Your Mileage May Vary

On a Sunday morning nearly twenty years ago, as I sat in the back of a Foursquare megachurch that I had been attending for some months with a group of friends, the pastor decided to go into a more forceful political rant than usual, mostly about sexual sin. It was so bombastically over the top, with such animosity towards dissent, that I considered slinking out, but, as a family near the front stood up to walk out, the pastor singled them out to the whole congregation, who jeered them as they left. I sat through the rest of the sermon, avoiding being the next target. Because of that moment, along with the pastor’s clear love of money and self-aggrandizement—he had been pressing the congregation for more tithes for months, because he wanted to expand his television presence and build an overflow hall bigger than the already large main hall—I left the church a few weeks later. With no understanding of discipleship, because my only extended time in congregations was among emotionalized, corporatized, Americanized Christianity in the charismatic vein, I came to the conclusion that what I had witnessed was Christianity, and that Christianity was a false religion. I would not step foot in a church again for over a decade.

I’m not going to hand-wave away my sins during the time of apostasy that followed; I fell in and out of the partying lifestyle for several years after that. I’m not here to discuss the fine grain details of what is and isn’t sin, but how the evangelical church, on the whole, avoids taking responsibility for how it drives many people away. While I will not begrudge God’s providence, the truth is that, if I had been in a healthy church that followed Scripture, engaged in real discipleship, and wasn’t focused on getting as many potential tithers in the door as possible, I may have stuck with the faith. Yet, I almost never see anyone in ministry speak to the reality that the behavior of the church often causes people to reject the faith. Just as we can be the ordinary means of grace that God uses to draw people to Him, we can be the ordinary means that the enemy uses to push people away from God.

Acknowledging this is often taboo in conservative evangelical circles; “once saved always saved” we’re told, and, if someone leaves the church, they were never of us in the first place. Therefore, questioning, and even rejecting, how one’s congregation fellowships, how it communicates the faith and how it treats dissent, which can cause people to see the church as more of a business defending its bottom line or a system of hierarchy protecting its power, is labeled “divisiveness.” As someone who, twenty years after leaving that Foursquare church, has just as much disdain for its way of “doing church,” but who has more faith in Christ than ever, I don’t care to entertain such rationalizations. Is there an element of rejection of certain aspects of Christian ethics among the “deconstructed”? Of course, but there’s just as much, if not more, of an exasperation with watching the Christians in their lives reject other aspects of Christian ethics, and shaming anyone who pushes back.

This is what I can’t help but think of in a season where a generation of controversial Christian media figures are passing; those who never found themselves on the wrong side of their ministries lionize them while shaming those who find catharsis in detailing how the figures’ teachings hurt them. For the deconstructed, it’s very similar to what a child of a parent with a personality disorder experiences, where they are chastised by the parent’s peers for not appreciating everything the parent has done for them (which is the narrative of victimization the parent has sold). When a Christian figure who left a large wake of controversy behind him passes, the notion that those caught in that wake should keep their mouths shut as the figure’s fans all but canonize him is near-sociopathic. It’s also terribly disingenuous, because the same people who demand this reverence of their celebrities are often the first, for example, to talk about how prominent Catholic figures are probably in hell, the second they pass.

My wife and I have come to see reaching our deconstructed friends and family as a key part of the Great Commission God has given us, and nothing is a greater roadblock to showing those people whom we love the truth of the gospel than other Christians.