I was born and raised a United Methodist Christian. As good Methodists, my parents had me baptized as a baby. Since, I can’t remember much of anything during my first year of life, I have no recollection of this important event. What I do remember of my early years, was this desire to not go to church if the weather was bad. The church my family went to (and the one I was baptized in), Ft. Jefferson United Methodist was kind of out of the way, meaning in the country. So, weather really did factor into whether or not we went. However, my grandparents were faithful, weekly attenders, which meant if we missed too often, my parents would have surely heard about it. I also remember a little bit of Vacation Bible School. Mostly, I remember there was the semi-truck that would be parked in the parking lot and it was hideously decorated/painted. I also remember the church had a graveyard on the premises and we were in a volleyball league. I also remember various lunches/bbq’s at other members homes. Then my dad took a job in Piqua, OH, so we moved from the only home I knew in Greenville, OH.
This move proved significant in my spiritual life, and in fact is a theme that will follow me into early adulthood. Our new house, was situated on opposite corners from a United Methodist Church called Grace. This is where we ended up going, probably more out of ease than anything else. Our family built lifetime friendships there and my sister and her family continue to go there, although the church built a new building and relocated. This church had a significant youth group that I got very involved in.
And this is where I really get involved in my own spiritual journey. Not including my Confirmation class, which allowed me to become an official member of the United Methodist church, I became very active in the church and youth program. I was fortunate to have one youth pastor through Jr. High and High School. Chris, my youth pastor, was an interesting mix of mainline theology and charismatic theology. He was a great guy and a perfect youth pastor for the evangelical model of youth ministry, but it planted within me and a lot of my friends a theology that would later in life need to be ripped apart and re-evaluated. Some examples of this included a guilt-based salvation, an attempt at an unrealistic spiritual life, emotionalism, and a gospel of sin management. I experienced events like Acquire the Fire, a Teen Mania mission trip, and going out on the streets of our town to evangelize our town. As I continued on this path the separation between myself and the realities of our world grew wider and wider. I began to despise the culture, and gain greater arrogance of my position as a born again Christian. I became so certain of so many things including my interpretation of the Bible, my salvation, and my ability to lead Christians in this way of living as a believer.
I continued on this way of being Christian when I went to college at Indiana Wesleyan University. The best thing about being at IWU was that I had an experience of community that I hadn’t had before in life, but as I say that I understand that I could have had that experience at almost any college, so I don’t think it was unique. What was unique about it was the foundation for that community to happen on. This community centered itself on sin management and a highly emotional Christian experience. For example, it was required to go to chapel 3x a week, which isn’t terrible, but the expectation is so high that it’s highly unsustainable. When someone, like myself, can’t sustain that high level of emotion in worship, then public shame is imposed on that person. This of course leads to all kinds of faking and eventually a duality that permeates most of the student body. The other part of this is found in the rules that students contractually agree to follow. These rules, in my day, were things like not smoking, drinking, dancing, and watching R-rated movies. Other things that fall into this category were things like having a curfew, not being able to live off campus easily, not swearing, and the list could go on and on.
As I mentioned earlier, this kind of Christianity is not sustainable over a long period of time, at least for me, but I would argue for anyone. During my junior year at IWU, I really started to question a lot of what I knew to be true up to that point in my life, and that questioning has continued to the present. One thing that I was noticing was the churches around our campus were not growing even though they were using a similar model. Each year one church would be the biggest and that was because it became the popluar church for all the on fire IWU students to go to. This was a trend that as I started doing some research that I was noticing all over the country. Churches were not reaching new people, they were just stealing other churches people by being cool. So, the next question for me, was why isn’t the church reaching people outside the church and that question was really began to ruin everything for me. I was being ruined becasue I was finding serious structural and theological flaws within the evangelical world that I was immersed in. There were in fact good reasons why I always felt guilty, shameful, and in a constant state of beating myself up over my spiritual life.
Another factor that was significant during my last two years of college was my major and minor areas of study. I was majoring in Biblical Literature and this allowed me to be exposed to the problems within the text and being allowed to explore those issues. My minor was in intercultural studies which allowed me to be exposed to different ways of thinking around the world and the importance of contextuality and culture. Taking Greek, Cultural Anthropology, and a handful of other courses along with my own line of questioning and discovery of postmodernism opened up a whole new world and way of thinking for me. In the end, I left college with a Biblical Literature degree and also completely disillusioned with the church.
In a wise decision, I figured the best way to work out this disillusionment was to become a youth pastor. Actually I was already working in a church as a part-time youth pastor, but after graduation, I decided to go into it full time. I was hired by a mid-sized United Methodist church in a suburb of Kansas City, MO. I figured this to be a good move to go into a classic mainline situation, since I had become so disillusioned with evangelicalism, but it turned out that I would suffer the same things at my new mainline home. During this time, I discovered Emergent Village and other streams in the emerging church, and that essentially saved me. For if it weren’t for the emerging church conversations and friendships I formed in Kansas City I probably would have left the church for good. After 2 1/2 years at that church in Kansas City, things started to really deteriorate. There was a movement within the church started by one crazy women that really started to attack me personally and professionally. The details I won’t go into, but it burned me out to the point where I really couldn’t do my job with any kind of desire and so I made this known to the pastor. The next thing I knew, I was being asked to leave the church. I suppose if I wouldn’t have submitted to this request I would have been fired, but I don’t know this for sure. During this time, I found no support within the church and I found myself angry and bitter at the church as a whole. I was done.
So, how is that I find myself in seminary now? Even through the midst of my disillusionment and hurt, Christ is still within me and all around me. I can’t seem to shake him even though I’ve tried to. So I guess my desire still remains to serve the world as member of Christ’s body. I can’t however do that in what I know as a traditional evangelical or mainline situation. So I guess I have to explore new ways of being the church and be a part of what I call the Imagination of God. So I’m leaning into my disillusionment and pain building a new theology and new way of life that I believe God is leading me into. The crazy thing is that I’m doing that with a lot of people who have similar stories and that gives me hope. My journey now is one of questioning and discovery and to steal a title of a book mine is a story of emergence.
