Reevaluating Biblical Inerrancy: A Personal Journey

*Warning: this will make some readers uncomfortable. However, it is important to engage thoughtfully and respectfully with perspectives that differ from your own.

Introduction

Hi, friends.

I know, I know. I’ve been absent for a while. We’ve been packing and preparing for our trip back to the United States. We’re spending time with our families, and then we’ll be touring the country visiting churches and sharing our work in France. As a result, I’ve been extremely busy.

Personal Faith Journey

This won’t be a follow up to my series about my own faith journey, but it will touch on a topic that is tightly interwoven with it. I want to share something that has deeply affected me and, I believe, hundreds of other people who have deconstructed their faith.

Since we’re in America at the moment, we took some time to visit some old friends of ours, people that we have known for many years and love dearly. I know that the wife has gone through an incredibly traumatic deconstruction journey, but I didn’t know that her husband ended up traveling the same path. While we were visiting with them, he told me that he is no longer a Christian. When he shared what caused him to lose his faith, I understood. I had similar questions myself.

The Problem with Biblical Inerrancy

You see, he was told his whole life that the Bible is inerrant, that there cannot be any contradictions or falsehoods, that the Bible is the literal Word of God spoken to humans. In this view, the Holy Spirit moved the hands of people who wrote the Bible to record exactly what he wanted. God is all-knowing; therefore, the Bible cannot be wrong.

Imagine my friend’s surprise when he discovered a contradiction in the Bible. He was unable to reconcile this contradiction, and so this began to lead him down a path of deconstruction.

Unfortunately, this is an incredibly common problem that young people face. This is especially true for people who grew up in a tradition similar to ours, where the Bible is held up as almost a fourth member of the trinity. In fact, many doctrinal statements begin with the Bible, instead of talking about God or Jesus first.

Contradictions and Deconstruction

Our whole early lives are spent in an environment where we attend church several times a week, and most of us are homeschooled or attend schools that are affiliated with our denominations. And so we spend much of our lives having the idea that the Bible must be the inerrant word of God. This is a fact that cannot be questioned. We often hear that if science disagrees with the Bible, then the Bible is right. Anytime there are any perceived contradictions in the text, they can’t really be contradictions; it’s simply a problem of our own understanding.

The Impact on Youth

As a result, when young people grow up, graduate high school, and move on to become adults, they are encouraged to attend colleges or universities that are closely connected with the denominations. The fear is that, if a young person attends a secular institution, the institution will corrupt him or her.

The thing is, they’re not wrong.

Isolation is a key signifier of a cult. And isolation is an important part of fundamentalism. Think about it: they control all information, treat outsiders as scary, corrupting influences, and claim to have absolute truth. I won’t mince my words–Christian fundamentalism is a cult. Each sect believes that they have the truth and that all other sects aren’t truly Christian.

When young (or old) people leave the cult and venture outside, they discover that the world isn’t as scary as they’ve been led to believe. Science may actually have something to contribute to society. And, devastatingly, the Bible does, in fact, contain contradictions that cannot simply be explained away.

When confronted with these things, the most common response is to leave, to walk away from the church and the faith. And I understand it. I had moments of crisis like this as a young adult. We spend so much time being indoctrinated to believe that this book contains all the answers to life’s problems and questions, and that it is the absolute truth and final authority, that when we are confronted with the fact that these beliefs are wrong, we can’t handle it. We’ve never been given any other framework with which to interpret the Bible. And since the Bible is the foundation upon which all other doctrines are built, the rest of our faith crumbles with the cracks in that foundation.

So we have no choice but to leave. If we can’t believe the Bible, what can we believe?

And therein lies one of the fundamental problems of fundamentalism. The framework of our faith collapses just like that.

I was one of the lucky ones, if you can call it that. My faith didn’t completely collapse as a result of my questions. I remember finding a seeming contradiction in the Bible and then running to apologetics websites to find an explanation. I remember sitting in church and reading the gospel accounts of the resurrection of Christ. They’re all very different. So I had to find a means of synthesizing these accounts. Many of my college years were spent this way.

A New Perspective on the Bible

The only thing that kept my faith from collapsing completely was my deep fear of going to hell. That’s another issue that I won’t get into right now. It may sound like I’m exaggerating, but I had undiagnosed depression and anxiety at the time, so I had a deep-seated fear of eternal punishment.

Here’s the problem–according to the Bible itself, the Word of God is Jesus. It’s stated as such in John chapter 1:

“In the beginning was the Word
    and the Word was with God
    and the Word was God.
The Word was with God in the beginning.”

And so the Word of God is a person, the one who was there at the beginning and who is revealed as the very expression of God on earth. Through Jesus we see who God is. And if something, even something in the Bible, doesn’t look like Jesus, then it very likely doesn’t look like God either.

And the Bible was written by people trying to understand what God was doing. As the theologian William Barclay says, “The Bible is the story of God acting and men interpreting, or failing to interpret, the action of God.“

In fact, there are many, many problematic parts of the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. God commands the murder of entire towns. God encourages the genocide of the Canaanite people. Slavery is assumed, and even encouraged at times. What we have in the Bible is people reacting to how God was working in their particular culture and society. Sometimes their interpretation is wrong. Yet, they always assume that God is on their side.

And then there are beautiful moments where the God that we recognize in Jesus breaks through. Consider one of my favorite passages from the book of Micah:

“With what should I approach the Lord
        and bow down before God on high?
Should I come before him with entirely burned offerings,
        with year-old calves?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
        with many torrents of oil?
Should I give my oldest child for my crime;
        the fruit of my body for the sin of my spirit?
8 He has told you, human one, what is good and
        what the Lord requires from you:
            to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God.”

This passages drills down to the essential aspects of God’s character and his (or her) expectations of us who follow him (or her).

This is a short version of my new perspective of the Bible. There is much more to it than that, and it has taken me years of deconstruction to become comfortable talking about the Bible in this way. I know that some of my readers will be uncomfortable, even enraged, by what I have said here.

And that’s the problem.

The cult of Christian fundamentalism places too much emphasis on what the Bible exactly says. They claim to interpret the Bible literally, specifically when it comes to the Genesis creation story or verses about homosexuality. Yet their literalism fails to serve their own purposes when Jesus tells us to love our neighbor and to turn the other cheek. Suddenly they claim a spiritual individual interpretation. And so, like my own, their hermeneutic (way of understanding the Bible) is inherently inconsistent and contradictory. The difference is that I’m at least willing to admit that I can be inconsistent.

People will accuse me of having a low view of Scripture now. And perhaps I do, if I allow the phrase to be defined by Christian fundamentalists. What I do know, however, is that I will place everything in my theology below the center of my faith, Jesus Christ. Through Jesus I will interpret the Bible. Through Jesus I see who God is.

Perhaps if the church allowed young people to think of the Bible in this way churches wouldn’t be shrinking the way that they are now. Perhaps they wouldn’t need to send people to their own colleges and universities and isolate them from broader society.

Perhaps my friend would still be a Christian.

Encouraging Open Dialogue

If we look for Jesus in the Bible, suddenly things become gray instead of black-and-white. It’s scary at first, because it means that grasping final authority and absolutes is significantly more difficult. But maybe wrestling with these things is part of the purpose of the Bible, to encourage conversation among people who disagree to try to understand what God is like.

The point is that it’s ok not to have to have answers for everything. The great mystery is part of the allure of faith for me. It has allowed me to love and serve with Christians from a variety of different faith backgrounds, even people with whom I disagree profoundly. The truth is that we’re all on this journey together, the journey learning how to fulfill the greatest commandments as Jesus spoke them, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

These two commandments are the central message of the Bible.

Conclusion and Call to Action

And now it’s your turn. How has your view of the Bible changed and developed as you’ve matured? What would you encourage Christian youth who are grappling with this issue to do?

Recommended resources:

–Introducing the Bible by William Barclay

–The Bible for normal people podcast by Pete Enns and Jared Byas

–How the Bible Actually Works by Pete Enns

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Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 9-Faith Journeys: Navigating the Gray Zones of Belief with Shane Claiborne and Upton Sinclair

Shane Claiborne, what can I say. In the story of my spiritual journey, there’s probably no single individual who has been more influential. And I discovered him thanks to a Lutheran teacher.

I’ve already talked about my cognitive dissonance at the discovery that Lutherans, whom I believed weren’t Christians, loved Jesus as much as any Baptist I’d known before. Sure, some of their teachings were different–In fact, one day we spent nearly the whole day debating infant baptism with every teacher in every class–but they lived lives that demonstrated the love of God.

But my religion teacher my final year of high school took the cognitive dissonance to a whole new level.

He looked like Jesus. Or, the Western, white version of Jesus that most American Christians picture. He had shoulder-length hair, a beard, and ear piercings. He played the drums during worship time in chapel. He venerated Mother Theresa, Greg Boyd, and, it turns out, Shane Claiborne. He was at once the embodiment of white Jesus and exactly the opposite of what my Baptist upbringing taught me a Christian should be.

In Dean Dunavan’s class I was quiet. I didn’t engage as much as others in my grade. I’m still this way when it comes to deep conversations. I need to think for a while before I feel prepared to respond, especially when I don’t feel 100% confident in my contribution. But I listened. He assigned us to read the book Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist and author who was incredibly influential in the lives of many young Christians of my generation.

Image Source

In his book, Shane Claiborne envisioned a new way of living out the Christian faith. A new way of life that asks questions like, “What if we took seriously the commands of Jesus when he says to love our enemies and to love our neighbors as ourselves?” He was strictly pacifist, and perhaps not communist, but at least communitarian in his way of thinking and living.

And I had an incredibly strong reaction against it.

I had been raised with answers, with a certain way of thinking about Christianity. Shane Claiborne questioned nearly every belief I held dear. It’s been years since I read the book, and I remember very few of the specific things he discussed in the book. What I do remember is the way he made me feel. It’s the book that planted a seed that has continued to grow throughout my life.

Shane Claiborne envisioned a world where Christians lived together in community, across theological lines, with a focus on changing the world serving our neighbors. He took to task the rich who tried to explain away verses where Jesus instructs the wealthy to give up their wealth. He wondered what the world would be like if we chose to love our enemies instead of going to war against them.

Those are just a few of the things I got out of reading the book. Again, I don’t remember a lot of the specifics, but I do remember how it made me feel. At first I was upset. But over time, as I thought more deeply about it, I came around to his point of view.

But there was a problem.

The problem is that I was still part of a fundamentalist Baptist church, and there was no room for this kind of thinking in those churches. And so, as things continued, I grew further and further from the church I had been brought up in.

And then there were the Lutherans. They were definitely more open than the Baptists, but they still very much fell into the white, suburban category. It didn’t help that it was a private Lutheran school, so the kids tended to come from upper middle class families.

And so I felt alone. Sure, there were people who were as engaged with what we were reading as I was. Sure, there were people who developed some revolutionary ideas. I think, however, that most of them lacked the experience of living in a poor family with parents who struggled to pay their bills every day. I still don’t know how my parents managed to enroll me at the school and keep my tuition paid. The thing is, when you’ve seen firsthand the cracks in the systems that are meant to support the lower systems of society, it has a way of radicalizing you. This is especially true of people who are exposed to ideas that present a dream of how things could be better.

I caught this dream. I caught it fervently. That same year I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, a radical socialist author, for one of my English classes. This story about working class families who were under the thumb of the Chicago meatpacking elite really spoke to me. I went on to read many of his other works.

Upton Sinclair Image Source

But I never lost my fundamentalist faith. Part of it was definitely the fear of going to hell that was instilled in me from a young age. But I think it went deeper than that. Reading Shane Claiborne and other authors like him showed a whole other side to the gospel. It was a gospel that didn’t only seek to save us from hell, but also to change our whole society into a place where no one would have to go without.

And I wanted to hold onto both of these sides of my faith. I still believed strongly in the gospel of faith and salvation, but I wanted to go deeper into seeking a more just society. I wanted to seek justice within the confines of the church in which I had been raised. And it made me feel isolated.

I felt like I was the only one. The only one who wanted to hold onto both sides of the gospel. The only one who was unwilling to compromise my beliefs in search of justice for all. When I looked into the world, I saw only churches who chose one or the other: Either they would hold onto the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and ignore the biblical call to seek justice for the poor and oppressed, or they would hold onto the gospel of social justice and ignore the biblical call to share the good news of Jesus.

But I wanted both.

Searching for a community that both clung to the deep personal spirituality with which I was brought up and the social gospel which I had discovered led me on a long path. It turns out I wasn’t alone in my beliefs. But it took years for me to figure that out.

Life was so much easier before, when things were black or white, when evil and good were obvious, when I didn’t have to figure out the right and the wrong because my leaders would tell me what they were. But now, I began to see everything in shades of gray. The hard and fast barrier between black and white began to break down as soon as I discovered that Lutherans were just as much real Christians as the Baptists I had grown up with. And it continued to fall as I discovered a theology that was open and welcoming to everyone, fighting for justice in a world filled with injustice. Right and wrong were a lot less clear when I discovered that the Bible isn’t as clearly interpreted as I had been led to believe. In fact, there were whole messages in the Bible that I’d never even heard before.

And so I continued walking alone, feeling a crisis of faith. It wasn’t really a crisis in the sense that I was losing my faith. It was a crisis in the sense that there was a lot more to having faith than I had previously believed. And I had to discover for myself what that meant for me.

This journey, which began with the challenging ideas of Shane Claiborne, continues to shape my life today. Now, at 35, I find myself in France, working among refugees, embodying the very principles of love and justice that Claiborne inspired in me. This journey of faith and justice is ongoing, and I anticipate it will continue to evolve, shaping my life and work for years to come.

My family on the beach at Calais, France

The problem with writing these narrative posts is that I never know where to stop or how much to include. I could go on. And on. And on. But I’ll stop for now. The influences of Shane Claiborne, my religion teacher, and Upton Sinclair kicked off a process that has deeply and profoundly changed me. In fact, I still believe I’m changing. I’ll never be the same person who was so sure of my faith and my beliefs that I was as a young person. Life was easier then, but I don’t ever want to go back.

In fact, I’m just getting started.

Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 8-Questioning Faith: Navigating the Rapids of Cognitive Dissonance in Lutheran Waters

Talking to myself

I have to apologize once more. I’ve let my blog lapse a bit, since I’ve been rather busy the last couple of weeks. I know I have an audience of thousands, just waiting with breath held for my next post.

Just kidding. I know I’m mostly talking to myself. That’s ok.

In my last post, I talked about a crucial moment, one that altered the course of my life forever. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but looking back I can see how that moment and the events that followed had a hand in setting me on a course, a path that I’m still traveling.

So in a way, I’m thankful that I got suspended. I don’t know where I’d be if things hadn’t come to a head in that way 20 years ago. But it certainly didn’t feel like a good thing at the time.

I won’t get bogged down in details, but my brother ended up getting expelled from our Baptist school the same year that I was suspended. That’s not my story to tell, but I’ll just say that my brother is a little… different. And, in an environment where conformity and obedience are expected unquestioningly, being different is a serious problem.

And so, following those events, my parents were completely disillusioned with the church and the school where we had been. They didn’t immediately leave, but as in my own story, their lives were never the same.

Into the lions’ den

The first things my parents decided was that I couldn’t attend that school anymore. You have to understand, for us public school just wasn’t an option. There were too many things that could go wrong in a public school, too many temptations to do evil. So my parents searched around the Saint Paul area to find another school where I could complete my final two years of high school.

My brother, by the way, was close to graduation when he was expelled, so he had to go on to get his GED (a high school diploma equivalent).

So my parents went searching in the summer of 2005, and they presented me with two options: the local Catholic school or the local Lutheran school. Both of those schools were a bit intimidating to me, because in the worldview in which I was raised, Baptists are the only denomination with the truth, the only way to achieve salvation. All those other churches were full of people who weren’t truly Christians.

To me, the Catholic school was the scarier option. Catholics worshipped Mary and the Saints, after all, and they didn’t even believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead! (I know now that neither of those things is true, but it’s what I was taught). As a result, with little hesitation, I chose the Lutheran school, fully expecting it to be filled with cultists who practiced infant baptism.

Between the time that finished my 10th grade year at the Baptist school and began the next year at the Lutheran school, we still attended the Baptist church that was connected to the school. It was a somewhat awkward experience, because almost everyone from the youth group also attended the school. No one ever said anything particularly offensive about it to me, which would have almost been better than what actually happened. No, instead there were snide remarks and occasional hints of heresy directed my way by both other kids in the youth group and the leaders of the church.

See!? Jesus is still on the cross. Catholics MUST NOT believe that Jesus rose from the dead! Image source

“Don’t let those Lutherans convert you!” was something whispered in my ear by the school secretary one Sunday after church.

“Joseph,” my friend said, “when you go to public school…”

“It’s not public school,” I replied. “It’s a Lutheran school.”

“Oh well, same thing,” he said. “When you go to the Lutheran school, just remember who you are and don’t get into any fights.”

There were many, many other such things said to me that summer. In fact, I began to take it to heart. I was already primed to believe that Lutheran’s weren’t real Christians, and so it was a small stretch to believe that they would tempt me to sin. I viewed it as almost going into the proverbial lions’ den.

How naive I was.

The lions’ den itself. Well, at least they don’t have Jesus on the cross. Image source.

And so I went. Into the lion’s den. Only, the lions weren’t lions; they were people, just like me. With all their flaws and dreams and desires. Together they were reaching out for something greater than themselves.

Just like I was.

Cognitive Dissonance

Instead of devouring me whole, they welcomed me. Instead of “converting” me, they asked me to think for myself. Instead of rejecting the tenants of the Christian faith, they loved Jesus with their whole hearts. They were different than I was told that they’d be.

And I didn’t understand.

For a long time that first year, I had a bout of cognitive dissonance. How could these people who weren’t really Christians love Jesus so much? How could they have such differing beliefs than I did, when the Bible was so clear as to what it taught?

All of this sounds ridiculous now. It just shows how far I’ve come.

It turns out there was a reason the Baptists didn’t want me to leave the Baptist fold. Exactly what they were afraid of ended up happening to me. I began to accept people of other Christian traditions as brothers and sisters in faith. The control that my fundamentalist church had on my life began to slip. And I began to ask questions.

Many of the same questions I still ask to this day. And I still haven’t found all the answers.

“What kinds of questions?” you ask. Well, that will have to wait until next time, when I tell you the story of how I was introduced to a writer who would challenge many of the things I hold dear, someone who affected many young Christians of my generation.

Curse you, Shane Claiborne. My life was so much easier before I met you.

Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 7- Unveiling Adolescence: A Crucial Moment That Altered My Path Forever

Imagine a group of teenage boys sitting around a table at lunchtime. What are they discussing? What are they doing? Why are they laughing?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. One of the boys is me. I’m 15 years old. I’m sitting with my two closest friends, Thomas and Eric*. Joining us are a few other boys, younger than we are. Our school is so small that there are only a few tables, and kids from 7th through 12th grade eat together.

We’re discussing the girls, because of course we are. One of the boys very obviously has a crush on Michaela*. We’re spending some time teasing him and gossiping, as teenagers often do during lunch.

“Michaela’s hot!” I say.

“Her family has an SUV,” Thomas chimes in, I guess pointing out how much money they have.

“Guess what did we in the backseat of her car!” I exclaim, making an obviously off-color joke.

Lunch ends, and we all go back to class. I don’t think anymore about what we’ve been discussing at lunch. It’s no more or less ridiculous than any other conversations we teen boys have.

Later in the day, I’m sitting in class. I don’t remember which one. The pastor’s wife, who is also the English teacher, comes in and calls me and Eric out of class. I’m not sure what she needs us for, but I’m sure it can’t be anything too bad.

Eric and I are led into the main church auditorium. We’re told to sit and wait. A short while later Manfred* comes out of the principal’s office, which is in the hall just outside the auditorium. He was one of the younger boys sitting with us at lunch, the one who has a crush on Michaela. As he passes me, he grins. I’m incredibly confused.

I’m called into the principal’s office. And this is the last moment I feel fully secure and at home in the Fundamentalist Baptist Church.

“Do you know why I called you in here today?” The principal asks. He’s a middle aged man, tall and thin. He has a mustache and glasses.

“No,” I reply honestly.

“What did you talk about at lunch today?” He asks me.

“Uh… I don’t really remember,” I say.

“Well, Manfred was just in here, and he told me a few things,” he says. “He told me that you talked about Michaela.”

“Yeah, I guess we did,” I reply. I see now where this is going.

“He told me you said,” he checks his Post-It notes, where he’s been writing things down, “‘Michaela’s hot’ and, ‘Guess what we did in the backseat of the car.”

“Yeah, I guess I did,” I reply, unsure of exactly what he wants me to say. This is a normal feeling for me. I have a fear of being punished and shamed.

And then the lecturing begins. I knew it was coming.

“Joseph, do you watch pornography?” He asks me.

“No, sir,” I respond.

“Because if I could take a gun and aim it at every young man in this school, you’re not the one I would have pulled the trigger on for having impure thoughts,” he says, bafflingly.

By the way, I’m not making any of this up.

He spends at least another half an hour lecturing me about how I needed to repent of my sin and ask God for forgiveness. He says that he will have to talk to my parents and the girl’s parents as well. Apparently Manfred has been telling everyone in his class about our conversation, and so now everyone knows.

After the lecture is over, he sends me out of the room, back to class. In class I can’t focus. I am suffering from anxiety and know that what I’ve experienced is just the beginning. Some time later I am once again summoned to the principal’s office.

I’m surprised, as I enter, to see almost everyone from Manfred’s class in the room. And there, in the chair, is Michaela. She’s sobbing with her head in her hands.

“Joseph,” the principal addresses me, “the comments you made at lunch have affected everyone in this room. You will need to ask the forgiveness of all of them.”

He begins to go around the room of 10 or so people. He asks each of them the same question:

“Do you forgive Joseph?”

They invariably respond with, “Yes.”

And then he reaches Michaela. She’s still sitting with her head in her hands. He asks her the question.

Through her fingers she sobs out a “yes.”

I can’t remain unmoved by the young girl’s crying and obvious distress. She has been embarrassed publicly for something that I said.

“I’m sorry, Michaela,” I tell her.

The principal dismisses everyone but me from the office.

“After school I’m going to be speaking with your parents,” he tells me. “You’re probably going to be suspended.”

I’m flabbergasted. I’ve never even received a detention in my whole time at this school.

“Yes, sir,” I say, and exit the office.

And the talk with my parents happens. My dad is a teacher at the school, so my behavior also reflects badly on him. But when we get home, my parents are surprisingly understanding.

I explain the story to them. I explain that I thought it wasn’t a big deal. I’m not proud of what I said, but I’m more embarrassed than ashamed. I make up a stupid excuse that I was talking about playing video games in the back seat of the girl’s car.

My parents confront the principal the next day. I am called back into the office.

“Your parents tell me you said you were talking about video games,” he tells me.

Of course it’s a lie.

“No, I wasn’t,” I tell him, honestly.

“You are going to receive an in-school suspension,” he informs me.

Going to bed is a relief to me every night during this time. When I sleep I can forget the trouble I’ve found myself in. When I wake up, I am sick with anxiety, not wanting to face the principal or my peers, because everyone knows what’s going on. Again, it’s a small school.

Later that week we have soccer practice. I attend, and run my laps as normal. We do a drill where we have to try to get the ball past our goalkeeper, Thomas. The coach, who is also the youth pastor, keeps score. The winners don’t have to run sprints at the end of practice.

I lose the ball at one point.

“Joseph loses a point,” the coach says. Disappointed, I continue playing.

“Never mind, Joseph doesn’t lose a point,” he corrects himself.

I find this strange. Usually he’s tough on us during practice. Why is he being so nice?

I learn the answer when I get home. My parents sit me down.

“You’re going to be taken off the soccer team,” they inform me.

I’m devastated. I love playing soccer. I love being on the team. My best friends play too.

I know I have to return my jersey, so the next day I wait until the coach is out of his office. I sneak in through the unlocked door and set the jersey on a chair. I’m too ashamed to face him.

And so began the end of my life among the fundamentalist Baptists. The next chapter of my life would begin to completely change my way of thinking. I would remain in Baptist churches and go to a Baptist college for 10 more years, but the rift that began with this experience would continue widening, little by little until the inevitable separation.

This moment in time was incredibly stressful and difficult in my teenage mind. The after-effects resonated throughout the school and church. But I look back on this time as the spark that set off a deep change in my heart and mind, the effects of which would take years to be fully realized. And for that, I am thankful.

What about you? Can you look back on an instance in your life that set off a series of events that changed who you are? If so, let me know in the comments or via email. I would love to engage with you. Also, sign up to my blog using the link below to continue following my journey of deconstruction and rebuilding.

Follow along with the rest of my journey!

Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 6 – Breaking Boundaries: Adventures in Faith and Friendship

To speak frankly, the Baptist church broke me. I spoke in my last post about how excited I was to begin a new adventure in the North Country of Minnesota. And there was much that was positive about my time there, but it’s also where I began to develop my own set of thoughts and beliefs. It’s where I experienced adolescence, which is difficult enough on its own, but to have spiritual abuse added to the mix made it something entirely worse.

I can’t cover every detail about my life in my first few years in Minnesota, because it would end up being novel-length. So let me address some of the high(and low)lights.

The skyline of Saint Paul, Minnesota

I pointed out in my last post that going to school was completely new to me. I’d never been to public school, and so I didn’t know what to expect. I spoke of my social awkwardness, my tendency toward trying to be funny and a class clown. It was my way of coping with new experiences.

I told you, I spent at least 6 days every week at the church building that also served as a school. My first year there, we had a principal from a southern state. You could tell by the way he talked. Sometimes when he was trying to give a lecture or be hard on us kids, it would sound so funny that we would laugh or giggle. This would upset him even more. I never crossed him too much, since I was always deferential and tried to follow the rules when I was being watched. The same can’t be said of my friend.

I knew him from the first weeks of life in Minnesota. When I first met him, I noticed he was tall, had a thick Minnesotan accent, and had died his hair an unnatural shade of red. He was a bit older than me, around my brother’s age. His name was Thomas*.

At first I don’t think he liked me too much. He was my brother’s age, about two years older than I was. I was young and annoying. I dressed funny and played foolish jokes on people. Thomas was cool. He had a job, and he shopped at designer clothing shops so often that the people at the local Banana Republic knew him by name. He was a bit embarrassed by that.

That all changed in the winter of 2004 when we went on a mission trip to Uruguay with our youth group. For some reason, our youth pastor teamed us up, and so we sat next to each other on the plane and spent much of our free time together. It turned out we got along much better than either of us had realized.

The outside of the church and school I attended for my first three years in Minnesota, 2002-2005

I think our youth pastor regretted his decision to pair us up rather quickly. I remember being called into his office to talk at one point. I was told that I was a good kid, but that I needed to stop spending so much time with Thomas. I said, “yes, sir,” but I didn’t listen.

I’ll delve into some of the more ridiculous situations we got ourselves into in a later post, but Thomas has become a lifelong friend, someone I still talk to rather often and spend time with whenever I’m in town.

School itself was fine. I’ve always been the type of person who didn’t have to try too hard in school to get good grades. So I usually did my homework, but I wouldn’t study for tests or go above and beyond in any way. I wonder how much more I could have achieved if I’d taken my schooling more seriously…

We used mostly Bob Jones curriculum, the same as what I’d used when I was homeschooling. As a result, I largely knew what to expect. It was “history” and “science” with a fundamentalist Christian bent. That means we learned science from an exclusively young earth creationist perspective, with many proof-textings from the Bible. Our history, especially the American history, had a conservative bias, for example heavily focusing on states’ rights as the primary driver behind the Civil War.

I didn’t think critically about it, and I hardly even knew there were any other perspectives. I wasn’t taught to think critically, and I was expected to accept all the teachings as gospel truth, especially when it came to things like the Bible. I was taught one way to interpret the Bible: literally. Any apparent contradictions or errors were either explained in such a way that the answers put the onus on the individual for not understanding correctly or were explained away in such a way that they weren’t really contradictions or errors at all.

I thought this was the only approach to the Bible and to science and history. This would lead to a sort of crisis of faith for me during college, when I realized that there were other ways of reading and interpreting the Bible, and when I started to read about scientific topics, realizing that many of the things I’d been taught were just plain wrong. But that, too, is a topic for another post.

The rules were very much black and white. Dress code was heavily tilted to place more of the burden on the girls, as is quite common in this type of church. Girls had to wear skirts, couldn’t have shirts cut too low, had to have their hair in a certain way. I remember that they would have dress checks before we had our formal banquets in the spring. They had to make sure that us boys were protected.

But the dress code didn’t only burden the girls. For boys, we were required to wear collared shirts and to have them tucked into our pants. We had to wear belts if our pants had belt loops. We also had to be clean-shaven. This wasn’t a problem for me at all during my teenage years. I only had to shave once a week, if I was lucky.

Thomas wasn’t so lucky though. Sometimes the principal or secretary would come into a class room, and the boys would have to stand. They would walk up and down the rows of the boys and check to make sure we were wearing belts, and then they would lean in close to our faces to make sure we had shaved. If you had failed to shave that day, you would not only be written up, but you would be sent to the bathroom to shave with a pink women’s razor.

Yeah, shame was a big part of the experience.

One day one of these checks took place and Thomas was told he hadn’t shaved, and was sent to the bathroom to shave. The problem was that he had, in fact, shaved that morning, but his hair grew in quickly and so he had some stubble on his face. There was no use in arguing however, though he often tried; rules were rules, and authority was to be respected and unquestioningly obeyed.

Thomas was often getting in trouble for this kind of thing. He was never a strict rule follower. He was the type who wanted to know why the rules existed in the first place. He was also different in the fact that his family were Democrats. We looked askance at Democrats or anything having to do with them. All good Christians are Republicans, so they were not good Christians.

The only reason he even went to that school was that his mom was a teacher there. She was a wonderful, kind, generous person who was very much beloved by her students and others in the school. Perhaps his parents were a bit too permissive, but they obviously loved him, and I really enjoyed getting to know his whole family.

And I, the good kid, would allow myself to be drawn into his antics, which is why I was told not to hang out with him. Most of the things we did were innocent enough, at least at first. He would hold my hand and we would sing songs together from the stage in the sanctuary. “It looks like you’re gay,” we were reprimanded. We would play wrestle and rough house in class. We would run together at soccer practice and gossip and complain about the rules.

He was a classic bad influence.

But he began to open my mind in some ways that I had never thought of before. I’d never spent much time with a real Democrat. It turned out they weren’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. He’d question some of the policies at the school, and some of the political messages we received. Once our principal showed up for a patriotic day dressed in full Civil War chaplain attire, revolver and all. Thomas wasn’t crazy about that.

They had a “government” class, which mostly consisted of long, meandering lectures from the principal. The message boiled down to “America good” and “other countries bad.” Or more specifically, “capitalism good” and “anything that isn’t explicitly capitalistic is socialism or communism.” Thomas really liked to shake things up in that class, poking holes in the teacher’s arguments and sometimes purposely playing devil’s advocate in order to feel heard and annoy him.

Being younger than he was, I looked up to him. I wanted to impress him. I didn’t want him to think I was a sheltered baby. This got us into a lot of trouble later on, but it started innocently enough. If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I would have turned out. He is partially responsible for starting me on a path that I never saw coming, and, in hindsight, ended up having a positive outcome.

And so, I continued in this school until my sophomore year of high school, 10th grade. Why did I leave after 10th grade, you ask? Well that’s a story for the next blog post. It was an event that sparked my desire for something different and forced me into uncomfortable relationships with people of other faith backgrounds. It fundamentally altered the course of my life. It was traumatic at the time, but looking back I am thankful. If I hadn’t been suspended in my 10th grade year, my life would have been completely different.

But that’s a story for next time.

Life is crazy, my friends. Everyone’s journey is a little bit different. What about you? What experiences did you have in school growing up that have stuck with you and shaped you to become the person you are today? Feel free to leave me a comment below or send me an email. I’d love to hear more about your life.

Until next time, I wish you peace and a spirit of grace. Make time for kindness.

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*Not his real name

Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 5 – Frosty Beginnings: Unraveling the Northern Odyssey

I know it’s been a bit since my last post, but you know how life is. From this point on is when we really start getting into the weeds of my life and the development of my faith. Yes, this is all focused on me and my experience. I can only tell my story and where it’s led. I know many others will have had similar but different experiences. I hope you find consolation in the fact that you are not alone. If my story resonates with you, I hope you’ll let me know, either in the comments or via email. I would love to hear about your faith journey too.

I left off with my family still in South Carolina. Our time there was the longest that we’ve stayed in one place in my whole life. It was very much home to me, and I still feel a certain nostalgia for it, despite having left more than two decades ago.

My dad was a teacher. He was always a teacher. He only ever wanted to be a teacher. He worked at Toys R Us the seven years we lived in South Carolina, but he always wanted to go back to teaching. He had been a teacher before I was born but had left to pastor the church in Kentucky that I spoke about previously. Having graduated from a Conservative Christian college, he never received a state license to teach. The college couldn’t provide one for him since they weren’t accredited at the time.

And so, in order to teach he need needed to find jobs in private schools that didn’t require licensure. Having given up his dream of finishing a master’s program at Bob Jones University, he began seeking new opportunities to teach. He reached out to school all over the country, which was a bit harder to do in the early days of the internet. He sent his resume around until he was finally contacted by a school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

My parents dropped me off at my uncle and aunt’s house, which wasn’t far from where we lived in South Carolina, and flew to Minnesota to interview and survey the church and school. Of course, I forgot to mention, it was a fundamentalist Christian school. In order to be a teacher there, he was required to attend the church with his whole family. 

It wasn’t much later that my parents declared their intention to uproot their family and move to the frozen north. And so, we rented a moving truck, which we spent all day loading (my dad was terrible at this), and we set off for new adventures in a new place. I remember the exact date, in fact. It was August 5, 2002. I was 13 years old, and it seemed like an adventure. I’d never been that far north before, and I was excited to experience more snow than I’d ever seen before. Boy, was I naïve.

We arrived at our new home in Cottage Grove, Minnesota a few days later, having stopped to visit my grandparents and a few other places on the way. When we arrived, a host of people from our new church and school came to help us unload. I met my new math teacher, the pastor’s son, and others. It was a hot day in Minnesota, I was told, but to me it seemed like nothing.

It was about a month later that I began my first year attending school. Since it was a small Christian school, my dad was a teacher for many different classes. He was my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, my math teacher, my English teacher, my history teacher, and a teacher for some classes for the high school students. 

Yeah, there was no way to get away from him.

I was brimming with excitement about finally going to school like all the other kids. It was definitely different from my homeschooling experience. For one, there were other kids around who weren’t my siblings. I got to know most of these kids really well because they also went to the church. The school was in the same building as the church, and so I was at that building at least 6 days every week, sometimes 7 if there was a Saturday youth activity. 

It was around this time that I also started realizing that I was different than most other kids. I was somewhat maladjusted because of my years homeschooling. I wasn’t sure how to interact with other people my own age, so I learned to be funny. Or at least, I tried. It was my way to get the feedback I needed. If I could make people laugh then I didn’t have to wonder or worry about what they were feeling about me.

This habit of trying to be funny has stayed with me ever since. It keeps me from having to share my true feelings, and it gives me an out when I’m not sure what people expect from me. I’m sure some people are annoyed by it, but I’ve been at it too long to know any other way of interacting with others.

And I was successful, for the most part. I became something of a class clown, though I was always obedient, and tried hard not to hurt anyone with my jokes, though I’m sure I did, and I still do sometimes. If I’ve ever hurt you, I’m sorry.

And so, I spent three years attending this small Baptist school. It’s where I first discovered the opposite sex. It’s where I tried my hardest to win the approval of those in authority and my peers.

I didn’t have words for it at the time, but it’s also where I began to come to terms with what I began to call my “inner darkness,” a deep melancholy feeling that wouldn’t let me enjoy even positive experiences to their fullest extent, and learned to second-guess and over-analyze every social interaction I had until I was exhausted. I learned that what I was dealing with was a sin problem, and that I wasn’t having enough faith or trust in the power of God to take away these feelings.

But enough about that for now. There are many more things I need to say about my time at this school and church, some positive, but many very dark as well. I’ll pick it up next time, discussing my experience at school and church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I had some wild adventures, and I made a dear friend, someone who’s stuck by my side until this day.

Follow along for more adventures and studies of a theology that always left me feeling inadequate. Sign up using the link below so you don’t miss the rest of this wild ride.

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Brewing Faith Part 2: A Pretentious Look at Being Pretentious

Yeah, I’m gonna write about coffee again. What? Did you think that I titled my blog “Coffee and Theology” for nothing? I’ve spent some time writing posts about my background and my theological misgivings. But I don’t want to lose focus of the second great love of my life after Jesus (third, if you count my wife. Sorry, Rachel): coffee.

My first job was at Caribou Coffee at the Rosedale Center in Roseville, Minnesota. It was a kiosk in the middle of the shopping mall, and it was perhaps not run as well as some other stores. However, it was here that I first learned about the differences between dark and light roast coffees, what French roast means, and how to make espresso beverages.

For those of you that don’t know, Starbucks rules the world in terms of chain coffee shops.

Except in Minnesota.

Along with the many oddities of my home state, such as calling a casserole a hot dish, playing duck, duck, gray duck instead of duck, duck, goose, and often exclaiming “uffdah!” when we run into someone at the store, we have a uniquely Minnesotan coffee chain.

Caribou rules Minnesota. Starbucks exists, but Caribou is usually preferred by the locals.

The actual Caribou I worked at! Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/why-are-so-many-malls-in-minnesota-called-blank-dale/

And so, as I worked at a chain coffee shop, where the lines could sometimes be 10-15 minutes long, the coffee we made didn’t exactly live up to the small batch roasted, artisanal coffee that I have come to be snobbish about in my adult years. But I enjoyed the job and learning about coffee.

I learned very quickly that I preferred light roast coffee. Though I would pretend that I loved the deep dark, oily roasts, such as French roast, in order to impress the girls. At first I also loved the sugary, whip-cream topped “lattes” that we sold. When many people say they love coffee, these are the types of drinks they’re talking about. But after a time, I couldn’t handle the overly sweet drinks anymore, and I learned to love plain, black coffee.

I came to love the nutty, often fruity flavors of a good quality light roast, freshly brewed from the pot. I came to despise adding anything to my coffee that took away from its unique flavor profile and made it less than what it was.

Lord, I sounded pretentious just there.

I fell into the trap of looking down on anyone who would dare to order anything that wasn’t plain, black coffee, looking upon them with an air of indignation that would make even the most pretentious movie critics seem humble by comparison.

In fact, I complained so much about it to my girlfriend in college (my wife now) that she would order plain black coffee when we went to a cafe to study. She obviously hated it, but she would try to drink it to impress me. Then she wouldn’t finish it and throw away the remainder. That would annoy me even more.

I’m sorry, Rachel. I don’t care if you put milk in your coffee anymore.

Anyway, back to my coffee journey.

In a way my journey from not caring in the least about the quality of my coffee to the caring overly much to the point of becoming pretentious to only caring about making good coffee for myself and giving others the freedom to love coffee the way that they like closely mirrors my faith journey. In fact, it took kind of a similar path at around the same time.

As I mentioned in my other blog series, I grew up in an incredibly legalistic, overly judgmental faith tradition. At first, it scared me. But later, in adolescence, I wanted to please those around me, so I adopted this set of beliefs and wanted to force others around me into this same tradition.

It was unhealthy, both to me and to those around me.

But later, as my mind opened, and I learned to hold onto the things that are most important in my faith and let everything else go, I began to appreciate other expressions of Christianity, and to acknowledge them as equally valid ways to love God. I began to want to talk with people about their differing beliefs, rather than judging them for those beliefs.

And with my love of coffee, I feel the same. Enjoy your coffee however you want. If you aren’t harming anyone, you can enjoy your caffeine fix in whatever way is most palatable to you. You have my permission.

I know, you really hoped I would give you my permission.

Coffee from our favorite cafe in Calais

As we experience this journey together, it’s important to remember that there isn’t only one way to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. These are the greatest commandments handed down to us by Jesus.

As long as your goal is to love God and love your neighbor, then you can count on my support, even if we disagree on other issues of theology.

Just know: I will continue taking my coffee black.

What about you? How do you prefer your coffee? Have your tastes changed over the years? More importantly, how do you interact with people who have different perspectives from yours? Let me know in the comments. Follow my journey into the worlds of theology and coffee. Let’s get caffeinated together!

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Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 4 – From Hymns to Heartache: Unveiling the Facade of Familial Bliss

Well I guess it’s that time.

Time for me to begin delving into my faith formation. I’ve touched on it a bit so far, but it goes much deeper than you may perhaps realize. I talked in my previous post about my experience going to church at least three times every week. In that post, I made it sound completely positive.

And in a way, it was.

After all, I had my family, friends, and social gatherings all tied to one place. I didn’t go to school because I was homeschooled, so I didn’t have much opportunity to interact with other kids outside of my neighborhood apart from church. So in a real way, church was my community, my whole life.

An actual photo of the church I went to in South Carolina. It was in a different building when I was there, but that one was torn down and a new one replaced it.

What I didn’t see as a child growing up there was how much its teachings were affecting me, how damaging some of the things that were said from the pulpit would end up being to my developing mind. I didn’t see how my mental health would suffer as a result of constant manipulation by the leaders, who stated quite plainly that they were just, “following the Bible.”

It would be impossible for me to list here everything that was said that could be damaging or cause me to doubt my salvation, so I’ll plan to only hit on a few main points. I’ll start with an anecdote. It’s a simple one, but it’s one of my favorites to tell because of how it’s equal parts funny and disturbing in hindsight. I tell it all the time when I speak in front of churches.

It was a normal Sunday evening service. I was perhaps 9 or 10 years old. As always, I was incredibly bored. My mom had started to take away any kind of drawing supplies or coloring pages she had given me when I was younger, so I was forced to pay attention to the sermon. Ugh.

This night we had a guest speaker. I don’t remember his name or where he was from. I just remember that our regular pastor wasn’t preaching that night. And while I don’t remember the main point of his sermon, something he said hit me hard. So hard, in fact, that I carry it with me to this day.

“When we get to heaven, we’re going to spend an eternity praising the Lord! We’ll sing hymns and songs; we’ll hear his greatness announced and his character discussed! All of eternity will be spent worshiping God!”

In my mind, I thought, “That sounds like the most boring, awful thing ever!”

And immediately following his pronouncement, the preacher said, “If that doesn’t sound amazing to you, you don’t know Christ as your Lord and Savior.”

And I was devistated.

“I must not know Christ as my Lord and Savior!” I thought to myself in a panic. Thankfully, I had just the remedy for this: asking Jesus to save me.

And so I did. Again. And again. And again. And again.

You see, this is just one example of a pattern. Our church would say that they didn’t believe you could lose your salvation once you’d accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior. But they’d append it by saying that if you didn’t do this, or believe that, or act this way, you never really knew Jesus in the first place.

This, probably more than anything else, really messed with me. I must have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior hundreds of times, without exaggeration.

But that’s not all.

From the time I was born I was programmed. I was programmed to believe that the church had the answers, and that only this church had the answers. The pastor placed such an emphasis on “correct doctrine” that he believed anyone who disagreed or had differences from this doctrine was in danger of hellfire.

I was programmed to believe in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. See, there aren’t any contradictions in the Bible. There aren’t any incorrect statements. Everything in the Bible is historically accurate and is meant to be taken literally and plainly.

Sorry, I don’t have any more great pictures of South Carolina, so here you go. This is the trailer park where I lived.

This of course means that any scientific or historical research that contradicts what the Bible literally says must be incorrect, because the Bible can’t be wrong. And so, the Genesis creation story (really there are multiple creation stories in Genesis, but that’s beside the point) must necessarily be an accurate representation of how the earth was created.

But “correct doctrine” didn’t just include biblical inerrancy. It also included agreeing with every standard set forth by the leaders of the church. Essentially, this meant having some form of control over every facet of our lives.

Another anecdote: I was sitting in church (as was often the case). The pastor was preaching this time. He was preaching about the evils of worldly music (any music that isn’t classical or explicitly religious).

“I used to counsel a young woman. She confessed to me once that she liked to listen to rock music. She said, ‘I don’t listen to heavy metal or anything; I just listen to light rock.’

“I’ll have you know that two weeks later that woman drove a car off a cliff and killed herself!”

And thus I learned about the dangers of rock n’ roll.

But seriously, I was led to believe that there wasn’t possibly anything else going wrong in this young woman’s life that could have led to her taking her own life. It was the rock music that killed her. In my 10 year old mind, it made sense. It hammered home the point that I should never listen to rock music.

Worship music was a big no-no too. In fact, any kind of music with a beat or with drums in it was viewed as immoral. Worship music was worst because it was considered to be “mixing truth with error.” And so the only songs we would sing in church were hymns. And the occasional patriotic song.

And I also heard things preached about making sure we obey our parents. Obedience was a big theme in the preaching at this kind of church. Our pastors obey God; our parents obey our pastors; and we obey our parents. If I didn’t obey immediately, not only would I risk being punished by my parents, but I also risked being punished by God. And if I didn’t feel bad about it, I might not be saved, so I would ask Jesus Christ to be my Lord and Savior again.

And round and round and round it went.

Anyway, these are just a few examples. There are more. Many, many more. But that would require many blog posts, and I think I’d like to address the deeper themes one at a time later on. For now, I’m just summarizing my story.

The point is, I was made to feel inadequate and completely dependent on my church. Any questioning, and toe out of line, and I was made not only to feel guilty, but also to question my own salvation. The Bible was weaponized, and God was made to seem constantly angry. He was watching and scrutinizing every little thing I did to make sure I didn’t screw up.

I didn’t have words for it then, but my mental health was seriously struggling, even when I was a child, as a result of this type of manipulation. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I developed the language I needed. But that’s a story for another time.

But my story is far from over. In my next post, I’ll discuss the end of my time in South Carolina and my move to Minnesota, where I spent much of my adolescence.

You’re going to want to follow along.

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Caffeinated Chronicles: Part 3 – From Hymns to Hide and Seek: A Veneer of Happy Family

In my last post in the series, I shared a bit about our move to South Carolina and our lives while we were there. These were some of my formative years, where I learned about the world and what it means to be human. It wasn’t all Toys R Us and blackberry picking though. In this post I’m going to share about my church experiences in South Carolina. Buckle up.

As I was quite young when we first moved to South Carolina, I mostly remember things that were really impactful from those times: a statement made that really affected me, a particularly joyful or sorrowful experience, etc.

One of the first things we did when we moved to our new home was seek out a church. Just any church wouldn’t do, you see. We were looking for something quite specific. We needed a Baptist church.

I can hear you now, “A Baptist church? In South Carolina? That shouldn’t be too hard to come by!”

Indeed, it was easy to find Baptist churches there. Nearly every block in every town had a Baptist church. You could hardly turn around without seeing one.

But there was a problem. These were all part of the evil leftist Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Ok, ok, I’m exaggerating. My parents didn’t believe the SBC was an evil leftist organization. Well, not completely.

But my parents and others of their ilk didn’t believe that a Baptist church should be part of a broader convention like this. They didn’t want anyone telling them what they could and couldn’t do or say in their church. Any kind of hierarchical structure was looked at askance. And so the very institution of the SBC was an affront to their theological sensibilities.

No, they needed an independent fundamentalist Baptist church (IFB). They were looking for a church that wasn’t governed by any hierarchy, hence the “independent” part.

And don’t get me started on the “fundamentalist” part. Actually, what am I saying? That’s like the whole reason I’ve chosen to write this blog. I’m already started on it, and I have no intention of stopping.

So my parents did their research. Somehow. (I have no idea how people found places like this before the internet). And they found an appropriate church for us to try out. I won’t name the church here, because I know it still exists, and they don’t deserve to be harassed.

I remember my first Sunday at the church. I was six. During Sunday school, I was led to a side room, to the right of the platform with the pulpit (and the American flag) on it. I was given a coloring page that went along with a Bible story. I don’t remember the Bible story, but I do remember that it was the pastor’s wife who led the class. She asked how old I was and gave me some crayons. I gripped the crayons with my fist and colored all over the paper with a complete disregard for the lines. It’s how I color to this day.

And then during the main service, we would join our parents during the songs, and then we would go down a long hallway to an annex, where we would have children’s church. Children’s church was essentially a time of singing non-sensical songs such as the ones demonstrated in the videos below.

Then we would have a message from a poor college student (usually someone from Bob Jones University), often dealing with important topics for kids, such as why the Bible should be taken literally, how important it is to obey our parents, or why we should never write Xmas instead of Christmas (It’s because the liberals want to take Christ out of Christmas).

Church would then end, and we would play outside on the church grounds for a long time, while we waited for our parents to finish talking. I’d usually give my mom my Bible and run outside to play. I remember her telling me often, “I’m not your pack animal.” I didn’t understand what she meant.

Then we would go home and have a big lunch and spend time as a family before we would return to church for the evening service. Evening services were the worst ones. There was no children’s church, nothing fun to do. The kids had to sit with our parents during the whole service, even sermon time! When I was small my mom would give me coloring pages or books to keep me occupied, but when I got older she stopped, and I was expected to listen to the whole sermon. I often fell asleep.

And then there were the Wednesday night services. My parents would go to the main building and have a prayer service. How boring. We kids were lucky though. We got to go to the separate gymnasium building. There, we would have a short time of singing and a message tailored to kids. After that we would go in the gym and play organized games, such as floor hockey or basketball. Then, when the game was over, we would have free time until our parents came to pick us up. It was the best.

Yes, it’s safe to say that church was in incredibly important, integral part of our family life. My siblings and I were homeschooled, so we didn’t have many friends besides the ones we made at church. We not only attended church gatherings, but also festivals, picnics, summer camps, activities, outings, etc. Our lives revolved around church.

Wow. I just made my church sound really good. And, like, a lot of fun. Maybe I should just leave it at that and let you think that I had nothing but a positive experience at my childhood churches. Maybe I should just let you think that it was always fun, and that I had an amazing community of loving, caring people surrounding me.

And that wouldn’t be completely untrue.

But it goes deeper. Much deeper and much darker. What I’ve expressed here is the veneer that kept us all dependent on our church community. After all, it was our primary form of socializing. But you just have to dig a little deeper, strip away a little of the whitewash, and you can begin to see the cracks. What I’ve depicted here as a happy, inclusive family is exactly what those in charge would want you to see. But trust me: Beneath that surface, that shiny, loving community becomes a nightmare.

You’re going to want to follow along.

As I reflect on my formative years spent within the walls of our South Carolina church, I’m reminded of the intricate tapestry of experiences that shaped me. While I’ve shared glimpses of the laughter and camaraderie that defined our community, there’s much more to unravel. Join me on this journey as we delve deeper into the complexities beneath the surface, exploring the nuances of faith, community, and personal growth. Subscribe to stay updated on the next chapter of my story and gain exclusive access to insights and revelations that continue to unfold. Together, let’s navigate the highs and lows, the joys and struggles, as we uncover the profound truths hidden within the fabric of our shared experiences.

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Brewing Faith Part 1: Sipping on Coffee and Theology, One Cup at a Time

I like coffee.

There. I said it.

I really, really, really like coffee.

This post won’t be a follow up to my series about my development and theology. Instead, it’ll be about my love of my favorite beverage. It’ll be part of a series about coffee and different types of coffee that I like. I might even discuss my limited experience trying to roast coffee.

After all, my blog is called “Coffee and Theology,” so it’s only fitting that I should discuss coffee at some point, right?

My deep love for coffee is rooted in the fact that my mom grew up in Brazil. She wasn’t Brazilian, but she was born and raised there, so she was what we call a “third culture kid.” Her parents were Americans who moved to Brazil in the 1950s as missionaries with the Baptist church.

My mom brought her love of coffee to her life in America as she settled and attended college there. She passed this love down to me.

In fact, I’ve been drinking coffee since before I can remember. I used to drink it with milk or flavored creamer, but as my tastes developed, I discovered that I love plain, black coffee. At least, when it’s made well with high-quality beans. My parents couldn’t afford high-quality coffee beans. So we drank Folger’s. Or whatever was on sale at Aldi that week. My mom would make coffee every single morning. Many of my fondest memories revolve around drinking (terrible) coffee with my parents. It was something that brought us together as a family.

As I’ve grown my love for coffee hasn’t changed, but my tastes have. I have a tendency to try to become somewhat snobbish about some of the things that I like, so I’m always looking for the best coffee beans I can find at a reasonable price. I’ve developed a deep love of light roasts, and the nutty, fruity flavor profiles that they provide.

I began watching YouTube videos by James Hoffman and others about how to make the best coffee with whatever equipment I have. As of now, my favorite ways to make coffee are with my V60 pour over and my French Press. I had an Aero Press in the United States, but for some foolish reason, I chose not to bring it to France with me. This decision will be rectified when I return to the US for the summer.

Yes, I am snobbish when I make my own coffee, but having grown up with bad coffee made poorly, I can still stomach gas station coffee or the donated coffee we have at my work. In fact, it will come as no surprise that I need coffee to function. The same can be said of most every coffee-lover.

As this is my first post about coffee, let me explain how it figures into the theme of the blog. One of my first posts dealt with this theme, but I’ll state it here as well.

I believe in a faith that is not stagnant, not passive. I want my faith to fill me with passion and to influence every decision I make, so that I impact those around me for the better. I still describe myself as a Christian, although I usually choose alternative words, since that word carries so much baggage.

So I liken my faith to my love of coffee. I need my coffee to function. When I haven’t had my coffee I feel unmotivated and unwilling to do anything. The first thing I do in the morning is make coffee, and it energizes me to live my day.

I want my faith to play a similar role, energizing me to love those around me and fulfill the greatest commandments that we received from Jesus: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.

I want faith to be like caffeine in my soul (it’s cheesy, I know).

In conclusion, my journey with coffee parallels my spiritual quest for a faith that is vibrant and transformative. From childhood memories shared over a cup of Folger’s to the pursuit of the perfect pour-over, coffee has been a constant companion, reminding me of the importance of savoring life’s simple pleasures. As I continue to explore the nuances of coffee brewing, I am reminded of the depth and richness of my faith journey, seeking to infuse each day with purpose and passion. Just as a well-brewed cup of coffee awakens the senses, I aspire for my faith to be a catalyst for love, compassion, and meaningful connection in the world around me. So, here’s to embracing both the aroma of freshly ground beans and the aroma of divine grace, as we journey onward, one sip at a time.

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