“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

Hmmm….

I read an article the other day where the author – an Evangelical Christian pastor – was describing his interactions with a couple of men, formerly of Evangelical congregations, who had become ‘…repelled by Christianity’. The article then went on to describe his (so far unsuccessful) efforts to get them to come back in to the ‘fold’, as it were. While his essay recognised several good points regarding what needs to change in Evangelical Christianity, one sentence popped out at me as being totally key in the perception of Evangelical Christianity, in addition to all the other things he was saying, and which he had completely failed to notice as such. The sentence was,

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

And that, right there, is the very heart of the problem. In my opinion, the ‘gospel’, as the writer sees it, is indeed the problem. It’s both: it’s ‘We’ and it’s ‘The gospel’.

First, I will present the essay as written (with just one emphasis inserted by me), and then I will present my rebuttal on the ‘gospel is not the problem’ idea. There is actually some good stuff here, despite the guy failing to recognise the key issue^[1].

Two long conversations in two days with two different men, one identical story: Grew up in traditional churches. Highly involved. Now completely repelled by Christianity. Why? Because of the terrible, appalling attitudes held and atrocities done by its leaders.

Heartbreaking.

I said all the obvious things. Apologised. Tried to point them away from religion towards Jesus. Apologised again. Mostly listened. But to be honest I don’t blame them. They were probably safer outside the church. I blame us.

Both men are still open spiritually, cautiously interested in my faith, deeply caring individuals. Both told me ‘I do my best. I’m a good person’. But both of them are also far too hurt to be open to any form of church.

I feel sad. Ashamed – as a Christian and especially as a leader. But I also feel discouraged. Here we are doing our best to reach the one lost sheep, whilst others are repelling the 99. Our back door is bigger and busier by far than our front door.

The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly fondly recalls growing up in the crowded Catholic tenements of Glasgow. Families were enormous and the children would play all day in and out of each other’s homes. At night, he jokes, each dad would make sure that the right number of children was put to bed in each house, without worrying about whose they actually were.

It’s a bit like that in the church. We continually seek to welcome strangers into our home, whilst our own children go missing, and then comfort ourselves that the numbers are roughly the same. We aspire to be good witnesses to the world, whilst neglecting and alienating the members of our own family.

The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem. [Emphasis mine – Ed] This is not a failure of Christian apologetics (both of the men I met are open intellectually); it’s a failure of Christians to apologise (their hurt hearts are firmly and understandably closed).

This is why we *must* do more than just preach the gospel and try to be nice. We must also urgently, practically nurture communities of healing and gospel life. We need systemic change in the institutional church. And of course we must hold leaders to account whilst raising up women and men whose integrity matches their ability. For every pioneer evangelist outside the front door amongst the unchurched, we probably need ten prodigal mothers and fathers on the back porch quietly loving and listening to those who have been (or are about to be) ‘dechurched’. What’s the point of winning new people when we are losing – repelling – the ones we’ve already got?

Religious sentimentality and a fetishistic obsession with the familiar is obscuring the concrete reality of our situation. There is hard graft, dirty and difficult work to be done: first, burying the dead religious rituals despised by Jesus (it won’t be popular), and then actively building the living, loving community he actually came to establish. We must apply ourselves to work and pray with all our strength to renew old churches and to plant new churches. Both together. One without the other will not work. And we must dismantle the toxic distinction between priesthood and laity. Oh and we are also going to have to apologise. A lot.

And then personally we must also be prepared to go on many long journeys with prodigals like the two men I met these past two days. We must listen to them respectfully and befriend them unconditionally. One whiff of bible-bashing and they will run a mile. But give it a few more chats over a few more months and there may well come a night, after a few beers no doubt, when one or other of these men will turn to me and finally say ‘OK, talk to me about the Jesus stuff. How can you really believe all that ****? Tell me more.’

Our back door is bigger than our front door and it has a long and winding driveway.

Kyrie eleison

So, there we have, along with the beautifully honest points about what corrective changes need to be made in churches, the understandable desire of a pastor to bring back what he sees as his ‘lost sheep’. You can feel the compassion and concern that he has for them, and it is certainly genuine.

Sadly, though, it has to be said: it is obvious that his ultimate objective is to bring them back to believing the same things that he and his congregation do. You can even see the ulterior motives there in his closing sentences, despite using the word ‘unconditional’, and also in his unfortunate and revealing use of the word ‘prodigal’. Heck, he even admits that they are probably safer outside of church! And while he indeed says ” ‘We’ are wrong”, there’s actually much more to it than that.

Recently, I have been working with ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), helping to bring them back into what could be seen as a ‘normal’ life, free of the habits engendered by a lifetime of being steeped in a toxic religious atmosphere. While the JWs do indeed have a whole pile of, shall we say, ‘problematic’, and indeed harmful, doctrines, I’m afraid Evangelicalism is little different except in specifics. The JWs have many ideas of reality that dictate the way in which they approach life and faith, and in this regard Evangelicalism is of course the same. After all, any person’s faith background, if it is held sincerely^[2], will always dictate – to a greater or lesser extent – the way in which the person lives their lives. And it appears that the key to either voluntary or enforced adherence to one’s faith practices, in many if not most congregations, is that of fear. Fear of others’ opinions, fear of sanctions, fear of leadership, fear of exposure and/or public ridicule or shaming, fear of death, fear of afterlife punishment, and the list goes on. It’s all about fear.

When things like this become apparent to a former adherent to a particular faith tradition, possibly like the two men in the piece above; where they see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, as it were, it becomes the prime reason why those people would never want to return to that particular ‘flock'^[3]. If the gospel is one of fear – whatever form that fear may take – why would you want to subject yourself to that sort of thing? Especially when the pastor can’t see, and indeed doesn’t know and/or understand, what it was that drives people away in the first place^[4]. And you can’t ‘unsee’ what you’ve seen; indeed, it would be dishonest, and ultimately pointless, to do so.

And there’s more.

Let’s come back to the main assertion:

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

You see, I’d actually say that the ‘gospel’, as Evangelical Christianity calls and defines it, is indeed the problem^[5]. Emphatically, it’s not that Evangelicalism itself is evil, and nor are the people in it.^[6]. A lot of good comes from Evangelicalism; I believe that the love that many have for Jesus is genuine and they do lots of good things in society (some of which, yes, has strings attached) and above all their love for Jesus is expressed in some really good, inspired and indeed anointed worship music.

So, why is their ‘gospel’ a ‘Great Evil’, as the title of this piece claims?

The simple answer, which I will of course complicate by explaining and describing it, is that their gospel misrepresents God, presenting Him in the most terrible light possible, so much so that no-one in their right mind would want to associate themselves with such a monster god. And that’s even before you get into how this god has supposedly put – equally horrific – things in place in order to ‘put things right’.

When you really look deeply into Evangelical doctrine – and believe me, I have done just that! – you will find that the summary below is what is held as the true nature of spiritual reality^[7] by Evangelical Christians. I’m sure they would try to qualify, explain away and and ‘Ah, but…’ the whole thing; I’m sure that I, as an Evangelical many years ago, would have done the same thing. But, right at its very heart, this is Evangelicalism^[8]. Here, then, is what you have to believe, at the heart of it, if you’re going to call yourself an Evangelical Christian. Hold tight; here we go!

Evangelicalism’s god is an angry, capricious and bullying god^[9] that acts more like humans than humans do.

He’s easily offended, he holds grudges, and the only thing he accepts to appease him (and as everyone knows, appeasement only works until the bully decides it doesn’t) is to kill his own son to satisfy his ‘holiness’, his ‘justice’ and also his honour.

People are given the ‘choice’ to ‘love’ this god, or burn forever in a furnace – ‘Hell’ – of that god’s own designing and maintaining^[10], while those he’s supposed to have trained to love others either look on in glee – a standard doctrine in 19th century Evangelicalism, which, I am disappointed to be able to say, has persisted to this day in many circles – or are somehow ‘trained’ to forget about their loved ones burning; this being the other doctrine that explains how people can live a blessed life in Heaven while the excluded roast and scream^[11].

And, because ‘narrow is the way’ (Mt 7:13-14), this inescapably means that many more people will go to that furnace than will not, probably including their (Evangelicals’) children, which they still keep popping out despite knowing that most people will end up in the furnace, statistically including their children. It seems they’re prepared to take that risk with the eternal futures of the people they will (hopefully) love more than anyone or anything else in this life.

And, remember, all this happens – Hell and so on – because this god is a god of love, they tell us.

The English word ‘Gospel’ – the translation of the Greek word ‘ευαγγελιον’ (euaggelion) – means ‘Good News’. This is where we get the terms ‘Evangelical’ and ‘evangelist’ from, of course^[12].

The gospel^[13] espoused by Evangelical Christianity, though, can under no circumstances be decribed as ‘good news’. It is in fact far, far worse news than anything in history, putting even the genocide of the Holocaust to shame. It pains me to even have to explain this, but in fact according to the Evangelical gospel, every single one of the Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust went straight to Hell, because they didn’t come to a belief in Jesus before they died. By any definition, except apparently any coming from Evangelicalism, this concept represents such a diabolical evil that the only way to reconcile it with a loving god is…. well, there isn’t one. The only way that an Evangelical Christian, one who really believes that, anyway, can so reconcile it is for them to live with a cognitive dissonance. That a god of love can cause and perpetuate such suffering is only capable of being handled by the human mind by means of having a cognitive dissonance. And that goes with the glibness of their claim that most people, whom their god loves, remember, will burn in Hell for all eternity, and their ability to believe that without going completely insane.

No, this is NOT good news by any standard, and it is the reason why I refer to it as ‘The Great Evil of Evangelicalism’. Because that’s what it is.

Furthermore, the Hell doctrine is an integral part of Evangelicalism; it is fully intertwined with the way the religion works; it is ‘non-resectable’, to use a surgical term – it cannot be removed without doing irreparable damage to the entire structure. If you remove this doctrine, you break the whole thing, and it won’t be Evangelicalism anymore. This is why it’s so deadly. If you’re an honest Evangelical, you have to admit that you believe that this doctrine is true and, indeed, that what it describes will really happen to real people.

One of the reasons why Jesus came was in order to show God as being, well, in a word, ‘Nice’. Someone who loves us just as we are; someone Who has our best interests at heart. Someone Who heals, forgives and restores the broken. He did this in order to set right the image of god that people of His time had; that of being, shall we say, ‘Not nice’!

And yet, over the centuries, successive generations of Christian theologians have twisted that image back to the pre-Jesus concept of a horrible god. Nowhere and no-when has this been more apparent than over the last 150 years or so, since Evangelicalism (and its precursors) began.

This, then, is the evil of Evangelicalism^[14]. Despite the clear example of Jesus, the depiction of God is one of Him being cruel, vengeful, sadistic – and, rather than continue the list, let’s just sum it up with one word: Unapproachable. Who would want the company of a god like that, in the unlikely event that he’d even allow us near him? And so, ordinary, decent people are rightly repelled by that depiction. The very people who need Jesus the most are repelled by Evangelicalism’s depiction of Him, and are thereby denied all the benefits and blessing of direct faith in, and personal knowledge of, Jesus.

Since Evangelicalism is founded on such a diabolically evil dissonance, and one where words and definitions are routinely and irreparably twisted, it would be far better if not only those two brothers being counselled by our pastor friend, but also everyone else with a gentle loving heart, should avoid Evangelicalism entirely.

Such gentle hearts only get corrupted by the constant exposure to the evil that is the Evangelical gospel, which really is the polar opposite of everything that Jesus was, that He showed, and that He taught. I say this from personal experience; that’s what happened to me and it took me fifteen years to detox from it. Try holding the Evangelical gospel up next to the loving teachings of Jesus, and you will see that it only holds water if any of the things He is recorded as saying are twisted out of their real meanings and contexts.

I am so glad that those guys got out, and I sincerely hope that they will eventually recover. I’m not assuming that the points I make in this essay are the reasons why those two guys came out of Evangelicalism – indeed, the reasons are given as being the atrocities committed by leadership. But you can bet that there were other reasons too, and these will have much in common with both what I have written here, and what other ‘exvangelicals’ too have experienced.

So, regarding going ‘back in’ to Evangelicalism, well, you don’t recover from poisoning by drinking more poison. Yes, Jesus is amazing; again, I speak from personal experience. But, in Evangelicalism, even Jesus has been twisted and, in fact, silenced by the Bibliolatry^[15] of Evangelicalism.

You see, if Jesus^[16] tells a believer something that is ‘against’ the ‘clear teaching’ of the Bible – as interpreted by Evangelicalism, of course – then it is Jesus that is wrong, not the Bible. Moreover, Evangelicalism has stained and sullied the Bible over the years, and to such an extent, that now even the purest-hearted believer finds it hard to read it because of all the disgusting twisted interpretations they’ve been fed down the years that keep coming back to mind unbidden.

No, let those escaped men deconstruct in whatever way they need. Leave them alone. Don’t try to recapture them and draw them back into the cage they have escaped from. That would be pure evil – which like all the worst evil, comes from people who think they have the best motives.

Here is an excellent and very much on-point quotation from Rob Bell – a pastor who has of course been rejected by Evangelicalism because of his teachings against belief in Hell:

“Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the Gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly Father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die?

“That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can. And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

“And so there are conferences about how churches can be more “relevant” and “missional” and “welcoming,” and there are vast resources, many, many books and films, for those who want to “reach out” and “connect” and “build relationships” with people who aren’t part of the church. And that can be helpful. But at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this?

“Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

– Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

And so the two men, in the original essay, came out of Evangelicalism. But, of course, for Evangelicals, that’s no escape! There is no escape from a god who would pursue a person right to the ends of the earth to make sure that they end up in that fiery furnace!^[17] They would say that simply running away or ignoring [their perception of] the truth won’t save you. There is no escape!

But it’s not that. It’s that these people are so honest that they believe that God isn’t like Evangelicalism says he is, so why would they want to be part of a community where that is believed and acted upon? They simply don’t believe that any more, so to them it doesn’t matter that this ‘truth’ might pursue them, for it is no longer relevant. So why would they ever want to return to something that they have essentially grown out of? Their path of spiritual growth has led them away from Evangelicalism, and to go back would be to nullify that growth. They have grown past that, in the same way that a butterfly has grown past being a caterpillar, and what butterfly ever benefitted from taking flying lessons from caterpillars?

And so, it’s not just that “…others are repelling the 99” as the author says; it is also, most emphatically, their gospel itself.

I am aware that many of my readers believe fully in the atoning death of Jesus, and in the deflection of God’s wrath away from us and onto Jesus. Of Jesus being the sacrificial Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world. I’m not trying to take that away from those people; far from it. Take a look at this article for more on what Jesus did on the Cross and why it all applies no matter what the precise details are of your belief system. Remember also that there are almost as many ways of looking at the Cross as there are denominations. Be encouraged; be secure: Jesus is still Lord, and Jesus still died for our sins, no matter how that actually works in practice.

The actual Gospel is sooooo much better than Evangelicalism gives credit for. However it works, Jesus has obtained forgiveness of sin and victory over death! This is not heresy; this is the glorious truth of it all!

So what is the Gospel, then? Many people outside of Christianity say, ‘If God is so good and so powerful, why can’t He just forgive people anyway?’

And, that, I believe, that is the Good News – the Gospel – that those ‘outside’ so intuitively realise: that God does indeed forgive, and has indeed forgiven, everything that everyone has ever done wrong, every ‘sin’ both actual and only perceived. This is indeed the case; because for Him they were never a problem. “As far as the East is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions [sins] from us” (Psalm 103:12-14). There are so many ramifications that lead on from that one basic truth, but that in essence is what we’re looking at.

I might go into more detail on this later in the series, but, for now, I think I’ve blathered on enough!

Grace and Peace to you all

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I am sensitive to the possibility that some of the dark things I have been sharing recently may have introduced, or reinforced, some unease in my readers.

Either the things shared themselves, or the reactions they have engendered in my readers. Or even just the reminders of things that maybe we had buried as too painful to confront.

Either way, doubts may have arisen (or pre-existed) about their faith, doubts about their church, doubts about their leaders, their denomination, their beliefs. While I fully acknowledge that God uses all these factors in order to move His children on in their spiritual walk, sometimes we need a bit of help along the way. There’s nothing wrong with doubts, but they can be uncomfortable, and that’s what I want to address today.

In our processes of rebuilding our faith structure, therefore, and re-realising what we actually believe, it is good to get some encouragement from ‘outside’; in this instance, from a good ‘third party’, the brilliant John Pavlowitz. This essay reminds us of just how good God is, which is always a good thing 🙂

Here, then, is his encouraging piece. I hope it blesses you as much as it has blessed me!

I just don’t know if I believe anymore—and I don’t know what to do about it.

I hear words like these every single day from people from every corner of the planet, from every strand of the Christian tradition, and every segment of society. They are once-religious people who, for any number of reasons, are now finding the very ground of faith eroding beneath their feet, and they are panicking.

And this fear is understandable. After all, a faith shift is terrifying stuff to endure. It’s one thing to question the institutional Church or to poke holes in the religious systems we’ve put in place, or even to critique the Bible and how we interpret it. Those are all manageable crises.

We can endure such things and still hold a steady confidence in the belief that God is and that God is good. Even if on some days, that is all that remains of our fragile faith narrative, it can be enough.

But what do you do when with all the sleepless wrestling and the furrowed-browed prayers and the ceaseless questions and the best-intended efforts, even that seems out of reach? What happens when the very reality of God (or of a God who is good) seems too much for you to claim ownership of? How do you keep going while in the middle of a full-blown spiritual collapse?

It often isn’t a matter of just being more determined or more “religious”. Most of the time, people have reached these desperate moments despite continually reading the Bible and praying and volunteering and attending church services, and trying to believe. They haven’t refrained from those disciplines. They often are as devout and engaged as ever, only these pursuits no longer yield the clarity and confidence and comfort they once did.

Many people come to me in that barren spiritual dryness, and they almost always carry the crushing guilt of failure. They are grieving deeply, feeling helpless to get back what they’ve lost, and angry at themselves for not being faithful enough to conjure up a belief that used to come as a simple given. (And often they’re pretty ticked off at God, too.)

If you’re in that place right now, I won’t pretend there’s any easy way out or a simple path back to faith. I can’t even promise that you’ll ever find your way back, at least not to what you used to call belief. It may be a very different experience in the future.

So what can you do right now?

It might be to pray or read the Bible or find a new church, but likely it’s something else entirely.

Maybe it’s about asking yourself what you still know to be true; about the goodness of people, about the things that matter to you, about the gifts you’ve been given, about the kind of person you want to be in the world.

It could be that today it’s just about what’s right in front of you: about what you can see and hear and touch and smell and taste. Maybe the best thing you can do right now is to experience all of the things that you can know, and simply receive them with gratitude: a delicious meal, the evening breeze, some music that moves you, the laughter of your best friend, the intimacy of a relationship, the smell of your child’s head as you hug them. Those measurable and tangible things can form a working theology of beauty, awe, and gratitude that don’t need to be called anything else.

Perhaps just accepting these pure and measurable gifts of being alive and presently cherishing them is all the faith you are able to have right now, and that’s OK. Maybe that’s as close to proof of the Divine as you can consent to in these moments.

To simply live and to find appreciation in the living is itself a spiritual pursuit; it is a holy thing. And as you do this, you may find that this contentment is the straighter pathway back to what you’ve lost. It may clear the road to God that has been cluttered by sadness, anger, doubt, and yes, even religion.

But don’t lay that expectation on yourself right now, because that would only turn this all into a means to an end, a result to achieve, another religious exercise to evaluate. For now, just receive the goodness and pleasures of this day and allow them to speak to and surprise you. You may find there the beginning of a new season of faith.

Don’t worry about what anyone else says. You’re the one walking this road, and you understand it in ways they never will.

And above all, don’t worry about God. If God is indeed God, then God is big enough to handle your doubts and uncertainty and knows exactly what you’re going through and why belief is such a struggle right now.

You may have indeed lost your faith, or you may have just lost your way a bit. Either way, this might be a good time to breathe, look around, and find joy in what is beside and around you as you travel.

If that is all the faith you can muster right now, let it be so.

Be encouraged.

The original post can be found here

Continuing our sequence of Dark Testimonies, as part of my series on the Problems of Evangelicalism, here is another beautifully eloquent testimony from one of my friends.

My friend has asked to remain anonymous, so I have of course honoured that – but the story still maintains its power nevertheless. Here we go:

Self – Flagellation 

In the church of my youth, self-flagellation^[1] was a spiritual discipline.

I’ll explain.

During communion services, men were allowed to stand up, read from the Bible, and expand on their thoughts a little. Women were generally restricted to asking the organist to play a specific hymn/song, or to pray. If they read from the Bible, they weren’t allowed to say anything about what they’d read out, as that would be considered teaching.

Anyway, one Sunday morning, during the communion service, my father rose to his feet and, in a rare display of emotion, announced, ‘I am a sinner!’. Specifically, he told the congregation about some behaviour he wasn’t proud of, but the heart of his confession was this peculiar passion about being a sinner. Reaffirming his fallen identity in public was very much the trumpet blast of his faith, as it was for many in the congregation.

After he sat down, another man stood up to talk about how ‘brave’ my dad was for telling us of his sins.

My father’s passion for public confession was symptomatic of a wider theological fallacy in the church we attended. Men would rarely get passionate about grace, mercy, or the life and ministry of Jesus, but they loved to talk about sin. With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve reached the conclusion that this was the closest these believers ever got to a mystical experience.

The reformed theology of my denomination didn’t allow for joy. It taught us we were ‘worthless sinners’, and that the only reason any of us could approach God was because the torture we deserved had been taken out on Jesus.

We could stand in God’s presence under a ‘cloak of righteousness’, but always in the knowledge that we deserved to burn.

We spent more time, energy, and emotion obsessing about sin than we did focussing on Jesus and what he showed us about the curative, liberating, inclusive, and unconditional love of God. I’m not even sure this form of faith can be described as Christianity.

– Anonymous

Well. How do you follow that? How far had those people drifted from the simple, light and free, joy-filled faith that Christianity – Flying in the Spirit – really brings?

The testimony serves as a stark reminder that being sin-focused, either/both personally or as a church, leads to misery, drudgery and darkness. Sadly, sin-fixation is endemic in many if not most of today’s Evangelical churches. As I’ve said before,

I’ve also noticed that when you start to enthuse about your freedom while talking with a Legalist – whether they know they are one or not! – the first thing they will do is to try to explain to you why you should not be free.

And this is both symptomatic of a sin-fixation and also the ‘thin end of the wedge’ of creeping legalism; the ‘yeast of the Pharisees’. Bit by bit, any kind of acknowledgement that sin is something you should be looking at, concentrating on or even defending against, any hint of that will lead eventually to legalism. And so, it is especially relevant to look at Hebrews 12:1 once again, “…let us throw off…the sin that so easily entangles…” ‘Sin’ entangles not only by addiction and obsession, as most Evangelicals would interpret this passage – and they’d be partly right – but also that it’s the obsession with sin itself that is what really entangles. How can I put this with sufficient emphasis? The actual obsession with trying to not sin, making sure you’re not ‘entertaining’ any form of sin, trying to ‘stay away from every kind of evil’ (1Thess 5:22), and all that sort of thing. The fear that the ‘devil’, who ‘…prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour…’ might just get a look-in and devour the believer^[2]. All these things are themselves the problem. As my friend’s testimony so eloquently describes, it’s not the ‘sins’ themselves that made that church service so dark – it was the actual fixation on sin that is the problem^[3]. I say ‘is the problem’ because it’s not just limited to the time and place of my friend’s story, but it goes on all the time in the minds and congregations of legalistic Christians. And it was even the main fixation of the Pharisees back in New Testament times, so it’s not like it’s anything new. The constant battle against ‘sin’ is the major defining feature of many Evangelical Christians’ faith. And that’s so sad.

In Romans 7, St. Paul famously writes about his struggles with ‘sin’, concluding that it is Jesus Christ our Lord who sets him free from all that. Notice that he’s not saying that Jesus stops him from sinning, nor that Jesus quiets that notional ‘other man’, the ‘wretched man’ that persists in his desire to ‘sin’. Instead, Jesus sets him free; He takes away the whole problem by making it so that ‘sin’ is no longer an issue between man and God; it has nothing to do with righteousness any more. Because of Jesus, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because the Law of the Spirit of Life has set us free from that Law of sin and death that the ‘wretched man’ of Romans 7 was subjected to. Many preachers I have heard have commented that the allocation of chapter and verse, for some parts of the Scriptures, was not ‘inspired’ in that sometimes the chapter breaks occur at silly and unhelpful places. The Romans 7 and 8 juncture is such a place, because the chapter break interrupts Paul’s logic flow. However, not one of those preachers went any further than to say that the chapter break of Romans 7-8 is not inspired; they didn’t ever once say why they thought that^[4].

Well the reason why is as I have just said above. Jesus has set us free from the need to worry about ‘sin’ because there is now no condemnation. None at all. In fact, given that Romans 3:20 says, ‘Therefore no-one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the Law, rather through the Law we become conscious of our sin’, he’s saying that trying to follow the Law – obeying the Rules, to put it bluntly – is futile and pointless. Now that the Law has exposed ‘our’ ‘sin’, it has fulfilled its purpose. Everyone who believes that they have ‘broken God’s Law’ now knows that; job done, so the Law can now pack up and go home. What Paul does in Romans 7-8, and through all his preceding arguments, is to say that Law is no longer relevant in terms of human righteousness, because that’s all been done by Jesus.

Therefore, being constantly sin-conscious is to deny that there is now no condemnation for those in Christ. Those who are in Christ have been set free from that same Law of sin and death that has no place in their lives any more. He also said – to a different group of believers and at a different time – that ‘if you walk in the Spirit, then you will not gratify the desires of the flesh’. This doesn’t mean that it prevents you from gratifying, or giving in to, those desires, whatever they are^[5], but instead that just by walking in the Spirit means that you are no longer walking in the flesh, whatever that means. Walking in the Spirit – walking with Jesus and doing what you see Father doing (Jn 5:19) – is what the Christian life can and should be.

Note that I don’t mean walking around with your head in the clouds singing la-la-la. It’s that the state of being for Christians who realise the freedom of Grace – which is what makes us free to walk in the Spirit in the first place – is that they just get on with their lives, generally conscious that their lives are in the right place with God and that, just by living and doing the right thing, along with things the Spirit prompts them to do, they are living a righteous life. Not by their own efforts, but by resting in the place that God has given them: the place of righteousness, the place of peace, and the place of joy, because that’s what the Kingdom of God is about, not about rules and regulations. Romans 14:17 says that, “…the kingdom of God is not about food and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit”. In that passage, Paul is arguing that eating or drinking the right or wrong foods is not what it’s all about; that’s all irrelevant. What it’s about is righteousness, peace and joy in the Spirit. It’s not about Law.^[6]. By that point in his letter to the Romans, Paul had already established that the righteousness needed is by faith, and that that is a gift – a Grace, a charis (Greek), a free gift of God. And therefore his readers have already got it. It’s not something that can be taken away or lost in any fashion.

In Romans 3:21, right in the heart of the passages so favoured by legalists, Paul is actually saying something different from legalism. In that passage he says that the righteousness is apart from Law. It has nothing to do with Law – with behaviour – not even a little bit (Eph 2:8-9). The essence of Romans 3:21 is that the righteousness is almost a new thing, because he says there, “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify”. Not only does it say, ‘But now…’ as if something has changed – which it has, of course – but also the Law and the Prophets testify to it. This means that the Law and the Prophets have ‘handed over’ that new righteousness apart from Law. It ties in with Jesus’s Transfiguration (Mt 17:1-8, Mk 9:2-13, Lk 9:28-36), where God’s voice says ‘This is My Son; listen to Him!’, meaning that from now on, Jesus supersedes the Law (signified by the presence of Moses) and the Prophets (signified by Elijah), This is an aspect of the Transfiguration that is little understood by Evangelical Christianity, and even if you explained it to them, they would choose not to accept that interpretation. I would say that’s at least partly because they want to retain the rules from the Law and the Prophets.

Well, of course they do; it helps them stay sin-conscious! Where would sin-consciousness be without Moses? 🤣

Header picture shows two mediaeval plonkers performing self-flagellation. You’d have thought times would have changed by now, wouldn’t you? 🤣

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We begin our series on the problems with Evangelicalism by sharing some ‘dark testimonies’.

These are testimonies by Christians who were subjected to the dark evils of being part of a domineering Evangelical faith. Testimonies where damage was done, and people were abused to one extent or another. In some cases, there was a happy ending. In other cases, not so much. But I’m going to share them anyway.

The testimonies give great examples of some of the excesses and abuses of Evangelical leadership, their indoctrination methods and their harsh dealings with members of their congregations. As usual, I would emphasise that not all Evangelical congregations have leaders like this; however a potential church member isn’t going to know until they have been ‘netted'^[1]. Most new Christians, and also people ‘seeking’ or showing an interest in Christianity, haven’t a clue about the less-than-innocent things that go on in the churches at which they enquire, in their innocence, about the things of God.

As I said in the opening piece of this series, normally I like to concentrate on “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” (Phil 4:8) but in these cases, it is necessary to look into the darkness to see what it’s really like in there.

So here’s the first of those pieces, an account of the oppressive Calvinist church^[2] background of my online friend, Sonny Ray:

Of course, like I assume most American highschoolers of the early 1970s, I was taught Edwards’ “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.”^[3] That was the flavor of the “christianity” (note that I didn’t capitalize it!) I grew up with.

We were taught nothing but fear. I was 14 when I “prayed the sinner’s prayer” and “got saved”. But by that point I already had a decade of KNOWING and BELIEVING in the God of Love. Looking back, I realize that I knew what they taught us was not the God of Jesus. The god (note that I didn’t capitalize it!) they taught me was not the Love of 1 Corinthians 13.

But growing up in conservative, rural, Deep South United States in the age of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, they kept us almost perfectly in check by threatening us with hell. And I not only got it in church (note that I didn’t capitalize it!). I got it at home. Mama was the image, in the flesh, of the tyrant god that the Calvinists teach. She ruled with anger, shaming, degradation, all kinds of negative approaches. Not to mention extreme corporal punishment.

It took me a very long time to walk away from that lie. To throw out the tyrant slavemaster and abusive father-figure they showed me. To learn again the God I understood as a 3 year old. The God who’s “got the whole world in His hands”. That was a children’s song my mama sang to me out on the front porch of our house one night. It was very probably the ONLY positive contribution she ever made to my faith. For in THAT MOMENT, I knew God was love. And I wanted to know that God. A God who could love me that much was a God I wanted to know. A God I could believe in.

But even having had that epiphany, I had no control over the indoctrination I received and accepted for the next 40 years! Hell, I was a CHILD. How was I supposed to avoid what they forced down my throat? They were meant to teach, guide, nurture and protect me!

But God love them. I can’t be too hard on them. They only passed down to me, the same errors they were taught.

It took me almost 30 years to escape. I’ll save the details of that for some other time. But when I escaped, I set a huge bonfire, burning that bridge behind me. Breaking away from that hell was traumatic. I knew I had to walk away. But I can’t tell you how much fear dogged me. It took a good while for me to get done with the deconstruction; burn the wood, hay, and stubble; and start gradually building back, stone by stone, the foundation and then the structure of the faith I have today — 27 years later!

I could go on. But you get the picture.

[Emperor] Constantine I was IMO one of the worst things that ever happened to the movement begun by Jesus. And we’ve already spent 1700 years, this year, paying the consequences of THAT error. And he was only one of the problems — errors — hypocrisies — heresies — the “church” has succumbed to in the 2000 years since Christ.

– Sonny Ray, used with his kind permission

Note how, in Sonny Ray’s experience, even though he had ‘prayed the Sinner’s Prayer’, still his church and family felt they could threaten him with Hell.

This, to me, has to be one of the worst inconsistencies in all of Evangelicalism. ‘He who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved’ (Romans 10:13; Joel 2:32), claims the evangelist salesman who calls people out to the altar to ‘get saved’. Will be saved. Not, ‘will be saved as long as you behave yourself’, but will be saved. “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6) [emphasis mine] and other similar reassuring verses.

And then in a typical bait-and-switch, all of a sudden the deal is changed; now you have to behave yourself as well; if you believe that, then it effectively cancels out those verses they used to sell it to you.^[4] The idea of threatening the ‘already-saved’ with hell also has this corollary: the person making the threat is also subject to its effects; i.e. they too could ‘go to hell’ if they put a foot wrong, despite being ‘already saved’. The idea of ‘once saved, always saved‘, is anathema to these people because if that was true then they’d lose their ability to threaten. Maybe also they are so insecure in their salvation that they feel that they too would be condemned due to ‘blood-guiltiness'^[5] were they to not ‘point out’ errors and transgressions in others?

He also demonstrates something I have mentioned in my previous work: how the pure Jesus experience, knowing God as Father and all that, how it gets overlaid by layers of toxic church baggage, through intensive indoctrination. It really is criminal, although Sonny Ray is very gracious towards the people who did that to him and doesn’t hold it against them.

Anyway, these are just points that immediately struck me; I will leave you to glean your own conclusions and thinking from the story.

Grace and Peace to you!

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