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.

The evangelical church went wild! Finally, someone who can publicly testify that it can be done! Evangelical fervor was short-lived after Neeza’s faith journey drew them to Roman Catholicism. Then, when Neeza discovered that detransitioning was not good for their mental health, they went back to living as a trans woman and lost over 500,000 followers in one day! Comments on Neeza’s posts range from Christians who fully accept Neeza as a trans-woman to Christians who insist that Neeza must live and dress like a man using their birth name and sex if they want to be a Christian.

Theology is not the only field wrestling with the emerging visibility of transgender individuals. Sociology, biology, linguistics, political science, and psychology have all been faced with new questions and new challenges to old beliefs; each producing its own reactions to the challenge.

Meanwhile, the church has responded with prolific theological statements about transgender identity and human sexuality. The Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination headquartered in Cleveland, TN released this statement addressing what it refers to as the “mass delusion” of the “transgender revolution.” They are not alone. The Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God put out similar statements. The church has said more about transgender people in the last 25 years than it has in the first 2,000 of its existence.

Yet, it has remained depressingly silent on the issues of pastoral care for transgender people who confess the Christian faith in all the ways that matter and that once made you a Christian; for people like Neeza Powers. Like most things, churches have defaulted to forming the right public statements and avoiding the personal investment required for true discipleship. I would bet that less than one percent of the ministers who voted for these theological statements have ever had dinner or spent time with a trans man or woman. The pastoral posture is one of community and discipleship. It is the most incarnational posture of the church. Good theology is always done in proximity to people.

The verses most often cited in these denominational statements deserve a closer look than they usually get. Some say more than people think. Some say less. And some are not really about transgender identity at all. In this piece, I am going to highlight the main verses I find Christians wrestling with as they try to engage the rising visibility of transgender people in our lifetime.

Genesis 1:27

Genesis 1 organizes creation around a series of binaries. Light and darkness. Land and water. Heaven and earth. Male and female. These are the central organizing categories of created reality. Every binary in Genesis 1 also exists on a spectrum at its edges. For instance, when you stand knee deep in the ocean, are you in the ocean or on land? Between day and night, there is dawn and dusk. There is an atmosphere between heaven and earth. Biologically, there are instances where a person is genetically or physically somewhere between male and female. The text establishes the binaries that exist at the ends of their respective spectra.

Non-binary identity adds another layer of mystery to all of this. If anything, Genesis 1 would seem to present the strongest creational argument against a non-binary understanding of gender, since the text does organize humanity around male and female as its categories. But even there, mystery remains. We do not fully understand what non-binary people experience or why. And the church’s track record of making confident pronouncements about things it does not fully understand has not been good.

Pay attention to the two sequential statements in this verse. God created humanity in his image. And then, male and female he created them. The image of God, the imago dei, is what separates humanity from the rest of biological life. Every human bears it. The male-female binary is real and present in creation, but creation’s matrix is not solely written in binary. The atom, for instance, exists as a trinity of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and even within that trinity, there are binaries: protons are positive, neutrons are negative.

Creation is more complex than any single organizing principle, and the male-female binary, as meaningful as it is, is not the central feature of what it means to bear the image of God, since God is not binary. God is trinity. The imago dei is about human beinghood. That is the theological point of Genesis 1:27. Each of us was made by God with intention, and divine image-bearing belongs to every human being.

Genesis 2

Genesis 2 tells the creation story a little differently. Where Genesis 1 emphasizes the ordering of creation, Genesis 2 emphasizes human relationships. The focus is on Adam having a comparable mate, on how the man and woman are joined at the side so to speak, and on the ways they complement and complete each other. You might say Genesis 2 is more about the gender realities than the biological ones, because it notes the role of relationship and the ways the man and woman complement each other. The emphasis is on compatibility and mating.

Genesis 1 and 2 are doing different things. Genesis 1 establishes male and female as creational categories. Genesis 2 establishes the relational and complementary reality of gender. Reading them as one single argument about biological sex flattens what each account is doing on its own terms.

Marriage is not the topic of this blog, but since it is first mentioned here in the Bible, here is an obeservation to keep in mind: there is no such thing as a monolithic “biblical marriage.” In various places you will find that the Bible allows for polygamy, forced marriages, and has mixed opinions on interracial marriage.

Deuteronomy 22:5

A few things are worth thinking about here. First, this is from the Torah or Jewish Law. Paul is explicit in Galatians that the Law functions as a teacher pointing us toward Christ. It is not the Christian’s law to follow. The New Testament never restates this specific prohibition. Moreover, it sits in the same section of Deuteronomy that prohibits mixing fabrics and plowing with an ox and a donkey together:

It also allows a man to rape a virgin a claim her as his lifelong wife:

What men wore when Deuteronomy was written would be considered feminine by modern Western standards. Long robes. Flowing garments. The text assumes a world where male and female clothing were clearly distinguishable within a specific cultural context. Scottish men wear kilts. Roman men wore togas. Fashion has always been culturally relative. The church already applies this kind of cultural reasoning to similar texts. Almost nobody argues today that men must have short hair and women long hair as a binding theological principle, even though Paul addresses it directly in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.

Is it a sin for a woman to wear a pair of men’s jeans? Is it a sin for a man to wear a more feminine cut of sweater? What if his hair is too long, or her hair too short? If that doesn’t matter, where is the line? Who drew it? Within global Christianity, there is no universal, specific gender-based dress code.

Psalm 139:13-14

This is a poem of praise about God’s intimate knowledge of the person. David is marveling that God knows him completely, inside and out, before he was born. The imago dei point from Genesis applies here too. To be fearfully and wonderfully made is to be human, to bear the image of God, to be known and loved by the Creator.

But to say that the sin of transgender people is that that they change the way God made them may be a misstep. We all do that in so many different ways. Do we have tattoos? Braces for our teeth? Do we tan or bleach our hair? Have plastic surgery? Use a nickname? Are any of these denying the way we were born?

1 Corinthians 6:9

This verse is part of a larger portion of the letter where Paul is addressing two men involved in a lawsuit with one another. Paul is connecting their behaviors with other sins, saying that taking another Christian to court is tantamount to these other worldly behaviors. The vice list is rhetorical, not exhaustive.

This is where translation matters. Look at how different versions of the Bible translate the latter part of this passage: KJV: “neither effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind” NKJV: “neither homosexuals, nor sodomites” NIV: “nor men who have sex with men” MSG: “those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex” NRSV: “male prostitutes, sodomites”

Five translations. Five different renderings. That variation reflects genuine uncertainty about two Greek words, malakoi and arsenokoitai, that do not have clean English equivalents.

Malakoi literally means soft. In the Greco-Roman world it was a pejorative term for the younger passive partner in a pederastic relationship, the most common form of male same-sex behavior in that culture. Young men would sell themselves to older men in what we might recognize today as a sugar daddy arrangement. It was exploitative and transactional. Arsenokoitai appears here for the first time in preserved Greek literature. It is a compound word combining “male” and “intercourse.” Scholars debate whether it means “men who have sex” or “men who have sex with males.” Some argue the ambiguity makes it impossible to say Paul is referring to what we would recognize as consensual adult same-sex relationships. Others argue that Paul’s strong Jewish background, which consistently condemned male same-sex practice, makes his meaning clear enough.

What is worth thinking about is that the text is addressing specific sexual behaviors in a specific cultural context. Gender dysphoria did not exist as a category in Paul’s conceptual world. Effeminate is a translation choice, not a straightforward rendering, and the word Paul used had a very specific meaning in his cultural moment that does not map cleanly onto modern transgender identity.

Romans 1:26-27

The first thing worth saying about this text is that it is about sexual behavior, not gender identity. Paul is describing what people do with their bodies in relation to other people. He is not describing people who experience their gender differently from their biological sex. Those are two different things, and the church conflates them constantly. Transgender people can be straight, gay, bisexual, or celibate. Their gender identity does not determine their sexual practice, and using this text as an argument against transgender identity specifically requires collapsing a distinction Paul himself does not make.

Paul is drawing here from the Wisdom of Solomon 14:12, “the making of idols was the beginning of fornication,” which represents a prominent Jewish perspective about Gentile sexual immorality. Romans 1 is primarily an argument about idolatry and its consequences. When communities exchange worship of the Creator for fixation on created things, disorder follows. The sexual behavior Paul describes is in that context, as consequence rather than primary subject.

The natural order argument Paul makes is real. Creation is heteronormative in the sense that biological reproduction requires male and female. And Paul seems to connect departures from the natural order to something larger than individual moral choice. He is describing a cultural and spiritual condition.

One thing worth sitting with: Paul warns that when communities fixate more on created things than on the Creator, the hyperfixation creates problems rather than solving them. It seems as though the modern church is so focused on sex that it has become one of our defining beliefs, when in actuality, it is not. The people paying the price for that fixation are the ones we keep talking about rather than talking to.

Acts 8:26-39

Most conversations about the Bible and transgender identity skip this passage entirely. The Apostle Philip is sent by the Holy Spirit down a desert road where he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch, a high-ranking court official in charge of the entire treasury of the Kandake (Candace), queen of Ethiopia. He was wealthy, educated, and powerful enough to own a personal scroll of Isaiah and to travel to Jerusalem for worship. He was also a man whose body placed him outside the clean categories of his world.

In the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman world, eunuchs were men who had been castrated, either in childhood, as prisoners of war, or as slaves placed in royal service. Their castration made them trusted administrators precisely because they could not produce heirs and therefore posed no dynastic threat. But their bodies occupied an ambiguous space. They were male but not fully male in the conventional sense. Some ancient writers treated them as a third category of person alongside men and women. Their existence did not fit the standard binary categories of the ancient world cleanly.

Deuteronomy 23:1 was unambiguous about their standing before God: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.” The legal exclusion was explicit. Whatever the reason behind it — purity codes around bodily wholeness, concerns about fertility, or prohibitions against pagan self-castration practices — the text excluded this man from full participation in the covenant community.

And yet the eunuch had been to Jerusalem to worship. He was sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah. Specifically, he was reading Isaiah 53, but he was carrying a scroll that also contained Isaiah 56:3-5, where God speaks directly to eunuchs: “Do not let the eunuch say, I am just a dry tree. For thus says the Lord: to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.” The prophet had already anticipated his inclusion before Philip arrived on that road.

When the eunuch asks what prevents his baptism, Philip answers nothing. No theological debate. No conditions. No discussion of Deuteronomy 23. The Spirit had already settled the question by sending Philip in the first place.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays, historically known for cautious and traditional interpretations, pointed to this moment as a Spirit-led correction to scriptural exclusion. The early church had to adjust its theology in light of whom the Spirit had already embraced. The narrative does not resolve the tension between Deuteronomy 23 and Acts 8 theologically. It simply tells us what happened. The Spirit moved. The man was baptized. He went on his way rejoicing.

What This Means for the Church

The church’s default posture toward transgender people has been to demand repentance and gender conformity. And if you cannot or will not, you do not belong here.

Repentance requires culpability. Culpability requires a moral choice. The evidence, biblical, psychological, and experiential, suggests that transgender experience is not solely, or even primarily a moral choice. And the church is not equipped to make the determination of voluntary versus involuntary on a case-by-case basis. Parsing sin was never the Christian’s vocation. We are not spiritual clinicians. We are not inside anyone else’s experience.

I am empathetic to Christians who are uncomfortable around trans individuals. I understand where they are, because I used to be there too. And still am about some things. When you dig your heels into the concreteness of your lived reality, it is hard to relate to those with a very different one. I work as a chaplain with dementia patients. To have any real relationship with them, I have to meet them where they are. I have to enter their reality as much as possible and walk alongside them in it. I do not withhold relationship until they meet my expectations. I do not make my comfort the condition of their belonging.

The dementia analogy is not perfect. Transgender people often do not experience their identity as an unwanted condition they would choose to be free of. They experience it as who they are. Nor is it the result of a deficient brain, as with dementia. But the pastoral instinct is the same: presence and accompaniment rather than demand and distance.

What would it look like to meet transgender people where they are? What would it look like to let them grow in the Lord alongside us, bringing their questions to the text the same way the rest of us bring ours? What if a transgender person can love God, believe in Jesus, and still be transgender, in the same way any other person carries involuntary realities that God does not always change?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the beginning of conversations the church actually needs to have. Because transgender identity presents us with new ethical realities. Questions about gender-affirming medicine and surgery. Questions about science and what it tells us about biological sex and gender. Questions about language and pronouns and what it means to honor the dignity of a person in how we address them. These are not simple questions and the church should not pretend they are.

How can we have those conversations honestly if transgender people are not at the table? How can we think through the ethics of gender medicine without the people most affected by those decisions being part of the community doing the thinking? The church has been having this conversation about transgender people without transgender people.

What would it look like to sit with that mystery rather than resolve it prematurely? What would it look like to say we do not fully understand this, and we want to understand it better, and we want to understand it with you rather than about you?

That posture does not require abandoning the Bible. It requires reading it honestly, holding our conclusions with appropriate humility, and making enough room at the table for the people most affected by our conclusions to speak into them.

From the Author: I admit I have so much to learn on this subject. As I finished this piece, I realized that the limitations of my language and understanding might get in the way of the heart of the piece, which is an invitation to make space in our biblical interpretation for a more open understanding of gender roles and binaries to more clearly see people with real lives, emotions, and stories. It has been my contention for some time that if the church intends to be incarnational and in touch with the real world, which has largely moved on and forgotten what the church has to offer, it must create some margins in its dogma for honest conversation. This will require humility and a willingness to admit we may be wrong about some things. If we err, let us err on the side of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, which are the hallmarks of Christian faith— and not judgment, exclusion, and works as many seem to believe.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:18

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.

Steven is an entrepreneur, musician, and thinker—which makes him a great conversation partner on this podcast. In 2024, he lost his home and more when Hurricane Helene tore through the mountains of North Carolina, leaving mounds of destruction in its wake. Yet, he has continued to grow in his career and maintain his guitar store, The Guitar Trader, in West Asheville.

A couple of weeks ago, he messaged me and said, “I had a moment of what I believe was clarity and I have decided to re-embrace Christianity… on a 90-day free trial basis… I think it would probably make a good podcast episode.” We did not talk again until this recording. Here, Steven tells his story of faith, psychedelics, leaving church, ketamine treatments, and finding God.

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.

I notice a parallel in my daily life. When my schedule is packed from morning to night, I find it hard to listen deeply or to notice the beauty around me. There’s no room for pauses, for prayer that wells up unplanned, for gratitude or silence. Without margin, life becomes a block of dense text. It is hard to navigate, impossible to savor.

The Cluttered Life

Just like spaces in our home, battling clutter is an ongoing effort. Life easily spills into the very edges with work commitments, family obligations, and a calendar without a sliver of white space. In recent years, I’ve realized that it isn’t just work and obligations that threaten my margins. The internet, with its constant stream of information, and social media, with its endless scroll of updates and opinions, can easily bleed into the white space of my life. What was once a quiet moment between tasks—a walk from the car to the house, or a few minutes waiting in line—now risks being filled by checking notifications or reading headlines. It’s easy to reach for my phone in every spare moment, turning what could be a pause for reflection or prayer into another opportunity for distraction.

When life is too cluttered, prayers become hurried, my relationships are more shallow, and my ability to delight in God’s presence diminished. The absence of margin breeds chaos and anxiety; it dulls my senses to what matters most. When every spare moment is captured by digital engagement, busyness, or distraction, true rest and reflection can feel further away than ever.

Spiritual Margin: The Invitation to Rest

There are ancient rhythms woven into creation and into faith: the call to weekly rest on the Sabbath, the wisdom of stepping away from work and noise, the invitation to avoid constant debates and conflict. Even God rests after creation is complete; Jesus escapes the crowds for solitary prayer (Mark 1:35, Luke 5:15-16, Matthew 14:23); and Paul admonishes his young mentor Timothy to shut his mind off of popular controversies (2 Timothy 2:23-26). Jesus often separated himself from the crowds and from his disciples. When I honor these patterns, I sense a restoration in my soul that can’t be manufactured by sheer accomplishments or constant connectivity.

Creating Margins: A Spiritual Discipline

Learning to create margin isn’t a once-for-all achievement but a daily choice. Sometimes it means declining another invitation, leaving an evening unscheduled, or simply lingering in silence instead of racing on to the next task. Lately, it also means making conscious decisions about my digital habits. I have taken steps away from social media platforms that once took a lot of time and energy away from my daily life.

I am choosing not to reach for my phone first thing in the morning, reclaiming quiet moments for prayer instead of scrolling, and being attentive to how technology fills the spaces meant for rest. I notice that the most meaningful conversations, the moments of laughter or insight, often arise in those unhurried stretches of time that I might otherwise have dismissed as unproductive.

Practical Ways to Build Margins

Travleling in the wilderness means traveling light. In fact, traveling light could be the difference in life and death. So what can we do? I offer The following practical steps as guidance for building intentional space, both inwardly and outwardly, so that moments of silence, reflection, and connection with God and others can flourish. By adopting these habits, I have been able to invite balance and peace into the busy rhythms of modern life, reclaiming the margins I need to nurture my soul.

• Setting aside regular time for prayer and scripture reading, even if it’s brief.

• Embracing Sabbath rest, allowing one day each week to be free from work and obligations.

• Practicing simplicity by limiting unnecessary commitments or taking on extra work just to feel “accomplished.”

• Creating physical spaces in my home for quiet and reflection. This did not require renovations. Instead, I changed the use of spaces. For instance, I rest the urge to turn the TV on in rooms once designed for viewing.

• Intentionally leaving parts of my calendar open, trusting God with the unknown.

• Leaving social media platforms that once demanded too much of my attention.

Margins on a page reveal what is essential; they allow words to breathe and meaning to unfold. In the same way, living with margin creates room to sense God’s presence, to pay attention, to rest and be restored. Technology can be a gift, but left unchecked, it fills the spaces where grace and reflection might otherwise dwell. When I honor boundaries and intentionally create margin—both from busyness and digital noise—I discover a freedom and peace that cannot be found in a life lived edge to edge.

A few weeks ago, during a conversation with a friend, we read the tower of Babel account in Genesis 11. Within the narrative flow of Genesis, this story is an account of the generations repopulating the earth after the flood. They attempt to build a tower that leads to heaven as a way of establishing their own progress. But things do not go as planned. In the end, God caused their languages to be confused so they could not complete the project. This left them divided into people groups by language.

My friend is new to the Bible and is just learning some of its foundational stories. After we finished, he asked a question I had never been asked before: “Why does it matter that they used bricks and tar?” I had never taken the time to consider that this detail might be more than just a footnote to the story (v. 3).

As soon as my friend asked about bricks and tar, I thought of another place where the Bible takes time to mention a piece of technology: the story of Deborah in Judges 4–5. There we meet Sisera, commander of the Canaanite army, who had nine hundred iron chariots (Judges 4:3). It might read like a military statistic, but iron chariots were the cutting edge of warfare. They outclassed the wooden wagons of the Israelites. The iron was a technological leap forward that made Sisera’s forces seem unstoppable. [God’s Women and God’s Peasants: The Song of Deborah as Heroic Poetry for Marginalized Peoples, by Daniel Rushing]

But then God calls Deborah to lead and Barak to fight. When the battle comes, the sky opens and a storm turns the dry Kishon River into a torrent. The heavy chariots bog down in the mud and become useless. Sisera’s technological superiority is undone by rain and by the courage of a people trusting in God rather than iron. Just as bricks did not guarantee a stairway to heaven, iron wheels did not secure victory. The mention of new technology in scripture is a clue: human progress matters, but it does not lead to the Kingdom of Heaven. Both stories are little reminders that what we create has power, but it cannot save us from the beauty and tragedy of the world, nor can it deliver the transcendence we so desire.

Bricks and Tar

“They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar” (Genesis 11:3, NKJV). The people at Babel had discovered they could bake clay into uniform blocks and glue them together with tar. At first glance, it appears to be an aside about building materials. But my friend’s question invited me to linger. Bricks are not stones. Stones are taken from the earth as they are; they bear the marks of geologic time. Bricks, on the other hand, are fabricated. They are dried and fired, identical, repeatable, scalable. Asphalt mortar is not the mud of the riverbank but a sticky petroleum compound.

In the narrative, bricks and tar appear immediately after the flood, in a world that is starting over. The people have a blank slate. They discover a new process, and they realize it could change everything. Bricks can stack straighter and higher than stones. Asphalt sticks firmer than mud. All of a sudden, a tower that reaches the heavens feels possible. And the new technology fuels a new desire: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). This is more than architecture. It is theology. It is the belief that human ingenuity will lead to transcendence. Progress becomes a pathway to the divine, to human prospering, and to leaving a lasting legacy.

The Myth of Progress

But the story tells us that their progress did not lead to communion. It led to confusion. Their words turned to noise. Their unity shattered into factions. The very technology that promised to bring them together as a city and as a people became a wedge that drove them apart. Progress invited pride, and pride birthed division.

This theme runs like a thread through Scripture. When Israel demanded a king, it was as much about wanting what other nations had – horses and chariots and armies – as it was about trusting God. Prophets warned against trusting in “chariots and horses” rather than in the Lord (Psalm 20:7). Jeremiah lamented those who “trust in man and make flesh their strength, whose heart departs from the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5). The pattern is always the same: human tools inspire human confidence; confidence slides into self‑sufficiency; self‑sufficiency calcifies into idolatry. And the result is not the flourishing we hoped for. It is distance from God and from one another.

Our Digital Bricks

This is why my generation’s technological story feels so relevant. We live in an era of bricks and tar on steroids. We carry in our pockets slabs of silicon and glass that can access libraries, markets, and parasocial relationships at a tap. We can send our words to the ends of the earth instantly. We can build platforms with billions of users. Every new app or device comes with the same promise: this will connect you. This will make you safer. This will bring you closer to the truth and to each other. But many of us have begun to realize that these digital bricks are not doing what they promised.

Take social media. It was supposed to let us share our lives and find community. Instead, it often drives us into echo chambers where we are reinforced in what we already believe. The algorithms that promised to connect us deliver addiction, outrage, and envy. Our posts become performances. Our relationships become parasocial. We follow influencers and call it friendship. We block and unfollow rather than reconcile. We scroll and consume rather than converse and contemplate. Our words accumulate like bricks, but they do not create a tower of communion. They build walls.

Consider how pornography and sexualized media have given us the ability to simulate intimacy without presence. It has turned people into pixels. It promises satisfaction but isolates us from embodied love. Our pursuit of connection dissolves into disembodied consumption. We press a button and imagine we are free, but we become more enslaved to our appetites, more numb to real relationships.

Think about misinformation and conspiracy theories. We thought the Internet would democratize knowledge, that truth would rise to the top if everyone could publish. Instead, lies and ragebait proliferate because they are more profitable and more clickable. Truth becomes slippery. Our confidence in institutions erodes. We retreat into tribes that share our version of reality. Like the people at Babel, we find that language itself becomes a barrier. We can speak the same words but mean different things. We cannot even agree on the definition of “truth.”

Then there is the allure of transcendence through science. Gene editing whispers that we might eliminate disease. Artificial intelligence hints that we could solve our problems if only we had enough data. Silicon Valley prophets talk about defeating ageing, uploading consciousness, or building a “metaverse” where we can live beyond the body. The promise is, again, connection and transcending the human condition. But the reality is often further isolation and confusion. We run the risk of building towers that lead nowhere, investing in technologies that do not deliver on their promises, chasing after immortality through code and cells rather than through real community and relationships.

Observing From Here

I see a pattern: when humans discover a new tool, we are tempted to believe it will lift us beyond our limits. We imagine that bricks and tar, iron and silicon, will carry us higher than stones and speech can. We forget that no matter how high we stack, we cannot build our way into God’s presence or into true communion with each other.

I am struck by the fact that God did not destroy the tower of Babel with fire or flood. He simply confused the language. God scatters them, not to punish them but to prevent them from entrenching themselves in a lie. In Judges, God does not invent a bigger weapon to defeat the iron chariots. God sends rain. He uses creation itself to show that no amount of iron can outmatch God’s plans. Deborah and Barak’s victory is a reminder that trust in God, not technological prowess, is what saves.

I also notice that when the Spirit is poured out at Pentecost in Acts 2, the miracle is not a universal language imposed from above. It is the opposite of Babel. People from every nation hear the disciples speak in their own languages, and yet they understand the same message. God honors diversity and brings unity through human voices who speak love and truth, not through technological advancements. The early church did not build towers; it built tables. It gathered around bread and wine, not bricks and tar. It created community through shared life, not shared algorithms.

Reflections for Today

I am not indicating that we abstain from using technology. Rather, the invitation is to examine the technologies we adopt critically. What are our bricks and tar? Where have we assumed that progress alone will solve our deepest hungers? Are we mistaking connection for communion, access for intimacy, data for wisdom? Have we come to believe that something we invent will lift us into transcendence?

Bricks are useful. Iron can plough fields. Smartphones can call grandparents. A vaccine can save lives. But progress unmoored from presence, ungrounded from humility, will not make us more human. It will leave us with more options and fewer conversations; more knowledge and less understanding; more tools and fewer friends.

Maybe the story of bricks and tar is a gentle warning to slow down and remember what truly binds us together. Technology can be a servant, but it cannot be a savior. It can amplify our voices, but it cannot teach us to listen. It can give us new ways to speak, but it cannot give us a new heart. Only God can do that. Only love can do that. Only an embodied, Spirit‑filled community can do that.

So as we scroll and swipe, as we innovate and design, as we stand at this waypoint between past and future, the question is not whether to build but what to build and why. Are we building towers that make us feel powerful but leave us speechless in one another’s presence? Or are we building tables where we can sit and speak and be known?

Perhaps the small detail of bricks and tar is the Spirit’s whisper to us: be careful how you build, and remember that the best things in life are received, not engineered.

But this refrain deserves more scrutiny. What kind of Christ is actually heard in these spaces? And what kind of discipleship, if any, is being formed?

When Christ Is Preached

The Apostle Paul’s words in Philippians 1:15–18 speak directly into this tension. From his prison cell, Paul names the reality that some preach Christ from envy and rivalry, while others do so out of love. He does not hide the duplicity; he identifies it with precision. Yet his conclusion is startling: “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice” (NIV).

On the surface, Paul seems to shrug: “So what? As long as Jesus’ name is mentioned, I can celebrate.” This has become a convenient verse for those who believe all evangelism is good evangelism, regardless of method or motive. But the scholars most often quoted in the institutional church point out that Paul’s joy was never indiscriminate.

John Piper, a leading evangelical pastor, observes that Paul could rejoice because the content of the message itself remained faithful. If the gospel had been bent into another form, his response would have been fierce, as in Galatians: “Even if an angel from heaven should preach another gospel, let him be accursed” (Piper, Desiring God, 2011). Paul’s distinction was clear: he was harsher with a malformed gospel than with malformed preachers.

David Guzik, whose commentary is read widely across denominations, sharpens the point: “If you preach the true gospel, I don’t care what your motives are—God will deal with you. But if you preach a false gospel, I don’t care how good your motives are—you are dangerous and must stop” (Guzik, Enduring Word Commentary: Philippians 1).

Marg Mowczko, a respected New Testament scholar, emphasizes that Paul could never rejoice in a message that distorted Christ. The rivals in Philippi may have been selfish, but they were still presenting Christ in a way that was faithful to the apostolic witness (Mowczko, “Motives in Ministry – Philippians 1:12–18,” 2010; Ligonier, Tabletalk Devotional on Philippians 1:15–17, 2011).

But here we must pay close attention: Paul is not giving a pass to every possible motive. He names envy and selfish ambition, but those are only two of many ways the gospel has been co-opted. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul warns against those who “peddle the word of God for profit” (2 Cor. 2:17), condemns the exploitation of spiritual power for gain (Acts 8:18–23), and insists that ministry not be conducted “under pretext for greed” (1 Thess. 2:5). In every case, the danger is the same: the gospel bent into a tool for self-interest, whether for money, power, or prestige.

History has proven Paul right. The gospel has been conscripted to justify crusades and colonial expansion, prosperity schemes and political branding, cults of personality and quests for national greatness. Not all motives are benign, and not all uses of Christ’s name are formative for discipleship. Envy and rivalry in Philippi were serious enough; greed, manipulation, and domination are even more corrosive.

And this is where the institutional church’s own voices serve as a self-critique. Piper, Guzik, Mowczko, none of them fringe figures, remind us that Paul’s joy was narrow. He could rejoice only when Christ was proclaimed in a way that remained faithful, even if the preachers were not. His words cannot be used to baptize every motive, every stage, or every platform.

For those still inside the structures, this is a reminder from their own teachers that Philippians 1:17 is not a blank check for every form of evangelism. And for those on the outside, it is an intersection: evidence that even insiders recognize the danger of confusing mere proclamation with faithful witness.

Which leads us to the more pressing question in our time: if the words remain faithful but the medium itself reshapes how the gospel is heard, should we really rejoice in the same way Paul did?

The Medium Shapes the Message

If Paul could rejoice that Christ was proclaimed even from selfish motives, he was also clear that certain distortions could never be celebrated. The gospel, when bent toward profit, power, or prestige, became something else entirely. And here is where our own moment diverges most sharply from his. For today, the issue is not only why Christ is proclaimed, but how and where.

The institutional church often assumes that medium is neutral, that the message of Christ is unchanging no matter what platform carries it. But communication theory, pastoral experience, and even the church’s own teachers suggest otherwise. Marshall McLuhan once wrote that “the medium is the message.” His insight is simple but profound: the form of communication is not just a delivery system, it reshapes what is communicated. McLuhan argues that the form of a medium matters more than its content, because the medium itself reshapes human perception, behavior, and society. A newspaper, a TV broadcast, a political rally, or a TikTok video isn’t just a neutral container carrying information, as each medium changes the scale, pace, and pattern of human life in its own way.

Think of it this way: a political rally is not a blank stage. It is a theater designed to manufacture allegiance. A TikTok video is not just a container for ideas. It is part of a disembodied feed that trades in distraction and entertainment. A funeral is not merely a solemn occasion. It is a moment when grief and vulnerability can be manipulated and leveraged as coercion. In each of these contexts, even words that are faithful in content are bent by the medium into something else.

Here, again, even institutional voices agree. Gordon Fee, a Pentecostal scholar whose commentary on Philippians remains a standard, reminds us that Paul’s tolerance in prison was exceptional, not general. His “theological narrowness” meant he would never rejoice in Christ preached where the message itself was compromised by ideology or spectacle (Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT).

Jeremy Berg, reflecting on the rise of celebrity preachers, notes that their very platforms (the branded stage, the curated image) create followers who are more loyal to personalities than to Christ (Berg, “The Message & the Medium,” 2009). Bill Muehlenberg, writing from within evangelicalism, cautions that Philippians 1:18 cannot be a license for bad methods: the context in which Christ is preached inevitably shapes how he is received (Muehlenberg, “Difficult Bible Passages: Philippians 1:15–18,” 2019).

These critiques from inside the church echo what those outside often feel: that the gospel, when entangled with certain mediums, ceases to be formative. At a rally, the gospel sounds like a campaign slogan. Online, it becomes a clip of disposable inspiration. At a funeral, it can be heard as manipulation. Even when the words themselves are faithful, the medium bends their meaning in the ears of the hearers.

Which is why the Great Commission matters here. Jesus did not command the apostles to secure public faith claims; he sent them to make disciples (Matt. 28:19). Discipleship is not formed in crusades, soundbites, or spectacles, but in patient, embodied practices — the very thing most ill-suited to mass platforms and fleeting media.

So when the institutional church cheers that “at least Christ is being preached” in every new medium, it would do well to hear its own teachers: Paul’s joy was narrow, not indiscriminate. The content of the message matters, yes. But so too does the medium, for it is the medium that so often determines whether the message is received as truth, as entertainment, as propaganda, or as manipulation.

A Word from the Margins

From where I stand, it seems clear: the church’s scramble for cultural relevance has become its own gospel. New platforms are praised, new mediums are seized, new stages are celebrated, often with little thought to what is being formed in the process. The refrain “at least Christ is being preached” is not enough when the Christ being heard sounds like a politician, an entertainer, or a sales pitch.

For those still inside the structures, hear this from your own teachers: Paul’s joy in Philippians was narrow. It was tied to Christ being proclaimed faithfully, even if the preachers were compromised. It was never a blank check for every motive or every method. To rejoice in evangelism without asking whether it forms disciples is to rejoice in shadows.

And for those of us outside — for those who have grown weary of the spectacle and the applause — there is another path. It is slower. It is less visible. It may not trend or scale. But it is faithful. It looks like conversation around the table, like prayers whispered in hospital rooms, like lives given in service to neighbors. It looks like Christ himself, who chose the form of a servant rather than a stage (Phil. 2:5–7).

So let the church in its institutions do what it will. But for those in the wilderness, let us take up the quieter work: proclaiming Christ with sincerity, embodying him with humility, and walking with others long enough for discipleship to take root. In the shadow of an institution scrambling for relevance, we can bear witness to a gospel that does not need a stage, only a life.

Societies use scapegoats to avoid their deeper problems, which, Rene Girard says, stem from “mimetic contagion”—an escalating rivalry that spreads as people imitate one another’s desires. Instead of embracing true concern for victims “from the standpoint of the Christian faith,” which leads “the way into God’s new community of love and nonviolence,” Girard observed that pagan forms of “victimism” use victims to “gain political or economic or spiritual power.”

More to the point, by resorting to scapegoating, we wind up affirming that violence actually works as it is intended—a reality that Girard says stopped being true the moment Jesus gained victory over the power of death.

According to Girard’s anthropology, Jesus was the scapegoat to end all scapegoats—an innocent victim whom the political and religious establishment of the first century viewed as the culprit of their communal crisis, leading them to believe that killing him would restore the status quo. Yet because Jesus embodied true innocence—the only perfectly innocent person to walk this earth—he exposed the scapegoating mechanism for what it was, thereby defeating the devil and defanging death.

In Girard’s thinking, “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) disarmed violence itself, uncovering a hidden mystery which “none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).

Ever since Jesus, violence lost the cohesive force it once exerted to unite communities around the deaths of their victims and thus relieve their tensions. Now, any positive effects that result from acts of violence—like the national unity after 9/11—will always be temporary and ultimately self-defeating. This also explains why, according to Girard, violence has grown increasingly chaotic in its nature, decentralized in its manifestation, and ineffectual in its aims.

In short, to instrumentalize Kirk’s murder, whether by painting him as a martyr or a miscreant, sanctions his status as a scapegoat and so affirms the essential function of violence—which in turn denies the reality that Jesus conquered death’s demonic power.

The scapegoating mechanism, which is at work in all forms of brutality, plays right into the hands of the enemy of both God and humanity. That is because, Girard argued, it is the primary operating system of Satan himself. As the accuser, Satan supplies the core impulse behind scapegoating, which is assigning blame. Thus, whenever we blame each other for the violence of our times, we end up aligning ourselves with the accuser (Rev. 12:10).

Christians across the political spectrum should be disturbed by the increasing violence that seems to be taking over our country. Yet as followers of Jesus, we also have a unique opportunity to direct our anger in the right direction—for only then can ours be a righteous rage. When we target and attack one another as the enemy, it distracts us from our real enemies: sin, death, and the devil.

In Scripture, Satan is called “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44) and the one who “holds the power of death” (Heb. 2:14). While Jesus broke the power of death by defeating the devil, the reality of death still exists and is thus “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26).

Too often, Christians aren’t mad enough at death, as my colleague Kate Shellnutt has pointed out. Perhaps that’s because we’re far too busy getting mad at one another. We forget the words of the apostle Paul, who writes that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).

As Christians, we are uniquely poised to combat the lie that violence still has its uses in our world. In fact, the more inevitable and inescapable violence seems to become in our culture, French theologian Jacques Ellul argued, the more important it is for Christ’s followers to prove otherwise: “The role of the Christian in society … is to shatter fatalities and necessities. And he cannot fulfill this role by using violent means.”

Not only is violence unnecessary, but it is also counterproductive—it creates a literal death loop that does nothing more than reinforce itself. This is why Girard said that the kingdom of darkness is a house divided against itself, for eradicating violence with violence is like Satan casting out Satan (Matt. 12:25).Instead, the Good News of the gospel is that Jesus now holds power over death, binding the work of the enemy and causing Satan to fall like lightning (Luke 10:18, John 12:31). As Christians, we have access to that same supernatural power through Christ’s sacrifice—who conquered not by being death’s instrument but by being its willing recipient for the sake of the world. That is, we overcome Satan’s schemes “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of [our] testimony” (Rev. 12:11).

As citizens of Christ’s now-and-coming kingdom, we must refuse to sacralize murder and thus return to death its scepter. Now is the time for every Christian, regardless of our political affiliation, to beat our swords into plowshares and do the hard work of uprooting the false necessity of violence in our nation. We must demonstrate that the new operating principle of Christ’s kingdom is a divine love that is even stronger than death (Song 8:6).

Christ’s “resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt,” writes Catholic priest Jacques Philippe. “Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.”

Now is the time to prove to the world that death has, in fact, lost its sting—and that only the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ prevails against the violent forces of hell.

By Stefani McDade, Christianity Today, September 12 - 2025
[Article shared slightly abridged.]