The use of new technology in the worship life of the church always ruffles a few feathers. As a twenty-something year old pastor, I ruffled the feathers of a few parishioners when I put a screen and projector up in the church to use for song lyrics and lesson notes. A few years later I was criticized for using an iPad for my sermon notes rather than a notebook and Bible. We even had a church meeting about wireless microphones that got pushback. Then came the era of social media: what can the church post and what shouldn’t the church post?

As a younger man, when it came to ministry and spreading the gospel, I believed the methods didn’t matter, the message did. We should reach the masses by any means necessary! I was perplexed by curmudgeonly saints who did not share in my zeal for using technology to share the good news.

So call me a curmudgeon when it comes to cameras in church. Trust me, I have never felt older in my life! When I stepped away from church-work and attending church in 2020, cameras and streaming equipment were already being used in churches of all sizes. The last church I pastored recorded and streamed services each Sunday, a practice to which I was indifferent. I was still a “by any means” necessary gospel preacher. It never felt weird or intrusive. The cameras were there to capture what happened from those leading worship: primarily the singers, musicians, and preacher. I requested that the cameras stop rolling before communion was served, as it was each week, and in cases where we might have special prayer for the church or individuals. Those requests were largely followed with few exceptions.

Then COVID prevented weekly in-person worship services and churches had no choice but to get the cameras rolling and get the videos out on the internet. That is when I started to get concerned. What before seemed like a benign practice to help spread the word about Jesus and His church became a central part of the worship experience. I knew the floodgates of media were about to open. From my armchair, I started to warn pastors of the effects of this transition to media as a necessary element of Sunday worship because I understood the risk.

Christianity at its core is an embodied faith. The center of our faith is Jesus, who left heaven as a member of the Trinity to become a human, with a body, giving his flesh and blood to us as a continual memorial, and referring to his own body as a temple. The first Christians were taught that they were the “body of Christ.” The practice of our faith is fleshly, bloody, relational, and incarnational. The move to more disembodied practices, such as worshiping from a screen instead of in community, is an existential threat to the faith that was handed down to us by Christ and His apostles.

I returned to church a couple of years later and found that churches had really went all in to make sure they were collecting media to share as content online. Cameras were everywhere. Mics hung from boom-stands across the stage. Lighting was added to accentuate what was seen on screen. One church I attended spent tens of thousands of dollars on a massive LED screen for the stage to replace the old projector screen because it was better for cameras and online streaming. New volunteer opportunities were offered for those wanting to join the media team. One could serve the mission of Jesus by running a camera on Sunday.

This is the pragmatism that drives most evangelical churches: get the message out by any means necessary. But do the methods matter? The older I get, the more I think they do. There are real benefits to streaming: for the homebound, the sick, the curious who aren’t ready to walk through the doors yet. I don’t dismiss that. But then I went to church one morning and the cameras weren’t just facing the worship leaders anymore. They were facing me! Not to help me worship, or provide an online experience for a shut-in at home who can’t make it out of the house, but to capture my moments of worship to add emotional and personal connection the virtual content. To record me and others worshiping for marketing materials produced by the church.

I responded the group running the ad by sharing my dislike of the practice of recruiting photographers and videographers to capture “candid worship.” Their response was kind and thoughtful, but defaulted to, and I quote, “...we want to be able to share what God is doing, testify to what He’s done, and invite others into what He is building.” In another words, we want the recordings of your worship to market our “revival.” It might make worshipers uncomfortable, but anything for the cause, amirite? <insert smirk here>

I admit part of my reaction to cameras in worship settings stems from my broader resistance to the growing, unauthorized intrusion into our private lives. We cannot go anywhere without cameras on us at all times. Phones and eyeglasses are equipped with cameras. We are always being watched. And despite the reality that anytime we are in public we have no assurance of privacy from our peers, even governments are collecting footage of us at an alarming rate. Yet, we do nothing. We are all on the slippery slope but no one seems to know how to get off of it. Even if all this intrusion into our privacy by the public and the government is allowed, aren’t there some things that are still sacred? Shouldn’t there be spaces so sacred that cameras aren’t allowed to record you? Like spaces where we worship?

Last year I attended a men’s ministry camping event with a local church. It was my first time in years stepping out of my comfort zone and participating in a church sponsored retreat. All in all it was a net positive experience. I was genuinely encouraged and edified. But on the last night, there was a service in which I was deeply affected. During a time of prayer and reflection, I became emotional, experiencing a moment with God that I badly needed. With eyes closed, and tears streaming, I spoke quietly to God with my heart and subtle whispers. Then, I opened my eyes to find a camera man with a camera zoomed right in on my face. I had never felt so violated! It felt more than intrusive, it felt voyeuristic. The videographer was in the worship setting, but not worshiping. He was there collecting footage while we, the congregation, had come to worship God.

I left that service thinking a lot about what happened. Why did I feel so icky? Was it wrong that I assumed I could have a private moment in worship in a corporate setting? Am I the only one who feels this way? Over time, I came to realize that what happened to me was a violation. In the same way intimate moments with my wife aren’t meant for the masses, intimate moments between Jesus and His bride (the church) aren’t for the masses. They are for the individuals, the ones baring their souls, the ones ugly crying in repentance, the ones with hands raised finding hope in the midst of their crisis. Such things are too sacred for social media I think. And I know I am not alone.

I reflected on my work as a Youth Pastor at youth camps in the early 2000s. We took young people’s phones away so that they could be focused on the moment, the formation, and God. Young people experienced transformative moments at camp because it was safe. They could be themselves with no one watching or judging, something that young people need at that stage in their lives. Then I thought about how awkward it would be for some of these teenagers to be filmed at their most vulnerable spiritual moments. How would they feel? How would a non-believer feel about attending a church service where they have come with a genuine longing to learn more about Jesus only to be met with cameramen walking around the congregation shooting the best shots they can find of people having a moment?

Maybe I am an outlier. An old curmudgeon. Perhaps the next generation is more into being constantly recorded than I am. But I don’t think that is true. In fact, studies show that more and more younger people are getting out of the social media matrix. One of my own daughters, a young adult, doesn’t embrace social media and told me she wants to be present, to not always be burdened with the need to be seen, to be documented. I have mad respect for that. I suspect she is not alone. Churches need to take a long hard look at what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of pragmatism. Worship is too sacred to be exploited, no matter what the marketing numbers say.

A lot of grief intersected with my life this week. One of my best friends is moving to another state, and I had what might have been my final dinner here in Charlotte with him on Wednesday evening. Summer is winding down, and soon it will be over, my daughters will return to college full-time, and my house will be a lot quieter.

Most days, we live willfully ignorant of all the grief and suffering in the world until it comes home to us. And why not? Who can bear it all? We are reminded more than ever how jaded we have become to the trials and suffering in the world: wars, genocide, mass shootings. If we focus too much on it, we might feel as if the world is coming apart at the seams. And in some ways it is.

Paul captures, possibly more than any other place in his writing, the whole of the human experience in Romans 8. He sets it up thus: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. (Romans 8:18-19).”

God is up to something in the world, and we play a part. A part so important that the entire cosmos breathlessly waits for our big reveal. A divine conspiracy is afoot, and we who have been called to Christ, justified by God’s grace, are also being glorified.

And all of creation is groaning for our glorification because it was unwillingly subjected to futility, Paul says. Submitted to futility by human sin. As RC Sproul once put it: “The word futility is one of the ugliest words in the English language. Nothing could possibly be worse, nothing could possibly drive the human being to despair more quickly, more deeply than the idea that our pain, our labor, that these things are merely exercises in futility, meaningless, that the human experience is like the myth of Sisyphus, who uses all of his energy to push that gigantic rock to the top of the mountain so that as soon as he gets to the top the rock falls back to the bottom and he has been sentenced to push it back to the top again and again and again forever in a labor that is in vain.”

Is that all life is? Suffering to the bitter end with no meaning? That is what the nihilist says.

But Paul is emphatic in saying, NO! That is not all life is! Paul says that this suffering, our groaning, is pointing to something more meaningful and more purposeful than we can imagine—the redemption of the cosmos. This is just but an appearance of futility. It matters somehow, and only God knows how.

Somehow suffering and glory are dance partners. They are not opposite and opposing forces, they are in tension like facing dancers holding hands, pulling against one another as they dance in a circle.

Just three chapters earlier, Paul wrote: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5).”

There it is again, the Holy Spirit doing something in our hearts—pouring out God’s love. From today’s reading: helping us in our weakness… making intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Because life does leave us speechless. And even when we aren’t speechless, we don’t always know what we should say or how we should pray. But the Spirit knows this. He knows all about our weaknesses. He works fully aware of the human condition. In our condition, we don’t always know what to pray because we don’t always know what it really is that we want.

This is part of the weakness the Spirit helps us with—we are driven by our desires even when we don’t know what those desires are. We are often driven by unconscious drives that we do not notice. So how can we know what to ask for?

Last week I tried an experiment on social media. I asked people to share what the would ask for if they could have one wish granted. Much like Solomon from our Old Testament reading today, who given the chance to ask God for one thing asked for wisdom. Ironically, he showed he already had wisdom just in the asking for it.

When I posted the question to social media, no one answered. And those who did said they would be afraid to ask for what they really wanted because they weren’t sure of the consequences. One person said, “I’ve read too many fairy tales and seen too many Twilight Zone episodes to even touch this one.”

Perhaps he was recalling the story of the “Monkey’s Paw” which was adapted for TV by Alfred Hitchcock in 1965. In it a couple is given a monkey’s paw from India. They may wish for anything. The wife wishes for money. The next day, their son is tragically killed in a work accident, and they inherit his insurance policy. Her request felt benign, but her desire proved deadly.

Even among Christians there is tension about what to say and how to pray, especially in times of suffering. For instance, I have heard Christians warn: “Don’t pray for patience, you’ll regret it!” The argument being that patience is learned through suffering, and no one wants to pray for that.

We ridicule and are ridiculed when in times where we don’t know what to do or say, we offer “thoughts and prayers.” To the world this is a cruel and meaningless gesture in the face of such great evils in our world.

But sometimes it is all we have….

Actually, all of the time, prayer is all that we have. While we may never understand the mysteries of prayer, the mechanics of it, we are told to pray. And here, we are told that God understands that even our most well-articulated prayers don’t really know what to say, but God knows what is in our hearts.

So we don’t always know what we’re asking for. We don’t always know what to say. But we know this. We know that God is not absent from the groan. God is not a bystander to the futility. The Spirit is in it, underneath it, translating it, carrying it, right now, into the presence of the Father, who already knows what we need before we find the words to ask.

And Paul will not let us stop there. He says something even harder to believe. Not just that God hears the groan. That God is working through it. All things. Not some things. Not the easy things, not the things that make sense to us. All things. Our groans on Tuesday night. This room’s groan, whatever you’re carrying into these pews this morning. The world’s groan, the wars, the doomscrolling, the futility that Paul says has a name older than any headline. All of it, somehow, being worked together. Not around the pain. But through it.

Suffering and glory, dancing. Pulling against each other, hand in hand, moving in the same circle. And I don’t know when the dance ends for any of us. I don’t know when the pulling stops and the pull finally gives way. But I know this. Paul knew it too, writing from his own losses, his own sufferings that made ours look almost small by comparison. He said the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is coming.

Not . Worth. Comparing.

Not because the suffering isn’t real or isn’t painful. It is real. It is painful. Candy is gone. My friend is moving. The world is groaning and so am I. But there is a glory coming that will make all of this look, in hindsight, like the labor pains before a birth. Real pain. Necessary pain. But not the final word.

Somehow. Only God knows how. But we know that he does.

From groaning to glory, we are not alone. We are never forsaken.

(This week’s lesson is Genesis 22:1-14, Year A, Proper 8 (13) in Revised Common Lectionary)

I talked with a colleague this past week about how hard these last two Sundays of the lectionary have been, especially with Father’s Day intersecting with these stories of Father Abraham. He told me that he titled the sermons for last week and this week: “Bad Dad Parts 1 and 2.”

I laughed when he said it, because he’s not wrong. Last week, Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness with nothing but bread and a skin of water between them. This week, he ties his other son to an altar and lifts a knife over him. If you only had these two stories to go on, you’d be forgiven for thinking Genesis is building a case against Abraham as a parent.

It is a challenging set of stories for the modern reader. We don’t get to skip past those challenges the way earlier generations sometimes did. We live in a culture, rightly, that takes child welfare seriously. We talk about generational trauma: the harm that gets passed down a family line without anyone naming it.

So when we read that God tested Abraham by asking him to do this to his son, we don’t just feel the ancient horror of the request. We feel something closer to home. We wonder: what it does to a child to grow up in a household where obedience to God could look like… this.

It helps, a little, to know what this request would have sounded like to Abraham himself, standing in his own time rather than ours. Child sacrifice was not the unthinkable thing to the ancient world that it is to us. The nations surrounding Abraham practiced it. It was a known, albeit horrifying, religious act— it was one way ancient people tried to secure the favor of their gods.

What would have shocked Abraham’s first hearers about this story is not that a god might ask for a son. It’s that Abraham’s God STOPS the sacrifice of the child. The scandal of the story, to its original audience, was God’s refusal to take Abraham’s child, not His request.

That doesn’t make our discomfort wrong. It just locates it correctly. We are not the first people to find this story unbearable. We’re not even the first people to find it strange. We’re the first to find it strange for our particular reasons, living where we live, having learned what we’ve learned about what childhood trauma and what does to a person.

But I don’t want to explain the discomfort away this morning. I want us to stay inside it, because that discomfort is where this sermon lives. Not in a tidy resolution where everything Abraham did turns out to be fine because God stopped him in time. But in the harder question underneath it: what do you do with the unbearable thing you’ve been asked to carry, on the days before you know whether there’s a ram in the thicket or not?

Or better said: How do you keep walking toward something with heaviness, when you don’t yet know when, if ever, you’ll be allowed to set it down?

One way Christians have read these stories about Abraham is allegorically. In fact, we drew from Paul’s allegorical reading of Ishmael and Hagar in last week’s sermon.

One allegorical reading of today’s lesson is to read it as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion of Jesus. You might have heard this interpretation of the story: Isaac was the only son of Abraham, taken up a hill carrying wood on his back, after a three-day journey, bound and laid on the wood to be sacrificed to God, when suddenly the sacrifice is no longer the son but a lamb, or more accurately a ram, who was caught in a thicket that might have been thorns. The imagery is all there, even if it is a little on the nose.

Interestingly, though, despite Abraham being talked about a lot in the New Testament, no New Testament writer references this story as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion.

Instead, the New Testament draws upon this story to say something about hope — the kind of hope that holds even when you can’t see how the story ends.

The book of Hebrews, chapter 11 talks about the binding of Isaac and says: “17 By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, 18 even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” 19 Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.”

Hebrews says, “Abraham reasoned.” The Greek word we translate as reason is logizomai. It means to calculate, to reason, or to take into account. It is the same verb used in Romans, chapter 4, when Paul says that “Abraham believed God, and it was CREDITED to him as righteousness. God reckoned Abraham as faithful, and Abraham reckoned God as faithful. Abraham is faithful because God is faithful first. Abraham had seen the faithfulness of God firsthand in the miraculous birth of Isaac when he was an old man.

But there is more to the story than just Abraham’s faithfulness. Abraham’s faith led to hope. A hope that sustained him on what must have been one of the heaviest days of his life. The text names the heaviness, first in the physicality of the act: he loaded the donkey with wood, then he placed the wood on Isaac to carry, he carried the fire and the knife.

Then there is the emotional heaviness, as Isaac asked, “Father, the wood and the fire are here, but where is the lamb?” Surely those words from his son would have weighed heavy on Father Abraham’s heart.

Most of us will never walk three days up a mountain with wood strapped to our back and a knife in our hand. But all of us know what it is to carry something heavy toward an ending we cannot see.

Maybe it’s a diagnosis. Maybe it’s a marriage you’re not sure will survive the year. Maybe it’s a child you love who has wandered somewhere you cannot follow them, and all you can do is keep walking toward whatever is coming next, one day at a time, the way Abraham did.

Maybe it is NOT even personal. Maybe it’s something we are carrying together, as a congregation, facing the search for a new pastor when none of us expected to be standing in this particular wilderness this summer.

What is the burden you are carrying right now? What are the questions you are asking that don’t seem to have a good answer?

I think of a dying woman I visited with a few weeks ago.

I had spoken with her only two weeks earlier. There was no indication then that she’d be on end-of-life care within days. But the call came, I went to her room, and found her breathing, but unresponsive, surrounded by family.

The family shared how things had unfolded. The doctors had laid out the options, and the family didn’t have much time to decide. They could keep treating, keep pushing, keep fighting for a few more days or weeks. Or they could shift her to comfort care, and let her go.

They chose comfort care. They chose to let the dying happen, in front of them, without fighting it any further.

I spent time with them as they shared how they had navigated the recent and sudden changes in her health. I heard in their voices how hard the decision was, but also how easy it was. I listened to the memories they wanted to tell me, the stories of who she had been to them.

They loved her. That was never the question. What moved them to let her go was what they believed was waiting on the other side. They spoke about seeing her again in heaven. About her being reunited with her husband, a son who had just died, and with the other loved ones they’d already lost, in a way that didn’t sound like wishful thinking. They spoke about it the way you’d speak about something you already knew was true.

I sat there as they shared and thought about Abraham, walking up that mountain. Not denying the weight of what he carried. Not pretending it wasn’t real.

Just believing, somehow, that the story wasn’t only what he could see in front of him.

That family was carrying something just as heavy as wood and fire and a knife. And they made their decision in a similar way Abraham made his. Heavy, and hopeful, both at once.

But this kind of hope isn’t only sized for a hospital room.

In the summer of 1939, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting safely in New York City, studying and lecturing at Union Theological Seminary, an ocean away from his home country of Germany, which was about to tear itself and the world apart. Friends had arranged for him to be there. They believed, rightly, that a man like him would not survive what was coming in Germany. For he refused to swear into the Nazi military on the basis of religious convictions.

He lasted twenty-six days in America.

Then, he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr that he had come to the conclusion he had made a mistake. He could not stay in America while his people faced the trials of Nazi Germany alone. He got back on a boat. He sailed home, into the very thing his friends had risked everything to pull him out of.

He had no promise that it would turn out well. No vision, no angel, no voice from heaven telling him how the story ends. He just believed that obedience meant going back, and he went, carrying whatever was waiting for him on the other side of that decision.

He spent the next six years working in the resistance, was arrested, imprisoned for nearly two years, and finally executed in a concentration camp, just three weeks before the war ended. His own last words to a fellow prisoner were these: “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.”

Bonhoeffer didn’t get a ram in the thicket. Neither did that family in the hospital room, not in the way they probably wanted one. And some of you, carrying whatever you’re carrying right now, may not get one either. Not in the way you’re hoping for.

But that was never really what the hope was riding on. Not for Abraham. Not for that family. Not for Bonhoeffer, walking towards the gallows believing the end of one thing was only the beginning of another.

Hope like that doesn’t ask you to pretend the wood isn’t heavy. It doesn’t ask you to stop feeling the weight of your hard questions. It just asks you to keep walking, one more day, considering the way Abraham did, that God is able to do what you cannot yet see how God will do.

Whatever you’re carrying up your mountain this morning, you do not have to carry it alone, and you do not have to know how it ends. You only have to keep walking. Faithfully. Because God is faithful. Because God was faithful first.

Heavy, and hopeful. Both at once. That’s not despair. That’s faith.

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Preached at New Hope Presbyterian Church, Gastonia NC, 06/28/2026

I cannot verify Morgan’s prediction about the future. But his diagnosis of the present is hard to argue with, and it raises a question I have been sitting with since I left a contemporary evangelical church late last year to start worshiping at a Presbyterian church. What if worship is not supposed to hold our attention at all? What if it is supposed to be boring?

How We Got Here

To understand the state of worship in most churches today, you must understand two powerful forces that reshaped what evangelicals do on Sunday mornings: the Church Growth Movement and what is now referred to as the worship industrial complex.

The Church Growth Movement grew out of the missionary movements of the 1950s through 1970s. Donald McGavran published The Bridges of God in 1955, the first book to suggest that churches should study why some congregations grow and others do not. McGavran, a missionary to India, argued that churches should reach people without destroying their cultural identity, and that Western individualism was a hindrance to evangelism. He made his case from a good place, and it is a compelling one.

In the 1970s, leaders like C. Peter Wagner built on McGavran’s missiology and applied it to how churches worship. Until then, congregations primarily asked whether a given worship practice was rooted in their theological tradition. The Church Growth Movement added a new question: how can our worship practices best reach the unchurched? This became known as the seeker-sensitive model. It did not just argue that worship should be accessible to believers and non-believers alike. It argued that the elements of worship are flexible, designed not primarily to draw us into wonder, but to draw people through the door.

Liturgies had already been simplified or abandoned following the evangelistic fervor of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of restorationist movements like Pentecostalism and Mormonism. The Church Growth Movement accelerated that trend. Responsive readings, vestments, public confession, creeds, and the liturgical calendar fell away in church after church. Traditional hymns gave way to praise choruses. Choirs were replaced by praise bands. Eventually video screens, smoke machines, stage lighting, and choreographed dance entered the picture.

Sermons changed too. Instead of working through biblical texts verse by verse or following the church calendar, sermons increasingly addressed everyday concerns: how to be a better parent, how to cope with anxiety, how to build healthier relationships, how to find purpose.

Excellence became a ministry value in its own right, meaning the flawless execution of the Sunday service from the parking lot to the pew. Churches invested heavily in signage, hospitality, media, theater seating, and technology.

Where the Church Growth Movement overlapped with charismatic renewal, worship increasingly aimed at producing an experience of God’s presence. Longer musical sets, spontaneous prayer, and emotionally expressive singing became standard. Once-traditional Baptist and Methodist churches began to look and feel like Pentecostal churches on Sunday morning, minus the tongues.

The Worship Industrial Complex

You can always follow the money. The pragmatism the Church Growth Movement introduced was eventually monetized by what I call the worship industrial complex: the network of churches, music publishers, conferences, record labels, streaming platforms, technology companies, influencers, and celebrity worship leaders that has turned Christian worship from a local ecclesial practice into a global religious industry.

The cycle works something like this. A large church writes and performs original songs. The songs are professionally recorded and marketed. They spread widely through streaming and licensing. Conferences, tours, and social media amplify the artists. Other churches adopt the songs to stay current. Royalties and brand recognition fund the next round of production. Over time, influence concentrates in a small number of churches and organizations whose music and practices shape worship around the world, regardless of denomination or theological tradition.

This is the machinery behind the music playing in most American sanctuaries on a given Sunday. It is not a conspiracy. It is an economy. And economies, once established, tend to protect themselves.

Leaving the Machine

I left the sweat and fervor of Pentecostalism to join the frozen chosen, and I could not be happier. One of the things I value most about my Presbyterian church is its commitment to the regulative principle of worship: we use only the practices affirmed in Scripture and the earliest Christian traditions. This stands in contrast to the normative principle, which holds that any element not explicitly prohibited in the Bible is permitted. If it works, use it.

We do not go to church to be entertained. We go to glorify God, pray, read Scripture, confess our sins and our faith, sing congregational songs, hear the Scriptures preached, and receive the sacrament of communion. Is it boring sometimes? Yes. Do I have a strong emotional reaction to every element of every service? No. But I leave feeling fed, and I see the effects of that feeding through the week that follows. There is something edifying about the simplicity of the service, the ease with which everyone participates, and the beauty of its imperfections when we engage simply as fellow humans rather than as an audience pursuing performative excellence.

The Tyranny of the Practical

My conception of worship was first challenged years before I left Pentecostalism, ironically by Pentecostal scholar Chris Green. I once heard him speak at an academic conference on the subject of worship, and he suggested that worship should be an escape from the noise and busyness of the world. Modern worshipers, he argued, do not need more stimulation to stay engaged. They need something to quiet their minds long enough to reconnect with their souls. He described long, unhurried, even boring church services as a spiritually formative practice for Christian disciples.

Years later, Green challenged me again. This time he argued that sermons themselves should not be practical. I cannot recall his exact words, but the substance was this: sermons should call us to contemplation, and contemplation is a protest against the “tyranny of the practical.” Worship, he said, should move us beyond thinking of God as merely useful. Contemplation is not trying to solve a problem. It is delighting in God for God’s own sake, and for ours.

That phrase has stayed with me. The tyranny of the practical. It names something true about American Christianity, and not just its worship style. We have come to expect that everything in church should be useful, should produce a measurable outcome, should help us in some identifiable way. Worship that asks nothing of us but our attention, and offers nothing back but the presence of God, starts to feel like a waste of time.

What If Boring Is the Point?

In response to Morgan’s Facebook post, I asked a question of my own: what if church is supposed to be boring? The responses ranged widely. Some said boring would be a relief compared to the low-grade anxiety of coercive, high-energy services. Others said they preferred quieter, more reflective worship. Still others insisted that worship has to be engaging and “anointed,” using the Pentecostal term for emotionally charged singing or preaching, in order to hold people’s attention.

I am not questioning anyone’s preferences. But I want to ask whether worship was ever supposed to be about our preferences in the first place. What if true Christian worship operates at a very low level of stimulation by design?

So what do we make of the churches that are bombastic and highly entertaining? Clearly they produce results. People come to Christ there. Churches grow. I have no doubt disciples are made. But is it worship? Is it the mystical engagement of human beings with the divine through the receiving of Word and Sacrament? Would you still show up if all that remained was Scripture, song, prayer, and fellowship, stripped of spectacle? Or is that not enough?

I think those high-energy services have a place. I would describe them as a kind of Christian concert or motivational event, a convergence of self-help and religious teaching, well suited for people who need and want that level of emotional stimulation. Even I need and enjoy that at times. Spectacle has its place.

But for me, that isn’t biblical or traditional worship. Sunday worship is not meant to be evangelistic, though it will still draw those the Spirit is calling. It is not meant to entertain, but to call us into wonder. It is not meant to be practical, it is meant to form us spiritually in ways nothing practical ever could.

That is what I need on this leg of my Christian journey. And apparently, so do a growing number of others.

I grew up in what is often referred to as a Holiness church. We had a lot of rules to follow. When I was a child, we weren’t allowed to go to movie theaters. We couldn’t go to the beach (so we went to the “coast” instead). Men weren’t allowed to grow our hair long. Women weren’t allowed to cut their hair. Women also had a dress code to follow, and if they did not follow the dress code, they could be kicked out of the church. In fact, I had an aunt who was kicked out of our church for wearing sandals that showed her toes, even though they closed off her heel. She was told that showing the heel was fine, but the toes were just too much!

In the Holiness church, we believed in salvation by grace, the same as Presbyterians. But we also believed that salvation could be lost — that what God gave, sin could take back. We called it backsliding. And we heard about it constantly. So I developed a practice at a young age, without anyone teaching me to, of reviewing my entire day before I slept. Every thought. Every temptation. Every action. Every moment where I might have crossed a line. I would call it out to God and repent for it. In case the rapture took place overnight and I got left behind, or if I died, I wanted to make sure I went to heaven.

I was really trying hard to stay saved. And it turns out I was terrible at it. I used to tell people “my church preached backsliding and I practiced it!” The harder I tried, the more I felt the pull of everything I was tempted by. Eventually this led to a lot of anxiety and depression. The dread of sin became a dread of life. And church — the place where I should feel the closest to God — became the hardest place to be, because I didn’t feel like I belonged there.

What I was experiencing has a name. Theologians and clinicians both use it: religious scrupulosity. It is the spiritual disorder that results when the conscience is trained to find sin everywhere and grace nowhere. When the management of the old self becomes the whole of the religious life. When you are so focused on what you might lose that you cannot receive what you have already been given.

This is not a phenomenon of the modern Holiness movement. It is a struggle as old as time. In his book The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul describes the religious scrupulosity of Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation. He describes him as “a monk devoted to a rigorous kind of austerity. Luther set out to be the perfect monk. He fasted days and indulged in severe forms of self-flagellation. He went beyond the rules of the monastery in matters of self-denial. His prayer vigils were longer than anyone else’s. He refused the normal allotments of blankets and almost froze to death. He punished his body so severely that he later commented it was in the monk’s cell that did permanent damage to his digestive system.”

I see it today as a chaplain on a daily basis. People living out the final chapters of their lives, still not sure if they are good enough for God.

It is one of the most common referrals I receive. “Dear Chaplain, will you see Ms. Smith? She is a Christian lady reaching the end of life and has expressed that she doesn’t think God loves her and she’s not good enough for heaven. Will you see her?”

That is a paraphrase of an actual referral I received last week. When I visited her in the nursing home, I found an 85-year-old woman who has believed, confessed, repented, been baptized — who loved God her whole life, taught Sunday school, led Bible studies, and tried her best to live a godly life — lying in a hospital bed convinced that God will not be there when she needs God the most. Because she wasn’t good enough. Because there was that one thing, years ago, that she can’t forgive herself for, and she is convinced that even God won’t forgive her. Because the God she was taught to believe in was a God who keeps score, a ledger sheet of good deeds versus bad deeds, and in her heart she knew the balance sheet wasn’t in her favor.

What are we to do then? While believing on the one hand in the grace and forgiveness afforded to us by God through Christ, but on the other hand knowing we don’t always follow his commandments, as Jesus told us to do out of love. Or when our relationship with God feels weak or non-existent. Or when we make poor decisions that turn out to be major life mistakes and we cannot go back in time and undo them. Should we just act like none of that matters? That God’s grace is sufficient? Do we sit down every night and record every sin to make sure that we measure up? Or do we just give in to the sin and say, well, we’re just going to leave it up to God?

Paul asks this question plainly in Romans 6, in response to his teaching on grace in Romans 5: should we continue in sin that grace may increase? He is addressing people who might have drawn the wrong conclusion from the right doctrine. He asks, if grace covers our sin, what does that have to do with how we live day to day? Paul says it has everything to do with how we live. The new life is not a license to remain bound to the old life. The freedom Christ purchased is not permission to go on living as though nothing has changed.

But here is what the Holiness church did with that passage, and what a great deal of Christians have done with it:

When Paul said, “by no means,” we heard: stay clean, or lose what you have. We read, “how can we who died to sin go on living in it?” and we heard: if you are still struggling, you haven’t really died. You haven’t really been saved. Or worse — you were saved, and you lost it, and now you have to get it back.

Because of that, to this day it is very hard for me to tell someone the day I really gave my heart to Jesus. I know that around fifteen or sixteen years old is when I started to really feel that draw to the Lord and really committed my life to following him. But as a child, up to that point, and even after it, every altar call, every opportunity — why not go ahead and get saved? The math seemed straightforward. If you could lose it, you kept renewing it. What I was doing, without knowing the word for it, was practicing scrupulosity — the exhausting, faith-destroying behavior of trying to manage my way into a security that the gospel was already offering me for free.

Paul is not issuing a warning. He is making an announcement. The old self had no choice — it was captive to sin, a slave to sin, bound to it, unable to do anything but live inside its confines. That is what captivity means. But the one who conquered sin, Jesus, is the one in whom you now live. And what is alive in you now is not captive to sin. Sin’s dominion has been broken. Not just weakened. Broken.

This is not a command to Christians to try harder. It is an invitation to live from what is already true about us.

Paul is not saying grace is fragile. He is saying sin has already lost. You are not on probation. You are not one bad week away from forfeiting what Christ purchased. You are free. The question is not whether you might lose your freedom. The question is whether you will live from it — or whether you will go on acting like the chains are still there.

And yet. Most of us know that living in freedom is not as simple as being told to do so. Paul knew it too. Just one chapter later, in Romans 7, he laments: when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind. Wretched person that I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?

He is not backsliding. He is being honest about life in the here and now, life in between baptism and resurrection. Between Egypt and the Promised Land. Between Good Friday and Easter. Between what has been declared true about us and what has been fully realized in us. This is where our stories are actually forged — with real people, real emotions, real temptations, real thirst in in-between spaces. It is in these wildernesses where we are tried and tempted, where we find out how much we are in need of the grace of God.

Our lesson from Genesis 21 introduces us to one of those messy in-between places, as Abraham and Sarah wrestled with their new life now that the son of God’s promise, Isaac, had been born. He was the product of God’s covenant with Abraham.

The scene opens in Abraham’s house with Isaac playing with his older brother Ishmael. Ishmael was born out of frustration. He was a child of the flesh, a child born of expediency, when Sarah told Abraham that if he wanted a child he should have one with their Egyptian servant, Hagar.

Sarah saw Ishmael playing with Isaac and could not tolerate it. The son of the slave woman could not share the inheritance with the son of promise. So Abraham, reluctantly but obediently, gave Hagar and Ishmael bread and a skin of water and sent them into the wilderness of Beersheba. An interesting text, by the way, to hear on Father’s Day.

The matter was very distressing to Abraham. That is what the text says. Distressing. He was grieved by it. But he sent them away anyway. He was obedient and trusted God when God said God would take care of Ishmael.

They wandered in the wilderness until the water ran out. Hagar put the boy under a bush because she could not watch him die. She walked away, a bowshot’s distance, and sat down and wept. And God heard the boy crying. What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid. God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. It was there the whole time. She just could not see it.

This is not the first time God found Hagar in the wilderness. In Genesis 16, when she fled Sarah the first time, God met her there, and she gave God a name: El Roi, the God who sees me.

Interestingly, centuries before the church had the Revised Common Lectionary, Paul referenced the story of Hagar and Ishmael being cast out in his letter to the Galatians. In chapter 4, he reads Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, as an allegory — two women, two sons, two covenants, two ways of coming into relationship with God. Ishmael was born of flesh, of human effort and striving. Isaac was born of promise, of grace, of divine interruption into what seemed impossible.

“Cast out the slave woman and her son!” Paul says to the Galatians. “The child of the flesh cannot inherit alongside the child of promise!”

It is a powerful reading, and it has shaped Christian interpretation for over two thousand years. The old self must go. The new self must take its place.

But then we go back to Genesis 21, and we discover that the son of the flesh did not just disappear. He did not physically die. He never leaves the story. He was still there throughout the Old Testament, he and his descendants, at first hand in hand with the son of promise, then thirsty in the wilderness.

Paul was right. The old self and the new self are real. The life of flesh and the life of promise cannot share the household equally, and our own life experiences confirm it. You cannot live your life out of the old self and expect the new life to flourish. Something has to change. Something has to be sent away.

But notice what God does not ask Abraham to do. Instead of asking Abraham to destroy Ishmael, God asks him to be obedient and to trust Ishmael to God’s care. That is a distinct act of faith in itself. Abraham’s job is not to manage what happens in the wilderness, in the in-between space. His job is to let go and trust the God who sees.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann concludes from this passage that the fate of natural man and the pilgrimage of the children of promise are two distinct ways in which life can be discerned. Distinct. Not identical, not merged — but both real, both under God’s attention, both within the scope of what God is doing.

This is the tension we actually live in. Not the clean death of the old self that we wish for. Not the elimination of the struggle that we pray for. Instead, we find the coexistence of Ishmael and Isaac — the old life and the new, the flesh and the Spirit, the thirst and the well — running alongside each other in the long journey between baptism and resurrection.

Funny we should be talking about Father Abraham on Father’s Day. Abraham was a complicated father. He had a complicated relationship with his children. Just wait until next week and see what he does. Yet he was called faithful.

My dad died in 2019. It was a big moment in my life, because I was very close to my father. Like Abraham, my dad had me when he was older in age. He did not expect to become a father. I am his only son, his only child, actually. But before he was my dad, he had a life I never knew or saw. At one time, my father was a drug addict and an alcoholic. He had been in and out of treatment programs for most of his adult life. He had even served time in jail. His family tried to help. The church tried to help. Nothing worked. Until one night, before I was born, he had a radical encounter with Jesus and fully surrendered his life to God’s saving power. Miraculously, my dad was instantly delivered from the desire for substances. He testified, his entire life, that even the thought of the taste of alcohol made him sick after he was saved. He never used again. He never felt really tempted by it. He became a good father and a good husband. His deliverance was instantaneous and profound.

But my friend Darren also came to Christ as an addict, and it didn’t happen that way for Darren. Darren spent years in treatment and 12-step programs and accountability. To this day, Darren stays sober by going to meetings, because he knows that’s what he needs. When Darren is honest, he says the thirst might still there. And so he does what is necessary to make sure he is not enslaved to the old life, but that he is giving in to the new.

My father’s story is an Isaac story. The old life ended and did not come back. I am grateful for that, and so was he, every day he lived.

But most of us are living an Ishmael story. The old self does not disappear. It wanders in the wilderness, in the in-between places. It gets thirsty at the edges of the life we are trying to build. And the church has too often told us what to do about that: try harder, manage better, follow more rules, stay clean, avoid the appearance of evil. For most of us, that produces not holiness but scrupulosity — a grinding, exhausting, performance-based worthiness that never quite convinces us, because we know what we are really like on the inside.

So what does obedience look like, if it isn’t the management of the old self? It looks like Abraham. It looks like doing the hard thing God asks — and sometimes God asks hard things, things that cost us, things that grieve us — and then releasing what comes next into God’s hands. Tending to the new life. Trusting God with the wilderness. Not pretending Ishmael isn’t out there, but not being consumed by what Ishmael is doing out there. Trusting that the God who gave you Isaac is the same God who sees Ishmael under the bush.

That is a transferable posture. You can take it into your week. When the old self rises up — when the thirst returns, when the temptation comes, when Paul’s words in Romans 7 feel more true to you than his words in Romans 6 — you do not have to spiral. You do not have to review the day’s sins. You do not have to get saved again and again and again to make sure it took.

You tend to your new life in Christ. You do what obedience asks of you today. And you trust God with the rest.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes that the human longing to be seen — really seen, not for what we perform or produce, but for who we are — is one of the deepest longings we carry.

The woman in the nursing home asked me the question we have all asked in one form or another: “am I good enough for God?”

I could not tell her where she landed on the ledger. I could tell her the ledger was never the point. The better question is, am I loved by God? And the answer to that is always a resounding YES.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I have always enjoyed celebrating Trinity Sunday, and it was one of my favorite Sundays to preach. The biblical texts for the day were always theologically rich and held so much potential for interpretation. My favorite passage on the Trinity is John 17, where Jesus prays for the unity of his disciples and the church through the centuries, that they may be one as he and the Father are one, God in him and him in God. Unfortunately, it is never prescribed as the gospel reading for Trinity Sunday, but I usually found a way to work it in. That verse not only gives us the evidence we use to help write and defend the doctrine of the Trinity, it tells us about the Trinitarian God’s desire for the church: that they may be in unity as God is in unity. The Trinity is a model for church unity.

I never fully appreciated that until I arrived as a seminary student at Gardner-Webb University and Dr. Steve Harmon taught a class on ecumenism, or Christian unity. Here I was, a Pentecostal preacher at a Baptist school, learning about how to be in unity with Catholics and other churches that seemed so foreign to my experience of the faith. I learned that unity is not uniformity. We may never achieve full communion with one another, but we can identify the gifts each tradition brings to the body of Christ and learn to share them. The locus of unity moves from the appearance of uniformity to an appreciation of diversity.

It was also there at seminary where I heard a preacher deliver a Trinity Sunday sermon that I think about every year when this Sunday comes around. He described his own faith journey as a gradual revelation of the Trinity. He was born into a Presbyterian family and raised hearing about the sovereignty of God the Father. Then he dated a girl who attended a Pentecostal church and went along with her, and there he encountered the Holy Spirit. Then as an adult he became an ordained Baptist minister and came to understand more deeply the Son, salvation, and what it means to be centered on the cross.

Little did I know that was becoming my story. Here, I offer reflections on my own journey of knowing the Triune God from the Holy Spirit to Jesus, from Jesus to the Father.

The Spirit

The Pentecostal church gave me my first and most formative encounter with God, and like most first loves it is complicated to look back on. Nevertheless, the Pentecostals introduced me to Jesus, and taught me a lot about the work of the Holy Spirit.

When I began to surrender my life to God and follow the Holy Spirit, it gave me a high tolerance for ambiguity and mystery, because I felt like I had God as a partner on the journey. It was okay to live and take risks, to go to scary places and do hard things, because God was with me. It was okay to be curious and ask questions.

God was not a million miles away, nor was he too holy for me, nor was he confined to the words on the pages of the Bible. The Spirit gave me hope, a sense of purpose and belonging, and helped me understand the words of Jesus, was somehow Jesus himself, and connected me to the divine in ways I still do not have categories for. I learned how to follow Jesus by being led by the Spirit.

In time, I left the Pentecostal church for reasons I write about elsewhere on this blog.

With one foot out of the Pentecostal church and one foot in, I enrolled at a Baptist seminary. My time at Gardner-Webb University was life-changing. My classmates came from all different backgrounds and all different churches. I learned more from them than I did from the instructors, and that is no small feat.

The Son

The Baptist tradition is insistently Christocentric. Everything comes back to the Son. The cross, the resurrection, the personal relationship with Christ is the organizing center of Christian life in Baptist doctrine. In the Pentecostal church, I had encountered the Spirit with great intensity. At Gardner-Webb I encountered the one the Spirit points to, the one in whom all the traditions find their coherence, the one who prayed in John 17 that they all may be one as he and the Father are one.

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Jesus’ Prayer, John 17, NIV

When I arrived at Gardner-Webb, Jesus felt like a Spirit to me. That is what the Pentecostal church had given me — a Jesus who moves, fills, and empowers, a Jesus encountered in the electricity of a worship service.

At seminary, I began to see Jesus in his body. My classmates came from every denomination and every background, and watching God be worshipped and studied across all of those lines did something to my understanding of who Jesus is. The worship and theology classes were open, genuinely open, and we learned from one another in ways that classroom instruction alone could never produce. I learned as much from my classmates as I did from the instructors, and that is no small thing to say.

My Baptist seminary formation felt in some ways like an extension of my Pentecostal upbringing. Baptists also emphasize free worship, the authority of the Bible, and do not have much use for creeds or formal liturgy. But something shifted for me while taking Dr. Harmon’s course on Christian unity. He taught me to see what each tradition contributes to the whole, to look for the gifts rather than the deficiencies, to understand that the Spirit’s work is visible across the full diversity of the church’s expressions. I took that lesson seriously and integrated into my life as fellow student among Christians of all stripes and denominations. I began to find Jesus in his flesh and blood body on earth: the church.

When the Son became flesh, it changed everything about how we understand God. The Son is not only the one the Spirit points to. He is the one who entered the mess of human history, took on a body, and identified himself permanently with humanity. And when he prayed in John 17 that they may be one as he and the Father are one, he was not praying for a spiritual unity divorced from the body. He was praying for the unity of his actual, physical, diverse, disagreeing, complicated body on earth. I found that body at with the Baptists. I saw Jesus incarnate in the church, and it changed the way I follow Him.

The Father

I am Presbyterian now, and Reformed theology is bringing me full circle. Now I am learning more about the Father, the symbol of divine sovereignty. It has not been easy for me to open my mind to this revelation. The sovereignty of God is one of the hardest pills to swallow when you are reconstructing after a season of deconstruction.

Instead of find it restricting, I have found it to be a relief. At the end of the day, the honest answer to most of our deepest theological questions is simply this: only God knows.

It is also helping me appreciate the beauty of God’s love for me. Growing up Pentecostal, the calling was primarily about what you did. You were called to preach, to do vocational ministry, to perform your faith in visible and measurable ways. In Reformed theology I am learning that even my salvation is a call. God found me before I found him. I am not in church trying to find God. I am in church because God found me.

That shift has given me a confidence in my relationship with God and his church that I did not have before. The Father is the one who holds the whole story, whose sovereignty means that even the seasons when my life fell apart were inside his providence, whose covenant stretches back before I was born and forward beyond anything I can see. That is not a small God. That is a God large enough to hold everything I have experienced and everything I still do not understand. Finding my way into that reality has felt, more than anything else, like coming home.

Why the Trinity Is Still the Answer

There are Christians today, many of them deconstructed post-evangelicals, who are exploring polytheistic frameworks to make sense of their experience of the divine. Some are drawn to Divine Council theology, associated with scholars like Michael Heiser, with its vision of a heavenly court of divine beings. Others simply find that a bare monotheism feels too thin to account for the richness of genuine encounter with God, or they feel it makes it more difficult to make sense of God’s violence actions as reported in the Old Testament. These are not new concerns. Marcion tried to resolve this in the 2^nd century by claiming Jesus was not the son of the Old Testament God. Nor are these random departures. They are symptoms of a real hunger for a God who is relational, dynamic, loving, and personally present.

The ancient church wrestled for centuries with exactly these questions, and what emerged was not a philosophical compromise. It was a revelation. One God, undivided, in three persons. A divine community, eternally relational, eternally giving and receiving, eternally other-oriented. The Trinity tells us that at the heart of ultimate reality is not a solitary sovereign but a community of love. God is not alone and has never been alone. The relationality we experience as the deepest feature of human life is a reflection of the nature of God himself.

This is something more ancient and more satisfying than a divine council, and it took the whole church, across centuries and traditions and arguments and councils, to find the words for it. It is not polytheism, where each God is distinct and separate and sometimes in conflict. It is three in one, one in three, undivided, a divine community that is also a model for human community. When the church gets it right, when it lives as a community that holds unity and diversity together without collapsing either, it is reflecting something true about the nature of God.

Language Is Inadequate But Not Useless

The church has always said the Trinity can only be fully understood through revelation, and that even then words fall short. Every analogy breaks down. The three-leaf clover, the three states of water, the three roles of a single person — all of them capture something and all of them distort something. The Trinity is finally a mystery, and mystery is a reality to be inhabited rather than a problem to be solved.

Language is part of how revelation works. The Spirit uses words, inadequate as they are, to point toward what words cannot fully contain. That is what preaching is. That is what theology is. That is what this piece is. An attempt to give the best shape we can to something that exceeds our capacity to describe it.

I grew up Pentecostal and encountered the Spirit who cannot help but tell the truth. I studied at a Baptist seminary and encountered the Son in whom all the traditions find their unity. I am becoming Presbyterian and encountering the Father whose sovereignty is large enough to hold everything I do not understand. The doctrine that makes sense of all three encounters, that insists they are one God and that their oneness is the ground of everything else, is the Trinity.

It is mysterious. It is mystical. And if I am honest, it is also just cool! There is nothing quite like it in any other faith tradition.

Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen, amen.

I spent years as a pastor in that framework, and I watched it fail people in ways I could not explain at the time.

What Western Christianity Did With Sin

The Western church (all the streams that began in Rome) inherited from Augustine a framework in which the primary problem Jesus came to address was the condition of individual sinfulness. To get sinful people saved so they can go to Heaven when they die. Sin is fundamentally a problem of the inner life, and salvation is therefore fundamentally about the transformation of the individual soul, and consequentially their personal behaviors.

By the time this framework had traveled through the Puritan tradition into American evangelicalism and into the Pentecostal movements of the twentieth century, discipleship had become largely synonymous with personal piety. Holiness meant separation from worldly pleasures. The spiritual life was measured by what you abstained from.

I grew up in this world. The Church of God, the Pentecostal denomination I was once ordained in, had a list of behaviors that marked you as holy or unholy. Tobacco. Alcohol. Certain kinds of dress. Entertainment choices. Sexual practices. These were the things the church watched and measured. They were also, as I noted in previous pieces, not derived from careful biblical exegesis but from a cultural inheritance the tradition had treated as Scripture.

What I did not have language for as a pastor was why this framework felt so incomplete. Why did it produce morally respectable people who were also sometimes cruel, greedy, racist, exploitative, and indifferent to suffering? Why did it have so much to say about personal vices and so little to say about the ways power was being used to harm people inside and outside the church?

What the New Testament Actually Emphasizes

When you read the New Testament carefully with fresh eyes, a pattern emerges that challenges the personal piety framework. Yes, the New Testament addresses personal behaviors, but always in the light of how they affect others against their will. Consensual behaviors, such as consenting to consume more calories or carcinogens, aren’t paramount in the teachings of Jesus or the apostles.

Greed is probably the most consistently addressed personal behavior in the entire New Testament. Jesus addresses it more than almost any other subject. The rich young ruler. The parable of the rich fool. The camel and the eye of the needle. Paul calls greed idolatry in Colossians 3. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil in 1 Timothy. Greed is personal but its damage is always relational. It concentrates power, exploits the vulnerable, and destroys community.

Pride and the hunger for status are addressed constantly. The disciples arguing about who is greatest. Warnings about seeking the best seats and performing religiosity for social approval. The Pharisee and the tax collector. Paul’s entire argument about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians is partly a corrective to status-seeking within the community.

Sexual immorality, porneia in Paul’s vocabulary, is a broad term but its consistent context in Paul is exploitation and the violation of covenant relationship. The concern is rarely about private pleasure. It is about the harm done to the partner and to the bonds of community.

Then there are the behaviors the New Testament treats most lightly. What you eat and drink. Bodily habits and personal pleasures. Paul is almost dismissive in Romans 14: the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. In Colossians 2 he says rules about do not handle, do not taste, do not touch have an appearance of wisdom but lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

These are the behaviors Western Christianity made central to its definition of holiness. The New Testament treats them as secondary at best.

“You have died with Christ, and he has set you free from the spiritual powers of this world. So why do you keep on following the rules of the world, such as, ²¹ “Don’t handle! Don’t taste! Don’t touch!”? Such rules are mere human teachings about things that deteriorate as we use them. These rules may seem wise because they require strong devotion, pious self-denial, and severe bodily discipline. But they provide no help in conquering a person’s evil desires” (Colossians 2:20-23, NLT).

A Different Conversation

A few years ago I discovered liberation theology and observed the ways it bridged the confessions of the Western church with the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. I found it to be a helpful theological development that was not encumbered with American, white, Protestant fixation on personal piety.

Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian theologian whose 1971 book A Theology of Liberation gave the movement its name, was reading the Exodus narrative, the prophets, and the Gospels and asking why the church in Latin America looked nothing like what he found there. His answer was that the Western church had domesticated the gospel, turning a story about God’s liberation of the oppressed into a program for the spiritual improvement of the comfortable.

James Cone made the same argument from the context of American racism. The God of the Bible is consistently on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. A Christianity that obsesses over private moral behavior while remaining silent about the structures that crush human beings has confused the gospel with something else.

It is a truly biblical theology. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah all preach consistent prophetic indictments of those who grind the faces of the poor, who pervert justice, who use power to dominate the vulnerable. Isaiah 58 is perhaps the sharpest statement: God is not interested in your fasting and your religious observance while you exploit your workers and ignore the hungry. The fast God chooses is to loose the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free.

Jesus inherits this tradition directly. The parable of the sheep and goats locates final judgment not in personal doctrinal correctness or private moral purity but in whether you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the prisoner. The harshest words in the Gospels are reserved for religious leaders who use their authority to burden and exclude rather than liberate and welcome.

What I Am Coming To Believe

I am not proposing that liberation theology replaces the whole of Western theology or that personal sin does not exist. The New Testament addresses personal behavior, and the transformation of the inner life is genuinely part of what God is doing in human beings. You cannot reduce Christianity to just a social justice program without losing something essential.

But I am proposing that Western Christianity has so privatized sin that it has lost the prophetic tradition almost entirely. When the church spends more energy policing what its members taste, touch, love, and handle than it does confronting the structures that exploit the vulnerable, it has inverted the New Testament’s own hierarchy of moral concern.

Liberation theology is correcting a distortion within Western Christianity, not replacing it. It is recovering the prophetic and social dimension that the tradition suppressed, without abandoning the personal and relational dimension that the Western tradition rightly preserves.

Reformed Theology Already Knows This

There is an irony worth naming here. The Reformed tradition, which produced some of the most rigorous thinking about personal piety and behavioral conformity in Protestant history, also contains the clearest theological argument against the framework I am critiquing.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone, sola fide, is the Reformation’s most fundamental assertion: salvation is not a program for becoming a better person. It is God’s declaration of righteousness over the sinner on the basis of Christ’s work alone, received through faith, entirely apart from human moral achievement. You do not earn it. You do not maintain it by behavioral conformity. You do not lose it by failing to live up to the community’s standards of holiness. The Reformers fought bitterly for this against a Catholic penitential system they believed had turned salvation into exactly the kind of moral improvement program I am describing.

Calvin was equally clear that sanctification, the transformation of the Christian life, is the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer and flows from justification rather than contributing to it. You do not become righteous in order to be accepted. You are accepted and therefore become, slowly and imperfectly, more like the one who accepted you. The order matters. Grace precedes transformation. Belonging precedes behavior.

The problem is that this theology, which should have produced a community of people freed from the anxiety of moral performance, often produced the opposite in practice. When justification by faith becomes a doctrinal position held alongside an intensely behavioral definition of sanctification, the result is a community that says you are saved by grace but discipled by conformity. The gospel door is wide open and the hallway inside is very narrow.

Liberation theology’s correction is important here. If salvation is genuinely about God’s rescue of human beings from the powers that harm and destroy them, and not about God’s program for producing morally respectable individuals, then the community of the saved should look like people being freed from those powers, not people being policed into behavioral conformity.

God can tolerate us being human, enjoying the pleasures of life. What God will not ultimately tolerate is the use of power to exploit, exclude, and destroy the vulnerable. That is the sin the prophets named. That is the sin Jesus addressed most sharply. And that is the sin the church has been most reluctant to confront, because it is also the sin most of us are most complicit in.

What Discipleship Actually Looks Like

If the locus of sin is reoriented this way, discipleship looks different. The church spends less energy policing the private behaviors of its members and more energy asking how its community participates in or resists the structures that harm the vulnerable. Pastoral care is less about helping people clean up their personal lives and more about walking alongside people in the full complexity of their humanity. The measure of a healthy congregation is not how morally respectable its members look but how seriously it takes the question of who is being harmed and who is doing the harming.

This does not mean personal transformation stops mattering. It means the transformation the New Testament describes is bigger than personal respectability. It is the transformation of people who have been freed from the powers that harm them and freed for participation in God’s work of liberation in the world, just as they are.

Jesus said the whole law and the prophets hang on loving God and loving your neighbor. The prophetic tradition knew what loving your neighbor meant in practice. It meant confronting the powers that harm them. It meant standing between the vulnerable and those who would exploit them.

I was born into the Pentecostal church. Pentecostals are restorationists and believe they have recovered the power and authority of the first century church as described Acts 2, which had been lost by every other church tradition, Protestant and Catholic, between their time and the time of the apostles. How did the church lose it? By becoming too religious and too dependent on man-made creeds and confessions.

When I sat in my Church History class at Lee University, I felt like I was learning about a completely different civilization. Most of it happened in Europe, ended up being apostate, and didn’t matter because I was in the full-gospel church where God literally showed up to our church services. I wish I could say that I took time in seminary to think differently, but I didn’t. Even though I was at a Baptist Divinity School with amazing history and theology teachers, I still heard it as someone else’s story, not mine. So it feels a little like I am learning about the Christian faith for the first time. Before diving into the depths of Calvin, I am starting with the Five Solas of the Reformation.

Sola Scriptura, Nuda Scriptura, and Biblicism

First up, the doctrine of sola scriptura, or “Scripture alone.” I have had a tense relationship with the Bible over the years and have written about it on this blog. What I am coming to understand is that a lot of my problems with the Bible, particularly beliefs about its divine inspiration and inerrancy, are more about how I was taught to interpret the Bible as a Pentecostal and less about the Bible itself. Which makes sense, because I have always loved the Bible! I read it, meditate on it, I try to live my life following it. Anytime I write about faith or spirituality, I reference Scripture and draw from it.

Pentecostals believe in verbal inspiration and claim to have a very high view of Scripture. So high, in fact, that sometimes it feels like the Bible is a fourth part of the Trinity, or quaternity. This is because Pentecostals treat the Bible as a plain, self-interpreting, exhaustive handbook for all of life, directly accessible to any sincere reader without the mediation of tradition, community, or trained teachers. This is biblicism. This is not what the Reformers meant when they said “Scripture alone.”

The Reformers held that Scripture is the supreme and final authority; divinely inspired, fully authoritative, but always read within the church, accountable to creedal tradition, and interpreted by trained ministers in community. The Bible is not self-interpreting in the biblicist sense. It requires the work of the whole church across time to read faithfully. The Westminster Confession’s doctrine of Scripture is robust and high, but it is embedded in 32 other chapters of collectively discerned doctrine, which is the opposite of the biblicist posture.

The Pentecostal trend toward biblicism is epistemological. Since Pentecostals believed they are a modern restoration of the first century church, the first Pentecostals were non-creedal and held that the New Testament was the only rule for faith and practice. This is not sola scriptura. This is nuda scriptura. Even though they produced their own confessions within half a century of emerging on the scene, that root of non-creedalism keeps bearing fruit.

The fruit looks like this: their doctrines and Scripture become inseparable. To question one is to question the other. Because their doctrines are not mere man-made creeds, they are the plain teachings of an infallible, divinely inspired Bible. The Bible is not informing their tradition. Their tradition is the Bible.

I am not saying this makes any of their doctrines heretical necessarily. What I am saying is that their doctrines emerged in a biblicist, sectarian environment rather than a catholic* one. This is why you will often hear Pentecostals talk about their “distinctives.” Sectarian churches always define themselves by their boundaries; what makes them different from everyone else. Catholic churches define themselves around a center of shared beliefs.
*Cathoilic here does not refer to Roman Catholicism, but the universal Christian church.

Nuda Scriptura is a method of biblical interpretation disconnected from the whole of Christian theology and tradition, even when it intersects with historic catholic doctrine at points. The doctrines it tends to produce are peripheral to historic Christianity rather than central to it — speaking in tongues as initial evidence of Spirit baptism, premillennialism, non-trinitarianism, entire sanctification as a second definite work, divine healing in the atonement, and various purity codes governing dress and behavior. None of these are among the things the church across time and tradition has agreed are essential. They are the distinctives of a particular sectarian stream, not the inheritance of the whole church.

What I experienced as a Pentecostal was a sort of doctrinal dissonance, especially in relation to the Bible. Because Pentecostals still believe in prophets and apostles, and that God still speaks to the church through tongues and interpretation and gifts of prophecy, beliefs emerged as though they were doctrine even though there was no statement of faith, discerned by the body, and published for the church. Things like dispensationalism, the anointing, and prosperity gospel teachings about tithing and giving are mostly the gospel truth to Pentecostals even though they aren’t always found in their doctrinal statements. In practice many Pentecostals are biblicists about doctrine and charismatics about experience, and the two never fully reconcile. This is partly why Pentecostal movements are so vulnerable to authoritarian leadership. The doctrine of inspired present speech, unaccountable to creedal tradition, creates enormous space for a charismatic leader’s words to function as divine authority.

Where that Leaves Me

I have not arrived anywhere. I am still working this out.

But I can say that studying the Reformers’ understanding of sola scriptura has done something unexpected: it has given me back the Bible. Not as an inerrant textbook or a magic answer book or a fourth member of the Godhead. As the church’s book, it is the text that the community of faith has been reading together for two thousand years, arguing over, confessing together, and being formed by.

The lectionary we follow in the Presbyterian church is part of this. Every week the text is assigned. The preacher does not get to choose what is convenient or familiar. The whole sweep of Scripture moves through the congregation over three years whether it is comfortable or not. I spent years in churches where the preacher circled the same pet texts week after week, and I did not have language for why that bothered me. Now I do. Without accountability to the whole text, the pulpit becomes a platform for whatever the pastor already believes. The Bible is invoked but it is not really in charge.

That is the difference between sola scriptura and nuda scriptura in practice. One situates the reader inside a community that has been reading this text for two thousand years and takes that history seriously. The other hands the reader the text and wishes them luck.

I spent a long time thinking I had a Bible problem. I had a hermeneutics problem. And the tradition I thought had nothing to teach me turned out to have been working on that problem for five hundred years.

But I am no longer in it. And I want to tell you exactly why. I think a lot of people are sitting in similar pews, feeling similar things, and not sure they have permission to name them. Consider this my attempt to name them out loud.

Here are six reasons I made the move.

1. I want to be part of a denomination that does not unilaterally discriminate against gay and lesbian Christians.

My shift toward the full inclusion of queer people in the life and work of the church was gradual, but there were several moments along the way that were real turning points.

This journey began as soon as I became a pastor in the Pentecostal church. Over the years I walked closely with gay and lesbian Christians, watched them wrestle with their faith and their identity, and saw firsthand what exclusion costs a person and a community. I cannot share those stories in detail. They are not mine to tell. What I can say is that what I witnessed in those years did not line up with what I was expected to believe and preach.

As a pastor I witnessed first-hand how they were always at war with themselves. When they felt they were “overcoming” their sexuality, they would show up, get involved, pour themselves into the church. When they felt they were losing that war, they would disappear. I watched them beg God to make them straight. God did not. And even in their struggle, they showed every evidence of the Holy Spirit working in their lives. Their gifts were real. Their faith was real. But their shame kept them from community, from one another, and from God.

It looked like Adam and Eve after the fall, hiding, ashamed, distant from God and distant from each other. If Jesus came to undo the curse, I cannot make sense of a theology that keeps people hiding in shame, their gifts withheld from the body of Christ because of who they love.

The second moment was supernatural, and I do not use that word lightly. I was at a Christian festival where gay and lesbian Christians were included and participating fully. I attended a worship event where gay and lesbian Christians helped lead the service. At the end of the service I had to leave and be alone. What I had just experienced left me with a lot of mixed emotions. I found a private place and stood there trembling and weeping, unable to explain what I was feeling. And in that moment, God spoke to me the way God speaks to me. The word was clear: “How long will you pretend that my Spirit is not working through gay and lesbian Christians?” I stopped pretending.

And then life brought it closer to home.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. I am not dismissing the traditional sexual ethic of the church as if it carries no weight. It is a serious theological position with deep roots, held by serious Christians across centuries and traditions, and it deserves honest engagement. But I have also come to believe, through Scripture, experience, and the work of the Spirit I have witnessed in gay and lesbian Christians, that God does not reject them. That they belong in the life and work of the church fully and without discrimatory conditions.

One of the things that pushed me away from Pentecostal denominations on this issue was not simply where they landed, but how they handled the question. The door was closed. There was no room for conversation, no acknowledgment that the Spirit might still be leading the church into deeper understanding. Pentecostal bodies I have been part of treated their position as settled and unchallengeable, which meant that anyone who even questioned it had no place at the table.

The PCUSA has handled it differently. As a denomination it is open and affirming, but individual congregations retain the freedom to wrestle with what inclusion and acceptance mean in their own context. I think this tension is healthy. It keeps the community in honest conversation rather than forcing everyone to choose a lane and stay in it. The final word of the denomination is welcome, and the local church is free to work out what that welcome looks like in practice. That is the kind of institution I want to be part of, one that holds a conviction with enough humility to keep the conversation alive.

2. I have always preferred Presbyterian polity.

Ecclesiology is not a small thing. How a church is governed shapes everything: who has power, how it is checked, what accountability looks like, and what happens when things go wrong.

I was ordained in the Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination that on paper operated with an Episcopal polity, meaning authority flows from bishops down through a hierarchy of leadership. But in practice it was anything but consistent. For instance, one bishop might appoint pastors to churches directly. Another might allow a congregation to elect their own pastor. Local churches were free to develop their own internal governance however they saw fit. Some operated with a church council not unlike a Presbyterian session. Others ran with a fully apostolic model in which the pastor was the final word, the bishop of the house, accountable to no one inside the local congregation.

What I observed over years of ministry is that this inconsistency makes the church vulnerable in at least three ways. It makes the local congregation subject to the whims of whoever is in the pulpit. It makes higher denominational leadership unpredictable and unreliable. And it creates the conditions for cults of personality to take hold, where a church rises and falls entirely on the strength of one person’s charisma. When that person is gone, so is the church.

I watched this happen up close. I once pastored a young church that had only been planted a little more than decade before I was installed. The founding pastor was sharp, charismatic, and well-intentioned. He had built something real. Even though the church had elders, he ran the church on a mostly apostolic model, and over time he had shaped the congregation mostly around his own personality and vision. He had also, perhaps wisely given his more progressive theology, kept his church at arm’s length from the larger denomination. The congregation was far more progressive theologically than the Church of God as a whole, so that distance made a certain kind of sense.

Then his personal life interrupted the life of the church with scandal. And when the house of cards fell, what was left was a congregation whose leadership had been shaped entirely to function under the pastor, not without him. They were not bad leaders. They simply had never been equipped or empowered to operate independently of his leadership. The denomination had no real relationship with the local church and did not know how to work with them, and the people discovered in the worst possible moment that they did not even share the beliefs and practices of the larger body they technically belonged to. The result was not just a decline in numbers and finances. It was real damage to real people whose lives got caught in the crosshairs. It was tragic.

That experience, more than anything else, convinced me that polity is not a bureaucratic afterthought. It is pastoral infrastructure. It is what holds a community together when the personality at the center can no longer hold.

Presbyterian polity distributes authority through elders, sessions, presbyteries, synods, and the General Assembly. Decisions are made by bodies, not individuals. Accountability runs in multiple directions. No single pastor can shape a congregation into their own image without checks. It is not a perfect system. But it is structurally designed to protect the congregation from the unchecked ambition or catastrophic failure of any one leader.

3. The liturgy and the lectionary are doing something to me.

I was first exposed to liturgical worship in seminary, where we spent entire classes crafting services around different liturgical traditions. For the first time I saw what structured, intentional worship could look like. As a Pentecostal pastor I tried to bring some of that sensibility to the churches I led, designing services with intention and flow. But I was always inventing the wheel as I went. There is no universal Pentecostal liturgy to draw from. Every week was a fresh construction project, and the result was that worship lived or died by the creativity and energy of whoever was putting it together.

What I have found in the Presbyterian Church is the opposite of that. Every week, we follow the same ancient order. We confess. We receive assurance of pardon. We hear Scripture read according to the Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year cycle that takes the congregation through the whole sweep of the biblical story. There is a rhythm to it that I love and need. I find it stabilizing.

The lectionary has changed the way I experience preaching. I find myself drawn to sermons where I can tell the preacher was forced to wrestle with whatever text was assigned that week, whether it was convenient or not, whether it fit a preferred theme or not. Without the lectionary, I noticed in myself during my years of preaching, and in others from the pew, a tendency to circle the same wagons week after week, returning to the same themes, the same pet texts, the same comfortable territory.

Pentecostal preaching is largely built around creating an emotional response, for better or worse. The sermon is a vehicle for producing a feeling, and the text is whatever gets you there. When there is no lectionary holding the preacher accountable to Scripture, the pulpit becomes a platform for whatever the pastor wants to talk about that week. Sometimes that is a soapbox. Sometimes it is a pressure valve, the pastor working out his own frustrations and grievances in front of a captive audience. Sometimes it is just a handful of bullet points dressed up with enough emotional intensity to feel like a word from God. The congregation leaves stirred up but not necessarily formed. They have been shaped by the personality and preoccupations of the person in the pulpit, not by the whole counsel of Scripture.

But there is something else the liturgy does that is so important. It shapes a sense of belonging. Knowing that on any given Sunday, Presbyterian congregations, and others using similar liturgies or the lectionary, across the world are hearing the same texts, praying the same prayers, moving through the same liturgical seasons, gives me a feeling of connection to something much larger than my local congregation. It locates me inside a tradition, inside a community that stretches far beyond the walls of the church I am sitting in. That is not something you find in free-church traditions, where what happens on Sunday morning is largely invented fresh each week. The common liturgy and the common lectionary mean we are all on the same page, and that shared foundation is something I had been craving.

4. Reformed theology is more hospitable to the way I actually believe.

I want to be upfront: I am drawn toward Christian universalism. I hold it as a hope rather than a certainty, the hope that the love of God is finally and thoroughly larger than any theological system’s account of hell. This conviction did not arrive all at once.

Even as a child, the idea of a punitive hell designed for eternal torment never really frightened me. It felt illogical. Do spirits have a nerve endings that feel pain? Wouldn’t eternal flames destroy the nerves anyway? Besides the illogical nature of eternal conscience torment, I could not reconcile the idea of a God who is fundamentally love with a God who burns and tortures people forever based on what they believed about Jesus. The logical and emotional case against eternal conscious torment was always there for me, but the theological case came later.

After September 11, I heard Rachel Held Evans share an experience she had watching events unfold in the Middle-East. She described watching footage, of an Islamic woman being dragged through the streets and stoned to death. As she watched, she thought about how this woman had probably been born Muslim, raised in a context where she never encountered the Gospel, or where Christianity was presented to her as the religion of the West and of empire. Evans could not accept that after being stoned to death, this woman would then be punished by God forever by fire for not believing in something she had never genuinely heard. I could not accept it either.

Later I discovered that many of the early church fathers, including Origen, held a more universal view of salvation. I encountered the doctrine of apokatastasis, the belief in the ultimate restoration of all things, and it made more sense to me than anything else I had read. It filled the gaps that both Calvinism and Arminianism left open.

I want to say something honest about Wesleyan-Pentecostal theology here, because I think it gets at why I am now finding Reformed theology a better fit. In the Wesleyan-Pentecostal world, God is impressionable. He is moved by impassioned prayer. He is reactive to human behavior. His will can be circumvented by human disobedience. I do not think we are in a position to make those kinds of claims about God. We are like ants on a table, in our own two-dimensional plane. God is the builder of the table, seeing above and below it, operating from a dimension we cannot access or fully describe. The Wesleyan framework puts too much weight on human decision and too little on divine sovereignty. And when salvation depends entirely on the human decision made before death, the scope of redemption becomes permanently limited by human failure.

Reformed theology, with its insistence on the sovereignty of God, gives me more room to hold my universalist hope. If God’s redemptive purposes are truly sovereign, then I can remain open to the possibility that those purposes are larger and more tenacious than any of our systems have imagined.

Now, I am not naive about the tensions here. The Westminster Confession of Faith, which sits inside the PCUSA’s Book of Confessions, affirms eternal conscious torment for the wicked. Strict Calvinism includes double predestination and limited atonement, neither of which maps cleanly onto universalism. I know all of this. And yet, I find the Reformers’ arguments on election genuinely compelling and biblically founded. Election is not a foreign concept invented by Calvin. It is embedded in the Jewish world Jesus was born into, and the biblical case for it is serious. The distinction between Calvinist and Arminian versions of limited atonement has always struck me as revealing: Calvinists say only those God chooses are atoned for, while Arminians say only those who choose God are atoned for. Both positions limit the atonement. They just disagree about who does the limiting.

What I appreciate about the PCUSA is that its Book of Confessions spans centuries of Reformed thought, from the Westminster Confession written in 1646 to the Brief Statement of Faith adopted in 1991. These documents were written in different eras, for different contexts, and they do not always seem to agree with one another. The PCUSA does not resolve that tension by elevating one confession above the rest. It holds them all and trusts its people to live inside the complexity. That kind of theological spaciousness is itself a confession of humility, an acknowledgment that we are ants on the table, and God is not obligated to fit inside our frameworks.

At the end of the day, I want to worship in a community that leaves the hardest questions where they belong: with God.

5. I cannot accept Pentecostal beliefs about the end of the world.

I have written about this at length elsewhere on this blog, so I will not rehearse all of it here. If you want the full case, you can read it. What I want to talk about is something more personal: what it feels like to try to minister, preach, and use your gifts inside a dispensationalist/millenialist framework, and why I could no longer do it.

What you believe about how the world ends shapes how you act in the present. This belief affects all other beliefs. That is especially true in Pentecostalism, where eschatology is not just a doctrine but an identity. Pentecostals believe they are an end times movement, fully endowed with apostolic power and mandate like the first century church. Beliefs about end times are not just a part of Pentecostal theology, it is the whole point. That conviction shapes their mission, their worship, their politics, and their sense of purpose. When your identity is built around the end of the world, everything gets read through that lens.

It became impossible to have an honest conversation about Christian ethics inside that framework. Creation care, the sanctity of life, the ethics of nonviolence, our obligations to the poor and the earth — all of these conversations run into a wall when the underlying assumption is that God is going to destroy everything anyway. Why care for a world that is destined for the fire? Why work for peace when war is written into the script?

Jesus taught a message of peace, love, and reconciliation. The Sermon on the Mount is not ambiguous. But in dispensationalism, war is not a failure of human civilization. It is God’s will. Jesus himself returns as a warrior. He kills people. He wages a final campaign of violence before the millennium begins. Those beliefs are very hard to overcome when you are trying to preach the Prince of Peace to people who have been taught that the Prince of Peace is coming back with a sword to settle accounts.

Every election, every geopolitical development, every natural disaster becomes a potential sign loaded with prophetic meaning. Sometimes political events do carry theological significance. Sometimes they do not. But inside a dispensationalist congregation that distinction is nearly impossible to make. There is no corner of life it does not reach.

6. Pentecostalism has become too sectarian, too apocalyptic, and in some expressions, cultic.

There is a version of Pentecostalism that is genuinely beautiful. Spirit-filled, justice-oriented, rooted in the experience of marginalized communities who found in the Spirit a power that the powerful could not take from them. That version is real, and I respect it. But I want to talk about the version I have actually lived in and around for most of my life.

Pentecostals believe they are “full gospel.” The implication of that phrase is that everyone else is preaching a partial gospel, a lesser gospel, a gospel missing something essential that only Pentecostals have. The Church of God, the denomination I was ordained in, used to sing a song called “The Church of God is Right.” That song demonstrates the denominational psychology. It captures something real about how Pentecostals understand themselves in relation to the rest of the Christian world. Even among the most ecumenical Pentecostals I have known, there is an underlying belief that they are uniquely called, uniquely endowed, uniquely positioned to be the church in a world where everyone else has lost the plot. That is sectarianism. And sectarianism, left to develop on its own, curdles into something worse.

When you combine that theological superiority with the apostolic model of leadership I described earlier, you get the conditions for spiritual abuse. I have watched pastors verbally abuse their congregations from the pulpit. Berate them, humiliate them, and lord authority over them in the name of the Spirit. And here is the part that is hardest to explain to people outside of it: many Pentecostal congregations want that. The meaner the pastor, the more anointed he seems. The harsher the word, the more it feels like God is speaking. It is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, where the congregation becomes captive to the personality and demands of a charismatic leader. That leader then micromanages the daily lives of the members: what they wear, what words they use, what they eat and drink, who they spend time with. The boundaries between pastoral care and control dissolve entirely.

This pattern did not emerge in a vacuum. It has been accelerating, and it found its fullest political expression in the alignment of large segments of Pentecostalism with Donald Trump. The language of divine anointing, of God raising up a chosen vessel, of spiritual warfare against the enemies of the church, was deployed to baptize a political figure in apostolic authority. This was not a fringe development. It was mainstream. The New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that explicitly teaches a theology of dominionism, the belief that Christians are called to take control of the seven mountains of culture and society, provided the theological scaffolding. What resulted was a Pentecostalism so entangled with political power and authoritarian personality that it became, in many expressions, indistinguishable from a cult.

I did not leave because I stopped believing in the Holy Spirit. I left because I think the Spirit is grieved by much of what Pentecostalism has become. And I no longer wanted to be in a tradition where I had to spend my energy fighting that current rather than doing the work I am called to do.

I was ordained in a Pentecostal church. I gave a significant portion of my life to that tradition, and I do not regret all of it. But I repudiate a great deal of it, and I think honesty requires me to say so. I am not the same person I was when I started, and the tradition I am in should reflect that. Joining the Presbyterian Church is an honest account of where I am now.

In Front of Me

A Poem by Ryan Logan

In front of me on the desk,
a coffee cup, a printed list.
In front of me, people to visit,
patients and families to whom I want to listen
and be present.
In front of me,
a patient’s room.
I knock, introduce myself as the chaplain,
enter, and sense a heavy gloom.
In front of me,
a stranger sits.
“How are you doing today?” I ask.
“Not good,” he admits.
In front of me,
I listen to a story unfold —
a fall, crowded ED, brain scans, IV pain meds.
He laments,
“I just hate getting old.”
In front of me,
his voice hoarse, breaking between frustration and despair:
“My doctors say I may die
and you talk about spiritual care.
I’m a good man,” he says,
“this just isn’t fair.
Is God punishing me?”
he wonders.
It doesn’t feel like
He is there.”

In front of me,
spiritual distress —
fear, grief, anger,
and maybe some guilt, I assess.
How do I go deeper, not wanting to press?
I’ll slow down, build trust —
perhaps in time he’ll feel safe enough
to unburden himself
and confess.
In front of me,
the patient wrestles
with so much unknown.
“Surgery or hospice?
What do I tell my family?
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
I’m not ready to go.”
A future suddenly postponed.
“It sounds like these results
hit you
like a cyclone.”
In front of me,
his concerned wife,
hoping the doctors
can save the love of her life.
“What’s it been like
watching your husband
go through this?”
“We’re taking it
one day at a time,” she sighs deeply.
“Whatever happens,
we’re trusting God will renew us.”

In front of me,
a frightened man
facing a crisis
no one foresaw.
In front of him,
a chaplain
with no easy answers at all.

In front of me,
a problem I can’t fix —
compounding losses,
anticipatory grief, and self-doubt,
a scary mix.
In front of me,
long stretches of silence.
I let the moment breathe,
depending on Divine guidance.
“What do you need today?”
I gently entone.
“Please pray for me,” he requests.
“Lord, help him know he’s not suffering alone.”
In front of us,
a thin place opens
where God seems present
after sharing honest thoughts and emotions.
“Thank you, Chaplain.”
He exhales, shoulders dropping.
“You’re welcome.
Is there anything you need before I go?”
He replies,
“Any chance you can come back tomorrow?”

Read more

In the Exodus story, Israel is guided by a cloud by day and a fire by night. When the cloud moves, the people move. When it settles, they stop. They pitch their tents. They stay. Faithfulness is not measured by constant motion, but by attentiveness. Knowing when to wander matters. Knowing when to settle matters just as much (Exodus 13:21–22; Numbers 9:17–23).

I have been thinking about that distinction a lot lately. Not because I have lost my appetite for truth, but because I am increasingly aware of how restless we have become in our pursuit of it. We live in a moment where an infinite catalog of information sits at our fingertips. Knowledge no longer asks for a set time or a chosen place. It travels with us. We listen while we drive, absorb while we exercise, and process information in the spaces that once belonged to silence. There is always something else to understand, another voice explaining what we have not yet considered, another layer inviting us to keep clicking, keep learning. The dissemination of information has become ambient, almost compulsory, and we rarely stop long enough to ask what this constant exposure is actually doing to our souls.

Part of what makes this moment difficult to name is that we inherited a way of thinking about knowledge long before we ever chose it. The Enlightenment trained us to trust information as a moral good, to believe that more knowledge naturally produces better people, healthier societies, and wiser faith. Learning came to be seen as neutral at worst and virtuous at best. Questions became signs of humility. Certainty became suspect. Over time, even faith was quietly reshaped around this assumption. Jesus’ command to love God with heart, soul, and mind was rightly reclaimed by intellectuals emphasizing worship via mental ascent as a corrective to forms of faith that had drifted toward feeling alone (Matthew 22:37). But what began as balance slowly became an overcorrection. The mind was elevated, and the heart and soul were diminished. Biblical faith never made that separation. When faith is reorganized primarily around cognition, we lose contact with the mystical heart where trust, intuition, and discernment are formed.

Biblical wisdom tells a different story. In Proverbs, wisdom is not treated as raw information to be accumulated, but as something that calls out, dwells with the faithful, and must be received inwardly (Proverbs 1:20–23; Proverbs 2:1–5). The invitation is not simply to understand, but to trust. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” we are told, rather than leaning solely on accumulated understanding (Proverbs 3:5). The Psalms repeatedly link wisdom to waiting, silence, and patient attentiveness to God’s presence, suggesting that knowing often emerges from stillness rather than activity (Psalm 37:7; Psalm 46:10).

Ecclesiastes presses the question even further. It does not dismiss learning outright, but it does refuse to romanticize it. The Teacher observes that “in much wisdom is much grief,” and that increasing knowledge often increases sorrow rather than peace (Ecclesiastes 1:18). Near the end of the book, we are warned that “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

These are not anti-intellectual claims. They are sober assessments of excess. They name what happens when the pursuit of knowledge loses contact with the limits of the human soul. Even Job, who demands answers, is finally led not into explanation but into silence and trust before the presence of God (Job 38–42). Wisdom in Scripture is relational, intuitive, and formed over time. It is carried in the heart, shaped by obedience, prayer, and lived attentiveness. When life is reduced to learning alone, we lose contact with that mystical center where discernment, communion, and peace are actually formed.

What we are living inside now feels like the natural outcome of a long habit of mind that equates growth with knowledge. Learning has become synonymous with progress. Curiosity has become a moral posture. Technology has removed natural limits, and engagement no longer knows when to stop. Everything can remain open, provisional, and under review. For certain personalities, especially those who find safety in understanding, this environment feels endlessly compelling. It also exacts a quiet cost. The soul grows tired of permanent transit.

You cannot always stay on the go. You cannot keep roaming, wandering, and deconstructing without end. Eventually, the soul begins to desire something else. Not certainty, and not closure, but rest. A place to stop for a while. A place to settle, even briefly. An outpost rather than a destination. A waypoint that others might recognize and return to.

There is something quietly countercultural about saying you are settled. In a world that prizes openness, revision, and perpetual learning, non-negotiability is often treated as moral failure. To stop examining can sound like refusal. To hold fast can sound like fear. And yet every life, if it is going to be lived with integrity, eventually arranges itself around what will not be renegotiated.

Non-negotiable beliefs, convictions, and values are not a sign that growth has ended. They are often the sign that formation has begun.

In practice, this kind of settling often shows up as a boundary. The decision not to engage every challenge. The freedom to say that something is not up for discussion. Not out of fear or fragility, but out of clarity. Boundaries like these are not a rejection of others, and they are not a refusal to learn. They are simply an acknowledgment that not every belief needs to remain publicly negotiable in order to remain alive.

If you find yourself tired in this moment, worn down by the constant flow of information, explanations, and invitations to reconsider everything, there is nothing wrong with you. You may not be closed. You may be full. Sometimes the exhaustion is not a signal that you need more input, but that you have already received enough. And sometimes wisdom looks like honoring that limit, staying where you are for a while, and letting what you already believe do its quiet work.

Read more

On paper, it is the clinical training program required for professional chaplains. In practice, it is far more personal. I entered CPE already working as a healthcare chaplain, sitting with people in moments when words matter and often fail; yet, I knew something was unfinished within me. I did not come to CPE primarily for the credentials, although I cannot say I am not incentivized by them. I came because I wanted to be formed. I wanted supervision, accountability, and the chance to examine my work in real time. More than that, I wanted to become a better version of myself, because who I am shapes the kind of presence I can offer others. I suspected it would require vulnerability. I did not yet understand how personally it would ask me to tell the truth.

This unit of CPE is focused on loss and grief. I expected the challenges and vulnerability of presenting verbatims of encounters, of placing my work and inner responses before peers and supervisors. What I did not expect was what would surface when I was asked to reflect on how my family grieves. As I traced the losses of my life and how I experienced them across different stages of my life, something surprising happened. What emerged was not simply grief, but unrecognized losses along with delayed grief and disenfranchised grief. These were losses that had never been named as losses, only absorbed, spiritualized, and carried forward as normal.

I had come into CPE expecting my father’s death to be the central grief story I would explore. It was significant, painful, and formative, but I discovered that I had actually grieved that loss more fully, and healthily than others. What rose to the surface instead were quieter losses. As a child, my older sisters moving out. The way I was forced to leave my church in the mountains as a young adult. Then, the loss of my ministerial ordination. These were losses wrapped in calling language, obedience language, and faith language, losses that were never permitted to be grieved. CPE did not allow me to talk about them in the abstract. It asked me to sit with them, to notice how they shaped my relationship to authority, accountability, and community, and to see how they followed me into the rooms where I sit with patients.

Naming these losses is changing the way I offer presence. I hear stories now that often intersect with my own, stories of church hurt, job loss, and complicated family dynamics. These are the kinds of stories that can easily pull a chaplain into fixing, theologizing, or reassuring. Instead, I am learning to stay. I am learning to let shared humanity do its quiet work and to trust that presence itself is not passive.

In this way, CPE has become a place of healing for me, and that healing is not a detour from chaplaincy. It is part of the work. Unlike many professions, chaplaincy does not ask you to transcend your wounds or weaknesses. It invites you to acknowledge them and lean into them. Henri Nouwen names this tension in The Wounded Healer, reminding us that the caregiver is not healed first and then sent out, but is always being healed while caring for others.

CPE is reshaping me more than it is teaching me. It is teaching me how grief has shaped my relationship to authority and evaluation, how community can feel dangerous when loss has gone unnamed, and how sharing suffering and what I perceive as weakness can invite real feedback, even when that feedback is hard to hear. It is also teaching me how to be present with myself.

When people think of CPE as merely clinical training or a box to check, I want them to understand the human element that makes it something else entirely. Each cohort defines the experience through their shared stories, work, and lives. The particular lives and stories in the room shape the formation that happens. Our lives intersect with others who are also seeking spiritual development in real time, and that shared humanity is not incidental. It is the curriculum.

In that sense, CPE is deeply spiritual. Not because it provides easy answers or spiritual experiences on demand, but because it refuses to let us bypass what is unfinished in us. It teaches us how to stay with loss without rushing to meaning, how to offer presence without fixing, and how to become, slowly and honestly, someone who can sit with suffering because they have learned to sit with their own. This is a waypoint for me, not an arrival or a conclusion, but a place where I am learning how to stay.

But, I’ve been carrying a lot of complexity in my faith for a long time I’ve spent years holding tension in conversations about faith, trying to honor every angle, aware of every nuance, and careful about how I say what I mean. It takes work to live that way. It pulls on something inside of you, even when you’re glad to do it.

There are days when I find myself wanting something simpler. I think about times when faith felt easier, when I belonged to a community that spoke the same language. We shared assumptions, rhythms, and a way of reading the Bible that didn’t need constant explanation. There was a comfort in that kind of familiarity, and I notice myself remembering it more often.

Life has moved on, and so have I. My faith has changed, and I’ve changed with it. Even so, the longing underneath those memories is real. I feel a desire for steadiness, or some kind of rootedness. A way of being that doesn’t require constant rethinking or reexplaining. A place where I can rest for a moment without feeling like everything depends on my ability to hold the tension together.

Serendipitously, I recently fell down an internet rabbit hole learning about roots. As it turns out, not all roots are the same, not even roots that are planted by the water, as a Psalm declares.

I learned a lot about how roots work. How they hold. How they adapt. I used to imagine rootedness as something simple, like one taproot driven deep into the ground. Something fixed. Something certain. But nature shows us something very different. Roots behave in all kinds of ways, depending on the environment they inhabit.

Some dig straight down into the earth.
Some spread out wide beneath the surface.
Some send up little breathing roots to take in oxygen.
Some run sideways.
Some travel underground for great distances.
Some hold on.
Some release.
Some die so new ones can take their place.

Rootedness isn’t one thing.

Consider the mangrove tree. Mangroves grow in places where land and water meet, the shifting edges where the shoreline is never quite the same from one season to the next. They live in tides and storms, in brackish water and soft soil, in the constant give-and-take between erosion and new ground forming. If they had only one kind of root, they wouldn’t survive. They would topple as soon as the shoreline changed.

Instead, they do something remarkable.

A mangrove sends out long stilt-like roots that brace it where it stands.
But it doesn’t assume that the ground will stay put.
It pays attention to the tides, to the soil, to the subtle shifts beneath it.
And as the shoreline moves, the mangrove grows new roots in the direction the world is changing. These new roots reach toward the places where life can still support them. Meanwhile, some of the older roots—ones that once held the tree—begin to rot or settle deeper into the water. The tree doesn’t cling to them. It simply grows in a new direction, staying rooted by staying responsive.

Over time, a mangrove becomes a portrait of stability and flexibility at the same time.
Anchored, but not fixed.
Present, but not frozen.
Rooted, but always growing.

I think that’s the kind of rootedness I’m longing for now.

Not the kind that depends on everything staying the same.
Not the kind that needs familiar answers to feel secure.
Not the kind that resists the tides.

A rootedness that grows with me.
A rootedness that pays attention to where life is shifting.
A rootedness that allows new growth and lets old roots rest.
A rootedness that doesn’t lose itself, even as it adapts.

That’s its own kind of peace. Not the peace of certainty, or of going back to how things used to be, but the peace of being connected enough to stand and flexible enough to grow.

And maybe this kind of rootedness also shapes how I think about community. I’m realizing I may never belong to a group that shares every value or reads Scripture exactly the way I do. But shared rootedness doesn’t always look like shared beliefs. Sometimes it looks like growing alongside people who are also just doing all they can to remain connected to the ground beneath them while the shoreline shifts.

I don’t have everything figured out.
I don’t know exactly what this longing will become.
But I’m starting to trust that I don’t need a faith that never moves.
I need a faith that knows how to root itself right at the edge—
where the tides keep changing—
and still remains a living tree.

It wasn’t an impulsive decision or a frustrated break. It felt like closure; as if I was finishing a conversation that had been happening quietly inside me for years. I’d sensed it for a long time, but this time it wasn’t burnout. It was revelation. I saw what it was doing to us, and what it was doing to me. I left because I could no long deny the insistent nudge that usually precedes something sacred: it’s time to move on.

I didn’t leave to make a statement. I wasn’t angry or afraid. I just knew that my time there had run its course, and to keep pretending otherwise would be a kind of dishonesty. So I stepped away. I left my account active as an archive, and I still post through other apps now and then. But I rarely engage. I check in occasionally on family and favorite friends, but I rarely engage. And with each passing week, I find myself caring less about the noise I’ve left behind.

I wasn’t sure what to expect after leaving. I thought maybe I’d feel lonely or disconnected. Instead, I felt relief. Not the kind of relief that comes after finishing a hard task, but something deeper — like my soul exhaled.

The impulse to check notifications or scroll for updates began to fade. I realized how much of my attention had been quietly tethered to the platform. It wasn’t addiction as much as habit. It was a constant low hum of curiosity, the sense that I might be missing something important. Acute FOMO.

Without that hum, the world feels different. More alive. More real.

The matter isn’t entirely settled in my soul. I haven’t disappeared from the digital world entirely. I’m still on other platforms. I still post to Facebook through secondary apps, and I check in occasionally on friends and family. I’m about two degrees away from it all. I remain close enough to sense the pull, far enough to breathe. Every day I rethink that balance, wondering whether it’s sustainable long term. I keep adjusting, changing my mind about what distance looks like. For now, it’s where I am.

A Change in Affections

John Wesley once described the Christian life as being marked by “a change of affections.” He used that phrase in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, where he wrote that salvation doesn’t just adjust our behavior, it reorders our loves. In Methodist thought, this idea became central: sanctification isn’t about sin management; it’s about the redirection of desire. The Spirit doesn’t make us less passionate, but rather makes us rightly passionate, turning our attention away from noise toward love.

That’s the best language I have for what’s happening in me. For years, I prayed to be free from the compulsion to stay on top of the news cycle, to weigh in on every issue, to keep up with every controversy, and I think that is finally happening. I used to see a kind of inner peace in others that I couldn’t find in myself. But I knew it existed. I felt drawn toward it from deep within the Spirit, even when I stumbled around its edges.

Now, little by little, that peace seems to be emerging from the shadows.

Last Sunday morning my wife and I were driving to church. The air was bright and sharp with autumn, and strong breezes sent leaves tumbling across the road and raining down on top of us. It was glorious!

The world looked like it was in high definition. No filters. No edits. Just beauty that didn’t need me to frame it. I remember thinking: so this is what attention feels like when it’s not divided.

I’ve seen leaves fall every year of my life. But this time, it felt like seeing them for the first time.

That’s the best way I can describe life after Facebook. It’s not that the world got quieter; it’s that I finally did.

A few nights later, I found myself lying on the couch in the quiet, talking to God and talking to myself. No background noise. No screens. Just stillness. I felt peace settle over me, and not the shallow kind that comes when everything’s going right, but the deeper kind that feels like permission. Permission to be.

And yet, right behind that peace came guilt. That old, pastoral instinct whispering, You should be doing something. You should be contributing. You should be visible.

Even rest felt suspicious. I had to sit with that for a while. This long-invisible tension between being and doing, presence and performance, was coming into focus.

I think that’s when it hit me: the guilt wasn’t coming from God. It was coming from a version of myself I had built for other people: the pastor, the content creator, the one who always had something meaningful to say. That self isn’t gone entirely, but it’s quieter now. And I’m not sure I miss him.

A Moment of Zeal

A few weeks ago, I broke my own rule and engaged in a divisive political post made by one of my friends. I know the man who made the post to be intelligent and thoughtful. I believe him to be a man of integrity. That’s probably why it bothered me. I really felt this divisive post was beneath him.

I felt compelled to say something — to challenge it, to call him higher. I told myself it was about truth. But if I’m honest, it was zeal. That same old zeal that thinks correction is a form of care.

I’ve had time to reflect on it since. At first, I felt like I let myself down. Then I let God down. But now, I don’t think God was angry. I think He was reminding me how easily I’m drawn back into the cycle of outrage and rivalry. It’s not that the conversation was wrong; it’s that my heart wasn’t quiet enough for it to be redemptive.

This is how mimesis, the imitation of desire that René Girard wrote about, works. We mirror each other’s passions, even our indignation, until our identities get wrapped up in the contest itself. I didn’t leave Facebook to be better than anyone else. I left because I no longer want to live inside that pattern.

Attention, Affection, and Vocational Guilt

Something in me is healing. My attention feels different. It’s not that I’m learning to focus harder — it’s that I’m learning what deserves focus.

I used to think attention was about discipline. Now I see it as a form of love.

When I sit with someone now, I listen without pretense. I don’t mentally compose a response. I don’t half-listen while imagining what I might post later. I just listen. And in that listening, I feel present; not as a chaplain or writer or minister, but as a person.

That’s the thing social media was stealing: not time, but presence. The ability to simply be in the world without trying to narrate it.

Still, I wrestle with vocational guilt. There’s a part of me that measures worth by output. Such as sermons preached, blogs written, posts shared. It’s the part that confuses faithfulness with productivity.

When that voice grows loud, I have to remind myself what kind of work I was actually called to. The work of presence. The slow, unmeasured work of care.

I’m beginning to see that the ministry of Christ was not about omnipresence, but about embodiment. God didn’t choose to broadcast from the heavens. He chose to dwell in a solitary body on earth.

Falling Away from Noise

I don’t want to make a hero out of disengagement. This isn’t about moral superiority or romanticizing silence. It’s about honesty.

The truth is, my relationship with social media has always mirrored my relationship with noise. I told myself I needed it to stay informed, to stay relevant. But deep down, I was feeding an old fear… the fear of being forgotten.

Stepping away hasn’t erased that fear, but it’s exposed it for what it is: a counterfeit calling. I don’t think we’re made to keep up with everything. I think we’re made to attend to what’s been entrusted to us— the people in our care, the place where we are, the work in front of us.

The old affections still knock sometimes. The feed still calls like a familiar rhythm in the distance. But I’m not drawn to it the way I once was.

When I log in now, it feels like visiting a place I used to live. The walls are the same, but the light has changed. The noise doesn’t tempt me anymore; it tires me.

Wesley’s language lingers in my mind: a change of affections. Maybe that’s what this season really is. It is not withdrawal, not resignation, but conversion. The slow work of the Spirit turning my loves in a new direction.

I think this is what sanctification looks like for me right now:
to stop trying to know everything,
to stop trying to be everywhere,
to finally let go of the illusion of being needed by everyone.

The leaves are still falling outside my window as I write this. They’ve been falling for weeks. The trees will stand bare for a while before anything new appears. I think I’m okay with that.

For the first time in a long time, I’m not restless.
I’m not trying to prove that I’m here.
I just am. And that feels like peace.