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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.

Continue reading “Why I Rewrote (mangled?) “Trust and Obey””

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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).

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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.

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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.

Continue reading “John Cooper of Skillet and Faithful Apostasy”

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.”

Continue reading “A Word About Love”

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

A friend of mine shared a link from Crossway titled “The Dying Away of Cultural Christianity.” In it, the author proposed (as evangelical authors so often do) that the rise of the Nones* happened because the Nones weren’t real Christians to begin with. Nope, they were just members of that boogeyman religion Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

They weren’t really Christians; they just faking it, because of Reasons. Maybe because Christian = American, or something. It couldn’t have anything to do with the actual reasons people who left Christianity said they left. (Click the “actual reasons” link; that’s Pew’s research on reasons why they left).

Reasons like learning about evolution and realizing it wasn’t compatible with the faith they had been taught, because they (like me) were taught that if Genesis 1-3 aren’t literal history the way we think of history now, we can’t possibly believe in the resurrection.

It couldn’t have anything to do with “Christians doing unchristian things,” like the 81% of evangelicals (the ones who voted) voting for a serial liar and self-bragged sexual assaulter. It couldn’t be because evangelicals are the group least likely to believe the United States has an obligation to accept refugees. Continue reading “Why the Nones Left”

A couple Sundays ago, I preached a sermon on the ten commandments. When I got to the second commandment, I asked, “Anybody tempted to carve an image of God and worship it?” No one was, so I moved on.

But as I was driving to church the next week, I was wrestling with doubt, as I often do, and this commandment popped into my head again.

What if the god I don’t believe in is a graven image? Something I made a long time ago in my heart and in my head so when I visited it or prayed to it, I felt better, but now I’ve grown out of it?

That’s the problem with graven images: They’re static. They don’t change.

God doesn’t change either, of course, but our understanding of God changes.

We think God wants sacrifices, but God lets us know better.

We think God is obsessed with rules, but Jesus comes and reveals God to us.

We think God loves us and hates them, but God turns out to care for everyone.

We think God looks like a bull, or a white dude with a beard, or an angry man in the sky. We make our pictures of God, but God keeps breaking them, smashing them to pieces. That’s what happens when you try to lay down metal on top of something that’s alive.

It’s like that poem about the blind men and the elephant. Imagine if they had each carved an image of the elephant and announced that THIS was what the elephant REALLY looked like.

But the elephant moves. The elephant is alive. And they haven’t seen all there is to see of it.

That’s God.

God is alive. God moves. And we have not seen all there is to see of God.

Maybe that’s why the second commandment said not to make images. Maybe it was about not locking God down, because when you lock God down in one image, what happens when you hit a spiritual growth spurt and all of a sudden you outgrow that god?

The name of the Israelite God in Hebrew, of course, is “I AM,” or “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE,” which is a really great way of saying, “Your image is invalid.”

Which isn’t to say we can’t know anything about God.

It isn’t to say when God found us and we felt God with us, that wasn’t actually God.

It’s just to say that when we felt God’s presence with us back then, the image we carved of God based on what we thought we knew might turn out to be a little… off.

Or a lot off.

So break your graven images,
crush them into powder.
Fall in love with God
Realize what you don’t know
Hold tight to what you do.

And follow along with this
one who loves you
Who will be
What
God
Will
Be.

I’m the student pastor at a small church north of Pittsburgh at the moment. Last Sunday, my supervisor pastor gave something of an invitation at the end of his sermon, with a prayer to pray along with. Afterward, he invited anyone who wanted to deepen their relationship with Christ to talk to him or one of the elders… or me.

I was terrified – and relieved that I had to leave immediately after worship for another commitment.

I asked him about it at our weekly meeting a few days later. He said he figured I would know what to do: “Be pastoral, listen…” I was a chaplain for a summer; I can definitely do that… “And if someone wants to deepen their relationship with God, I’m sure you’d be able to tell them how.”

I acknowledged that last sentence. I understood the words he was saying, but they were wrong. I definitely would not have been able to tell them how. And that bothered me.

I know the right answer – or at least the answers I grew up with: ♫ “Read your Bible, pray every day, and you’ll grow, grow, grow.” ♫ But the very idea of telling lay people that “right” answer scares me.

The notion of isolated believers reading the Bible and praying without instruction from righteous, wise, and educated people within the church is horrifying – especially when these days anyone can have an internet or radio ministry and nobody bothers to check, or even require any ecclesiastical credentials, and new (and older) Christians are often tempted to treat all religious teachers (at least who agree with them) as equally trustworthy. All that gets checked by Christian radio stations, it seems, is whether the check is good.

See, I’m just reaching the point where I think a relationship with Christ can be safe and good for me. I still have the notion that Christianity – especially a “deepened relationship” with Christ is dangerous for lay people. That’s fairly deeply embedded in my psyche. I think it makes people self-righteous bibliolaters who will do any sort of evil and/or stupid thing if they come to believe God wants them to do it, and they’ll encourage others to do likewise. I certainly did my share of both.

Diana Butler Bass laments that the options for Christians seem to be between knowledge on ice and ignorance on fire, and as a member of the frozen chosen, to be perfectly honest, I will take knowledge on ice every single time. Continue reading “Should the Heathen Be Converted?”

Content Warning: Abuse.

I was sitting in a class with my laptop open, trying to save some links and close some tabs while a classmate was reading a handout the professor distributed.

The professor peered over the lid to see what I was doing since I obviously wasn’t paying attention to the poetry reading.

I gave a sheepish grin, but instantly felt ashamed. I spent the rest of that class period trying to decide what to do, wishing I was somewhere else, and trying to remain as small as possible. I couldn’t pay attention at all.

Well that’s strange.

Yeah, it is. It doesn’t make sense as a reaction. “Normal people” would just shrug and go back to paying attention. I am a grown man and all it took was a peek over my screen from a professor to throw me into a vortex of bad thoughts. Continue reading “Stop Mocking Trigger Warnings; you look like a jerk”