, at any moment, might be massacred for whatever reason by Taliban foot soldiers.
We’re in agreement there! We’re all worried about these vulnerable people.
But what disturbs me greatly is the ever virulent diatribe that ebbs and flows from Fox News and like-minded news stations about these unfortunate souls.
If 30 million (the actual number is somewhere around 2.5 million) Americans watch Fox News every day and they believe half of the stuff that spews out of that channel then we have 30 million Americans who have little to no compassion for immigrants seeking refuge in America, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Turkey, and so on.
We begin to see people as animals and from there we then view them as insects. It isn’t far fetched to then believe that their decimation and massacre at the hands of Taliban terrorists is equal to that of cockroaches under our boots.
The rhetoric surrounding immigrants, especially brown immigrants coming out of Fox News, Newsmax and One America News pundits or whatever other hyper-nationalist news stations are is a rhetoric of hate.
Hate the immigrant. Say you’re sorry for their demise. Tell them they’re not welcome in your country and then smack their backside as they move on to another humanitarian crisis camp that you will call dirty, filthy, and deserving of the people who settle there.
And then go on about your life telling everyone how much your country needs Jesus because Jesus is love, kind, just, merciful, and holy.
Love the men who are fleeing for their lives so they don’t fall under gunfire or the sword. Love the women fleeing for their lives so they do not become breeders for a terrorist organization and their sex-deprived lunatic foot soldiers. Pray for the children, boys, and girls, who are petrified and will possibly be traumatized for life because of it.
Love them. Love them because they are people.
Instead of complaining about immigrants coming into your country to take your jobs look at them, not through them, as extended family members who need rescue and help.
Canada is a nation large enough to possibly fit the population of the planet in it twice over. Just don’t send people to the North West Territories because there’s nothing up there but land, bears, moose, and the occasional horror story stalker.
But fill Canada with people who need help. The United States of America, too.
Why we’ve come to think of them as undeserving of our resources because they were not born here is insane and cruel. I understand nations have national sovereignty and borders but we’re all on the same planet, sharing the same air, eating the same foods, and drinking the same water, albeit, cleaner water in some places than others.
We’re all one race stemming from one place. People with an intrinsic value whose worth supersedes international and national borders and laws.
We need to love our neighbors and help them in their time of need. Not because one day we’ll need them; because we might, but because it’s the right thing to do.
We cannot settle for news stations whose personas non grata proclaim faith, liberty, freedom, the pursuit of happiness, humanity, love, and yes, supposedly, a Christian faith, but then say and report everything contrary to it.
Love your neighbor.
Be on the side of compassion and empathy. Gun powder and sword are great at making soldiers of children but love and compassion are better at making people of character, principle, and morals.
If we want to see fewer insurgencies then we might try and start by extending a friendly hand to our neighbors.
Even when that love isn’t reciprocated, we love them. We love them well.
P.S.
I’ve placed a few photos of Afghanistan in this post. Bucolic settings, breathing taking ones, just to remind the reader that there’s more to a land when it is not constantly bombarded with terror attacks. More to it when it isn’t portrayed as a forgotten wasteland occupied by dirty brown immigrants who worship a different god. (I’m talking about you, Fox News).
Afghanistan is an extension of our land and our land an extension of theirs. Same planet, beautifully full and fully beautiful in all of its parts.
An argument can be made that there is an unhealthy level of hypocrisy in the pro-life movement concerning its response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Now, to our western mind the portmanteau pro-life means that the person values life from conception all the way through to the grave. Conception through birth, through life, and so on.
And there’s disagreement on why some of the most adamant pro-lifers fail to appreciate life as much once the person is struggling to pay bills, find lodging, facing eviction notices, in need of healthcare, education, unemployment assistance, and whatnot.
That’s not my argument here. That hypocrisy is evident in these areas and more before all. I needn’t argue the case there.
My beef is with pro-life American and Canadian Christians who use their faith and their freedoms during the COVID-19 pandemic to promote a lifestyle that is antithetical to a God and neighbor honoring ethic. They use their faith and rights to promote unwise habits which lead to the death of others.
“The Christian motive for hygiene and sanitation does not arise in self-preservation but in an ethic of service to our neighbor. We wish to care for the afflicted, which first and foremost means not infecting the healthy. Early Christians created the first hospitals in Europe as hygienic places to provide care during times of plague, on the understanding that negligence that spread disease further was, in fact, murder.”
Again, in his words, understanding that negligence that spread disease further was, in fact, murder.
I am shocked by every news article or tabloid post that informs the general public that another Covid denier, Anti-Vaxxer, and anti-establishment extremist with a Bible in one hand and the American constitution or the Canadian charter in the other has passed away from Covid related complications.
Stone, again, reminds us of just how far Christians and their Christ-centric ethics have come through the years whenever faced with moral or natural evil:
“During plague periods in the Roman Empire, Christians made a name for themselves. Historians have suggested that the terrible Antonine Plague of the 2nd century, which might have killed off a quarter of the Roman Empire, led to the spread of Christianity, as Christians cared for the sick and offered an spiritual model whereby plagues were not the work of angry and capricious deities but the product of a broken Creation in revolt against a loving God.
But the more famous epidemic is the Plague of Cyprian, named for a bishop who gave a colorful account of this disease in his sermons. Probably a disease related to Ebola, the Plague of Cyprian helped set off the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman world. But it did something else, too: It triggered the explosive growth of Christianity. Cyprian’s sermons told Christians not to grieve for plague victims (who live in heaven), but to redouble efforts to care for the living. His fellow bishop Dionysius described how Christians, “Heedless of danger … took charge of the sick, attending to their every need.”
Christians have often been at the forefront of disaster without the push from government entities, without the assistance of political agencies, without funds from wealthy corporations and yet they ventured past the green zone and into the circle of death to assist those most vulnerable, motivated by nothing more than love of God and neighbor.
The history of altruism found within Christian communities is so imitable. Their love for the destitute, the sick, the broken, the diseased, without much care for their own well-being was quite the example to follow. This nonpareil altruistic movement is what attracted so many, to the faith to begin with.
The difference, however, is that something has shifted our Christian witness. We have gone from petitioning for the sanctity of life to petitioning for the rights and freedoms of selfish living, which, in turn, and as a direct consequence of, has caused the spread of the coronavirus in so many communities that could have gone without it if we had been more Christ-like to begin with.
In ancient Israel, in the book of Leviticus in particular, the Jews required anyone with an infectious disease to quarantine away from the camp for seven days or more. Some, having a very infectious disease, would live outside the camp indefinitely so as to preserve the wellbeing and life of both parties.
And somehow, somewhere along with the development of the western Christian mind, this altruistic selflessness has gone out the window, and with it, compassion and empathy for neighbors.
Modern medicine has shown us how diseases work, how they spread, how they affect the body, disrupt certain bodily functions, and from there, how some of them can lead to death. We now know chemists can develop antibodies in the form of a vaccine to counteract the spread of diseases or the damage these pathogens wreak on society.
And one of the mechanisms we have developed over time and learned how to use better is the victimless tool of quarantine; which helps reduce the rate a pathogen transfers from one person to another by isolating and caring for the sick. On top of that, we have been blessed with access to masks, which have also proven to reduce the transmissibility of infectious diseases.
Social distancing and masks.
These are the two crosses we have been asked to bear by our society and even these have become steps on which we tread to cause the death of others.
Distance and face coverings are too heavy a burden for us to carry.
How does that make any sense?
In the onset of Christian monasticism, in the era in which Christian converts would disappear into the desert to seek God, and once there they would form communities that would open their doors to assist and house outcasts. It was there that many relinquished so many rights and privileges just to help their neighbor.
They would give up wealth, give up status, give up work, and yes, even safety to wander through the unknown for days and nights to reach a place where trauma existed, where abused and bruised souls needed refuge, a place where so many had lost family and friends and found a new family and new friends.
Christians for years upon years had given so much from their lives and personal comfort even if it helped someone else just a little.
However, the tides have shifted and today we’re trying to take as much for ourselves and even the little that would have gone to our neighbor and their stability in life as possible.
Had we been asked to give blood, relinquish the rights to our bank accounts, leave our jobs, turn in our citizenship and residency, face deportation and exile for the sake of Christ and the betterment of life of our neighbor we would.
But a vaccine shot, social distancing, and masks are too many steps too far.
Why?
Our pro-life stance is only pro-life when it deals with the rights of the unborn but let us not be challenged to protect the life and well-being of our neighbors who are already here.
Apostle Paul asked the first-century church in Galatia a question that I ask of our generation today:
“You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? […]” Galatians 3:1 NRSV
He confronted a church that began with the salvific gospel and ended up with traditional legalism. Paul was curious about where and who tricked them out of the gospel and seduced them into a religion of works.
I, too, ask the same question of our fellow western Christian minds today.
“You foolish Americans! You foolish Canadians! Who has bewitched you?”
Who has sapped your Christianity of empathy? Who has taught you to reduce your neighbor to a number on a board? Who has asked you to see dollar signs instead of the elderly? Who has robbed you of love for your neighbor and taught you to believe that minor inconveniences like social distancing and mask-wearing are persecutory aspects of a democratic society?
You’re living with a persecution complex in a hedonist society. You’re more in love with and entrapped by comfort and rights than you are with Christ’s character of selflessness.
If you’re asked to carry your brother’s burdens you not only refuse to lend him a hand but you castigate your brother for being in the predicament they’re in, to begin with. And, at times, you’re the direct cause of their troubles.
“Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Galatians 6:2 NRSV
We see so many people pass away from Covid and much of that spread is due to our gross negligence of brotherly and sisterly love.
Christianity has thrived through thousands of years of strife, persecution, famine, war, social ostracism, pestilence, and plagues and we have shown outsiders time and again just how much love God has placed in our hearts as we care for our neighbors.
But something happened. Something went wrong somewhere and we’re too unbothered or too preoccupied or too distracted to stop and think about what and why went wrong.
Stone compares our gross negligence in spreading a pathogen we could have helped combat and stop a year ago, saving countless lives in the process, as gross negligence equal to murder!
And I agree!
There are pro-lifers committing murder. Either as direct agents of death or co-conspirators with it.
When we fail to help our world through a time like this… through a pandemic like this one… we help kill it.
This is one of the most difficult write-ups I’ve ever dared to compose because it involves the celebrated Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. The man has influenced believers worldwide, myself included, to think critically about their faith and bridge the heart and mind in pursuit of truth.
His talks at university forums have shaped the way we engage one another, respectfully and candidly, even when grappling with some of life’s most troubling questions about meaning, purpose, and objective truth.
It is difficult to mention modern apologetics without mentioning Ravi. His work has covered Christian thought and had the reach of one of the world’s leading ministries, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM).
I recall the time where I would work as a cleaner and vacuum all day long listening to Ravi’s talks and sermons. His teachings on meaning and suffering. The purpose of Christ through emotion and rigorous thought. Of his many encounters with diplomats, governors, foreign ministers, and dangerous entities to share with them this great gospel message of hope, forgiveness, and redemption. His many talks kept my mind out of a gutter of fundamentalist flaws. Kept my soul from flailing miserably down the precipice of anti-intellectualism because through his ministry I sought to investigate other thinkers, predominantly so German philosopher and author Frederich Nietzche.
The fear of investigating other worldviews had dissipated with the firmness and gentleness with which Ravi spoke of revealed truth, reducing my prejudices about people to shreds and my uninformed nature to humble truth-seeking.
But then the allegations began.
First of his continued use of academic terms and titles that he did not study nor accomplish rightfully. He would call himself “Dr. Zacharias” when in reality his doctorate was honorary at best. He used this in talks, sermons, question and answer sessions, and went as far as to add such a title to his own name in a book.
This, as harmful as it is to the integrity of academia, isn’t as bad as what would come later.
News broke of an alleged plot to extort Ravi and the Zacharias family through a litany of salacious emails passed back and forth between Ravi and a married Canadian woman. There was a lawsuit to prevent his extortionists from doing more damage to his name, his reputation, the ministry and his family.
I recall thinking that it was very much possible for people to extort famous persons, more so religious ones who flew at the chance to silence any allegation of impropriety, however false, so as not to taint or tarnish their Christian witness.
For some time I allowed myself to believe Ravi’s narrative of this story. He and his wife, his family, and his ministry were but victims of a destructive and greedy force.
Until dozens of women who worked at massage parlors (two of which Ravi co-owned) alleged that he would solicit them for sexual favors in hopes of release from ministerial tensions. He suffered from chronic back pain and sought out every means to alleviate his debilitating pain and massage therapy seemed like the least invasive approach.
But looking back it sounded like the perfect cover-up, and evidence proved that it was, for his continued predation on financially and emotionally vulnerable women.
He used his position of prominence to create an atmosphere of acceptance when in fact his requests of sexual favors were in contrast to his Christian witness.
He would ask his therapists about their lives, their religious views, their family and friends, and financial stability or instability and become their de facto religious and financial father.
This is considered grooming. It’s the first step in hypnotizing your prey, your victim, so as to bring them into the fold of secrecy and continued abuse.
He would then walk into massage sessions nude because according to him it was accepted as a cultural norm. Other times he would disrobe, exposing his genitals to massage therapists, clearly aroused. Other times he would do all of this and request to be massaged inappropriately so as to attain sexual gratification from his therapists.
Most refused. Some submitted. Others felt they had no choice. Who would believe that the world’s leading apologist was running his hands up a massage therapist’s thighs or that his special requests meant sexual intercourse.
No one would believe them because our crippled evangelical industrial complex paved the highway for us to believe predators over victims ten out of ten times.
That is why Ravi did what he did, for decades, without getting caught or without ramifications.
He would always travel with a male ministry companion to claim that he never traveled alone but after meetings, he spent days, if not weeks, alone and without further supervision. In these shrouded moments of hidden acts, he would solicit the services of massage therapists and meet them at his hotel reception area. Other massage therapists would meet him in his room. One of them received a key to his room gracefully hidden within a book he gave her with a note inside that asked her to meet him in his room minutes later.
Ravi would travel to Bangkok where he owned two apartment spaces to write, he was a prolific writer and a voracious reader, therefore, according to him, he needed time for clarity and rest as he wrote. Uncluttered by the demands of day to day ministerial tasks and away from the weight of family responsibilities.
While there, he would meet several women, massage therapists, we know, who would spend time with him in his apartment. Alone. Away from the eyes of accountability partners, ministry partners, and his family.
His phones and laptop were turned over to technology specialists and in these were found hundreds of photos of women, most of them very young, with a few of them being suspiciously provocative. There were nude pictures of one of his victims, the one he bound to a non-disclosure agreement once she decided to come forward with their illicit and extra-marital affair.
Ravi was living like James Bond, womanizing and ravaging in between talks, whilst no one batted an eye.
Well, that’s the troubling part, I believe many people did but so few were willing to challenge the man’s conduct because of his position of prominence and his continued giftedness from the stage.
Hell. I was blessed by his giftedness and I owe much of my spiritual growth and inquisitive nature to him.
But, his level of compartmentalization and predatory behavior behind the scenes is but a reminder that we cannot give men or women power to govern and control with impunity. Without accountability. Without rigorous discipline and the threat of ouster should they fail to live up to the standard that has been set up for them.
Ravi is but the culmination of the evangelical industrial complex. We made him. We promoted him. We pushed him to stardom well knowing that we should not trust men or women so much but under the spell that he was so close to God.
Perhaps he was. Perhaps his walk with God was honest. But like an addict who struggles with his substance perhaps Ravi’s substance was an insatiable desire for sexual favors from and hidden extra-marital affairs with young married and unmarried women.
He used his power, his prominence, his money, his influence, his position of honor to woo dozens of women, seducing them into sin.
His intellect did not represent him in darkness. In fact, the truth he lived on stage was tarnished in a bed of adultery, multiple times, hundreds, perhaps.
His death might have been God’s coup de grace, mercy blow, to prevent his present and monumental disgrace in the eyes of the world. Cancer ruined his bones and took his life but his conduct while alive and healthy ruined his soul.
I hope Ravi made it to heaven. In fact, I believe he did if in his dying breath he sought forgiveness for his duplicitous lifestyle of predation.
One only attains heaven through a bridge that stands firm over the chasm of eternity, that bridge being Jesus Christ. There is no other way Ravi, or any of us for that matter, could enter God’s eternal rest.
But with that in mind, we cannot dismiss the fallout of his predatory behavior and sins that have stayed behind. The consequences of his actions are here and they are going to stick. They have to stick because we cannot stand idly by and allow this nefarious conduct to happen again.
His victims must be heard. His victims have to come forward with strength and in numbers. The woman bound by the NDA must be released by the Zacharias family so that we can hear, and learn, and listen, and repent, and lament, and reform.
We cannot allow truth to die in darkness for fear of losing influence and money. That was lost the day we decided to trust in the influence and giftedness of man over the eternally restorative and transformative power of Christ.
Now is a time of reckoning and Ravi’s name is going to face so much judgment.
For the sake of truth, it must.
The apologist, the intellectual, and the serial predator.
These thoughts were originally posted to Facebook years ago as I reflected on the passage of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of St. Luke.
Why Compassion Matters
How oft we forget the care Christ showed to those destitute and cast aside by society. How oft we forget the story of a Good Samaritan; an outcast in his time, who cared for a man half dead when no one else would. The Samaritan, too, was a neighbor to the Jews. As Christians, we tend to fall prey to the ideological fallacies of politics and nationalism; as hatred and even racism festers in our hearts towards our neighbors. Be those neighbors Christians, atheists, Muslims, straight, gay or etc. add it to the list. Jesus calls wrong for what it is. But none was as friendly and caring toward the outcast as He was and is and he calls us to do the same. How are you distancing yourself from your fellow neighbor? Can you love them as you love God?
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
Just then an expert in the law stood up to test Him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the law?” He asked him. “How do you read it?”
He answered:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
“You’ve answered correctly,” He told him. “Do this and you will live.”
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus took up the question and said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and fled, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man, he had compassion. He went over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. When I come back I’ll reimburse you for whatever extra you spend.’
“Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
“The one who showed mercy to him,” he said.
Then Jesus told him, “Go and do the same.”
Who Is My Neighbor?
Jesus makes it clear that no matter who our neighbor is or whatever their background may be our duty as faithful servants of the Most High is to love God with all our being and love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.
So then, who is your neighbor today?
Is it a Republican? A Democrat?
Is it Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Is it Donald Trump and Mike Pence?
A white man? A black woman?
A heterosexual? A transgender?
A racist? A terrorist?
An atheist? A muslim?
An evangelical? A fundamentalist?
Whatever someones affiliation, orientation, observation or predilection, especially in a pluralistic culture, it mustn’t change our conduct nor our disposition to emulate and reflect the compassionate heart of Christ to all.
Our heart should reflect that of our Lord in showing love, compassion, forgiveness, silence in moments where silence is required, tears where required, food for the hungry, open hearts for the hopeless, a shelter for the homeless, open arms to the sojourner, and yes, forgiveness for the sinner.
Go and do the same.
Our salve should produce healing because we were healed and are still going through the process of being restored and sanctified for God’s glory, day by day.
Go and do the same.
Our words need to flow out of a place of redemption, our language needs to reflect the words of Christ, and our conduct, His, so that when people see us they see not the man or the woman but the Christ who guides us. We must be but hands and feet whereas our heart and our mind belong to the Savior.
Go and do the same.
Find the broken-hearted, the suicidal, the depressed, the anxious, the fearful, the hopeless and confused souls who have come to an end of themselves and offer the hands and feet of Christ without asking for a dollar in return.
As Jesus instructed and lived, go and do the same.
How much time has your church leadership spent on addressing the various historical benefits you have inherited from its previous endeavors?
Does your church revisit its history often? Are there blind spots in your church community history that are too painful to revisit?
If you were to investigate your church’s past, would there be any shameful moments that have since been brushed under the rug?
Hmm…
We seldom acknowledge apostolic creeds, we seldom understand the complexity of power struggles within the early church, the effort that was made to stamp out dangerous heresies, and combat power-hungry heretics. We rarely think of what transpired after the book of Revelation, written by apostle John, and are only reanimated by Christian history when Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, and Graham are mentioned. We enjoy the fruits of our Christian predecessors fought for without giving an ounce of time and effort to acknowledge the evils some of them ignored and the evils some of them promoted.
It is time for the church to openly confront, shun, and confess the evils of Christian history without devaluing the work of these Christian giants who we normally admire. It’s okay to condemn the sins of our predecessors, our forebearers, our forefathers, our leaders who did so much for our Christian faith under the influence of a better spirit but still lived such morally duplicitous lives, whilst endorsing damnable systems that served to destroy the wellbeing and identity of millions of people.
To clarify…
Before my fellow keyboard warriors condemn me of being a deconstructionist and hater of say, history, I must confess to you that I have a dog in this fight. Before I explain why this is so important to me personally and more important to the church, universally, I must state that I value our history, I value the struggles we have faced as a church, I praise God for the men, women, and children who did not recant their faith in Christ when faced with fire, spear, sword, and beasts in the arenas. I am thankful for the courage of so many who gave their lives in hopes of preserving their great faith when questioned by Spanish inquisitors and forced to recant at the threat of death but held their ground and lost their lives doing so. I am doubly grateful for William Tyndale, Joan of Arc, and John Hooper.
I am honored by the sacrifices made by Polycarp, Justin Martyr, from which we derive the understanding of a martyr, a witness. I am in awe of the courage of Ptolemaeus, Lucius, Perpetua, and Felicity. Their lives were not lost without a cause.
I am in debt to the arduous efforts and sacrifices made by the early church apostles and disciples as they spread this great message of hope and salvation into the Roman Empire and beyond it, even, losing their lives in the process. For Stephen, the first martyr for Christ, Apostle James, and also James the earthly brother of Christ. Apostles Peter, Paul, Andrew, Matthew, Philip, Thomas, Jude, Bartholomew, Barnabas, and Simon who gave their lives for the faith and did not recoil at the face of execution.
I commend their courage. The thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children who walked this earth with their heads held high and faced the flames of death, voracious lions, gladiators, Roman spears, Spanish Inquisitors, European crusaders, and the devastating animosity of Islamic conquests.
I applaud them. I applaud their faith under such pressure, fear, starvation, despair, and loss. I admire their honorable conduct when facing struggles against physical and spiritual forces. Their unbending and unshakable faith in the afterlife. Their fervor for the Great Commission and their consistent want for better social structures to protect the poor and destitute, being themselves poor and destitute. Many did not wait for nor would they rely on the force and wealth of government and kings to enact goodwill toward all men but went about it on their own, feeding, assisting, healing, hosting, and delivering many from death at the risk of losing their own goods, favor, property, and lives.
Aye, aye, these are our heroes of the faith and we honor their memory and their sacrifice.
But
And there is almost always a but
But we must also, in the same spirit, openly condemn and without hesitance repudiate the immoral conduct and ineptitude of Christian leaders of the past and those still with us today.
The Dutch Protestant Church and The Nazi Regime
Rene De Reuver, Dutch minister and theologian.
Let us consider the imitable stance of the Dutch Protestant Church who, under the direction and leadership of Rene de Reuver, apologized for and condemned the mistreatment of Jews by the Dutch body of believers during the rise of the Nazi regime. The church assisted in adding despicable layers of anti-semite sentiments to an already inflamed Europe that would later spawn concentration camps within the Netherlands and throughout Europe.
Where the church had the opportunity to criticize the mistreatment of human beings by its government and the neighbor governing body in Germany it instead, because of its racist sentiments, allowed for Germany and Holland to assist in the decimation of the Dutch-Jewish population of Holland. Well over 70 percent of the Jewish community of Holland perished because of the nations overwhelmingly pro-Nazi participation in antisemite violence.
We cannot blame the Dutch church alone for what happened in Europe but the Dutch Protestant Church recognizes its willful participation in one of the vilest and most horrific stages of human history, the promulgation and dissemination of Nazi ideals and subservience to the Nazi regime.
Rene de Reuver states that it was in the Dutch Protestant Church where “the ground in which the seeds of antisemitism and hatred could grow.”
“For centuries a rift was maintained that could later isolate the Jews in society in such a way that they could be taken away and murdered. […] Also, in the war years, the ecclesiastical authorities often lacked the courage to choose a position for the Jewish citizens of our country.” Said De Reuver.
How telling that the church, the one entity that fears no man, no group, no authority or government structure, and has no fear of facing death was the most recreant of all institutions when asked to speak against the evils of the Nazi regime and the mistreatment of Dutch Jews but fell short for want of racial superiority.
“The church recognizes faults and feels a present responsibility. Antisemitism is a sin against God and against people. The Protestant Church is also part of this sinful history.” He added.
De Reuver has stressed the importance of the church in combating this heinous sin that has dilapidated church history and erased generations of Dutch Jews. He states that his church and fellow believers endeavor to combat this sin wherever it is found from now on.
“We undertake to do everything possible to further develop Judeo-Christian relations into a deep friendship of two equal partners, united among others in the fight against contemporary antisemitism.”
The Southern Baptist Convention and Slavery
Southern Baptist Convention 1995 Resolution
In 1995 the first resolution was made by SBC leaders to condemn the church’s participation in and the promotion of chattel slavery in the American south.
“We apologize to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime, and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Said the SBC leadership on the 150th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“WHEREAS, Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention; and
WHEREAS, Many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery; and
WHEREAS, In later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans; and
WHEREAS, Racism has led to discrimination, oppression, injustice, and violence, both in the Civil War and throughout the history of our nation; and
WHEREAS, Racism has divided the body of Christ and Southern Baptists in particular, and separated us from our African-American brothers and sisters; and
WHEREAS, Many of our congregations have intentionally and/or unintentionally excluded African-Americans from worship, membership, and leadership; and
WHEREAS, Racism profoundly distorts our understanding of Christian morality, leading some Southern Baptists to believe that racial prejudice and discrimination are compatible with the Gospel; and
WHEREAS, Jesus performed the ministry of reconciliation to restore sinners to a right relationship with the Heavenly Father, and to establish right relations among all human beings, especially within the family of faith.
Therefore, be it RESOLVED, That we, the messengers to the Sesquicentennial meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, assembled in Atlanta, Georgia, June 20-22, 1995, unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin; and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we affirm the Bibles teaching that every human life is sacred, and is of equal and immeasurable worth, made in Gods image, regardless of race or ethnicity (Genesis 1:27), and that, with respect to salvation through Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for (we) are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28); and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest, and we recognize that the racism which yet plagues our culture today is inextricably tied to the past; and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously (Psalm 19:13) or unconsciously (Leviticus 4:27); and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we ask forgiveness from our African-American brothers and sisters, acknowledging that our own healing is at stake; and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we hereby commit ourselves to eradicate racism in all its forms from Southern Baptist life and ministry; and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we commit ourselves to be doers of the Word (James 1:22) by pursuing racial reconciliation in all our relationships, especially with our brothers and sisters in Christ (1 John 2:6), to the end that our light would so shine before others, that they may see (our) good works and glorify (our) Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16); and
Be it finally RESOLVED, That we pledge our commitment to the Great Commission task of making disciples of all people (Matthew 28:19), confessing that in the church God is calling together one people from every tribe and nation (Revelation 5:9), and proclaiming that the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is the only certain and sufficient ground upon which redeemed persons will stand together in restored family union as joint-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).”
Beautiful!
The SBC lists their previous flaws, failures, and shortcomings, without losing their fervent love for Christ and the people who are made in His image. There is no equivocation here, these leaders do not vacillate when called to confront the dark and tenebrous history of their parents, grandparents, and beyond. It takes courage to admit fault, it takes grit and an unimaginable amount of time reflecting on the damage their partnership with evil systems caused and how their negligence cost the lives of thousands in America and millions in the Subsaharan tropics thousands of miles away and hundreds of years ago.
The SBC admits that their previous involvement in disenfranchising black Americans under the protection of ecclesiastical leadership, the discrimination of black Americans by church laity, and the acceptance of segregation within the denomination as a whole was and is an odious stretch of its history that must be openly condemned. Systemic racism ran through the genesis of the SBC and systematic racism was promoted for its survival.
Not anymore.
Many critiqued the SBC’s apology as too little too late, and its timing quite poor.
“Today racism is subtle. […] It’s corporate, and it’s very difficult to see it unless you are African American. I see it now in our convention in a lot of ways.” Said Willie T. McPherson, director of the Black Church Extension Division.
He informs the SBC and community that this apology was “just the beginning.” And that, “We already know that God will not operate where there is sin. And racism is sin.”
McPherson is hesitant to accept such a late apology by SBC leaders when for far too long black protestants have been victims of racist extremist violence outside the church and later revictimized by protestant clergy when the church was beckoned to lead the condemnation of such acts but fell silent and in other instances would repeat the vitriol of these same supremacists from the pulpit, verbatim.
SBC second vice president and black pastor, Gray Frost reminds us that we can still accept an apology, no matter how little or how late it comes, when it is made out of a genuine posture of repentance and hopes of reconciliation.
“On behalf of my black brothers and sisters, we accept your apology, […] We pray that the genuineness of your repentance will be reflected in your attitudes and in your actions.”
The Impiety of Pope Pius XII and the Nazi Regime
Pope Pius XII
Smithsonian Mag’s Theresa Machemer lays forth a scathing description of how Pope Pius XII either neglected or purposely ignored the calls of the allies to condemn the atrocities of the Nazi regime from his seat of papal power. Theresa states:
“To critics, the pontiff’s refusal to publicly condemn the Nazis represents a shameful moral failing with devastating consequences. In his polarizing 1999 biography of Pius, British journalist John Cornwell argued that the religious leader placed the papacy’s supremacy above the plight of Europe’s Jews, winning a modicum of power—and protection from the rising threat of communism—by becoming “Hitler’s pope” and pawn. Supporters, however, say that Pius’ silence was calculated to prevent German retaliation and ensure the continued success of the Catholic Church’s behind-the-scenes efforts to aid victims of Nazi persecution.”
Theresa makes mention to the ambiguity of the now shameful and repugnant Reichskonkordat, or the Concordat between the Holy See and the Germain Reich signed and promoted by the Vatican under Pope Pius XII’s leadership. This disgraceful agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and Hitler’s death machine focused primarily on the religious freedoms of Catholics, the freedoms to dress in priestly wear in Nazi Germany should one be a priest, and the right to display Catholic icons outside and inside Catholic churches and also the preservation of Catholic worship rights.
Pope Pius had the total authority of the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic church abroad, and worldwide to condemn the atrocities that were being committed against Jews in Europe but chose to settle for thirty-four articles of religious liberties for the sake of political peace.
Sounds oddly familiar. Sounds American.
Not only was there not peace in Italy, France, Germany, Poland, England, and the world over, but his cowardly stance on this issue will be remembered for generations to come. This failure is to be repudiated since there has been no formal apology on the side of Catholic leadership to disavow and discredit this leader’s cowardice but there are many petitions to canonize the miscreant.
Theresa continues:
“On September 18, 1942, Pius’ assistant, the future Pope Paul VI, received an eyewitness report of ‘incredible butchery’ of Jews in Warsaw. One month prior, Ukrainian Archbishop Andrzej Szeptycki had delivered a similar report informing the pope of atrocities carried out in the Lviv Ghetto, reports Haaretz’s Ofer Aderet.
Soon after, the United States’ envoy to the Vatican asked if it could corroborate accounts of mass killings in Warsaw and Lviv. In response, Vatican Secretary of State Luigi Maglione reportedly stated, ‘I don’t believe we have information that confirms this serious news in detail.’
While sifting through the papers, the researchers also found a memo from a Vatican staffer that warned against believing the reports, dismissing these accounts on the grounds that Jews ‘easily exaggerate’ and ‘Orientals’—a reference to Archbishop Sheptytsky—’are really not an example of honesty.’”
If the church is unable to condemn these aspects of its past for lack of documentation and credible sources I understand, to an extent. But the evidence here is overwhelming, as it was with the Dutch Protestant Church and with the Southern Baptist Convention, but the Vatican has yet to properly condemn its participation in the mistreatment and imprisonment of Italian Jews locally and European Jews abroad, which led to the extermination of so many Jews in the Final Solution. This blood is on the hands of both the Nazi regime and on the conscience of the churches who had the social influence to condemn these atrocities but stood idly by as families were sifted from their communities and gassed in extermination camps.
Scriptural Basis for Admitting Fault, Asking for Forgiveness and Bridging the Gap
“In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, a Mede by birth, who was ruler over the kingdom of the Chaldeans: In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the books according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet that the number of years for the desolation of Jerusalem would be 70. So I turned my attention to the Lord God to seek Him by prayer and petitions, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.
I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed:
Ah, Lord—the great and awe-inspiring God who keeps His gracious covenant with those who love Him and keep His commands— WE have sinned, done wrong, acted wickedly, rebelled, and turned away from Your commands and ordinances. WE have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to OUR kings, leaders, fathers, and all the people of the land.
Lord, righteousness belongs to You, but this day public shame belongs to US: the men of Judah, the residents of Jerusalem, and all Israel—those who are near and those who are far, in all the countries where You have dispersed them because of the disloyalty THEY have shown toward You. Lord, public shame belongs to US, OUR kings, OUR leaders, and OUR fathers, because WE have sinned against You. Compassion and forgiveness belong to the Lord our God, though WE have rebelled against Him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by following His instructions that He set before us through His servants the prophets.
ALL ISRAEL has broken Your law and turned away, refusing to obey You. The promised curse written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, has been poured out on us because WE have sinned against Him. He has carried out His words that He spoke against US and against OUR rulers by bringing on us so great a disaster that nothing like what has been done to Jerusalem has ever been done under all of heaven. Just as it is written in the law of Moses, all this disaster has come on us, yet we have not appeased the Lord our God by turning from OUR iniquities and paying attention to Your truth. So the Lord kept the disaster in mind and brought it on us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all He has done. But WE have not obeyed Him.
Now, Lord our God, who brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and made Your name renowned as it is this day, WE have sinned, WE have acted wickedly. Lord, in keeping with all Your righteous acts, may Your anger and wrath turn away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; for because of OUR sins and the iniquities of OUR fathers, Jerusalem, and Your people have become an object of ridicule to all those around us.
Therefore, our God, hear the prayer and the petitions of Your servant. Show Your favor to Your desolate sanctuary for the Lord’s sake. Listen, my God, and hear. Open Your eyes and see our desolations and the city called by Your name. For we are not presenting our petitions before You based on our righteous acts, but based on Your abundant compassion. Lord, hear! Lord, forgive! Lord, listen, and act! My God, for Your own sake, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name.”
Daniel, the prophet and dream interpreter to the king of Babylon and later the King of Persia is seen as a righteous man who served God wholeheartedly. He was exiled, or perhaps, kidnapped by the Babylonian army at a young age from his motherland, Israel, and catapulted to the epicenter of Babylon. He was given a new name, without his consent, forced to undertake a new diet, which he declined, forced to worship a different god, which he refused, and given authority to command those who disagreed with him and he did not abuse his power nor his position when given the chance.
He was entrusted with status by kings and royalty, given a seat of power over religious leaders and governers and he did not falter for want of power. The Bible is crystal clear in condemning moral failure, no matter who commits it. But nowhere in the Bible is there a fragment or a shred of dirt on Daniel. The kid turned prophet turned magistrate of both Babylon and Persia was blameless. This does not mean he was sinless but that he was without fault. He was an upstanding guy.
But pay attention! God is at work here!
Daniel, in all his grandeur and excellency beyond kings and servants, did not fail to point out the faults of his forefathers, whose continual sins had brought upon them economic, religious, and militaristic calamity.
Daniel goes on and on about how he is part of the problem that got his people into the position they were in and it shows in how he does not distance himself from participating in this ill but places himself in it wholeheartedly.
We
Us
Our kings
Our leaders
Our fathers
All Israel
Our rulers
Our sins
Our iniquities
This isn’t a process of self-immolation for the sake of communal favor but it is a righteous act of humility before God and people.
Daniel sets off to pray for his nation and the possible restoration of his people to Israel. He sets off to request forgiveness from God for his sins, the sins of his fathers, his people, his kings, and beyond for the sake of clarity and forgiveness.
Daniel set forth an example of humility at work and it paid off. If the reader continues on with Daniel’s story, from the same chapter, they will find that God answered Daniel’s prayer that same day. The Israelites were ultimately blessed by Ahasuerus (Artaxerxes) with the possibility to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the cities walls and later rebuild their temple.
All because one righteous man set off to humble himself before God and pray for forgiveness. Forgiveness not just for himself but for his entire nation. Whatever was left of it anyway.
Take Heed and Concluding Thoughts
The reason I set off to put this particular blog post together is that there is a resurgence of denialism within the American church and its embarrassing history when it comes to the mistreatment of black Americans at the hands of white American clergy and laity.
Far too many of us have believed the lie that when pointing out and condemning the sins of our fathers we then devalue the good they have done, therefore we must not even confront the evil they have perpetrated nor can we confront the lasting consequences of these evils in our society today.
This is foolish and cowardly! It’s pride at work in our hearts!
When the world looks to those who claim to represent Christ they want to see people who reflect Jesus, not people who represent denial, objection, failure to confront sin, failure to admit fault, failure to seek forgiveness of wrongs, failure to apologize, and a lack of humility!
They want to see people who stand tall like Daniel, the righteous prophet who did not hesitate to confess the horrible and demonstrably evil sins of his fathers, rulers, kings, and nation. Daniel saw that his relationship with God superseded his comfort in ignoring his nation’s marred history. He followed the precepts and designations of God who informed a previous king that if a nation, once exiled and banished from the cover of God’s blessings were to humble themselves, turn to him and call out to His name, then He would hear them from heaven and heal them. Heal their land.
Heal their hearts!
“If I close the sky so there is no rain, or if I command the grasshopper to consume the land, or if I send pestilence on My people, and My people who are called by My name humble themselves, pray and seek My face, and turn from their evil ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:13-14
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” Ezekiel 36:26
There are many American churches that have yet to grapple with the extent of their participation in the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, antebellum south racism, the sentiments that led to the civil war; where American southerners, who were staunch believers, fought for their right to own slaves and treat black people as property. These same individuals and their descendants formed terrorist militias like the Ku Klux Klan after losing the war and terrorized the black community in the name of God and country. They later enacted Jim Crow laws to further divide and segregate white and black communities, to further impoverish black Americans, and lynch them when they saw fit. Many carried their Bibles into church on a Sunday morning and found themselves warming their bodies by the fire where a negro had just been burned alive. Many condemned civil rights activist and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as a race-baiting nigger who wanted nothing more than to destroy the fabric of the American society, which consisted of a white supremacist hegemony for hundreds of years and had become the standard of the land. Many believers would later celebrate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Many would later hide their racial animosity and promote the great white flight into suburban communities which would become safe-havens for white Americans. They would bar black Americans from qualifying for loans to live within the same communities, whose children could not attend the same schools, and whose livelihood would outpace, outmatch, and outdo that of the blacks who were left to live in squalor and misery in government abandoned urban city-center communities.
Many of our American church citizens are living in the comfort of aloofness and willful ignorance, turning a blind eye to the history that separates them, their predominantly white and strangely segregated churches.
We see this when the majority of our predominantly white churches consider themselves culturally diverse and well-integrated not as a result of immersing itself in the communities it abandoned but by allowing the members of those communities to join their churches and adhere to their methods and isms. The culture within the church is predominantly European and anything other than this mode is considered pagan, unorthodox, and possibly unchristlike.
There are churches in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida who gladly display and proudly wave the Confederate flag as a show of their southern heritage whilst ignoring the terror that was caused under that particular banner in the black community in a not too distant past.
I believe that the rift between the black American church and the white American church will only be repaired and reconciled once the children of the offending party irrevocably condemn the actions of their racist forefathers; reduces the symbols, flags, and statues of confederate leaders to ash or pushes them into the darker corners of Civil War museums; and admits that there is still a virulent poison of implicit racism, discrimination, and segregation within their church communities.
Racism is still with us today and it is understandable for us to see it outside the church, as much sin proliferates and spreads in the world without catalytic factors. But to see this particular sin so present and alive inside the church to this very day, which at first was demonstrated with such animus but is now hidden under politics and willful ignorance is damnable and shameful.
We must confess it. Denounce it. Repudiate it. We must acknowledge our part in it like the Dutch Protestant Church has and like the Southern Baptist Convention has to find peace with our fellow brothers and sisters in the faith and answer the call of the Great Commission with a clean slate.
We cannot stand by or stand down like the Vatican of old and the Vatican of now and ignore the failings of our leaders, possibly hiding their faults and failures so as to save face.
Does not the Bible condemn this?
“Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.” Proverbs 28:13
So why tarry? Why bicker and fight over the why must we confess the sins and ills of our ancestors when scripture clearly directs the most righteous amongst us to do so, publicly!
I pray as Daniel prayed,
“Therefore, our God, hear the prayer and the petitions of Your servant. Show Your favor to Your desolate sanctuary for the Lord’s sake. Listen, my God, and hear. Open Your eyes and see our desolations and the city called by Your name. For we are not presenting our petitions before You based on our righteous acts, but based on Your abundant compassion. Lord, hear! Lord, forgive! Lord, listen, and act! My God, for Your own sake, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name.”
Because our American church needs to be reconciled. The separation and segregation that stems back hundreds of years, this wall, this partition based on the sin of racism needs to be done away with once and for all for the glory of Christ and the honor of God’s creation.
“In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.” Colossians 3:11
“For He is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility.” Ephesians 2:14
Until we confess these sins we will remain in Babylon (of the heart and soul), enchained, enslaved, and impoverished without hope, future, or perspective for a resolution to our lapsed race relations.
We can do better, Church. We can do better, American Church. It is time we confess our sins, explicitly and publicly, that we may be forgiven and our cross-race relationships restored.
For if the church fails to spear this mission, the world will, and when the world sets off to accomplish something outside of Christ’s character we are left with an even more broken system. Hence the rise of the Black Lives Matter organization and the embarrassing silence of the church on the issue of race.
Let us mirror the person of Christ and display humility in action. Seek out those who look different than you, who come from a different culture, a different upbringing, and listen to their stories and their brokenness. Bridge the gap, Christians. Do that which you were called to do.
I’ll leave you with the words of Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius as he addressed his soldiers before a battle from the film Gladiator:
“Brothers, what we do in life… echoes in eternity.”
This morning we had the privilege of attending Life Church in southeast Edmonton and it was a memorable experience. Before announcements were made, prayer offered for those who are sick, before the message, the worship team ended their ministerial session with a doxology.
Doxology: “Doxologies are an expression of praise to God. In the Christian church, we often hear them sung or chanted. They are a tradition that has meaning and importance for all Christians. Since the early church, doxologies have been a way for Christians to express their love and thankfulness for what God has done in their lives.
A doxology will be heard at the end of canticles, psalms, and hymns. They are a short hymn of praise one will find in various Christian and Jewish worship services today.”
Jesus taught His disciples to pray and the Bible teaches us to praise. We praise Him as He is, above all creatures, above every kingdom, man, tribe, and tongue. We worship and praise the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. One God, eternally existent in three persons. Praise Him.
Amen.
Pastor Mike Love, lead pastor at Life Church set off to remind congregants in attendance and those who opted for online services and watched from home that gratitude is as important to the life of a believer as is faith. He explains that like faith, gratitude is a posture of thankfulness. It must come from us to God before we see His blessings in action. Our thankfulness becomes a part of our Christlike character as we mature in our spiritual walk with God.
Context
Today’s scripture is found in the gospel of Luke.
“On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.’ When he saw them he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, ‘Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ And he said to him, ‘Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.’” Luke 11-19
Luke records for us a strange occurrence between Jesus and a group of lepers who happened to cross paths.
For those of us unfamiliar with leprosy, the CDC defines it this way:
“Hansen’s disease (also known as leprosy) is an infection caused by slow-growing bacteria called Mycobacterium leprae. It can affect the nerves, skin, eyes, and lining of the nose (nasal mucosa). With early diagnosis and treatment, the disease can be cured. People with Hansen’s disease can continue to work and lead an active life during and after treatment.
Leprosy was once feared as a highly contagious and devastating disease, but now we know it doesn’t spread easily and treatment is very effective. However, if left untreated, the nerve damage can result in crippling of hands and feet, paralysis, and blindness.”
And although we know today that this bacterial infection isn’t as communicable as we thought, back then, many thought it was. In fact, two thousand years ago people did not have Tylenol to relax an aching back or a Motrin or Aleve to soothe a headache. There was no penicillin, amoxicillin, or any other drug that could treat these diseases so societies and cultures would go to the extremes to separate anyone who displayed signs and symptoms of any disease. This was done to prevent pandemics from sweeping through nations and decimating their numbers.
In this case, men, women, and children who succumbed to this nefarious disease were determined unfit to live with the rest of society. They were cast out of town to live with other lepers, in squalor, where they would have to beg for food.
These individuals would become victims to some of the more grotesque forms of livelihoods as leprosy would eat away their fingers, toes, nose, and ears. Some would lose an eye or two, as the bacteria would devastate their bodies. Some would lose their feet or hands, and others their limbs. They would carry the mark of their disease on their body and the shame of it on their face.
These were outcasts. These were the untouchables of that time.
If any of them were to enter a town to beg for food or money, seeking help or relief, they would have to announce their entry at times from hundreds of feet away.
Imagine announcing your entry into a school, a Walmart, a venue as a diseased man or woman. Every time you reach for a door there are signs that say “diseased, stay away,” or “announce yourself from a distance and if we decide, we may serve you.”
It’s such a burden. A sad scene, really.
Now that the world is adjusting to the new reality of social distancing we are somewhat aware of how it feels to maintain a distance, how often we can visit someone or someplace, how many people can be in there, and how many restrictions are present to prevent the spread of a virus.
But our dignity is intact. Our personhood is there. Our decency is evident.
But lepers of antiquity were the lowliest of the low, who, if they did enter a city without announcing themselves they faced punishment, possibly death.
And if one were to, say, beat the disease and its spread halted, they would then present themselves to a priest, the highest level of government at the time, for inspection and purification.
The person was cleared from quarantine, was reinstituted into society, allowed to find lodging and work, possibly marry and raise children, revisit family they were forbidden to hug and touch for God knows how long.
You can imagine the ramifications of being a leper and never finding relief. It would not be a stretch to think some of them thought of taking their own lives.
But in the passage above, we see that Jesus is on his way to the capital city of Jerusalem and is met by ten lepers. These men had most certainly heard of Jesus, the miracle worker, and had hope that he might, just might heal them. They stood at a distance as was customary they shouted at him, pleading with him for restitution and a reversal of their misfortune. And here, many televangelists would have asked for money, money-hungry preachers would have asked for faith seeds (money) and prosperity moguls would have demanded partnerships (more money).
But Jesus tells them to do something very weird. He tells them, “Go and show yourselves to the priest.”
And as mentioned above, you know that a leper is only to show himself or herself to a priest for inspection of being, say, cured or healed of the disease. But these lepers probably looked at their hands and saw the disease present. They gazed over their feet and noticed that the disease still festered. Some looked to their missing limbs and saw no difference.
But they obeyed.
Strange, isn’t it?
If to find a cure for our disease we prod our chests out, beat our breasts with vigor, and accept any adventure necessary to accomplish the task in mind to be cured. We would climb mountains, swim through crocodile-infested swamps, we would fight a lion or even swim from one sea to another. We would fight beasts, murder men, collapse buildings if it means we attain that one thing we need most in our healing!
And here Jesus asks the lepers to present their unclean bodies to a priest to be inspected and declared clean.
Seeing how innocuous Jesus’ request was they simply went on about it.
One can even imagine one or two of the ten lepers grumbling amongst themselves, “He won’t even come closer to chat with us. Some healer he is. And now we have to go and humiliate ourselves before the priest, possibly face criminal charges or death.”
But a bizarre thing begins to take place. As the lepers head for the temple ground, their skin begins to clear up. Their fingers possibly restored. Those who limped now walk on both feet, without trouble. The man without an eye is now able to see clearly with two eyes. A man, once ashamed of his gaunt and diseased face, who at one time would hide it behind a cloth now rips the cloth off and feels the smoothness of his face. A woman who before could withstand the disfigured look of her feet now stands in awe and smiles at them.
You can imagine the jubilee, the joy, the ebullience of the ten lepers as their disease is swept away from their bodies. Their trip to the temple grounds is now one of absolute festivity compared to how hopeless their entry into the city was before.
As they make their way up, one of the ten stops to think about what just happened. Of the ten, only one looks back at Jesus and begins to shout his praises and his beatitudes.
This man at first bleated and moaned his way into cities and towns but now he faces charges of disrupting the peace for shouting with such joy.
This man fell at Jesus’ feet and gave him thanks. And Luke, the author of this gospel, makes note that this man was a Samaritan. He was an outcast because of his diseased and he was an outcast, considered of lower birth and importance in Israel, because of his nationality and ethnicity. He faced discrimination because of his illness and discrimination because of his faith, his upbringing, his geolocation, and his nationality.
But here, before Christ, he is but a man before his Maker.
Gratitude precedes blessing. It does not only proceed, comes after, but it precedes, rather, we give God thanks for things before they even happen in our lives.
Olivet Theory
And Jesus is heard saying something, say, to the credit of the Samaritan whose heart he saw through and saw integrity.
“Then Jesus answered, ‘Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ And he said to him, ‘Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.’”
We find in this passage that God is good. And in this passage from the gospel of Luke, we see that gratitude precedes blessing.
Gratitude precedes blessing. It does not only proceed, comes after, but it precedes, rather, we give God thanks for things before they even happen in our lives.
We are thankful to God before God blesses us, not just after.
“Listen! Obedience is better than sacrifice,” 1 Samuel 15:22 NLT
And I agree with Pastor Love’s thought that obedience leads to convenience in our walk with God because these ten lepers took a step of faith before anything had even happened for them.
They heard the voice of the Healer and they stepped forward in faith.
The only problem is that only one of them turned back and thanked the Healer for their healing.
How often do we forsake the Healer once we receive deliverance? We forsake God once we have attained and accomplished that which we set off to accomplish. We made promises and swore by our name and now that we are restored we are off to institutions, rules, regulations, and patterns instead of turning back and falling at the feet of Christ.
Words of Encouragement
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1
Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His love is eternal. Give thanks to the God of gods. His love is eternal. Give thanks to the Lord of lords. His love is eternal. Psalm 136:1-3
“My heart is confident, God; I will sing; I will sing praises with the whole of my being. Wake up, harp and lyre! I will wake up the dawn. I will praise You, Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises to You among the nations. For Your faithful love is higher than the heavens, and Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. God, be exalted above the heavens, and let Your glory be over the whole earth. Save with Your right hand and answer me so that those You love may be rescued.” Psalm 108:1-6
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” Colossians 3:16-17
“giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Ephesians 5:20
Instead of questions to consider…
Focus on the blessings that God has given you in life, the blessings that God has allowed to triumph in your present, and place your faith in the God who has foreseen tomorrow and knows that He will guide you through it.
I can’t imagine how many of us have been hurt by someone we love or at least someone we admire. I can imagine that the most memorably painful blows are dealt by people we love and trust most.
A family member, a spouse, or a trusted friend who mistreated us and never stopped to think of their words or their actions. Never apologized for it.
But why? We ask.
Why would they do that to me? What did I do wrong?
I can also imagine the struggle of dealing with guilt and the disillusionment over whether you’re responsible for the offense you’ve suffered. You wonder if the harm you’ve suffered was because of that one thing you did on Tuesday or the one thing you said six years ago.
You are harassed by someone bent on reducing you to a bag of misery. You are tormented by your mind of it. Paralyzed by the fear of repeating what you believe is the same mistake and receiving the same kind of treatment again, again and again.
This cycle of torture can change how we operate. It can change how we behave without us even knowing it.
I remember working in a firm where majority of the staff treated me with warmth, friendship, and a welcoming spirit. I recall how on my first day one of the staff members of the executive team came up and gave me a bear hug, a gentlemanly smile, and a welcome cheer. The reception could not have gone any smoother, until, that is, a coworker had what I believe, a bone to pick with me.
From degrading my work to reducing me to fodder in front of other coworkers, belittling me in private and dismissing that behavior when confronted led me to believe I was at fault.
Gaslighting 101, amiright?
What was a one time the most favorable work environment quickly spiraled into what I could call a living helll. I would wake up every morning dreading the possibility of making eye contact with this coworker. It took me 25 minutes to drive to work and with every kilometer traveled I felt a sense of panic overwhelm me. Panic would control me.
At one point, gripped by the fear and anxiety of what I look back now and call bullying and harassment, I asked another coworker to cover my post because I could feel my facial muscles tighten, my pulse become rapid, I felt my senses were heightened and I would sweat purfusely. I would sweat through my undershirt and my regular shirt all the way into my winter coat. I could not concentrate, focus, discern my emotions, my current situation because my mind, throughout the day and throughout my tenure there had, to this point, been a living, waking hell where I was imprisoned to this place for my income and survival, whilst battling the idea that I might be responsible for being a victim of bullying tactics. If it must have been something I said, something I had done. It must have been me.
After I asked my coworker for assistance I rushed out of the building for air. I couldn’t retain oxygen as if, I presumed, my chest didn’t want to breathe. My lungs could not hold air and I was losing my mind. I was having a panic attack at work.
I soon thought the pacifist in me would become a warmonger. My Christian upbringing was slipping as I contemplated violence as a form of retribution for what I believed was wrong and deserving of punishment.
Under this constant pressure, anxiety, stress, and trauma I was becoming someone other than myself. I was allowing certain patterns of thought which had not consumed me before, to overwhelm and control me. Whereas in the past I would shy away from raising my fists here I relished the thought. In the past I was always admonished to use my words wisely, in a way that wouldn’t nullify my witness of Jesus but here I welcomed nothing but the thought of destroying a human being with my words.
I cursed in my mind. I cursed in the car. I cursed in the bathroom at work. And one time, on my way home from work, what I thought was an accident had caused a traffic jam so bad it delayed my trip home. My wife needed the one car we owned so that she could head off to her night job. This traffic delay or accident, whatever it was, turned a 25 minute drive home into a one hour and ten minute build up of volcanic proportions.
Once my car reached the scene of what I thought was a construction site, an accident or even police lights was nothing but a delay caused by people who had decided to slow down on our side of the highway to observe a truck that had slid off the road on the opposite side of the highway.
The delay was caused by drivers decided to slow down just to see what happened on the other side of the road.
From that moment on the roads were clear and my realization of how stupid humans can be and how their choices effect those around them, killed me. I drove for the next twenty minutes above the speed limit and I screamed.
I screamed like I had never screamed before. I screamed so much I felt as if my throat wanted to split from my neck, in an attempt to preserve its longevity, but I would not let this hostage escape.
I screamed at the sky, the air, the cars, the road, other drivers, at the truck that slid off the road, (mind you nothing happened to the truck or the driver.) And I screamed so much that my vision became blurry as I drove. This delay made my wife late to work and made me feel like a failure, this justifying, in my head, the bullying I received at work. Maybe I was a failure. Maybe I deserved the mistreatment.
I was someone other that I had ever known. A behavior completely different from the true me or who I believed the true me to be.
All in all, the hurt I was caused and the pain I was made to feel had changed the way I dealt with reality and myself. The way I understood myself and how I reacted to people.
I noticed how snappy I was with my children. How I lacked patience, lacked alertness to my home duties, attention to my wife, and desire to even pray or seek goodness in life.
This constant barrage of stress and attack had changed the way I operated. It changed me.
I thank God for being merciful towards me, patient even, guiding me through this difficult time. My wife, also, understood my problematic reactions even though I could not verbalize them at the time. Another executive branch member came to my rescue to restitute a form or another of decorum, work place respect, and basic human decency in our work place.
With time I came to understand that the pain I was feeling, the hurt, the mistreatment that was directed towards me was not something intentional or natural to the individual responsible for it.
In fact, the person who was hurting me, was also hurt in the past by someone else.
The truism that hurt people hurt people serves us a wholesome reminder that our behaviors are a sign of pain and unresolved hurt in our own lives.
I’ve grown up in environments and settings where young boys and girls were getting into constant fist fights, destroying their bodies with drugs, and living with a promiscuous lifestyle only attained by veteran sex workers.
Young people. Adolescents, teenagers, and young adults. Slaves to hurt they suffered in the past. And I know this because I am still friends with some of them today.
So many of us are living with the pain of hurt and offense that it has changed the way we live and operate.
He states that individuals who are hurt carry a bag of pain with them as a result of these offenses:
Broken promises
Broken confidence
Personal rejection
False accusation
Abuse
And people who carry this bag around their waste, over their shoulders, or buried in their heart tend to be blind to their own behaviors when they are offending others. They become blind to the hurt they cause and become slaves to that willful ignorance. They exhibit these traits:
Walled in by bitterness
Blind to personal faults
Seek vengeance
Bent on destruction
Given to idolatry
We create a god out of our pain and worship it throughout our day. We dream of it and it chases us though our nightmares. We’re slaves to the hurt we have suffered and we are blinded by the hurt we cause others.
Olivet Theory
You can see how the situation is cyclical. Someone breaks a promise and we hide behind walls of hurt and bitterness.
Someone destroys our confidence and we become blind to our own mistakes.
We’re rejected and we want nothing more than vengeance and reckoning.
We’re falsely accused therefore we want to destroy someones character, maybe even their life.
We’re abused and if that abuse goes unresolved, goes without restitution, without justice, without correction then we give in to worshipping our pain and hurt.
We create a god out of our pain and worship it throughout our day. We dream of it and it chases us though our nightmares. We’re slaves to the hurt we have suffered and we are blinded by the hurt we cause others.
Friends, this ought not be.
Again, I’m grateful for those around me who strengthened me, admonished me, encouraged me to seek restitution. By God’s grace I did. By God’s grace I was able to look this coworker, a victim of someone else, and forgive the wrongs done to me.
We fail to realize that so many people are hurt and the pain they cause others they are blind to. They’re unaware because they have built walls, barriers, monuments of hatred, fear, paranoia, and insecurity to protect them from the reality of past hurt.
Until we’re able to understand this we will repeat this cycle until we reach the grave.
And it is true, as Erwin Lutzer writes in his book on When You’ve Been Wronged that reconciliation may not always be an accomplishable goal with the offending party but we may come to terms with ourselves.
We can be reconciled with ourselves so as not to become victimizers, perpetrators of offenses and bullies in our own lives.
We can halt this cycle of hurt by understanding that we can forgive, not necessarily forget but forgive continually, daily, seasonally, and so that we can move on.
This effort, though not an easy one, is doable.
Believe me. I’m living it right now.
Instead of recreating a bloody death scene we can conduct a masterpiece worthy of mention for generations to come.
Olivet Theory
When we’re torn between hatred for someone and forgiving them, we’re stuck in a arena where we are given two choices: wield a sword or conduct an orchestra.
We will either become gladiators who live and die by the sword or we can use our pain by transforming it into a conductors wand to lead an orchestra in tempo, accents, volume and stillness of time.
Instead of recreating a bloody death scene we can conduct a masterpiece worthy of mention for generations to come.
Forgiveness gives us that much power.
As it is true that hurt people hurt people we also know that healed people heal other people.
So here are the questions.
Are you hurt? Have you been hurt? How is that pain, that event, that person affecting your life today?
Perhaps they’re no longer around. Maybe that person was a coworker and the two of you no longer work together. Perhaps that person was a lover who is now an ex-lover. Perhaps a family member you no longer communicate with.
Perhaps they’re in a different country, perhaps in prison or far worse, perhaps they’re dead and beyond the reach of reconciliation but they are not beyond the reach of your forgiveness.
Forgiveness liberates the heart from the desire and the need to re-offend.
It sounds almost impossible to forgive someone deserving of retribution, say, even violence and execution, but we have a justice system for that and if the individual evaded justice here on earth rest assured that they will not evade ultimate Justice beyond the grave.
Forgiveness is a power you and I are able to wield to restore, renew, redeem, deliver, and heal.
Maybe today is the day you can start, yes, start to heal.
You deserve to heal and the people around you need the love you have inside, not the hurt.
Let’s break the cycle of pain and reinstate a cycle of wholesome healing and love.
I hope this post finds you well and I hope you stay well.
You are more than your pain. You are more than that bully. You are more than that offense, that hurt, that pain, that memory and that event. You are intrinsically of far more worth and value than any pain or hurt someone has caused you.
You are loved and you can give love. That’s a cycle we can comfortably promote.
God knows our world needs it.
Godspeed reader. Godspeed cycle breaker.
“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” – Matthew 6:12
Olivet Theory 