These words from the leader of the multi-site church network of which I was a site pastor signaled a monumental pivot in my life. It was February 2015, one week after our annual pastors’ retreat. The conversation happened at my request, after a sleepless night during the retreat.  

That day he shared in one of the workshops how every organization, including ours, had to decide which aspects of its culture were hard, and which were soft. By this he meant some parts (the “hard” ones) were non-negotiables. These aspects could not change without altering the fundamental identity of the organization. Other aspects (the “soft” ones) were of less importance, and further from the core of the organization. They could adapt and adjust over time. All night I wrestled with questions about which part of our church organization were “hard” and which were “soft”.

Why couldn’t I sleep, and why did I feel it was important to meet privately with my lead pastor the next week? Because for a couple years I found myself increasingly at odds with some of the statements in the church’s ten point doctrinal statement. And inside me, I felt a growing divide between what I considered to be the best answers to those questions and what I felt free to say publicly. I had a growing sense of unease about the irreconcilable goals of feeding the members of my church what they rightfully expected to receive, and my need to pursue and teach theological ideas that I found more life-giving. I realized I was at a fulcrum, a point of change, in my life. The balance was shifting.

In the coming entries in this series, I am going to share what led to this pivot in my life, as well as the ways my spiritual life has progressed over the following years. My hope in doing so is to provide hope and encouragement to any who may find themselves confused, perplexed, or frustrated by the beliefs and practices of the evangelical wing of the Protestant church in America. I plan to point to those authors, pastors, and podcasters who have been my companions on my journey, with the hope of illuminating a path for others who find themselves teetering on the edge of abandoning either their Christian faith or involvement in their church.

I want to repeat, I’m aware some who read about this journey will find it outside their comfort zone. Some may feel a need to argue or express concern for me on a personal level, or perhaps feel a need to prove I am wrong about the ideas I will share . I can only say, here at the beginning of this project, that my love for Jesus, my love and acceptance of others, and my own inner peace and contentment have never been more real than they are now. This is my story. If I can help someone move forward on the spiritual journey they find themselves on, I will consider that a privilege.  

One of the first classes I took was “Old Testament Survey”. In this class I was given a fire-hose of information about the several hundred pages of scripture that starts with Genesis and ends with Malachi. It was in the first couple days of this class that I was shown something I had never noticed in the first 3 chapters of Genesis. My professor showed us how there was not ONE creation account, but there were actually TWO.  We noted that the Hebrew word used for “God” or “the LORD” was different in the two creation accounts. And perhaps most importantly, we were asked to create a chart of the order of all the things God created and compare the two accounts side by side.

Genesis 1 has six clear days of creation, and it clearly delineates what was created on each day. All the animals are created on day 6 and humankind is created after all the animals, “both male and female God created them”. Genesis 2-3 tells a very different story in tone and in content. Most importantly what my OT professor wanted me to notice was that in this second creation story God creates Adam, and then notices Adam is lonely, so God creates the animals, trying to find a suitable companion for Adam. Finding none, God finally creates Eve.  

It had never hit me before, even though I had read these chapters so many times. First, that there were two very different tellings of the Creation story, and second, that the chronology of Creation did not align perfectly in the two stories.

At this point in my life, having gone to church every week since I was a young child, I had a rather simple understanding of the Bible. It was all true. It all happened, just as described. I’m not sure I ever heard anyone actually teach me this view of the Bible, but it’s what came naturally to me from my Sunday school and youth group leaders at my Presbyterian church. What I was holding in my hands was “The Word of God”, and since the author of the book was God, it was all completely accurate in everything it said.

But what I noticed here in Old Testament Survey was a problem. It couldn’t all be exactly true.  Either Adam was created after the animals (as in Genesis 1) or he was created before the animals (as in Genesis 2). 

There it was, right there in the first day of a “Read through the Bible in a Year” plan. Whatever it meant that this book was “The Word of God” could not mean “This book is completely accurate about everything it says.” 

At the time I don’t think it caused me a huge amount of problems.  I was a busy student with a full social life and a few other classes calling for my attention. But whether I recognized it or not, this was to be the first step on a long path of wondering, questioning, and seeking better answers about what exactly the Bible is.

As a Christian liberal arts university, SPU required attendance at chapel services several times a week. One week every school year they would bring in a speaker who would preach at 3 chapel services as well as several other venues across campus. One year they brought in Lori Salierno. 

Lori was memorable for two reasons. First, her teachings were inspiring, motivating, and packed an emotional punch. Second, she was a woman.  

Up till then I had heard a few female speakers at SPU chapel services, but none in church services. The women I had heard speak at SPU were not great speakers (dare I say boring?). Because of this, it was easy to go along with what seems to be Paul’s clear teaching to the church in Corinth and to his disciple Timothy. Namely, that women should not speak in church. It seemed clear from my very small sample size of experiences that Paul was right, because they weren’t very skilled and I did not find them to be inspired or inspiring.

That’s when Lori Salierno entered the story. She told stories of reaching out to her neighbors with acts of kindness and love. She shared beautifully from 2 Corinthians 4 about how we may be persecuted and falling apart but we are never abandoned by Christ. She made a huge impact on me as a guest speaker. She was actually one of the most skilled and inspired speakers I had ever heard. And she was a woman.

My experience of the Christian faith had just contradicted what I purported to believe - that only men should speak on God’s behalf in worship meetings. I had three choices: 1-deny that Lori’s gifts were given by the Holy Spirit, 2-find new ways of interpreting the words of Paul to allow for Lori’s gifts to be given by the Holy Spirit, or 3-just hold onto a vague sense of discomfort at the conflict between my experiences and my beliefs.

Could it be true that what I had found so inspiring from Lori’s speaking was actually not inspired, and was just from practicing oratory skills? Or could it be true that what I had experienced required an adjustment of my beliefs about what women could and could not do in the church? 

This issue would return a few years later, demanding more attention. But for the time being I settled into option 3, simply wondering about the conflict happening inside me.

The pinnacle of the concert every night was “the invitation”, in which the tour director Bryan talked for a few minutes about how to become a follower of Jesus. For anyone who responded by “praying the sinners prayer” there were certain members of the group that would meet with them after the concert one on one. All of us had received training at the rehearsal camp prior to the tour in taking people through an illustration of salvation called “The Bridge”. I didn’t know at the time, but this was built off of “The 4 Spiritual Laws”, created by Bill Bright and Campus Crusade For Christ. It was a way of explaining the core message of the good news with the goal of them responding by praying the prayer and starting a “personal relationship with Jesus”. It goes like this.

1. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

2. However, sin entered the world and created a break between God and people since God is holy.

3. Jesus paid the penalty of those sins (everyone’s) by dying on the cross, making it possible for the divide between God and people to be crossed.

4. You must make a conscious choice to repent of your sins and confess Jesus is Lord, to receive forgiveness of your sins and eternal salvation. (Would you like to do this now?)

Over the course of 5 summers with the Continental Singers, the first year as a singer, the next two as a singer/assistant director, and the final 2 as a director of the group, I heard or shared this gospel illustration somewhere around 400 times. It was “gospel truth”. 

I had no idea at that time how recent an invention in the history of Christianity this gospel presentation was. Although pieces of it can be found in revivalist preaching going back to the 1700s, the version I learned and shared had been created in the 1960s. It was a very recent development in a religion that had existed for nearly 2000 years. 

Graduating from SPU in 1991, engaged to Ann, I went on a summer tour through French speaking Europe while she stayed in the Seattle area and worked. When I returned in August I found a job as a courier and we prepared for our wedding at the beginning of 1992.  We traveled as director and singer/director’s wife on one more tour with the French Continentals, and then moved that fall to a small town in Oregon where I joined the staff of a Christian Church. This was a firmly evangelical church where I served as the worship pastor, leading all the music programs and worship services.

I had to adjust my methods from how things worked on the Continentals with cream of the crop vocalists and musicians to the reality of “work with who shows up” choir members and musicians. But the evangelical framework of how to use the Bible, explain salvation, and tenets of faith that I brought with me fit right into the culture there. 

These were wonderful years of ministry, learning under the mentorship of kind, loving leaders and developing friendships that have stood the test of time. Yes, I still had some wonderings about some things from my education and time at SPU, but I could easily set those aside as I busied myself creating weekly worship services and musical productions to tell the gospel story and help people make decisions to follow Christ.

What I very soon discovered only a couple of terms into my program was WES had a very PRO-WOMEN-IN-MINISTRY stance. There were women taking ministry leadership classes, there were women professors, there was a constant egalitarian message that came through the lectures in classes and the chapel speakers. 

In a class on Paul and his writings, I chose to do a research project on Paul’s views about women in ministry. I spent that quarter reading numerous books on the subject. I studied commentaries on the meanings of Greek words Paul used in passages related to women as well as how his words would likely have been interpreted by the original audience.

What I learned was a mixed bag. I remember the conclusion I wrote in that paper was that there were compelling reasons to believe Paul believed women should be freed from gender-based limitations in their use of spiritual gifts, but that the plain sense reading of the texts in 1 Timothy and Titus limiting the roles of women in ministry was very difficult to set aside. I discovered there was not one clear message that Paul taught and lived out, but sometimes he would say ground-breaking things like “In Christ there is no division between male and female” (Gal 3:28)  and in another setting he would say “women must be silent in the churches” (1 Cor 14:34).

I found this all very confusing, and difficult to reconcile, for at the time I was still trying to hold to an understanding of scripture that it was without error. I knew there were contradictions, but somehow I believed if I could just study enough I’d be able to find a way to smooth these over.

In my heart I wanted the scriptures to say, “God gives gifts to people as God desires, and they should use them to their full capacity regardless of who they are.” But what I read and studied left me somewhere between two worlds. One world, that of the conservative Christian church where I served, did not even allow women to serve communion during the services or be ushers. The other world, the one of academia, and the one that seemed intuitively right to me, encouraged women to use their God-given gifts freely. 

It would actually be many years later that I would be introduced to the idea that even if the Bible endorses or prohibits a thing, that does not mean it is endorsed or prohibited for all people everywhere for every generation. For many years I dealt with the nagging sense that my beliefs about the Bible were not big enough to contain what seemed true about God’s goodness, mercy and grace. I wanted the Bible to be clearer and without doubt about a more beautiful approach to women and their place in the Kingdom of God. But it just wasn’t. As I kept growing and maturing as a church leader and a man of faith, I would discover other issues that created this same tension.

In the fall of 2001 I discovered a multi-site church in Northwest Washington, and by Christmas I had accepted an invitation to pastor their just-started location on Whidbey Island. So we moved from the Portland area to this beautiful island a couple hours north of Seattle. This was a huge time of transition and growth for me, and some aspects of this new job fit me perfectly while others did not.

How was it a great fit? The fact the church was committed to using contemporary worship forms - mostly the use of modern worship music - and was clear about saying “If you don’t like this style of worship I’m sure you can find a church you’ll like better.” The church was dedicated to being SIMPLE and clear about it’s priorities of Worship, Small Groups, and Outreach. The church was dedicated to being a place where people of all sorts of backgrounds could come and find hope and healing. All of this resonated with me deeply, and I was excited to find a place that so closely matched my journaling about what type of church I wanted to lead. 

How wasn’t it a great fit? If I’m honest, I realized even when I was hired that the church’s statement about the Bible was problematic for me. In the 10 point doctrinal statement, #1 said this about the Bible:

The Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testament, are the inspired Word of God, without error in the original writings. The Bible is the complete written revelation of God’s will for the salvation of mankind and the divine and final authority for Christian faith and life.

As I read this now, 20 years later and five years after resigning from my pastor role, I’m amazed how long I actually lasted in that job.  Because from day one, there was distance between what I truly believed about the scriptures and the church’s doctrine.

In 2002 when I started I already knew I didn’t believe that first sentence about the scriptures being without error in the original writings.  What I knew for certain would have to be accepted only by faith, since no archeologist or Bible scholar has ever beheld an “original writing” of the scriptures. We have copies of copies of copies that have been passed down to us through the centuries. It may sound very spiritual to say “the originals were without error”, but no one would ever be able to confirm or deny the truth of that statement. Second, in my English Bible, translated from multiple Greek and Hebrew manuscripts from a variety of centuries, I found troublesome discrepancies between the two creation stories right in the first two chapters of the book. 

“Without error” was a difficult phrase for me to accept - and in fact I knew I did not accept it. But it seemed a small little phrase, and there was so much about the church that I loved. So because I was not required to sign off on the doctrinal statement to be hired as pastor, I simply stayed silent and buried my difference of opinion on that matter, and got busy in the work of leading a young church. 

The longer I stayed, the more I realized there was a growing gulf between what I felt the church expected me to believe and to teach about the Bible and what I actually believed and wanted to teach. But that process took about thirteen years to finally come to the fulcrum described at the beginning of this story. There were so many great things that happened along the way. People found new life in Christ. People found deeper experiences of God’s love through the activities of our church. People discovered giftings and developed them for use in God’s Kingdom. I’m so grateful for that time in my life and I’m so grateful for the inspiring leadership of our lead pastor, who tragically passed away in 2017.

I look back at those years and I feel so blessed to have had those experiences and to have been used by God in so many ways.  But I was being pulled into a more beautiful story, and something would eventually have to give.

I was sitting across from a friend named Dave at my favorite local coffee shop sometime around 2010. He was discussing the difficulty he was having staying engaged at the new church our church had planted in a neighboring community. He felt like the approach of the church was not open enough to accept and love people like they said they did. “Always a place for you” was the motto, but he felt like that was only true for people who accepted the church’s conservative views on science and social issues that were supposedly pulled right from the pages of scripture.

He said he had found a lot of life and encouragement from an author named Brian MacLaren. I had heard of MacLaren but didn’t know much of anything about him. Dave told me if I was interested in learning more I should pick up MacLaren’s book, “A New Kind of Christian”. At the time I just filed that away in the back of my brain and I told my friend I was open to discussing things with him further and thanked him for sharing with me. I wasn’t quite sure what to think except I thought he was right to feel like he did not really fit in the culture of that church anymore with his more liberal views about God’s inclusive love.

A couple years later, sometime around 2013, I ordered two books by MacLaren: “A New Kind of Christian” and “A New Kind of Christianity”. I wish I could remember what prompted me to order these books but I honestly can’t recall what made me hit the “purchase” button. I started reading the book secretly, knowing that the MacLaren name on the book could cause some raised eyebrows among the other pastors of the multi-site church as well as other pastors that I often met with for prayer and encouragement.

In this book, MacLaren tells his own story through the fictional character “Dan” who is an evangelical pastor who finds himself questioning the framework of the faith he inherited and teaches others week after week. In the first chapter “Dan” tells his wife after 17 years in the ministry he’s not sure he can do it much longer. This is because his experiences as a pastor interacting with those inside the church and skeptics he is trying to reach usually leads him to think the skeptics might be right to question what he’s always considered essential to his faith. 

Dan meets Neo (an Episcopalian priest) and they develop a friendship that becomes the setting for long conversations about the Bible, God, faith, and salvation.  These conversations eventually reform Dan’s faith and his practices as a pastor.

I remember when I read these two books that I felt a strong connection with both “Dan” and Brian MacLaren. They were struggling with a framework for Christianity that seemed too small, too limiting, too “God is on our side and thinks we are special”. I was wrestling with the same beliefs and feelings.

Week after week I prepared sermons to inspire the people in my church to live the Christian life more faithfully. But often there were two sermons. The first was the one I wanted to preach: the ideas and illustrations that I thought were really the point of the scripture I was talking about. The second was the one I actually preached on Sunday: a cleaned up version that aligned with what the people expected to hear, and what I had heard many times myself.

I knew the longer this went on, the more damaging it would be to me. I realized being one person “up front” and a different person inside my own head was not going to work long term.  I knew that at some point I’d have to make a choice whether I would share the more honest and authentic message, or make way for someone else to lead this congregation.

I had heard of the book when it was published a couple years earlier. It caused quite a bit of controversy in the world of the evangelical church because it asked a series of questions and posed answers “about Heaven, Hell, and the fate of everyone who ever lived”. These questions and answers departed from the interpretation of scripture I had learned and shared with people since I had been in high school. Though I had heard of the book, I had not picked it up.  At Ted’s prompting I did, not realizing I was about to experience something that would become a point of no return in my journey toward a more beautiful story.

As I think back to how I felt as I read the book back then, I realize it was not shocking to me. It was confirming. Bell put into language the questions and doubts I was having about the evangelical formulation of the salvation story. It addressed my difficulty believing in the literal existence of a place of eternal conscious torment for those who had not accepted Jesus as their savior. 

Years earlier I had searched the New Testament for any references about what it took to be saved. Starting in Matthew and heading to the end of Revelation, I listed them all. What I found went right in line with the first section of “Love Wins”: there is not one simple formula that says what it takes to be “saved”. In fact, there are many different passages that say very divergent ideas. Some, in line with the evangelical story, emphasized the importance of belief and faith. Many others, contrasting with the evangelical story, emphasized caring for the lowly and needy in the world. As Bell went through many of these same passages, he kept asking, “So when it comes to being saved, what is it? Do I need to do X, or believe Y, or say Z?” He gently reminded me that the story of God’s work in the world and the response God wants from people cannot be summarized in four bullet points like I had been teaching for many years. 

But it was when Bell turned his attention to Hell that I realized I was crossing a threshold from which it would be hard to return. He went through every passage in the New Testament that speaks of Hell. He then showed a way of understanding them that changed the story from describing a literal place of fire, with eternal conscious torment that never ever ended. He pointed out the difficulty he had in calling a being who could sentence people to infinite, eternal suffering “good”, “loving”, or “just”. He went on to demonstrate how certain Christian theologians from the 2nd century forward to the 21st had viewed hell differently than the literal place of torment I had always heard about . He pointed out numerous scriptures pointing out God’s ultimate plan to save everything and everybody, and asked the giant question, “Does God get what God wants?”

With poetic language I was not fully able to understand in that first reading, he helped me open my mind to a much more beautiful story of salvation. It was a story that had to involve some sort of consequences for sin, but also affirmed the ultimate goodness and love of God for all of creation and of course every human being who has ever lived. Although providing no answers for how exactly it would happen, Bell proposed there must be SOME way for people who either never heard of Jesus, had been born in areas of the world where the Jesus story was maligned, or who chose to ignore the good news of Jesus to still be engulfed in God’s beautiful, expansive, and redeeming love. 

Hell broke for me as I read “Love Wins”. I felt myself being pulled from a story about an unjust God who would torture people for eternity into a more beautiful story about a God who was loving and just and good toward every person who ever lived. It felt freeing. It felt right. But it also led to discomfort, knowing this more beautiful story would not be accepted in the church I pastored.

(For more on the topic of Hell and Eternity check out this post from my Reflections.)

It would probably be good to introduce what is meant by “the doctrine of inerrancy”. There are many places online one can find various definitions, but a quick Google search led me to this definition given by Don Stewart on blueletterbible.com:

“Inerrancy,” or “infallibility,” means that when all the facts are known, the Bible, in the original autographs, when properly interpreted, will prove itself to be without error in all matters that it covers. These include areas of theology, history, science, and all other disciplines of knowledge—they will be in perfect accord with the truth. The Bible, therefore, is totally trustworthy in everything that it records or teaches.  (https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/stewart_don/faq/bible-difficulties/question1-what-is-the-doctrine-of-biblical-inerrancy.cfm)

If that is too much to digest, in the simplest terms, a belief in biblical “inerrancy” is the belief the Bible is true in everything it says. No errors. No contradictions that cannot be solved when enough knowledge is gained. And if any errors are found, they were changes from the original, perfect, manuscripts.

Somewhere around 2012 I did a series of messages from a 100-day Bible reading plan that was called the “100 Best Passages” or something like that. This took readers at our church through 100 daily readings of the best-loved and well-known passages of scripture, starting in Genesis and ending in Revelation. I remember leading our small group of friends as we discussed each weekly reading during this season. What stuck in my mind as I read through the stories in the book of Genesis were inner arguments and questions about these supposedly “historical” and “inerrant” texts. Did humans really live over 500 years at a time? Did a flood cover the whole earth including the mountains?  Did a large boat enact God’s “Plan B” for humanity and animals? How come the creation stories did not line up with each other? Did a snake actually talk? Was a tower built to the heavens, bringing about the creation of different languages?  All of these questions provoked more and more cognitive dissonance as I heard others in the group talking as if all these events were literal and historical events. To me they read like myths - stories with deep meanings that provided answers to big questions about life, God, humankind, the cosmos, but were obviously not true in the literal historical sense.

I sat in those studies and bit my lip. I knew that to share my opinion would cause a whirlwind of defensiveness and distrust of my leadership among those who were in the group. I knew I had to keep my opinions to myself. They simply did not match the doctrinal statement of that church about the scriptures being without error in the original manuscripts. My opinions and growing beliefs about the non-innerancy of scripture simply felt out of place and dangerous to my own position of leadership in that church.

Somewhere around this time, another good friend named Dave recommended a book to me called “The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries To Hide It)” by Thom Stark. In this book, Stark shines a spotlight on the problems caused by trying to make the 66 books of the Bible fit under the doctrine of inerrancy.  His central idea is that not only does the text of these books NOT actually live up to the reputation the doctrine of inerrancy promises, but this reading of scripture is actually a modern construct from the last century rather than an ancient way of interacting with the text.

Reading this book, I was for the first time shown how the authors of the Bible argue with each other and correct each other as they go from the earliest writings to later writings.  With Stark’s help I began to see that these 66 books, created by authors over the course of hundreds of years in widely divergent socio-political-religious settings, offer divergent ideas about the God described in these books. I began to see that I was not crazy for having identified many places where the scriptures were not in agreement with each other. In fact, I was allowing the text to tell me it’s story in its own way. 

Thom’s book, once and for all, freed me from the need to make the Bible fit the doctrine of inerrancy. I remember feeling, over and over again, the relief that comes from finding a like-minded person who not only has seen what you’ve seen, but has gone much further down the road that you are starting to travel. I was relieved, because for the first time someone was explaining a different way of understanding and interpreting the Bible than the ways I had been handed.  I was introduced to a new framework for dealing with the shocking parts of the Old Testament where God is the author of genocide and violence. I was allowed to see a new way of reading texts that gave divergent answers to questions about God’s relationship to humans, and the problem of human suffering and evil. It was like opening a window in a stuffy room and letting in fresh air.

But it also initiated a process of fast-forward discovery that would lead me to the “fulcrum” scene detailed in the beginning of this story, where I would step down from my job as a pastor into an unknown future.

(For more thoughts about the doctrine of Inerrancy, see Is Biblical Inerrancy a House of Cards? in my Reflections.)

Coming Soon: Part 10 - The end, and a new beginning

By this point I knew that there were definitely two of the ten points on the doctrinal statement of my church that I no longer believed. I could not sign off on the points about the Bible and about Hell. And I was pretty sure I knew what that meant for my future as a pastor there. That’s why I couldn’t sleep that night. I realized that the journey I had always been on since I was a teenager was leading me to a big moment of decision.

I felt like I had 3 options. One was to keep covering up what I really believed and keep silent so that the church people would not be forced to deal with the issues that I had been wrestling with for years. The second option was to stay in place as the pastor and begin challenging my congregation to think differently about the Bible, somehow trying to straddle the two worlds until the church was ready to move in the same direction as me. The third option was to resign before the differences in my beliefs became a distraction to the mission of the church and caused difficulty between me and the people there.

When I discussed this issue with my lead pastor several days later, it was clear what the best option would be, for the church and for me. It was time to create a plan for me to turn the leadership of that church over to someone else. I never felt judged by him, or like he “forced my hand”. The meeting was my idea, and I knew pretty well which direction it would go. He was a humble man of grace and that is how I will always remember him.

Leaving that meeting I felt a mixture of emotions. I felt relief because I knew a time was coming that I could leave the internal struggles over my faith behind. I felt sadness, knowing this change would create separation between me and many good friends at the church, and knowing they would be sad too. I felt fear, because my entire adult career had been dedicated to pastoral ministry and I was not sure how I would support my family. I felt shame, because I knew people would be disappointed that I was leaving the church. The need to please everyone around me is a strong part of my personality. But I also felt excitement, because I knew there was something good ahead of me even if I could not see it.

Over the next few weeks the church leadership team and I developed an exit plan for me that allowed me to stay for three more months, and then receive a salary for three months through the summer, helping me figure out my next step.  It was a very generous gift that took a lot of the pressure off my financial concerns for our family of four. 

During those final three months at the church I gave partially true answers to people when they asked why I was leaving. The giving at the church had gone down the previous two years in a row, and the income I was receiving from the meager offerings was no longer sufficient for our family’s needs. To make ends meet I had started working 10-15 hours a week as a substitute school bus driver, as well as offering guitar lessons and refereeing soccer games. My schedule was always chaotic and I was working more and more hours and spreading my energy across too many activities. So I told people I needed to find full-time work that could support our family. That was true, but of course it was not the deepest truth about why I was stepping down from my position.

The big question at that point was whether I could find another church to pastor where my views on the Bible would be welcome. Looming behind that question was this one: “If I couldn’t find such a church, what would I do next?”

Coming Soon: Part 11 - Freeing God from my box (discovering Pete Enns)

With a sarcastic sense of humor and a deep understanding of the original languages and cultures of the Old and New Testament writers, Enns led me forward in my evolving views about the Bible. In just a couple bullet points here’s what I learned from his writing and his podcast “The Bible For Normal People”.  

• The Bible does not have a unified message. Rather, its authors argue over such foundational questions as “Why does evil happen?”, “Is God loving or vengeful?”, and “Does God love all people or just the Israelites?” This demonstrates an evolving understanding of God through the centuries that has happened.

• The Old Testament contains many stories where God is said to act in ways or command actions that are morally repugnant to us in the modern world. When this happens, we can see the authors as representatives of their time and tribal culture, with incomplete knowledge of the true nature of God.

• The Bible is not an answer book for all our modern issues, since situations faced by people thousands of years ago in tribal cultures cannot be made to fit our modern world. Rather the Bible is a collection of writings which encourages people to keep seeking God’s wisdom in our lives today. 

All of these ideas resonated with me. My devotional reading and scholarly study of the Bible over the years kept illuminating problems with a “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” approach to this collection of literature. The Bible, I was coming to see, represented the best understandings of God by people throughout the ancient near east. These faithful people were limited to the scientific, cultural, judicial, religious frameworks of their time and place. And so their writings about God and God’s actions represented their own time and place rather than being “once for all time” writings about religious and moral questions. 

Because of this changing understanding I began to breathe more freely when I saw God described as saying and doing things in the pages of the Bible that were not consistent with the Bible’s own description of God as loving and merciful and good. I could see the authors were simply writing from their limited perspective of their time and culture. 

No longer constrained by the limits of a doctrinal statement of a church that was paying my salary, I was able to let God out of the box of certainty where I had tried to keep God for so long.

The words of the song “Cannot Keep You” by Gungor express the sense of personal expansion in my understanding of God. 

They tried to keep you in a tent
They could not keep you in a temple
Or any of their idols, to see and understand
We cannot keep you in a church
We cannot keep you in a Bible
Or it's just another idol to box you in
They could not keep you in their walls
We cannot keep you in ours either
For you are so much greater

Who is like the Lord?
The maker of the heavens
Who dwells with the poor
He lifts them from the ashes
And He seats them among princess
Who is like the Lord?

We've tried to keep you in our tents
We've tried to keep you in our temples
We've worshiped all our idols
We want all that to end
So we will find you in the streets
And we will find you in the prisons
And even in our Bibles and churches

Who is like the Lord?
The maker of the heavens
Who dwells with the poor
He lifts them from the ashes
And He seats them among princess
Who is like the Lord?

I was beginning to see God as so much bigger, more loving, more good, more gracious, more inclusive than I had ever been able to understand. I found myself growing in my own sense of love for people, especially people who were different than me in their lifestyle and beliefs. I found myself growing in wonder at the complexity and beauty of all creation, and my very small place in it. In short, as I let God out of the box I had created for God, I felt free to love others more, and it was a very good thing.

After attending a Christian liberal arts university and then working in churches for nearly 25 years, I was resigning from the only career I’d ever had.

I searched and discovered a position that looked intriguing at a church in Oregon, and actually got an interview. But when they pressed me about my views on the Bible, it was apparent it was not going to be a good match. I was determined not to accept another church position that would make me continue feeling squeezed between what I believed and what the church doctrinal statement said.

I decided to start looking for administrative positions in non-profit organizations. There was one great opportunity with an international charity in Portland that I applied for and made it to the final two in their selection process, but then they hired the other person. After that, for a couple months I found no good opportunities. I discovered that the type of jobs I was looking at were too far away from our home, too low-paying, and they wouldn’t even give me an interview due to lack of relevant experience on my resume.

A call from a friend at a title and escrow company led to a 2-hour job each day delivering packets of home purchase documents to the county office for recording. It gave me something to do while I figured out what I was going to do next. On my rounds picking up the documents from title companies and from real estate offices, I ran into a realtor that I knew from our previous involvement at the Christian school in our town. He asked me what I was doing picking up the title docs and I explained my situation of looking for work.  He told me, “You ought to consider becoming a realtor.”

This was ridiculous to me when I heard it. I have always hated selling anything. School and sports team fundraisers that made me go door to door selling things always made me incredibly uncomfortable as a child. But he told me it wasn’t selling, it was serving people, which I was very qualified to do. He invited me to bring my wife Ann to a meeting with him where he would explain more about the work of a real estate agent and what it took to succeed. 

A few nights later we met and he explained his own transition into a real estate career 13 years earlier. He loved sharing with others how it had really benefited him and his family. He explained the challenge but the freedom of being in charge of your own schedule and what it meant to come alongside people in the midst of their real estate purchases and sales. 

After talking with him, I kept thinking about it for a few days, then Ann and I agreed it sounded like it could work. What did I have to lose? If it worked out I could keep doing ministry on the side, taking fill-in preaching roles in area churches, and growing my skills in a new field. So I took the leap, taking the online courses to get my license, and a few months later started as a rookie agent at the real estate company where I continue working today.

Word spread quickly that a pastor had just joined the company, and it was intriguing for me to experience a quick welcome from some, and suspicion from others. I sensed they wondered: would I try to insert religion into every conversation? Would I chastise them for using four letter words? Would I try to evangelize them?

I determined that I would simply keep my religious beliefs to myself and just learn everything I could from each person. I vowed to simply accept people and seek ways to demonstrate love and care for them no matter who they were. The result: for the first time in my adult life I found myself developing friendships with people who were NOT conservative Christians. Our conversations helped me see new perspectives and I learned to see that everyone has a story and life experiences that have guided them on their way to who they are. For the first time in my life I was learning what it meant to be a Christ-follower in a pluralistic group of people - not in a conservative Christian bubble. And for several of them, they expressed I was the first Christian friend they had ever made.

My faith started becoming more real, as I developed my real estate business in the “real world” establishing relationships with a much wider variety of people. In addition, I discovered a different sort of joy spending time in prayer and meditation as well as serving at our church and community. There was something fresh about doing these “religious” things as a volunteer rather than as a paid pastor. Something new was happening, and I was so grateful for the faithfulness of God.

Coming Soon: Part 13 - The New (and better!) Covenant

To understand the importance of Stanley’s writings in the journey I was walking, it will help if I give a bit of biblical background into the two major sections of the Bible - the Old and New Testament.

The words “testament” and “covenant” can be interchanged, so when one reads the “Old Testament” it’s the story of the Jewish people under the laws of Moses, also known as the Old Covenant. All the stories and poetry and laws in the Old Testament trace their authority back to the laws of Moses found in our first five books of the Old Testament, when the “Mosaic Covenant” was established. It wasn’t called the “Old Testament” until the Christian church emerged after the life of Jesus.

Five centuries before the time of Jesus, the prophet Jeremiah inspired his fellow Jews living in exile under the Babylonian empire. Hidden away in the large book containing his prophetic words is a revolutionary teaching about a coming time when God would initiate a new way of relating with people: a new covenant.  It’s found in Jeremiah 31:31-34 and I’ve included it below (from the New International Version).

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.

“It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord.

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.

“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.

“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”

For years as a senior pastor I had come back to this passage in wonderment. To me Jeremiah was pointing to a day when the laws of the Mosaic (Old) Covenant governing religious and social conduct would no longer be needed. He pointed to a brand new way of relating to God in which the ways of God would be written in people’s minds and hearts - not on a scroll or in a book or even a collection of books such as the Bible. This passage pointed forward to a time when people could know the Lord in a better, more intimate way.

As someone who spent hours every week dedicated to teaching others how to “know the Lord”, this made me wonder. And it seemed Jesus knew this scripture, because when his earthly life was about to be taken from him, he said these words to his disciples at the Last Supper, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” (Luke 22:20, NIV) Jesus was initiating the New Covenant promised nearly 500 years earlier. But if this was true, what should I do with the Old Covenant laws and regulations? What was I to do with all the writings of the Old Testament that used the Mosaic covenant as their authority?

I just kept wondering about this until in 2019 a couple different friends pointed me to the book Irresistible by Andy Stanley. Here Stanley takes readers through the entire story of the Bible, highlighting the ways God is depicted as speaking and acting in the Old Testament and contrasting it with the ways of Jesus and his teaching. Then Stanley makes the bold, even revolutionary, argument that Jesus, Peter, Paul, the first generation of Christ followers, and the author of the book of Hebrews all agree: the Old Covenant is over - the New Covenant has come. And, he argues, this New Covenant is vastly superior to the Old one it replaced. 

Stanley’s exposition of the scriptures comes to a climax with the reminder of the words of Hebrews 8:13. Just after reminding readers of the words from Jeremiah 31 quoted above, the author writes: “By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.”

As I read Stanley’s book I was convinced that what had been rolling around in my head for years was actually “biblical”. I did not need to somehow eliminate the contradictions so evident between the God of the Old Testament and the God represented by Jesus and his life and teachings. Jesus initiated the New Covenant. The New Covenant was summed up by Jesus in multiple places in the Gospels as “Love God with all you’ve got, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Then on the night before his death he added one more to his disciples: “Love each other the way I’ve loved you.”

If this was true, then the absolute test of whether I was following Christ would be the evidence of love in my life. It would not be my adherence to ancient moral, religious, or social codes. It would not be whether or not I could line up Bible verses to justify my actions or inactions. It would be love. Love that followed the example and the teaching of Jesus. 

I realized that instead of trying to solve mysteries of the Bible, I would do well to stick with what Jesus said were the most important commands. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love each other.

My mind and heart continued opening to a more beautiful story. A story that God loved all people everywhere. A story in which I do not have to manage other people’s beliefs and life practices, but I could learn from them. Through acts of love I could point people to the God who created them and who loves them. I could point them to Jesus, the initiator of this new and better way of relating to God, leaving behind the older understandings of God from the Old Testament. And this was exactly the message Jesus came to proclaim.

As Stanley points out, the angel who announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds outside Bethlehem summarized what was happening as “Good news of great joy for all people.” The gospel was always meant to be just that, and I was learning to really believe it myself.

Good news. Of great joy. For all people.

Coming Soon: the final part -This is me

I’ve worked since the fall of 2015 as a real estate agent, which came as a complete surprise to me and to all who knew me as a pastor (see part 12). I’ve focused on serving people, treating them the way I want to be treated, and respecting them no matter what background they have. I now have friendships with people who are very conservative Christians, “used to be active” Christians, Catholics, former Catholics, agnostics, and atheists. For the first time in my life I’ve met people who are gay, lesbian, and transgender and learned to see them as individual people beyond their sexual orientations.

After spending two decades telling people on Sunday how to live out their faith Monday through Saturday, I’ve actually been practicing that myself where I’m not surrounded by conservative Christian people all the time. 

As you’ve read in these posts, my mind has been freed to explore and seek answers to questions that made my former identification with the evangelical story of Christianity impossible. My soul has found life and joy in the more expansive, more inclusive, more mysterious, more connected and yes, more beautiful story I’ve discovered.

There are many more episodes in my life I could include in this telling of my journey, and perhaps I will insert them in time. I am certain there are more episodes of learning and growing to come as I continue this journey. I do not claim to have a systematic theology that answers every “what about this?” or “what about that?” But I am growing comfortable with the mysteries of a God that is beyond my comprehension, and a life that constantly surprises me. When people ask me, “How are you?”, my answer more and more is simply, “I am grateful.”

Thank you for reading this. I sincerely hope this story has encouraged you to keep seeking answers to the big questions in life, and to trust God is walking with you as you seek truth. I sincerely hope you have been spurred on to love God and to love people more. And I sincerely hope you will experience joy as you open yourself to the more beautiful story into which God invites you.

Don

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