Author: David M Schell

A couple weeks ago I was out for a run and listening to an episode of Make Me Smart. Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood were talking about how Uber won the fight to not have to treat their drivers as employees (provide benefits, etc). It reminded me of this poster from Despair.com:

Which got me thinking about how the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.

Which got me thinking about the exodus.

Which for some reason got me thinking about their complaints when they were wandering in the wilderness. They say in Numbers 11:5-6,

We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.

Which made me think about my own spiritual journey and the things that I miss about when I was an evangelical.

My leeks and melons and cucumbers

There was an evening this past summer when I was driving to the beach with Ryan and tuned in to a Christian radio station only to hear a Republican Christian railing against Democrats in a way that indicated he had learned about Democrats only from Fox News, or something even more partisan, and had never met a Christian who voted Democrat. While I was watching Ryan play on the playground, I wrote in my journal, “It’s like a whole other religion.”

I didn’t know it would be this hard not having a progressive Christian radio station, where the songs weren’t randomly spiced with all manner of terrible theology and the talk show hosts didn’t believe people with my political affiliation were not only unChristian but acting in bad faith.

Another time, a Saturday morning, I was making pancakes and it took me back to my childhood when my mom used to make pancakes on Saturday mornings and we would listen to the latest episode of Adventures in Odyssey by Focus on the Family. Adventures in Odyssey (AiO) was one of the highlights of many of my childhood days – especially Saturdays, when the new episodes came out.

I listened to a few episodes as a deconstructed-fundamentalist adult and YEESH. Many were… pretty bad. Stereotyping atheists as immoral because they didn’t believe in God, for example. All the villains were so because they weren’t Christians. One of my former favorite episodes, “A Name Not A Number,” featured an arch-villain named Mustafah, with a terrible fake middle-eastern accent. Another villain, if I recall correctly, explicitly said that he could do whatever he wanted because God doesn’t exist and therefore morals are irrelevant. MWAHAHAHA.

All kinds of stuff that just… doesn’t feel safe or right anymore, even though I uncritically accepted it as a child.

I feel it. I keep feeling that sense of exile, of being away from something that was good, and not being able to go back.

Except that it wasn’t good. It was filled with all manner of stuff that was harmful and abusive and traumatic. It was legalism and always being afraid – afraid that my dad would come home, or Jesus would come back before I had really really meant the sinner’s prayer; it was belief in hellfire and damnation, it was smallness, it was always being in service to either fundamentalist or republican ideas.

In other words, it was Egypt.

But I do miss those cucumbers and melons and leeks – the days when I could hear the word “Christian” and safely assume it meant something good; when mainstream Christianity was something that didn’t think I was in the service of the devil.

If evangelicalism was Egypt, then this space, this great unknowing I’ve spent much of the last decade in, is not exile. It’s the wilderness.

As I mentioned in my last post, I feel like I’ve been wandering in the wilderness for a very long time. I thought of that as I was running, but just in the moment I did, I felt hope.

That sense of despair I’ve had for so many years about being in exile suddenly shifted to a sense of being in the wilderness, freed from Egypt, and on my way to the promised land.

The promised land.

I felt hope that one day I will see the promised land. And it will be better than Egypt. Leeks and melons? How about milk and honey.

As sometimes happens, the sermon I was working on worked its way into my own spirituality.

I was planning my Advent sermon series, “Jesus in the Old Testament.”

The sermon for the coming week was Jesus in the books of history, and suddenly, right there on the road, listening to “Make Me Smart,” I realized that Jesus was leading me into the promised land.

A half-second later, I realized that

not only is Jesus leading me into the promised land,

Jesus IS the promised land.

THAT was a good and beautiful moment.

I’ve lived for a long time with the haunting worry that I’m wrong about God. The fear that all the good things I have hoped and tentatively believed about God might not be true.

Probably ever since I first started believing them, maybe starting in 2007 but especially starting in 2010/11.

A year ago – it turns out, exactly a year ago today – I wrestled in an unpublished post with what it might look like to commit to it, to dive all the way in. To call Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. heretics because their view of God is so radically different from mine.

I need assurances that the monster-God is never coming back, that this expression of the Christian faith, as I have come to know it, is the genuine, authentic, real-deal Christian faith… and not the bullsh*t I grew up with.

That God is love, and that’s at the center of everything.

That God is good, and that good and love are words whose meanings I understand well enough that, while they may mean more than what I understand them to mean, they don’t mean the opposite of what I understand them to mean.

The question, I suppose, is whether I need to call out these other expressions as heresies, distortions of the authentic Christian faith – even if they are heresies I have embraced. And I am starting to think that at least in my own heart, that answer may need to be yes.

I’ve been wandering in this wilderness for a long time now. Five years ago, I wrote a blog post called “The Wall I Built Against the Monster God,” and every so often I go back to trying to build the kind of connection I felt I had with God back when I was a borderline fundamentalist, and I always seem to start in the same place.

Every time, I rediscover that I have been along this road before. I read that post about encountering God in the chapel at Jumonville. I read poems I wrote that I called “Psalms for Doubters,” and journal entries, and I realize that I’ve been here before.

In some ways it feels like I’ve been wandering in circles in this wilderness.

About two months ago, I was preaching through the entire Bible on kind of a whirlwind tour. I got to the part after the Exodus, after Israel has entered the promised land, and I read these words:

Now therefore revere our God, and serve God in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:14

That is the verse before the famous “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I felt like God was speaking to me, saying that all those versions of God that I had believed in once, even that fear that maybe I’m wrong and God turns out to be not better than I can imagine, but worse… those are gods I need to let go of. I need to put them away.

It’s funny how after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, and even after entering the promised land, even after watching their parents die in that wilderness because they refused to trust in God, they still had these idols.

They still had these artifacts of what their parents believed in. Maybe they were making sacrifices to Yahweh but they were still also hedging their bets on Molech a little. “We’re going to only serve Yahweh, but I’m a little worried that the Egyptian sun god Ra might strike us down for not worshiping him instead.”

And Joshua got up on his soap box and said to them (and to me), “Quit hedging your bets. Go all in. It’s been 40 years. (In my case, 5+). Don’t you think it’s time you put those gods away?”

Put away the gods your ancestors served over the river and in Egypt.

Put away the gods your ancestors served.

Put away the gods.

The gods who were anti-gay. The gods who demanded a blood sacrifice. The gods who wouldn’t hesitate to crush my heart “for my own good.” The gods who were angry, who had no space for nuance; the gods who killed off baby Canaanites because their parents were evil.

Put away those gods.

The gods who were mean and cruel and hung you like a spider on a string over hellfire, who only gave a sh*t about you if you obeyed their bizarre rules. The gods who demanded that children obey their parents without question and threatened them with hellfire for disobedience, who demanded respect for abuse.

Put away those gods.

The gods I have been afraid of because I feared God might secretly be them, or turn into them.

Put away those gods.

The gods clamoring to replace the one true God, who is ahead, who is love and justice, who cares deeply for the poor and the alien, for the rights of the downtrodden.

Put away those gods.

Leave them on the other side of that river you crossed to get into Canaan.

Leave them in Egypt.

Amen.

Hallelujah.

So where does that leave people I disagree with, like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham and evangelicals who have decided Democrats are following the devil and the current Democratic presidential candidate might be the anti-Christ and Donald Trump is the second coming of Jesus?

Are they heretics?

Is it my job to say they are?

I don’t know.

And it turns out, I don’t need to.

The verse immediately after “put away the gods” is “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I don’t have to call them heretics, or call them anything. (But I for sure can’t worship their god).

“The Lord,” as you may know, is an English translation of the word “Adonai,” Hebrew for “My Lord,” which represents the vowel markings under the Hebrew word “YHWH,” the tetragrammaton, Hashem, The Name of God which observant Jews may not pronounce.

The name means “I Am What/Who I Am,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be.”

The God who isn’t held down by people’s self-serving agendas.

The God who is love and goodness, the God who is for justice. Whose goodness is beyond human understanding, but not against it. The God who liberates.

The God who is like Jesus, dying for his enemies.

If Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham and my evangelical friends want to worship the gods my ancestors served in Egypt and beyond the river, the ones who are vindictive and send gay people to hell, that’s up to them.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Okay, technically I can’t decide that for my house; they’re going to do what they’re going to do, but I can use my influence to encourage it.

Note 2: Apparently this thought has its roots in an idea I had two and a half years ago.

EDIT 4/24/2022: This article from Religion Dispatches, I believe, offers a much more compelling explanation for the current (and very weird) wave of right-wingers referring to anyone who acknowledges that same-sex couples exist as a “groomer.”

I thought it made sense when I saw a comment pending on this post this morning from “a legal American citizen, and voter” who told me “you sound like a groomer.”

Most interesting, and most relevant, was this bit, referring to the title of the post:

“Right now? Since the dawn of the party, hun bun.”

I read that line after reading the article from Religion Dispatches, and if you read it, you’ll find that his comment is absolutely right, but not for the reasons he thinks he is.

I marked it as spam, obviously.

Original Post: Last week a friend shared an article about pedophiles. Apparently Germany is investigating over 30,000 people in connection with child sex trafficking. I asked myself… why share this story?

This isn’t an isolated incident of pedophile-article-sharing. I’ve seen it more and more, from that conspiracy theory about missing girls having the same unusual names as extremely overpriced cabinets on Wayfair, to PizzaGate, which argued that a pizza shop in DC frequented by the Clinton campaign was actually a front for child sex trafficking. In the case of Pizzagate, led to one man marching into the pizza shop and getting arrested.

Now, to be clearer than I hope I should need to be, child sex trafficking is wrong. Adults having sex with minors is wrong because minors cannot consent. I saw a movie about sex trafficking a few years ago. My wife and I donated to a fund that fights child sex trafficking. It’s wrong and it’s evil.

But a lot of the stories I’ve seen about child sex trafficking haven’t included any kind of call to action. No “share this number,” no “put a sign in your yard” or “don’t be a pedophile,” “seven steps to protect your kids from getting trafficked,” or even “donate to this fund to fight pedophilia.” It’s just “here’s another story about pedophiles engaging in sex trafficking. Isn’t it awful?!”

So when I saw the 30,000-pedophiles article, which to my memory came without any call to action, just a “can you believe this!” kind of comment (I don’t remember the actual comment), I just thought… what’s up with this?

I googled it, but I couldn’t find an answer that made sense to me. There’s an article on Mother Jones that addresses this in part – and comes to a similar conclusion – but I don’t think is as coherent or, honestly, as friendly to conservatives.

To understand it, you have to first understand the difference between conservatives and progressives.

Now I feel like a recipe blogger, making you read all this to get to what you probably came here for – lyrics and sheet music of the rewrite. If that’s what you’re after, click here.

“Trust and Obey” is a classic hymn. It has a very catchy tune, and it’s filled with truisms that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

However, if you look closer, a few concerning elements emerge. Plus, given my own personal baggage of an authoritarian parent who said disobeying him was tantamount to disobeying God, being told to “trust and obey” is slightly triggering – especially when it comes with the statement that it’s the only way to be happy in Jesus.

This post is my response to John Piper’s shenanigans, adapted for John MacArthur’s more recent shenanigans.

Some dude who’s famous for… something, I guess? I think mostly it’s just for acting like a jerk. Anyway, John MacArthur apparently thinks Beth Moore should “Go Home” and stop preaching, or something to that effect.

I could 100% believe what I was reading. Mostly because John MacArthur getting traffic for saying something ridiculous is a pretty typical day.

I’m tired. I’ve spent the past few days hauling stuff from one house to another and unboxing and putting up blinds. But I thought, “Surely I have time to respond to this nonsense in the derisive manner it deserves. Not with ridiculous proof-texting, but with recycled ridiculous proof-texting.

Recycled misogyny deserves nothing less than recycled satirical proof-texting.So, without further ado, recycled satire.

Should Men Preach?

For an answer, I turn to scripture. And not just scripture – complementarian scripture. The (Male-oriented) English Standard Version, to be exact.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” (Genesis 3:1-3)

See how the man is already lying to the woman about what God said? By the time it gets to the woman, God’s command has been twisted and stretched.

If you can’t trust the first man, in the GARDEN OF EDEN, BEFORE THE FALL EVEN HAPPENED, to accurately relay God’s word spoken directly to him, to only ONE woman, how the heck can you trust future, fallen men, to accurately relay God’s word transferred via the Bible, to other men and then have them relay it? It’s like telephone. Gosh.

Pop quiz: Who committed the Bible’s first murder?

Answer: Cain. A man.

Then you get to Lamech (Genesis 4:23-24), who threatens sevenfold revenge to anyone who hurts him. Violent people, men.

Genesis 6:5, ESV: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Not woman. Man. The flood happens because of man.

Now consider the man of faith, Abraham. He goes to Egypt and he’s such a coward that he tells his wife to lie to the Egyptians because he’s afraid. Does this sound like qualifications of a spiritual leader? No, no it does not. But she’s submissive to her husband, and next thing ya know, she’s about to be Pharaoh’s wife.

Also, the thing he’s afraid of is that the Egyptians will kill him if they find out she’s his wife. He’s wrong. So basically the man of faith has (a) told his wife to lie because (b) he has bad judgment.

Then take Sodom and Gamorrah. The Bible says (Genesis 13:13) that “the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord.” Nothing about the women; just the men. God destroys the whole city because of the men of Sodom.

Moses, a man disobeys God, and his wife has to circumcise their boys.

We’re gonna have to move a little faster now. All but one of Israel’s apostate idol-worshiping heads of state? Men. (Jezebel was under Ahab, you’ll recall, so Ahab was still the head of state in that case, leaving only Athaliah).

Who’s responsible for nearly all the sexual assaults and rapes in the Bible? Men.

Who’s responsible for nearly all the violence recorded in the Bible? Men.

Denier of Christ? Peter. A man.

Betrayer of Christ? Judas. A man.

Don’t forget Apollos, a man, who had to be set straight by a woman, Priscilla, whose name appears in 2/3 of mentions of the couple ahead of her husband’s name, emphasizing her significance over him.

Who discovered Christ was risen first? Women.
Who didn’t believe them? Men.
Who was right? The women. Naturally.

So when the divinely-inspired author of I Timothy says Paul doesn’t allow women to teach or exercise authority over men on the basis of the woman eating of the forbidden fruit first, he’s standing on some pretty shaky exegetical ground.

Men are inconsistent, they often fail to convey God’s word rightly, they strike rocks when God tells them to speak to rocks, they are occasionally incapable of doing anything useful unless women go with them (Judges 4:8), and regularly give other men terrible advice (see Job’s friends, for example).

So it turns out, John MacArthur shouldn’t be telling pastors and preachers who are women to go home.

He should be telling himself and other men. Maybe if we kept ourselves in the kitchen holding babies, cooking, and doing laundry, we wouldn’t have time to hold 50-year anniversary celebrations where we mocked women doing hard theological and pastoral work for having different genitalia (which is seriously such a childish thing to do).

Your kitchen is calling you, J-Mac.

NOTE: I’m a pastor and I love being a pastor. I don’t actually think female sex organs are God’s necessary qualification for ministry.

I’ve been thinking all day about that facebook post by John Cooper from the band “Skillet,” and the approving blog post that quoted it, titled “Skillet’s John Cooper on Apostasy Among Young Christian Leaders,” referring to comments by Joshua Harris of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame, and Hillsong singer Marty Sampson.

My first reaction when reading Cooper’s post was, “He doesn’t get it.”

Either that or something about the weaponization of evangelical language, specifically “apostasy.” I could do some fancy Greek work or google work to tell you that “apostasy” means “falling away” and find all the uses in the Bible, but I’m not at work right now, and that’s not what I want to talk about anyway.

What I want to talk about is this thing where people walk away from a toxic faith (“Hey! Did you hear David Schell said all faith is toxic?!” -No, it’s like toxic masculinity – some pieces associated with it are toxic, some aren’t-)

I want to talk about how people walk away from toxic faith, by which I mean a brand of faith that harms people. I want to talk about how people question their faith, or elements of their faith that many deem “central” even though they aren’t in our oldest creeds, and they’re immediately branded as heretics, or apostates, or Presbyterians, whichever is worse.

I’ve been following closely (probably too closely) the United Methodist Church’s 2019 General Conference about human sexuality for the past few days. I went in with low expectations, and came out sadder.

One of the less-appreciated casualties of recent debates about sexuality, and of debates within the Christian church in general, has been the beauty and sanctity of the word “love.”

Love is a great word, maybe the best word. It tells us about God’s intentions for us, and for the world. We use it to describe romantic emotions we can barely contain or even describe. “Love” describes how parents feel about tiny humans we’ve created.

But in more recent debates about human sexuality, or theological doctrinal debates in the church, it’s come to mean something else.

It’s gotten so bad that in a note I made to myself when I was serving as a chaplain in a hospital, I didn’t say “love people.” I said, “Give a shit,” because “love people” has too much baggage for me.

“Give a shit” means that the person lying in that hospital bed means something to me; they’re not just another body in a room, filling out the time until I can go home. Or, as my CPE supervisor put it, “I care about what happens to you.”

And maybe that’s what love used to mean, but it doesn’t feel like that any more when it extends past my wife and kid and a few close friends.

“Love,” that beautiful, wonderful word, has come to mean “meanness.”

How did this happen? Through the addition of one word: “Tough.”

As some of you may know, I am signed up for a cool program that gives me free books in exchange for my honest review. Free books make me happy, but I’ve been pretty busy lately, what with getting ordained and starting a job as a full-time pastor.

But when Mike Morrell sent me an email about Brother John, promising, “This book can be read in a single sitting, and is suitable for readers of all ages – including kids,” I thought I’d request it. A few days later, it showed up in the mail.

First off, the paintings were lovely. Just beautiful. I would keep it for the illustrations alone.

However, I should’ve understood that the book was suitable for readers of all ages, including kids. Non-reading kids wouldn’t enjoy it as much, or at least nine-month-olds like mine. My kid wanted to chew on it. Ah well. Such is life.

When I opened the book, the first thing I saw was an endorsement by Rick Warren. This made me a little anxious because I read The Purpose-Driven Life in my early 20s and got very little out of it, least of all a purpose-driven life. It wasn’t until years later that I felt out a sense of calling.

In fact, I wrote a blog post called “The Purpose-Driven Boatwright” about how the Bible says Noah lived for 480 years before he “found his purpose” building an ark, and then lived for another 350 after the flood. I wrote another post in which I contested the idea that everyone has a specific, knowable purpose, suggesting that purpose is a pipe dream.

I am not the “purpose-driven life” target audience. 

So I rolled my eyes a little when I read the first words of the introduction. Between Rick Warren’s endorsement, and learning that this was an essay first submitted to a “Power of Purpose Essay Contest,” I was not warming to the book. But I stumbled on anyway, hoping the rest of it might be better.

As I read the first page, I realized my nine-month-old’s attention span for the lovely painting was not going to survive the long block of text on the opposite page. But I carried on, in places wondering where exactly all this was going, if anywhere.

Then August started talking about Brother John, on page 20. (The previous pages weren’t bad; they just… weren’t all that compelling yet, aside from the images).

By page 26, I began recognizing myself in August’s anxieties. A few pages later I had lost track of my boredom and become fully engrossed in what I was reading.

I can’t tell you what happened in those pages, or even find a single salient quote that would explain what happened there. The best way I can explain it is the old maxim that you read some books, and other books read you. Brother John read me.

I think it was maybe a book less about “purpose” than integrity – integration, loving from deep within your heart, as a blessing I like says.

Maybe purpose doesn’t mean having a specific, knowable thing that you’re supposed to do. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if I misread Warren all those years ago in hoping he would tell me what my career should be.

Maybe purpose isn’t an outer sign flashing arrows where you should go, but an inward sense of who you are and are called to be that builds over time and acts as a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.” Maybe it’s a bunch of different things aligning.

Maybe purpose is when you don’t even need that voice because you feel the assurance in your bones. Maybe purpose and calling go together, and maybe calling is just that slow realization that you’ve always wanted to do this and you don’t suck at it. (Which may have been delayed by my understanding of what it means to be “called” in my particular calling).

I liked Brother John and when I went back and skimmed it again so I could write this review it still grabbed me, in ways that I still can’t put into words. It moved me. Not all books do. Thumbs up.

If you want a copy for yourself, you’ll have to pay for it, probably. You can do that by following my Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/2Lp9Fxr