In this episode, I share some reflections on being a part of the Christian community, particularly relating to my experiences with the challenges of maintaining faith within flawed institutions.
I opened up about my previous experiences with panic attacks, depression, and dealing with some personal and systemic issues in church communities, which sometimes led me to ask raw questions about faith and the role of the church. What I’ve discovered, however, is that despite the faults and failings, the church is not as terrible as it might seem.
It is filled with people who are on their own complex faith journey and who are also striving to live a more Jesus-embodying life. Contrary to my assumptions coming out of some really difficult experiences, there are people willing to have open-minded conversations about differing perspectives and issues within Christian communities.
While our experiences may cause us to doubt, it is important to remember our experiences are just a small part of the larger picture. There is hope for healthier Christian communities.
What makes you the most hesitant to open to people? You can share in the comments below.
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Transitional music for this episode has been contributed by Corey Steiner. The opening song is Sunset Drive by Evert Z.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, friends. Welcome back to unfamed Christianity. Asher Whitmer. Here your host. This is the podcast where we seek to help Christians find culturally aware biblically nuanced and Jesus embodying responses to current day issues. Now in full transparency. This is the podcast where I sort through culturally aware biblically nuanced and Jesus embodying responses to current day issue. If it so happens to help Christians who are listening, and if it happens to help other people, then that is an amazing grace of God. Because really, if you think of as an author, I view myself when it comes to the podcast, there’s ideas I’ve been mulling around, maybe journaling about, maybe talking with people, and I’m wanting to begin fleshing out and find articulation for the things that I’m processing. That’s the podcast. If I want to hone it in a little clear, maybe dive into something specific and kind of sort through things, kind of get feedback and see how this lands on people in a written form, then I write an article about it, perhaps. And even this audio version, I’ll probably take it and tweak it and create a written version of sorts.
[00:01:21] And then behind the scenes, I’ve got a number of longer form writing projects that I at the very least, nibble away at, if not hope to publish eventually one day. And so this is very much kind of the raw wrestling through and sorting through what does it look like to embody Jesus faithfully in our current cultural moment. And so welcome. Thank you for joining me. If you’re new to the podcast, you may want to go back and listen to last week’s episode because it was kind of an update after being on a hiatus for a couple of months. And I’m coming back in now in full transparency. I do plan to do more interviews and so forth, but I’m also wanting to begin diving into some things that I am just kind of processing. Would like to talk with you, would like to invite you as a listener to participate in this conversation. Give me feedback. There’s been a number of things and over time I’ll share more and more what some of these things are. But there’s been a number of things that I’ve been processing and sorting through. Some of you who followed the podcast, the blog have caught on that in the last two years we relocated from Los Angeles, California to Canyon City, Colorado. And just some of the things of processing life and ministry and everything, there are reasons that go into such a relocation. There are reasons that go into some of the life changes that we’ve made, that everybody obviously makes. But it’s interesting to be someone who kind of writes or talks about these things publicly while also processing through my own journey and our own story. And I’ll be honest with you, there’s been versions and seasons of deconstruction in all of this. And I hesitate to use that term because it’s such a triggering term and I’m not at all meaning a deconversion or a doubting God. Like, is God even real? But more just. You have expectations of life, you have expectations of ministry, you have expectations of relationships and whatever. And as you go through the journey of life, you discover it doesn’t actually function like you expected it would or things don’t go quite how you thought they should, how you understand Scripture to say it should go or whatever.
[00:04:07] And it just leads us into this season of reflecting on and being like, okay, well, what’s up with that? Is my expectation off?
[00:04:19] Is there something else playing into this that obviously there’s other things playing in that I wasn’t expecting. But what do you make of the human experience bumping into an expectation that is contrary to the experience? That’s kind of a lot of what has, I don’t know, a lot of stuff that I’ve been processing lately. And I typically try not to share things publicly that are live current stories. So if it’s something our church is going through, I’m not going to be blogging and writing about that. Probably let it be in the rear view mirror a little bit. Now. There have been times where I was diving into a subject or an issue not realizing that just around the corner our church was going to face it directly or myself even. Usually I don’t dive into the questions. The things I’m wrestling through currently.
[00:05:26] I try to process that in a more private setting.
[00:05:30] And then when I feel like I’ve worked through it to a degree with with different friends and mentors and just people in my life and Scripture, then I get the courage or I feel a little like it’s a healthier place to start talking about it publicly to a certain degree.
[00:05:54] However, having said that, there are things that I would like to kind of jump into in the next few weeks that just straight up.
[00:06:08] I feel like we are in the middle of all kinds of stuff and I’ve got all kinds of posts, podcast, ideas, even people I’d love to interview around certain topics. And I’m like, where do I start? Because if I start at a certain place, it’s going to communicate a certain message to somebody.
[00:06:33] I don’t know exactly where the starting point should be. I’ve even wrestled with, is it even proper? Like, should I just not talk about any of this stuff until later?
[00:06:50] And I feel like I can’t really put it down.
[00:06:56] And then God saw fit to have me join through the voice of the church, have Teresa and I join the leadership team of our local church here in Canyon City. And being thrust into a leadership role in that way, like become privy to certain challenges that the church, at least our local church, is facing. And there’s this mixture of things that I’ve been processing outside that I’m now realizing, whoa, this is also something necessary and needed in the church.
[00:07:44] This podcast is not in any way an attempt to be a place for preaching for our local church.
[00:07:56] What I’m attempting to do is there are some things I’m seeing in our current cultural moment that I think we need to have conversations about.
[00:08:05] And I would just like, if we can create an environment of some healthy thought process and back and forth, that’s what I would love to dive into.
[00:08:23] One of the things that God has burdened me with in the last I would say, what are we at 2023? I would say the last seven years, maybe it goes more. Eight to seven years is just a desire for, well, yeah, let me back up.
Something I have a deep passion for is the health of the church, the health of the bride of Christ, that we reflect Jesus, that we reflect the biblical vision for God’s people.
[00:09:05] I’ve had that my dad was a pastor growing up. And so I don’t know if it was something about growing up in a pastor’s home that kind of curated that burden and passion, or I’m not at all going to try to claim like I have such a close relationship with God that I just feel super in tune. Because honestly, I don’t all the time.
[00:09:26] Sometimes I am so discouraged by the church that I struggle to even open the word of God because it’s like, well, what I see in scripture I’m not seeing lived out anywhere. And so that just creates this sense of disillusionment and so forth.
[00:09:46] But I can’t let it go. I can’t just drop something. It’s like the story of scripture is so beautiful. It’s the story of Jesus and what he is doing, what God is doing in humanity, in all of creation, through the church, is amazing. It’s beautiful. It’s worth fighting for. And so when I experience things firsthand, or I have people approach me, write me, whatever, where I realize the church is failing people, where there’s pain, where there’s abuse, where prejudice reigns, it aches deep in my soul.
[00:10:42] I’m not just saying that for dramatic effect.
[00:10:48] There have been many nights where I lie awake not able to shut my mind off of because of a situation that is just rolling around in my head and not being able to.
[00:11:00] What’s the way forward? How do we resolve this?
[00:11:04] How can there be reconciliation in this moment and not seeing it, praying about that, and then my mind still running after even one particular night. I remember spending a couple of hours in prayer and still just not finding mental peace, at least to kind of resolve it, just to kind of trace the timeline a bit. Like this was developing, I would say, in 20 15, 20 16, 20 17. And it’s a part of what led me to write to begin with, although I certainly did not have all the language around some of the issues and so forth that I do now. And I’m fully aware that there are things that I’m seeing and sensing that I’m probably not even quite got my finger on the right language and so forth, that a few years down the road I will be like, oh yeah, that describes what I’m sensing dealing with.
[00:12:08] But it led to me publishing Live Free in 2018, just the desire for men to walk in freedom and not just behavioral modification where we try to stuff our feelings and control ourselves a little bit more, but to actually live free where we have nothing to hide and we can go out and be fully who God has intended us to be in full transparency and full honor and integrity.
[00:12:39] And then a bunch of things kind of came to a head in 2020, when even before 2020, there was beginning to be a shift in bringing to the surface areas of abuse, areas of and I’m not using abuse flippantly, like misuse, I mean actual abuse, like sexual abuse or domestic abuse taking place. And I can remember getting emails from people, even some women in 2018, 2017 perhaps, and not knowing what to do with it because this was kind of out of my realm of expertise, my realm of experience even. And then even in the process of discovering 2019 2020 and coming to discover that I’ve gone through some experiences here that are abuse, are abusive, and I didn’t realize it, or I didn’t have language for it, and then having other friends and watching it, being in settings watching particularly I’m thinking of spiritual abuse kind of conflict that can happen between spiritual authorities and those under spiritual authority. Like watching it take place and not knowing what to do, even when you know what to do, just knowing that it’s not going to be received well, there’s not going to be reconciliation here, and not knowing how to navigate that.
[00:14:27] In the middle of all this, we have COVID hitting right and the church is being fragmented all over the place. And how you respond to some of the social events and very much I see closely tethered some of the matters of abuse with matters of prejudice that show up in culture, in close communities.
[00:14:50] And a lot of this kind of stirring up, I would say, you know how like in cartoons or gifs or gifs, however you pronounce it, sometimes if somebody’s got questions about things, you see these floating question marks rise up.
[00:15:08] Maybe that’s kind of what was going on, like in my soul, like a popping up of these question marks and continuing to puff out my soul, as it were. In 2021, I was reading, listening to La Cray’s, I am restored his autobiography and talking about his kind of journey into depression and anxiety attacks and finding healing, restoration from that, realizing as he’s describing these panic attacks, I’m not LaCrae. I’m not a celebrity like him. I don’t go and work, do my craft in front of thousands, millions of people a year.
[00:15:56] But what he was describing as a panic attack, I had been experiencing multiple times a week for close to six months. Up until that point, I had no clue. I thought a panic attack was like, somebody totally loses it. They no longer can do their work, they no longer can present. But the thing of driving down a road and all of a sudden just a huge, overwhelming sea of emotion, and you start weeping, and there’s no explanation for why you’re weeping and feels like you’re going to suffocate. You have to pull off and kind of just get through the moment, and it fades. It’s entirely irrational, stuff like that. Yeah, I was dealing with that, and that was kind of the moment when I started becoming aware of my own mental health and my own mental state.
[00:16:55] And it led me to begin reflecting on, and I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m working on a book called Unfolding Faith.
[00:17:04] That was kind of the wake up moment. I typed out the intro, the preface, kind of outlined the book there, June of 2021, and it usually goes like so I did some writing there in June of 2021, I think it was October, till I did some more writing on it, and then maybe January of 2022, I do some more writing on it.
[00:17:33] It’s usually like four months where I don’t do a lot of writing, and then a few weeks where I’m kind of diving back into it.
[00:17:41] And a lot of it is just kind of the journey post, or I would say it’s reflections post coming to the awareness of the fact that I’ve been dealing with some depression and I’ve been under a certain level. Of stress and have experienced my wife and I have experienced things emotionally, spiritually, to a certain extent. Physically, maybe, but mostly emotionally and spiritually that aren’t necessarily normal, that you don’t just somehow get used to. But it’s okay to actually hit pause and make huge life changes in a pursuit of health.
[00:18:29] I’m sharing this. It’s like post 2021, we’re in November of 2023. It’s two and a half years later. I have not had a panic attack for a year and a half.
[00:18:42] They were pretty strong for a six to seven month period. We went on a trip in the summer of 2021.
[00:18:50] It was not really exploratory. It was just happenstance that it turned out to be eight weeks long. But we did want to be intentional with meeting with some key people, mentors of ours, people we respected, and talking through some things, and we did that, and it was tremendous experience.
[00:19:11] I went like nine months, I think, without having a panic attack. And then the spring of 2022, I started having some more panic attacks, and there were circumstances around those that triggered them that I don’t feel it’s necessarily appropriate to go into those details right now, at least in this way. But all that to say, it led to us making some fairly significant changes.
[00:19:36] And for a year and a half, I have not had a panic attack.
[00:19:41] And there’s a number of things that have been involved in the post awakening, I guess you could say awakening to my need for my own personal, emotional, mental, little health.
[00:20:03] And there’s some things so there’s been moments, seasons of counseling and therapy, then seasons of not honestly some of the major shift in how I was doing mentally and emotionally. My wife and I often talk about it. It’s like we don’t even really know what we did.
[00:20:24] It’s not like we had a certain set of questions that we were journaling through.
[00:20:32] Yeah, to a certain degree it was like finding people to talk about, talk through some of these things with. But there’s still a lot that we would like to pursue in terms of further therapy and further just kind of help processing some of the past and so forth. It’s not 100% that we did something specific, but one of the major things as I look back on the last year and a half is that I’ve come to this realization that the church is not as bad as we think it is.
[00:21:14] Now you might wonder, how in the world do I come to this realization? Like, Asher, what in the world are you saying? And sometimes we’re in the middle of the mess so much, and all we can know and see is dysfunction and unhealth.
[00:21:32] And then every now and then we peek our heads out and we go visit a certain place or maybe we even move and relocate to different places. We have these seasons outside of the mess.
[00:21:44] But then something is said or something happens that is so similar to the triggering event of the past.
[00:21:54] We sense that fight or flight mode. And either we dig in our heels and we fight or we flee even when and here’s here’s the key thing that that I’ve been discovering pieces too. When okay, so maybe there are some similarities, but in situation B, there’s actually a different way of resolving the issue. There’s a different way of navigating through that. And I want to say up front 100% 1st, that this is not a story of, like, going through a mess and then finding perfection. And now we know how it’s done and now we’re going to write a book on how to do is in full transparency. And I don’t think anybody at our church would deny this, but our local church here in Canyon City is not a perfect church. The community, the people, I’m not a perfect person. I’ve not found perfection.
[00:22:58] So it’s not at all about finding perfection, but rather discovering that there are better ways to work through issues that are healthier and discovering that there are communities out there of people who want to grow in health.
[00:23:18] Sometimes we’re at a different place than some other people are. Sometimes we want to move at a different pace than other people do.
[00:23:28] But the church is not as bad as we might think it is now.
[00:23:36] It’s kind of funny because we felt God leading us here to Canyon City and it’s kind of through it was honestly through a house I can remember distinctly as an 18, 1719 year old at Bible school. And we’re just passionate about missions and everything and like life. I was never going to move for the sake of a house or the sake of particularly enjoying a certain place more than another place.
[00:24:15] And maybe I’ll talk more about my views of home and placement and our role in creation, maybe later.
[00:24:29] But it was undeniable that God was leading both Teresa and I in our prayers, personally prayers together. He was directing and kind of opening up the way to relocate for the house that we have. And that was something for us to process through a lot.
[00:24:52] And what all that means and what all God wants to do, we still don’t even really know. Fully understand, but our very like, it’s yeah, it’s just it’s there’s a lot more peace being in a place when you know that God has led you someplace and you’re following in that even though it doesn’t fully make sense right now, we can’t fully explain it or you see it kind of unfold.
[00:25:20] Yeah, there’s a lot of peace around that as opposed to doing things because you’re hoping to create something as you do it.
[00:25:31] Yeah, just hands down, I’m going to follow where God is leading us, even though it may not always make logical sense and that’s what we sensed. But there was a bit of a hesitation in me because I knew enough about the community to know that we have totally different worldviews, we have totally different experiences. We’re coming from our whole married life spent either in a city or overseas. Like our take on social issues, on political issues is totally different than a lot of people, at least that we were assuming.
[00:26:14] And it’s interesting, like talking to people, getting to know people more. I think there was some of that apprehension of us moving into the community and be know, who are these Whitmers from California? What are they going to do or think? Hey, friends, I’d like to tell you about a really cool app my wife and I discovered earlier this year. It’s called upside. Whenever we go to buy gas for our vehicles, we open the Upside app and we look at which gas station in our town provides the greatest amount of cash back. Usually it’s somewhere in the eleven cent to 17 cent per gallon range. And so then we just select the gas station that has the highest cash back rate for that day and we go fill up at that gas station. The price is usually a competitive price. It’s not like it sends us to the most expensive gas station in town. But we fill up, we pay what we normally would and then we get two, sometimes two and a half dollars cash back. This is a way for us that we’ve been building somewhat of a slush fund for extra activities, travel, stuff like that. If you would like to take advantage of this, click the link below sign up. It does give us a bonus when you sign up, but then you can share it with your friends and family and you retain a bonus for that as well. So we’re super clear it costs nothing to sign up. You don’t spend more than you normally would on gas. It’s just you’re able to look and see which opportunity provides the most cash back for that day and you can get cash back on your gas. We’ve enjoyed slowly collecting. I think in about three months we’ve made 36 $40 cash back. So it comes pretty consistently to about twelve to $15 cash back. Obviously it depends how much we drive around in a month, how much gas we use. Click the link below, sign up, start saving for those fun family activities in full transparency.
[00:28:16] Yes, we are different. We have different perspectives, different experiences, different worldviews. But what we’ve discovered is that the church is not as bad as we might think it is. That there are people who are actually open to learning a different perspective, that it can actually be healthy for us to learn different perspective, right? I would have never denied that, but I was definitely scared of it. I was definitely scared of being willing to have a conversation and to be fully transparent. I’m still scared of certain conversations with certain people because I just know there’s probably going to be some sort of accusation underlying about it. Experienced something, not locally but online, something similar to that recently where we seemed like we were having a decent conversation. I was kind of opening up, feeling like taking a risk, but also not entirely sure where the guy was coming from. And at the end of the conversation I was like, yeah, I think my hunch from the beginning was correct. It was more about maybe disagreeing with me for whatever reason and not like he was genuinely wanting to learn and understand more. And so it’s scary moving into those conversations because you don’t know how they’re going to go. You don’t know if somebody’s going to write you off as some liberal from liberal state or if somebody’s going to write you off as some pro megatrump or some pro abuse, whatever. Because that’s actually the time that we live in. We live in a moment when I hear so many people wanting to be understood. We actually have a really hard time doing the work to understand others.
[00:30:15] We’re very quick to put people in boxes. We don’t want to be in a box, but we’re very quick to put other people in a box.
[00:30:25] And we’re not actually all as bad and malicious and whatever as sometimes the narrative can be curated around. And I’m not at all trying to excuse prejudice. I’m not at all trying to excuse sin abuse. I’m not at all trying to excuse whatever.
I’m just saying, like, the church isn’t as bad as we might think it is, and this is someone who’s given to a more progressive in terms of conservative anabaptist culture.
[00:31:07] I’m more on the many would say the liberal side. I personally don’t like those things because I’m like, hey, I’m actually a little more historically anabaptist than some of you who claim that I’m liberal or whatever, but just in full transparency, why I say that is because I’ve had that thrown in my face.
[00:31:33] You’re a liberal. You think this way because you’re from California and you listen to all these news, blah, blah, blah, blah. And no matter how much I say, hey, first of all, listen, where are you from? You’re from Indiana? Iowa. Like, there’s more Republicans. There’s more conservatives in the state of California than there is in those states.
[00:31:52] California has just way more so there’s. But secondly, I don’t listen to all that. Don’t that’s not why I’m sharing the perspective and the point of view that I do. And so I get a little gunshot. I’m like, I’m afraid of opening up, of sharing that because I want us to be rigorous about dealing with the baggage in our own selves. Right, but I’ve discovered that there are people who I would have put in the box of this maybe pro Trump area or maybe like pro actually, it’s probably better to say, like, pro Republican or something.
[00:32:47] We just recently had a conversation.
[00:32:50] I don’t think this is confidential. Like, as a leadership team on the church, we had a conversation about capitalism. It was totally off topic, just like, I don’t even remember what triggered it. And there’s five of us on the leadership team. There were only four at the meeting and just realized we’ve got different perspectives about this. And we talk back and forth, and there’s pushback, and it’s just like, yeah, totally like, what I have seen and experienced in the city totally different than what some have experienced here. In rural I consider this rural America.
[00:33:28] It’s called Canyon City. A lot of people think it is a city. It’s quite small. I think it’s, I don’t know, somewhere between 16 and 18,000 people.
[00:33:37] So you can drive through it in five minutes. You spend most of your time sitting at stoplights. Like, that’s a small town, in my opinion.
[00:33:46] Yeah, it’s just been interesting to discover because I’ve had similar conversations where I would have been thrown off as a Marxist or, like, pro socialism and so I’m a little apprehensive to actually share what I think.
[00:34:04] And I made some comment. I don’t even remember what it was that kind of initiated the conversation. He was like, well, one of the brothers was I’m not sure I’m going to push back on that or whatever.
[00:34:16] I’m like, oh dear, where’s this going to go? But it was a good conversation. I learned things.
[00:34:27] We all express appreciation for each other in it and learning. And my whole point is it’s possible there are actually a lot of people in the world who want to learn, who want to have conversations around these big things, even when they may still come out relatively with the perspective that they had going into the conversation, but who are actually willing to uphold the dignity of others in the middle of it, who are actually willing to let part of somebody else’s experience and journey kind of shed off on their own. And now they at the very least might talk about things with a new awareness of other types of experience and so forth.
[00:35:16] The church is not as bad as we might think it is.
[00:35:22] There are a tremendous amount of pastors and church leaders who are broken over abusive situations that happen, who want to learn, who are also scared because when presented with an abusive situation, you have one swing and you have to hit it perfectly or else you will be.
[00:36:05] And I was about to say something that I’ve been taken to task for and so I hesitate to say it because I don’t want to miscommunicate.
[00:36:20] I know what it’s like when you have a situation before you and somehow you have to handle it just right.
[00:36:32] If you don’t handle it just right, there are going to be people who want to write you off, who are going to say things about you.
[00:36:46] Just like the mega camp wants to discredit asher Whitmer as a liberal from California, I’m just placing myself in as an example. But there are also other people on other sides of things who want to put you because you said the way we’re responding to a situation is out of hand, then that’s one and the same as supporting an abusive culture that’s difficult to navigate through from a church leadership perspective.
[00:37:30] There’s all kinds of misunderstandings that happen there’s. All kinds of people aren’t as malicious as what can sometimes be communicated all the way around. Whether I have sat in meetings and I was going to say something and then I realized it paints me as though, like I’m this perfect in the middle person and that’s not at all what I’m trying to do.
[00:38:13] I’m just saying there have been situations, meetings where certain individuals I would be concerned about, right? Like, hey, we should be empathizing and caring for this particular individual, not judging them or whatever. And so the part of me from everything building up that I’ve shared 30 minutes. Ago about leading into the panic attacks and the struggle and all this. That part of me is red flags going out the galore and then also realizing that that same individual having in this maybe sometimes the same meeting, maybe other meetings as we continue to work through things like they weren’t saying what they were saying or reacting what they were doing. Because of all the things that I assumed based off of past experiences, they do want to care properly. But there’s this other dynamic that is also a very real reality.
[00:39:30] And I don’t know I don’t know how to bring these two together. What I was going to say is I’ve sat in those meetings empathizing and burdened for both.
[00:39:51] Let’s care for.
[00:39:53] Let’s not just assume the person under us in terms of under our influence and we are responsible for guiding them through and so forth. Let’s not just assume that they’re being rebellious because they have this certain attitude or are asking these certain questions or whatever.
[00:40:13] So I want us to understand. But then also from the other perspective of those of us who have people given in authority, people to guide and responsible for leading us, let’s not assume that they just have malicious intent. And our cultural moment in America wants to erode trust between people, period.
[00:40:44] Between people. I think we’ve heard the narrative that anti authority. I think we’ve heard the narrative from the other perspective that there’s one that creates a negative view of laypeople, you might say, right? Like they’re anti authority. Well, there’s another that creates a negative view of people who are in authority. Well, they’re just abusive and malicious power hungry.
[00:41:17] That is what that is what cultural is conditioning us for that type of suspicion for each other even more. I really believe the devil wants to tear the church apart through that sort of suspicion of each other. And it’s all coalesced. Right in the middle of the rise of awareness, of abuse and just the natural suspicion that comes when all of a sudden you thought this was a good place, a good community. And then you’re discovering there’s a lot of ugliness here that you never knew about that’s going to create natural suspicion that kind of floats to the surface for a lot of Christian communities around the same time. COVID hits. And we’ve got people who are saying, like, if you take the COVID vaccine that somehow you’re opening a demonic door to the devil.
[00:42:17] It just compounds. If you use the hashtag Black Lives Matter, you are participating in works of darkness or whatever. It’s just all this stuff that creates suspicion or vice versa, right? If you’re concerned about using the hashtag Black Lives Matter, then you’re just a white supremacist who doesn’t care about anything.
[00:42:43] We have been conditioned and we’ve stumbled into this marsh, you might say, of chaos and distrust.
[00:42:55] And what I’ve discovered is that the church is not as bad as I first thought it was.
[00:43:05] Now I’m going to go into more things in later episodes that will cause us to be like, whoa, the church is really bad.
[00:43:17] But I chose to start here because I know a lot of people who are dealing with depression right now, or even if it’s not depression, like kind of negative not negative, anxious thoughts about our current time and about any sense of hope.
[00:43:33] And I think it’s important that we have this base in some future episodes and so forth. I’m going to talk about my concern about the culture of suspicion that we live in, where the automatic posture is that of suspicion that plays a part in, eroding, this trust where you can’t even have conversations with each other if you say a wrong sentence on either side, like, you’re automatically put in a box. And we’re not doing the work of trying to understand one another. And I am not talking about making excuses, just like, oh, if you point out an area of disagreement that it’s like, oh, well, you just didn’t quite understand here. I need to talk a little bit more. No, that’s not at all what I’m talking about. Yes, there are points of disagreement, for one thing, and then there are also ideas, theology practices that are just flat out wrong. They’re not right. And we’re going to dive into those things and work through those things. That’s what I want to talk about and address.
[00:44:45] But this notion of just kind of automatic assumptions, automatic suspicion, not willing to take a person in context, that’s eroding, trust, it’s destroying hope. It’s destroying confidence. Not in the church. That’s not what I’m concerned about. Right. Like the church. Okay, if the church isn’t trustworthy, then don’t put your confidence in the church.
[00:45:12] It’s destroying confidence in Jesus.
[00:45:15] It’s destroying confidence in God.
[00:45:18] We have people I believe deconstruction is an important work to kind of process through.
[00:45:27] Wait, where is human experience colliding with our expectations or with biblical expectations? And why is that not jiving quite like we thought it would or whatever to kind of pull back the curtain and see what’s actually going on and maybe realign some things that are going on. That’s an important work, but we’ve got people going beyond that to deconverting.
[00:45:50] I’m going to have an episode where I interact with people like Alyssa Childers and some tremendous concern that I have Rosaria Butterfield and how she’s kind of going down a similar line of just slandering other believers and not fairly representing what they’re talking about.
[00:46:11] But I also think there’s and I lead with that, because what I’m going to say next, some people are going to be like, you sound like Alyssa Childers.
[00:46:20] There is an epidemic happening where people are deconverting. They’re walking away from God.
[00:46:29] And part of that is because of the way the church and the people of God have failed that person.
[00:46:37] But one of the ways. One of the ways it’s not the only way, it’s maybe not the biggest way in their life, but it’s an increasingly more magnificent way as life continues to go on. One of the ways the people of God fail such individuals is by creating and perpetuating narratives that erode trust. When we can’t trust each other, we struggle to trust God.
[00:47:06] When we don’t engage with each other and discover the fruit of the Spirit through each other, we don’t have any tangible way of experiencing God. And so all of a sudden, God does become distant.
[00:47:20] I’m taking a class. I’m going to wrap this up. My whole point of this episode was the church is not as bad as we think it is. And the purpose is that I want this to be a catalyst for harmony instead of polarization.
[00:47:36] I want us to be willing to take the risk of engaging people, and it’s okay to be careful in that process and to test people. And you realize when they prove themselves not trustworthy, it’s okay to acknowledge that, to draw boundaries. That’s the point. That’s why I’m starting here.
[00:47:59] Yes.
[00:48:01] Okay, I’ll be up. I’m going to wrap something up, but I will just say one of my classes this semester in Bible college is a class called Discipleship and Counseling.
[00:48:24] And it’s taking the approach of biblical counseling. I don’t know how familiar you are with that. Just for clarity’s sake. Biblical counseling in this sense is a type or a theory of counseling. It’s not like, oh, there’s some counseling where they seek to use Scripture and then other counseling where they don’t seek to use Scripture.
[00:48:45] I know Christian counselors who use different approaches than quote unquote, biblical counseling who are very much biblical counselors. Biblical counseling is more this notion of we have everything in scripture itself to help us work through our issues. And essentially it’s this posture of the gist of it, or the framework is that all of our negative emotions and negative experiences in life happen because of sin, because of sin in our life. And then the goal is conformity to the image of Jesus, which I completely agree with. That is the goal. Excuse my children who are starting to make some noise.
[00:49:31] The goal is conforming to Jesus as opposed to our sinfulness and Scripture and truth and kind of just bringing that in reminder to our heads and more and more like that. That is what helps us conform to the image of Jesus.
[00:49:49] I’ve really struggled I love my Bible college experience, but I have really struggled with this class because I keep reading things, and I think I’ve shared little snippets of it. There’s literally almost every page, something similar where I could be highlighting, saying, that is false, that is not true, that is not a liar. I mean, that is a lie, or whatever.
[00:50:14] Or just like, man that curates spiritual abuse or just all kinds of things just left and right. I’m just really struggling to go through this class and be like, man, I have to somehow I have to write papers kind of applying what I’m learning. And it’s like I’m actually arguing with what I’m learning. I’m praying through this. God help me if there is something for me to learn through this and not just be fighting against it. Open my eyes. Help me understand all that. To say that there are a lot of issues to deal with 100%. We are humans in the church, and humans are broken, and the church is in creation. And this creation as it currently exists is in bondage to corruption. We feel the groans, as Paul says, just like a mother in labor.
[00:51:13] But the church is not as bad. People do not have as inherently malicious intentions as we might first expect. And it’s worth fighting for. It’s worth exploring, it’s worth pursuing understanding the work of seeking to understand each other better and the work of living together when we have different views and the way we sharpen each other and not just isolating into our silos.
[00:51:44] That’s all I have for now. I’d love to hear what’s percolating in your heart and mind as you think about this. What pushbacks do you have?
[00:51:54] What thoughts do you have? What books have you been reading that have helped you kind of navigate some of these experiences yourself? How have you experienced God? I didn’t get into this for the sake of time, but my wife and I have experienced God and the goodness of God through people in ways that, quite frankly, have shocked us.
[00:52:21] It’s not because of any particular person’s amount of perfection. Like, we are all people who have definitely caused enough pain and traumatic experiences around ourselves.
[00:52:37] But to me, it’s just a testament of how God uses imperfect people to meet each other in our moments of need to bring a soothing or healing through the community of his people.
[00:52:53] How have you experienced that? Have you experienced that? Have you not experienced that?
[00:53:00] I know that a lot of my listeners and readers are people who have experienced hurt from the church. And so I’m not taking that lightly.
[00:53:13] I’m not at all trying to communicate that you should not feel negative about the church. Rather, I’m trying to communicate hope in the reality that it’s not. Even though we go through these seasons where all we can see is the darkness and the chaos, that’s not the final message of the whole picture. Till next time. Grace and peace.
