Finding Jesus in the Footnotes

Although I couldn’t point to a specific problem, something at church seemed off. I couldn’t point to a specific false teaching and wouldn’t be able to articulate specifics until years later.  Years later, after I had time to de-program and look back from the outside-in.   My change had nothing to do with walking away from Jesus or deconstructing my faith.  It was the opposite — I was desperate to walk with Him again and I wanted to walk by faith.    

It was a heartfelt yearning to know Him more and to hear His voice.  Sometimes in between the rhythms of ministry or the pulses of work and family, I had started to hear a distant whisper.  It was the lightest, gentlest nudge, so fragile I could have easily missed it.  From deep to deep, I sensed him calling quietly but firmly to me, saying, “I love you. Follow Me”.  Although it was faint, I recognized the voice I’d once known well but had not heard for a very long time.

It wasn’t obvious, even to me, but I had grown cold.  Cold in heart. Cold from a mind that had been stuffed with knowledge about God, the Bible, godly living, culture, church history, and doctrine.  Cold amidst the busyness of trying to keep up with the godly and staying busy ministering.  Cold that was becoming frigid, from a full head and a heart that was hovering above empty. 

His still, small voice reminded of the deep ache I had learned to live with.  He was reaching down into my inner desperation and starvation, lifting me up to re-embrace the simple truth that “God so loved us that He sacrificed Himself to save us.” He hadn’t saved me into a showcase of theological vocabularies, routines, works, rituals, and traditions.  My church culture taught me to embrace these things to know Him better.   So why did I feel like I barely knew Him?

My soul was hungry and I didn’t know what to do. I was thirsty and didn’t know why. And the revival that God was re-starting with a whisper was building into a roar. But following His voice away from my culture and its routines would be so much harder than I could have realized.

I had spent nearly every Sunday and Wednesday of my life in various non-denominational churches and ministry.  Mine was a wonderful upbringing that raised me and blessed me in so many ways — a loving home, rich Bible study and instruction, mission conferences, some missions trips, and the warmth of church family.  But what I started to see in my adult years was the emphasis on “knowing about God“ had slowly but surely eclipsed the Biblical reality of “experiencing God.”

A gradual intellectualization of the Christian life had imperceptibly shifted the goal posts. And the change subtly but surely implied that God's grace, God’s Spirit, and God‘s Word by themselves were not enough. The Christian life apparently needed more, much more.  My pastors and influencers were carefully curating a collection of other essentials, principles, traditions, techniques they thought were also needed for the Kingdom.

First, we needed a collection of cherry-picked authors, thinkers, pastors, theologians, pundits, and resources that would help God to keep the flock on course.  The collection was assembled, then managed, by the self-appointed clergical class — a pastoral elite from the right schools who preached from the right version, quoted the right contemporaries, were intellectually brilliant, and had built a following of devotees.  The elite were brimming with the passion of Luther, the piety of a Puritan, a yearning to leave a legacy, and a strong opinion on everything under the sun. 

And because the secular world was galloping towards us to steal our freedoms, our books, our rights, our purity, and our children, the elite were pre-occupied with protecting the flock (but not necessarily shepherding the sheep).  If they were to protect us, they must first equip us.  And to properly equip us, they would need us to not only submit to their Biblical teaching, but more and more under their management.  In other words, their superior knowledge and intellect qualified them to wield more dominance over issues the Bible didn't obviously address.

They would micromanage their congregations the same way they micromanaged their own lives and homes. Discipleship would need to shift from what had been modeled by Jesus to a more cerebral, controllable classroom approach.  Biblical truths needed to be sorted into systems and principles distilled from going deeper than the text — systematic theology (only as explained by particular approved authors and cliques), deep studies of doctrine and book studies by approved authors, catechisms to fill our minds, seminars to fill our weekends, and of course venerating the right personalities and their advanced degrees.

Because good Christianity needed to be more cerebral than emotional, the flock also needed to be mentored how to think.  And even how to speak.  Thinking must be managed and molded through instruction in categories of truth, systems of thought, select classical literature, and specific school curriculums to name just a few.  Even when a congregant might share an exciting insight they’d learned in their personal Bible study, they would often be pleasantly corrected in how they should have worded their insight. 

But wait there was more.  If we were to be good Christians worthy of the name of Christ, there was always something more.  We needed more commentaries, more conferences and seminars, commentaries that summarized other commentaries, and an endless list of suggested reading — libraries of books, preferably old books, and only books written by the right people.  And most-favored book status and best-loved authors would be managed or censored by the elite for the safekeeping of the flock.  If it was good enough for their seminaries then it good for the congregation.  The blueprint for Christian living should be printable, manageable, and predictable – just like a college class syllabus.

Even preaching and teaching needed become more standardized.  Exposition now required deeper analysis, formulaic preparation, lengthy explanations of context, quotes from favorite church fathers who aren’t too mainstream, and lengthy interpretation beyond the plain truth of the text.  A good sermon should be at least 40-minutes in length.  To cover a passage that anyone could read in 30-minutes, a sermon series should probably last more than 2-years.  “What’s that you say?  Dr. So-and-so took 5-years to preach through John.  We can make our series longer than that!”  The plain message of the text was often too simple.  Every verse needed to be dissected, diagramed, expanded, and distilled into “biblical principles”.  Often these deeper insights were not obvious from reading the passage – good thing we had the elite and their libraries of interpretation to reveal the deepest truths.

Because of the profound and strategic importance of the family unit, it also needed to be organized and systemized.  The Bible gave us a good start on what a family is and how it  should operate, but there were so many additional “helps”.  There were strong views on parenting techniques, dogmatic views on school choices, roles and responsibilities for mom, roles and responsibilities for dad, chores for the children, meal time routines, entertainment choices, career choices, college options, adult expectations of young teens, hopes of marriage for slightly older teens, cynicism about most mental health realities, and a quirky preoccupation with authority.

Even consuming, understanding, and opining about news and world events would require more "assistance."  Locally by the right pastors, leaders, elders, or influencers as well as the more remote guidance of venerated bloggers, vloggers, and sermon floggers.  But the sheer weight of all this extrabiblical superstructure was crushing my soul, siphoning my joy, and crowding out the life of faith. After all, why did any of us need faith and the Holy Spirit if our leaders were administrating such an efficient system to reliably govern our daily lives?

But I needed to wake up. And it took the pain of suffering and the agony of trial to begin to shake off the dried mud of this legalism.  But there wasn’t too much left after dropping all the manmade extras.  My expectations of God Almighty had been dulled by years of teaching that He didn’t work like he once did in the Old and New Testaments.  Pulpit ministries had so deeply repressed my hope in God’s power or His miraculous intervention within the affairs of men, that I probably would have been suspicious had I audibly heard the voice of the archangel with the trump of God.

And the advice from the clergy for my tired soul was to minister more, self-discipline more, read more, follow the program, and stop talking about this!  In a twist of church history irony, the so-called reformed had rebuilt their own version of medieval Rome, their own Magisterium. The flock needed to be educated, managed, governed, and to submit to their control. We who had been set free were no longer free indeed. Rather than be filled with the Spirit, we had been loaded down with burdens we could hardly carry.

And the worst part is it had become very hard, if not impossible, to find Jesus in this ever-rising Babel of bureaucracy, opinion, and personality. But in His grace and love, He never let me go and began to draw me back toward home.