Most scholars believe that before Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John ever got written down, before Romans, before Revelation, before any of it, Paul sat down around the year 50 and wrote a letter to a small struggling church in Thessalonica. Tucked inside that letter is an instruction the church has spent the last two thousand years finding creative ways to ignore.

The Frontliners

When I was a teenager, a group called Frontliners came to my Southern Baptist church for a week. Every morning there was a rally, loud music and testimonies and prayers that felt like pep talks before a game, and then they loaded us into vans and sent us out in groups to knock on the doors of strangers. We had one question memorized.

If you died tonight, do you know for certain you would go to heaven?

I hated every minute of it. I can still feel the specific dread of standing on a stranger’s porch in the summer heat, a kid asking grown adults about their death like I was taking a survey. The word I have used for years to describe that feeling is icky, and I have stopped apologizing for how unspiritual that word sounds, because icky is what your conscience says before you have the theology to back it up. The adults in my life told me the discomfort was the cost of boldness. It took me a long time to understand that the discomfort was actually the truth, arriving early, waiting patiently for the rest of me to catch up.

The Oldest Instruction

Here is what Paul writes in that first letter, widely considered the earliest piece of Christian scripture we have.

He tells the Thessalonians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life,” to mind their own affairs, and to work with their hands, so that their daily lives might win the respect of outsiders.

What About the Great Commission

Every time I bring this verse up, someone asks the question you might be asking right now. What about the Great Commission? Jesus said go and make disciples of all nations, and that sounds like a mandate to start knocking on doors. I want to take that question seriously because it deserves it. Making disciples in Matthew’s gospel means teaching people to obey everything Jesus commanded, and everything Jesus commanded includes some very specific things.

Give in secret.

Pray behind a closed door.

Take the lowest seat at the table.

Love the people who oppose you.

The way of life Jesus asks his followers to pass on is a hidden, humble, quiet way of life, which means you cannot make disciples of a way you are not walking. The quiet life is the curriculum. A disciple is an apprentice, and an apprentice learns by watching someone do the work. Nobody ever apprenticed themselves to a memorized question shouted through a screen door.

An Apology

I want to pause the essay here and say something I have needed to say for a long time, and I want to say it plainly.

The church has a long history of confusing conquest with love. Centuries ago that confusion sailed on actual ships, blessed by official church documents that treated whole peoples and their lands as territory to be claimed for Christ. My own denomination has formally renounced that history, and I renounce the smaller version of it that I carried up strangers’ porch steps as a teenager, one memorized question about death at a time. I need to say this part too. Some of us doing the pressing were kids who had been pressed ourselves, handed a script by adults we trusted and told that our nausea was the price of faithfulness. If that was you, the apology reaches you from the other direction. You were somebody’s project before you were ever somebody’s recruiter.

Forced faith is not faith. It never was. Anything pressed on you against your will tells you about the presser, and it tells you nothing true about God.

A Quieter Witness

So what do we actually do? I think we start small and stay small. Learn your neighbor’s name before you ever learn their religious background. Show up with a casserole when the ambulance leaves their driveway. Do your job so honestly that people wonder where that comes from. Keep your promises. Coach the team. Fix the fence. Let people watch your life for ten years before they ever hear your testimony, and when someone finally asks you about your hope, answer them gently and then let it breathe. No follow-up appointment, no tract left on the table. The witness Paul imagined was slow and local and mostly silent, a life that wins respect before it ever opens its mouth. The people behind those doors never needed my question about dying tonight. They needed a neighbor, and we came as a survey team instead of showing up as friends.

My conscience knew it back then, on those porches, before I had a single word of theology to explain the ache. I am trying, all these years later, to make quietness my ambition. It may well be the oldest advice in the book.

This week, learn one thing about a neighbor you do not already know. Their name, their work, the thing they grow in their yard. No agenda, no follow-up strategy. Just knowledge held with care.

Order a copy of this book. Willie James Jenning’s, The Christian Imagination.

It is a demanding read and worth every page. Jennings traces how the colonial era shaped the way Western Christians learned to see people and place, and I have not read scripture the same way since. You won’t regret it.

We made our first batch of salsa this week from the garden, tomatoes and peppers we actually grew ourselves, and I could not stop grinning the whole time we were dipping the chips in it. There is something about eating a thing you watched come up out of the dirt that undoes me a little. Fitting, I think, for an essay about the quiet life.

It helps when you have your mom’s incredible salsa recipe. I have included a recipe card below for paid subscribers. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Have a great week, friends.

Hey friends,

One of the hardest parts of walking away from evangelicalism is figuring out what to do with the Bible itself. So many people I talk with (people right here reading this) have zero interest in opening scripture again. And I get it completely. The Bible got used on them like a weapon, and nobody wants to pick up the thing that hurt them.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of sitting with this. The Bible was never supposed to be a weapon. It was supposed to be bread. Something that feeds you instead of something that cuts you.

And the way back to that starts with a framework that isn’t very common in evangelical spaces.

I call this idea load bearing verses, and it’s become one of the most important frameworks in my own faith and in the book I’ve been writing.

Below, in the paid section, I'm sharing the actual excerpt from the chapter where I lay the whole thing out.

Write down the three or four verses currently holding up your faith. Not your favorites, but the ones that if removed would actually change what you believe.

I’ve been using the Lectio 365 app for months now and it has genuinely changed the rhythm of my days. It’s a free devotional from the 24-7 Prayer movement, built around morning, midday, and night prayers that walk you through scripture, silence, and the Lord’s Prayer. What I love most is that it doesn’t ask me to figure out what to read or how to pray on my own, it just gently hands me the next thing, whether that’s a psalm, a moment of stillness, or a question that sits with me longer than I expect. Some mornings I listen while I make coffee. Other mornings I actually sit still and read it. If you’re someone who wants a daily prayer practice but doesn’t know where to start, or if your old quiet time routines got tangled up with everything else you left behind, this one might be worth trying. It’s on the App Store and Google Play, and it costs nothing.

Our almost 14-year-old daughter was gone for two whole weeks this summer and came home this past weekend. What got me wasn’t just having her back in the house, it was watching her actually miss us. At almost 14 that is not something you can count on. Kids that age are supposed to be pulling away, and most days ours is too, that’s just how it works. But she came through the door and hugged us longer than she needed to and kept finding reasons to hang around the kitchen instead of disappearing into her room, and it hit me how special it is to know your kid genuinely missed you. Not needed you. Missed you. There’s a difference, and I felt all of it this weekend. So special.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

The rest of this one is for paid subscribers. If you've been getting something out of these letters, this is a good place to jump in, and you'll get early looks at the book as it comes together.

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Hey friends,

Last week I spent an entire day producing absolutely nothing, and it might have been the holiest thing I did all summer. My family went to the Kansas City Zoo and Aquarium.

We walked in enormous circles. We stood in line for drinks and food. My son leaned over the stingray touch tank with his arm in the water, waiting for one of those silky creatures to glide under his hand, and when it finally happened his whole face lit up like a stadium. My daughter took a million photos and videos. It was such a special day.

We watched the penguins do their little penguin business. We took a photo in front of a zebra-striped truck. We got tired and sunburned and happy, and then we drove home with nothing to show for any of it. No output. No deliverables. Nothing crossed off a list. Just a camera roll full of joy and four tired people who enjoyed each other’s company.

Nothing Got Done

Somewhere on the drive home it hit me how rare that kind of day has become in my life. I am a person with a book manuscript and a newsletter, a church family, an ordination process, a social media presence, and if I’m honest, most of my days get measured by what they produce. I suspect most of yours do too. We live inside a culture that has trained us to justify our existence through output. Even our rest gets conscripted into the machine. We recover so we can perform. We take vacations to come back sharper. We optimize our sleep. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that a day is only as good as what it accomplishes, and we dragged that idea straight into our spiritual lives as well.

I know I did. For years my faith ran on the same fuel as my calendar. Quiet times were measured. Ministry was counted. Growth had metrics. I could tell you exactly what my walk with God produced in any given quarter, and I mistook that output for intimacy. What a shame.

The Day God Blessed

Here’s the thing that undoes all of that, and it’s sitting right there on the first page of the Bible. When God finishes creating, God rests. Genesis says God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. Read that again slowly.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a little book called The Sabbath that I return to constantly, and in it he describes the Sabbath as a palace in time. He argues that Judaism’s great cathedrals were never built out of stone. They were built out of hours. One day in seven, wholly set apart, gloriously unproductive on purpose. Heschel saw menuha, the Hebrew word for the rest God created on the seventh day, as a positive thing in its own right. Not the absence of work. A presence. Tranquility, delight, and peace as actual created things that God spoke into existence the same way God spoke light.

Ronald Rolheiser says something similar when he writes about the spirituality of enjoyment. He suggests that delighting in a created thing honors the One who made it, and that many of us are far better at duty than we are at delight. That really hits home for me. I know how to be dutiful in my sleep. Delight takes practice.

And honestly, the zoo itself preaches this. The psalmist looks at the sea in Psalm 104 and marvels that God formed Leviathan just to play in it. God made something enormous and wild for the sheer fun of it. Play is stitched into creation on purpose. The otters at the zoo seem to know this in their bones. They spend their whole day doing loops in the water for no reason anyone can identify. Nobody has ever asked an otter what it accomplished this week.

Practice Being Useless

So, here’s what I want to gently suggest to you.

A day spent walking in circles with people you love, drinking a soda, and watching penguins, is not a wasted day. It might be the most holy thing you do all month. It’s a body-level declaration that the world can run without you for an afternoon, that God’s delight in you was never tied to your output, and that grace has no metrics.

Some of you left churches that measured you constantly. Attendance, giving, serving, and converting. You know what it feels like to be a line item.

Friend, the God I keep meeting on the other side of all that is a God who blessed the unproductive day first, who builds palaces out of hours, who makes sea monsters for fun. Go be gloriously useless in that God’s good world. It counts for more than you know.

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Put one useless block of time on your calendar this week. Two hours minimum. No errands, no self-improvement, and no catching up on anything. Wander a park, sit on a porch, or watch some animals do their thing. When the guilt shows up, and it will, just name it and let it pass.

I love to cook, and few things have shaped my cooking ability more than ’s book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It’s brilliant.

There's a Netflix series by the same name and her joy on screen is downright contagious. She treats cooking as play rather than performance, which is maybe why it belongs in this letter.

On June 25, tens of thousands of Netherlands fans flooded downtown Kansas City ahead of their World Cup match at Arrowhead Stadium, marching in a sea of orange right past Resurrection Downtown. Someone caught an aerial photo, and I’ve circled our building in it.

All those strangers singing in the street together, accomplishing nothing, radiating joy. Such a fun time to be in KC.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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Hey friends,

My home state just voted to put the Bible in front of millions of public-school kids, and I have been chewing on it all week.

As many of you know, I grew up in Texas and most of my family is still there. There are kids I love that are going to walk into these exact classrooms and get handed these exact lessons. So, this is not some far-off “culture war” headline for me. This effects my people, my hometown, and the book I love most.

And I will tell you where my gut went first, before I had any of the details. It went straight to suspicion. I love this book enough to get nervous the second I hear the government wants to be the one teaching it. I spent over a decade in evangelical ministry, which means I know the difference between handing somebody the Bible and handing them an argument about the Bible dressed up to look like the Bible. I know that difference because for years I was the one doing the dressing. I can say that honestly.

So, I went looking to see if my gut was right, and that is where my boy comes in.

Go watch Dan McClellan first

If you do nothing else with this email, go watch this video. I will link it right here. It’s over 18 minutes but it is well worth your time.

Dan McClellan is a biblical scholar, the real deal, the kind of guy who reads this stuff in the original languages and has spent his entire career in the actual text. He is way smarter than I am, and he put out a video breaking down these new Texas reading requirements that articulated the exact thing I had been feeling in my chest but could not have laid out half as cleanly.

The problem is they are not teaching the Bible, they are preaching their evangelical version of it, and he shows the receipts, from a watered-down translation chosen to smooth over the Bible's own tensions to a butchering of Job and Lamentations that keeps the tidy verses about bowing low and throws out all the grief and the arguing.

I have spent years sitting with people in the actual ash heap, and that sanded-down version of suffering is the exact theology that has quietly wrecked the faith of half the people who read these letters.

So here is where I land

So go watch Dan’s video, because he proves the case better than I ever could. And then do the thing the state will not do for your kids. Read them the whole book of Job, the furious chapters included. Read them a Lamentations that gets to grieve before it hopes. The Bible can survive being studied, sure. It cannot survive being used. And your kitchen table is a safer home for that book than the Texas State Board of Education is ever going to be.

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Pray a psalm of lament this week. We are so trained to clean up our prayers before we hand them to God that we forget the Bible gives us language for the unedited version. Open to Psalm 13 and pray it slowly, out loud if you can, and do not rush to the hopeful part.

Bring God the actual complaint you have been carrying. The thing about your job or your body or your marriage or that person you cannot stop being angry at. You do not have to tidy it first. The whole witness of the psalms is that honest grief is already a form of prayer, and the God of Job can clearly handle being yelled at.

Dan McClellan's book The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.

I don’t talk about Dan and his scholarship near enough. In his book, he works through the claims people love to end arguments with, the “it-says-so-right-here” verses on women and sexuality and slavery and the rest, and he shows you what the text actually does and does not say once you read it on its own terms. It is rigorous and it is also funny, which for a book about the Bible is no small thing.

You may not agree with every landing, and that is sort of the point. And what I love about Dan is that he wants you reading more carefully, not just taking his word for it.

A few weeks ago, a man showed up at Resurrection Downtown who was raised Catholic and was clearly still finding his footing with us. He asked one of our worship staff if there was any way he could help out (since he arrived almost 1 hour early), and she told him we needed a communion server for the 8:00 service. He said yes. And during the part where they walk you through how to do it, tear the bread this way, say these words, she looked over and his hands were shaking. He could not believe he was being asked to serve communion to other people. He could not believe he was being trusted with it.

I keep thinking about those shaking hands.

So many of us spent years being told we were on the outside of the table, and then one ordinary Sunday somebody hands us the bread and asks us to feed the people next to us. That is the whole thing. That is what coming home feels like.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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Hey friends,

Someone on Threads this week asked a question that I think a whole lot of people wrestle with, and my response to it got quite the reaction. I received several of comments from people expressing that “they had never heard it put that way”.

Here was the question:

I love this question. Partly because I asked some version of it myself for a whole lot of years, and partly because the most common answer I grew up with always felt a little off to me, like a shoe that is technically your size and you can feel the seam every single time you walk. I preached a version of that answer myself back when I was an evangelical pastor, which makes sitting with it now a little more tender for me.

The version I absorbed went something like this. God is so holy and so worked up about sin that somebody had to bleed for it, and Jesus stepped in and took the hit so the rest of us could walk free. And I get why it lands for people. It is tidy and there’s a courtroom and a gavel and everybody goes home satisfied.

I just have a real hard time picturing God standing around tapping his foot with his arms crossed, waiting on a blood payment before he would be willing to love us back. Anyone else?

Think about how Jesus actually talked about forgiveness while he was walking around alive. The prodigal kid comes stumbling home smelling like pigs, and the dad does not make him fill out any paperwork or settle up a debt first. The old man is already sprinting down the road before the kid even finishes his sad little rehearsed speech. Forgiveness was just… there. The whole time. No transaction required, no invoice, no nothing.

And it is not only the parables. While Jesus was hanging on the cross, in the middle of the very worst thing people could do to him, he looked down at the ones doing it and said forgive them. Not once the debt gets settled. Not after enough blood has been spilled to balance the books. Right there in the thick of it with the nails still in. That is not a God waiting on a transaction.

The same guy who told us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek was not exactly moonlighting as a God who needed paying off before he would soften toward us. And the more time I spend with it the more I think the courtroom was never the right room to be standing in.

So here is where I have landed, at least for today. Ask me again next week and who knows.

Here is the thing I want you to be able to carry around this week. Forgiveness was never something God was holding back and dangling over your head and waiting on you to pay up. It is just who God is, and who God has always been.

The cross and the empty tomb showed us in the most dramatic way imaginable how far that kind of love is willing to go, and how little death actually gets to keep.

If you grew up flinching every time someone painted God as furious and itching to punish, you have my permission to set that picture down. The God who hikes up his robe and sprints down the road toward the kid who wrecked everything is the truer one. Let that be the one you carry.

When you think it, say it.

When you think something kind about someone, say it right away. Do not let it sit in your head where it does nobody any good. If a friend comes to mind, tell them why. If somebody’s work moved you, let them know before the moment passes. I started doing this a few years back and it has quietly blessed more people than almost anything else I do. The encouragement you are sitting on is probably the exact thing somebody needs to hear today.

When you think it, say it.

I recently got to sit down for a podcast conversation with Dr. , who was my pastor when I was a kid. It meant the world to share a mic with the man who shaped so much of my early faith. He has a new book on the way, and he also puts out content here on Substack that is well worth your time, so I would encourage you to subscribe and follow along with what he is doing. And if you have a spare bit of time this week, give the podcast episode a listen, and share it with a friend.

We pulled in our very first garden harvest a couple of days ago. Eeeek!

Aren’t they cute? We were absolutely thrilled. There is something about a first harvest that rearranges your expectations in the best possible way. You walk out bracing for a letdown and you come back holding proof that small things grow when you tend them patiently. I think faith works a lot like that. The early fruit is rarely impressive to anyone watching, and it is still worth celebrating like crazy.

Before you go, this Saturday I am hosting a live Q&A right here on Substack, and it is a true ask me anything. Personal stuff, book stuff, church stuff, life stuff, whatever you have been curious about. Nothing is off the table.

I will go live Saturday, June 27, at 1pm Central. Click here to get it on your calendar.

This is one of the perks I set aside for paid subscribers, and it is one small way of thanking the folks who help make all of this possible. If you have been thinking about joining that circle, this would be a fun week to do it. Just $2.50/month annually (the lowest Substack allows) or $5/monthly.

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And if the timing is not right for that, no worries at all, you are still family here and these letters keep landing in your inbox every week.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Hey friends,

I spent a good chunk of last weekend at a UMC Candidacy Summit. This is a weekend long virtual gathering where the conference staff helps pastoral candidates explore and discern their call to pastoral ministry. Now, I have been a pastor for a long time. I have preached hundreds of sermons, and officiated dozens of funerals and weddings. And there I was sitting on a zoom call sharing my call to ministry story (which began 19 years ago).

The pathway to pastoral ministry in the UMC is a long road. You must be a member of a UMC for at least a year and then then once you start the process (depending on which route you take) it could be another year until they make it official. If I am being honest, there is a version of me from a few years back who would have found the whole thing a little insulting. “I already know how to do this”, or “Now you want me to jump through hoops for a piece of paper that says I am allowed to do the thing I have already given my life to?” But the me who showed up last weekend felt something I did not expect, and it caught me off guard. I felt grateful. Truly grateful. I felt like I was being handed a gift.

The Zoom Call

I visited with people from all over the Midwest, some of them young and bright-eyed and a little terrified, others coming in from other careers, a few of us further down the road or transferring in from other denominations. We went around and told pieces of our stories. Many of us had gotten lost, gotten hurt, talked ourselves out of it and back into it, and somehow found our way to a tradition that had a door propped open for us. It really was beautiful.

I have written a lot about leaving. This newsletter mostly exists because of the two years I spent in the wilderness after a decade of evangelical ministry. Lately I have been sitting with the other half of that story, the arriving. The quiet, undramatic, paperwork-heavy work of actually planting yourself somewhere new and saying out loud that you want to belong to it.

The Process Is the Point

Here is the thing I sat with after I got off the Zoom call on Saturday. The candidacy process is slow on purpose. There are mentors and interviews and forms and committees, and it takes as long as it takes.

A tradition that makes you take your time before it hands you over to a congregation is a tradition that takes both you and the people seriously. Nobody is going to rush me into pastoral ministry on the strength of charisma and a good story. And that’s a good thing. That was pretty much the whole game in the world I came from, and I watched it wreck more than a few good people.

So, I sat in those sessions as a candidate, fully aware of how strange it looked, and I let it be good. I let myself be a beginner again. There is a real freedom in handing yourself over to a process you trust. I have spent so much of my life being the one with the answers, the one expected to have it all figured out. Sitting on a call with people who were carrying their own questions, none of us pretending to have it nailed down, felt like the way of Jesus. It felt like home.

I am a candidate. After all these years, I am just beginning. And I cannot tell you how at home that makes me feel.

I look forward to sharing more of that journey with you.

This week I want to put the Wesley Covenant Prayer in your hands. It is the prayer Methodists have prayed for generations when they want to hand their whole lives over to God. Try praying it first thing, before your feet hit the floor and the day starts making its demands.

I made a little card with it you can print and keep by your bed or tuck into whatever you carry around. You can download the .pdf below.

Wesley Covenant Prayer Card

17.7KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Richard Rohr has a talk on what he calls the Jesus Hermeneutic, and I am not exaggerating when I say it lines up with where I have landed on scripture better than anything I have come across in a long time. If you handed me a microphone and asked me to explain how I read the Bible now, I would just play you this.

The short version is that Rohr studies how Jesus himself read his own scriptures, and he notices that Jesus did not treat every verse as carrying the same weight. Jesus kept reaching for the texts that point where the whole story is heading, toward mercy and inclusion and justice, and he read everything else in that light.

If you have ever felt worn out trying to defend parts of the Bible that seem to cut against the heart of Jesus, this is going to feel like fresh air in your lungs.

Watch it, then save it and watch it again.

I got to meet the writer in person this week over coffee, and it was one of those conversations that sends you home lighter than you showed up. He has a book coming out next fall as well, and hearing about it, and about how he actually does the daily work of writing, was exactly the encouragement I did not know I needed in the middle of my own book season. There is something about meeting an internet person in real life and finding out they are even better in three dimensions. You can see what he is up to here.

Before I go, I want to say something I do not say nearly enough. A lot of you found your way here carrying wounds from places that demanded so much of you and left you running on empty, and the fact that you keep letting me into your inbox every week is not a small thing to me. You are the reason this exists. You are the people I picture when I sit down to write, the friends I am actually talking to (yes, even when I am rambling on about Methodist processes), and getting to walk this stretch of road with you while I learn how to be a pastor all over again is honestly one of the great gifts of my life right now.

For those of you who have the room and want to help carry the work forward, becoming a paid subscriber is the simplest way to do it, and it lets me keep showing up here. No pressure and no guilt, ever.

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I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Hey friends,

Parenting teenagers is an adventure. Some days it feels like we are sailing on smooth water, but most days it feels like we are hanging on for dear life in a paddle boat being tossed about in the open sea. Don’t get me wrong, I love the ocean. I love a good adventure. But navigating the waters of parenting can feel isolating and insurmountable at times. That is precisely why I felt led to share with you what’s been going on in our world.

My son Luke is 14 and he just completed the 8th grade. He’s got this way of asking questions about things that most people just accept, and he does it not to be difficult but because he actually wants to know. He’s been doing it since he could talk. He’s a lot like his dad in that way, which is probably why I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t want to get confirmed this year.

For those of you who didn’t grow up Methodist, confirmation is basically the moment the church turns to a teenager and asks: so what do you think? It’s the church saying okay, you’re old enough now, do you want to claim this faith for yourself? Depending on your faith tradition there’s usually a yearlong class, some conversations with a pastor or mentor, and then a Sunday where the students stand up front and recite the apostle’s creed or read a faith statement and say yes in front of the whole congregation. It’s a meaningful thing when it’s real, but Luke didn’t feel like it was real for him yet. So he said so. And I think for a lot of people that would have been disappointing, but I have to tell you—I was so stinkin proud of him.

I have been there too. There have been seasons in my life that I didn’t really know what I believed or what I was doing or whether any of it was true anymore. I didn’t ever walk away from faith completely, but I had to find it again in a more honest form, and that process was uncomfortable and slow and I couldn’t have stood up in front of anyone during that time and made declarations with a straight face. I know what it feels like to need more time. I know what it feels like to have the questions be louder than the answers. So, when Luke said he wasn’t ready, I felt like I was looking at a younger version of myself.

What my wife and I told him is that our love for him has nothing to do with whether he gets confirmed or becomes a Christian or ends up in a church or something else entirely.

It just is. It doesn’t have conditions attached to it and it’s not going anywhere based on what he decides to do with God.

I think a lot of parents feel this pressure around their kids’ faith, like the kids are supposed to perform belief or at least look like they believe because it reflects on the family somehow. I’ve felt that. I know it’s real. But I’ve decided I just don’t care about it. I would rather him be honest than play pretend. He could have just gone along with it and smiled on a Sunday morning, and nobody would have known the difference. Instead, he told the truth about where he is. At fourteen. I know he is my kid, but I sincerely think that’s incredible.

I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that the God I believe in is not running a performance review on teenagers’ confirmation classes. The God who shows up all over scripture is the one who runs toward the returning son before the speech even starts, who searches the whole house for one lost coin, who leaves ninety-nine sheep to go find the one that wandered off. That is not the posture of someone waiting for you to have your theology sorted before they’ll sit with you.

Luke is somewhere in the middle of his own story. And honestly, most of us are.

John Wesley, the guy Methodism is actually named after, had his own famous heart-warming moment of assurance only after years of trying and failing and crossing an ocean and coming back more confused than when he left. The tradition has always had room for the person who needs more time because it was built by people who needed more time.

I don’t know where Luke will land, and he doesn’t either. And that’s okay.

This week I want to invite you to say maybe more often, especially about people.

Maybe your teenager isn’t being disrespectful. Maybe they’re carrying something you don’t know about yet. Maybe the friend who went quiet isn’t pulling away. Maybe the coworker who seems checked out is holding something heavy at home. Maybe the person who skipped church this week isn’t drifting, maybe they’re just tired. Maybe the neighbor who didn’t wave didn’t see you.

We spend so much energy building stories about people with almost no information, and those stories almost always assume the worst.

What if you just practiced assuming the most generous version instead?

So this week, when you’re about to land on a conclusion about someone, just pause. Say maybe. And see what that opens up.

This week I spent some time reflecting on which books had the most impact on me and one of those was The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard.

I read this book over 10 years ago, but I think about it almost every day. Willard’s argument that the Sermon on the Mount is an invitation into life available right now, and not some bar that is meant to crush you reoriented something fundamental for me. I can’t recommend Dallas Willard’s writings enough.

It’s Pride Month and I thought I would share with you a DM I received from someone recently that really touched my heart. Ryan said this:

Isn’t that the sweetest message? Gosh, that brought me so much joy. What a privilege it is to share God’s immense love.

Keep becoming,

-Beau

This newsletter is free to read and always will be, but if it's been worth something to you, a paid subscription is the best way to say so. You will get early book content, and everything that doesn't make it into the free essays. It's a few dollars a month and it directly funds this work.

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Hey friends,

I am in full-fledged book writing mode over here. While I am really excited about this project, I am also feeling a lot of other emotions as well. Is this going to be any good? Am I behind? Will anyone care about this? My writing sucks. The list goes on.

This is something I have experienced before. Although, most of the writing I have done in my career has been preparing sermons. And that is essentially how this newsletter started. I missed writing sermons.

I had a lot of these similar feelings over the past 15 years, but most of the time those sermons were shared with a congregation and went into a file. Never to be seen or heard again. The stakes are much bigger this time. This will stay in the world forever, and its potential reach is limitless.

I am realizing that book writing is different. Much different. It is going to take some time figuring out. My sermons were typically about 3000 words, and I am comfortable with that. I learned very quickly to say the most that you can with the fewest words possible. There just wasn’t much room for the extra. Well, a book can and often times should handle the extra. And I am finding that is hard for me. I just want to say it like it is and move on. I am not one for much elaboration or drawing things out. I like to say it plainly and memorably and be done with it.

If I don’t want this book to be 1/3 the length it needs to be, I have to dig deep. I have to change. I have to learn how to set the scene. Describe things in detail. Express my emotion. I have to adapt. I have to grow.

You know, growth is a funny thing. What comes to mind for me right now as I think about growth is the garden that we planted a month ago. This is our first ever attempt at a vegetable garden. Here is a picture of what it looked like on May 2nd:

We got everything planted. We made a plan for watering. This spot on our back deck gets full sun exposure. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, let’s see. We immediately started battling spider mites. One of our pepper plants got some kind of bacterial infection. One of our tomato plants got a horrible case of early blight. It ended up being so bad that we had to toss it and get a new one. Our dog won’t stop messing with the plants on the bottom shelf.

Let’s just say it has gone nothing like I expected. But as I take a step back and think about what has happened the last month in the garden, I realize that we have just taken it day by day. Moment by moment. We have overcome one problem at a time, and although it doesn’t seem like it (because I think we all tend to focus on the things that go wrong) there has still been some substantial growth. Look at the garden this week:

It hasn’t been perfect, but some fruit is starting to show.

And that is my prayer for this book. Just take it a day at time. Make some changes where I need to. Challenge myself to dig deeper. Take some stuff out. Start over at times. That is just what it’s going to take.

That word keeps catching me, because it's the one Jesus uses in John 15. The vinedresser in that passage walks the rows and cuts back the branches that are already bearing fruit, and he does it on purpose, so they bear even more the next season. Pruning is the thing you do to a healthy plant. It's a sign the vine is worth tending. So, when I tell you I'm pruning the newsletter, that's what I mean by it.

There will still be an essay every week so don’t worry about that. I am not going quiet on you. There will still be some sneak peeks and behind the scenes book content for paid subscribers. None of that is changing. This newsletter will just become more personal. It is going to be something that grows out of my actual week instead of a buttoned-up piece that I sweat over for 5 days straight. And then 3 small things will land at the bottom of every newsletter from here on out. And those 3 things are:

A Practice: One small, low-pressure thing to try that week. Nobody’s grading you.

A Recommendation: Something that I think that will be worth your time. A podcast, a book, an article, or maybe a show.

A Small Joy: One good thing from my week. Personal and honest. This will give you a small window into my world.

And y’all, this is me leaning in. I am not stepping back. I want you all closer for this stretch. The book is a deeper version of everything that brought you here in the first place, and these newsletters are how I am going to let you watch it happen in real time, mess and all.

This week I started treating my cell phone like a landline. I keep it plugged in somewhere in the house and just answer calls or respond to texts when I walk by or when I decide to, not the other way around. I have included a video here that inspired me to do it. You should give it a try and let me know what you think.

If you are a writer, I can’t recommend this book enough…

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.

This book was recommended to me by a friend of mine and it is fantastic. This book was released back in 1994, but it is hilarious and so so helpful. If you aren’t a writer, you should still read any book by Anne Lamott. Just search her work and pick one. You won’t be disappointed.

Last week on Thursday I made a last-minute hospital visit to see an elderly woman named Betty who is having some heart problems. I read some scripture and prayed with her, and it was so special. But after my prayer she looked up at me and said some of the kindest things (I had never met her before). Betty’s words really touched me. She said I had a gift for words and not everyone does. She was so sweet. And she had no idea how much I needed her words. I keep waiting for some sign that I'm not crazy to be doing this.

Who needs your kind words this week?

Thanks for being here, y’all. You mean so much to me and I feel so blessed to be on this journey with you.

If you want access to some of the special behind-the-scenes content that will be released in the next few months, be sure and upgrade to paid subscription.

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If $5/month isn’t in the budget right now just shoot me an email at beaustringer@gmail.com and we will work something out.

Keep becoming.

-Beau

The story in Acts 2 is one of the most fascinating passages in all of Scripture. The Spirit fell on all of them. Men and women both. People spoke and people heard. Then, Peter stood up and quoted the prophet Joel: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Notice, Paul doesn’t say “daughters, except in official capacities” or “daughters, pending a constitutional amendment.” Just daughters.

This week, as churches across the world were preparing their Pentecost sermons, Al Mohler announced he will propose a new amendment to the SBC constitution at the annual meeting in Orlando next month. The motion would add language to Article 3, Paragraph 1 of the SBC constitution specifying that a cooperating Southern Baptist church “does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation.” In other words, a woman standing at a pulpit and opening a Bible on a Sunday morning would be grounds for a church to lose its SBC standing.

I want to sit with that for a second. Let that sink in.

The very act Peter described the Spirit enabling (prophesying, speaking, declaring the good news) would be a disqualifying offense.

The Timing Is Rich

I don’t think timing is always meaningful. Sometimes things just happen when they happen. But there is something worth noticing when the nation’s largest protestant denomination moves to formally and constitutionally restrict women from preaching the same week the whole church is supposed to be remembering the moment God gave women the Spirit and the voice to do exactly that.

Mohler has always been a staunch advocate for male-only pastoral roles, and key SBC figures, including both candidates for SBC president, immediately endorsed his proposal. The speed of that endorsement tells you something. It tells you that this isn’t some kind of fringe position within that world. And I understand that. I grew up in that world. I pastored in an adjacent theological zip code for a long time. I know how the argument goes, I know the texts they lean on, and I know how convinced and sincere most of these guys are. But sincerity doesn’t settle the question. And critics within the SBC itself are already pointing out the inconsistency. The same voices who argued the SBC had no authority to interfere in local church autonomy when it came to creating a database of clergy abusers are now proposing to amend the constitution to dictate who may or may not lead those same autonomous churches. At some point, you have to name what you’re actually protecting.

What Pentecost Actually Claims

But here’s what I keep coming back to. Pentecost is a claim. It’s a declaration that the old boundary markers (the ones that determined who was in and who was out, who could speak and who had to be quiet, or who carried authority and who carried none) those markers were being retired. The Spirit was the announcement of a new world breaking in. And who are we to say that the Spirit got it wrong? Paul would later write that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. He was describing a community that had been restructured from the inside out by the presence of God.

The Question Nobody’s Asking

But what I find myself wanting to ask is simpler than all of this, and maybe harder. How many women have felt the pull of a call (the kind that wakes you up at night, or the kind that makes you lean forward when someone’s in pain and you somehow know what to say, or the kind that has been confirmed by people around you who have watched you love and lead and serve) and have spent years being told that call was either mistaken or illegitimate? How many of those women are sitting in SBC churches right now, watching this news, and feeling something close to grief? Whatever your hermeneutical convictions are, I don’t think you can look at those women and feel good about the world you’re building.

I’m not saying that’s always what’s happening, but I am saying that when the fruit of a theological position is the systematic silencing of people who are clearly gifted and clearly called (AKA Beth Moore), that’s worth examining. Jesus said you’ll know the tree by its fruit and Pentecost told us the Spirit moves where the Spirit moves, without asking anyone’s permission first.

The convention meets in Orlando next month and the Spirit, as far as I can tell, is not waiting for the vote.

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One of the most common things I hear from people in this space (people who have walked away from or are walking away from the faith traditions they grew up in) is that the Bible feels like a minefield now. They either avoid it completely because it’s too loaded, or they pick it up and immediately feel the old anxiety creeping back in. Or the guilt. Or the pressure to have the right interpretation. Or the fear that asking the wrong question means something is wrong with them.

I’ve been there. And I think a lot of you have too.

So I made something!

The How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind Guide is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a short, practical, accessible guide to approaching Scripture in a way that is intellectually honest, spiritually alive, and a lot less anxious than what most of us were taught. It’s a starting point for people who want to re-engage with Scripture without all the baggage that used to come with it.

It covers things like why knowing the genre of a biblical text changes everything, how to let Jesus function as the interpretive lens for the whole library, how to give yourself permission to read slowly and selectively without feeling like you’re failing, and what to actually do when you hit something in the text that disturbs or confuses you.

I wrote this for people who are reconstructing—who haven’t thrown the whole thing out, but who need a different set of tools than the ones they were handed. If that’s you, I think this will be genuinely useful.

The guide is linked below. I hope it’s helpful. And as always, I’d love to hear what you think. I am really proud of it.

Read more

I spent nearly a decade preaching the Bible and somewhere in there I was also, without fully realizing it, preaching a set of assumptions about the Bible that I had never actually examined. They came with the tradition. They were baked into my education. Nobody handed them to me as a package and said here is what you will believe about Scripture. They just accumulated over years of Sunday school and classes and sermons and small group discussions until they felt less like assumptions and more like the air I breathed.

Unlearning them has been one of the more disorienting and ultimately freeing experiences of my theological life. And it wasn’t because I love the Bible less than I used to. It was because I finally started taking it seriously on its own terms instead of the terms I was handed.

These are the five that did the most damage and took the longest to see clearly:

1. The Bible Wasn’t Written to You

This is the one that changes everything else once it lands. The Bible was written for you (Christians have always believed that) but it was not written to you. Every single book of the Bible had an original audience, a specific historical moment, a set of cultural assumptions, and a particular set of questions it was trying to answer. When Paul wrote his letter to the church in Rome, he was writing to actual people in first-century Rome who were navigating real tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the shadow of the emperor. When John wrote Revelation, he was writing to seven specific churches in Asia Minor who were living under Roman imperial pressure and needed a message encoded in apocalyptic imagery they would have recognized immediately.

N.T. Wright has spent his entire career making this case. That you cannot understand what a text means for us today without first understanding what it meant for them then. Pulling a verse out of its historical context and applying it directly to your life or your politics is not taking the Bible seriously. It’s actually doing the opposite. You’re flattening a living document into a fortune cookie.

2. Inerrancy Is Not an Ancient Doctrine

Most people who grew up in evangelical churches carry the impression that the church has always believed in biblical inerrancy the way their tradition defines it (that it’s ancient, settled, and essentially synonymous with taking the Bible seriously at all). The history tells a more complicated story. The formal doctrine of inerrancy as most American evangelicals hold it was codified at a conference held at a hotel in Chicago in October of 1978. That document, called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, was signed by around 300 evangelical scholars and leaders and was explicitly designed to push back against what they saw as liberalizing trends in evangelical scholarship.

That’s a document younger than the original Star Wars. And even among the scholars who signed it, there has been fierce and ongoing debate about what it actually means. Evangelical New Testament scholar Michael Licona lost his job at Southern Evangelical Seminary after suggesting that a passage in Matthew 27 might be apocalyptic in genre rather than literal history, and he believed in inerrancy.

What gets handed to people in the pew is a cleaned-up version that makes the doctrine sound simpler and more ancient than it actually is.

3. The Bible Is a Library, Not a Book

When you pick up the Bible, you are holding somewhere between 66 and 73 books depending on your tradition, written by dozens of authors across roughly a thousand years, in three different languages, spanning multiple literary genres that require completely different reading strategies. There is poetry in there. There is apocalyptic literature. There is law, wisdom writing, gospel narrative, personal correspondence, prophetic speech, and ancient genealogy. These are not the same kind of writing, and they do not work the same way.

You would walk away very confused about what instructions you were supposed to follow. The Psalms are not instructions. Job is not a theology textbook. Revelation is not a newspaper about the future. When you read poetry as history, or apocalyptic literature as journalism, or ancient Near Eastern cosmology as science, you are not taking the Bible more seriously. You are actually misreading it. The authors knew exactly what genre they were working in. Paying attention to that is one of the most basic forms of respect you can show the text.

4. You Are Always Interpreting

“I just read what the Bible says” is the most common thing I heard in evangelical spaces, and it sounds humble but it carries a hidden assumption that doesn’t hold up. Nobody reads the Bible without interpreting it.

The question is never whether you are interpreting, the question is whether you are doing it honestly, with good tools, and with some awareness of the assumptions you are bringing to the page.

Plus, every translation you read is already an interpretation. The translators made thousands of decisions about Greek and Hebrew words that have ranges of meaning, and every choice they made reflects a theological and linguistic judgment. The way you divide up a passage, the verse you decide to emphasize, the ones you skip over, the context you bring from your tradition, all of it shapes what you see in the text. Acknowledging that makes you a more honest reader. The most dangerous interpreter of Scripture is not the scholar who admits she has a method, it’s the person who is convinced they have no method at all.

5. The Bible Was Not Written to Answer the Questions You’re Bringing to It

This one might be the most pastorally important. A lot of people walk away from the Bible feeling like it failed them because they brought it questions it was never designed to answer. They wanted it to resolve the age of the earth, or tell them exactly what happens to people who never heard of Jesus, or give them a clear position on every contemporary political issue. When the answers felt forced or contradictory, they assumed something was wrong with them for asking.

I have heard it descrbed as a drama in multiple acts, and that’s a helpful frame. You don’t read a play expecting it to tell you the boiling point of water. You read it to understand something true about what it means to be human and to be in relationship with God. When you come to the Bible looking for that (for a living encounter with the God it testifies to) it delivers in ways that are hard to exhaust. The people who find the Bible most alive are almost always the ones who stopped demanding it be something it never claimed to be.

These five things barely scratch the surface. Each one of them could sustain a much longer conversation, and honestly, that’s exactly what I’m planning. An entire chapter of my upcoming book is dedicated to this. It will cover what the Bible actually is, how it was put together, what its authors were trying to do, and what it looks like to read it in a way that takes it seriously on its own terms rather than forcing it to be something it was never designed to be. I’ve been working on that chapter for a while now and it’s the one I’m most excited about. More on that as we get closer.

In the meantime, this Friday I’m releasing something for paid subscribers that I think is going to be genuinely useful. It’s called the How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind guide, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A practical, accessible guide to approaching Scripture in a way that is intellectually honest, spiritually alive, and a lot less anxiety-producing than what most of us were taught. If you’ve ever felt confused, frustrated, or vaguely guilty about your relationship with the Bible, this one is for you.

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, this is a great week to become one. You’ll get the guide on Friday 5/22/26, early access to book content as it develops, and you’ll be directly supporting this work so it can keep going.

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The tradition I was formed in had a very specific Jesus. He was personal, and spiritual, and focused almost entirely on where you go when you die and what you believe in your heart while you’re still alive. That Jesus was mostly unconcerned with saving souls.

It wasn’t until I read Marcus Borg’s The Last Week that a whole new world cracked open for me.

I don’t remember exactly when I read it. It was somewhere in the long stretch of years when I was pastoring and questioning and slowly becoming a different kind of Christian than I started out as, but I remember the feeling of reading the pages and thinking that I had been looking at something my whole life without actually seeing it.

The book is brilliant and illustrates an image I can’t shake.

On Palm Sunday morning, two processions entered Jerusalem from opposite sides of the city. From the west, Pontius Pilate rode in with the Roman cavalry with horses, armor, standards, the full machinery of imperial power on display, and a yearly reminder of who was actually in charge. From the east, Jesus rode in on a borrowed donkey with a crowd of Galilean peasants waving palm branches and shouting words from the Psalms. Borg and his co-author John Dominic Crossan argue that this was not coincidence. It was a counter procession. A piece of deliberate political theater, staged in direct response to Rome’s show of force and it was enacting a completely different vision of what power looks like and where it comes from.

I had read that passage probably a hundred times. I had preached it maybe a dozen, but I had never once seen it as political.

What We Were Trained Not to See

There’s a particular way of reading the gospels that became dominant in American evangelical Christianity, and it works by quietly evacuating Jesus of his historical context. You pull him out of first-century Roman-occupied Judea, you set aside the fact that his people were living under a brutal colonial regime, you treat the religious leaders he kept clashing with as stand-ins for generic human sinfulness rather than as a specific class of people navigating a specific political arrangement with their occupiers, and what you end up with is a Jesus who is spiritually urgent but historically weightless. He’s not really anywhere. He’s not really addressing anything in particular. He’s just saving you.

The problem with that reading is that it’s drastically incomplete. And the parts it leaves out happen to be the parts that most directly challenge the comfortable arrangement between Christianity and power that a lot of American churches have spent decades constructing.

The Sermon on the Mount Wasn’t a Self-Help Talk

When Jesus sat down on that hillside and started speaking, he was announcing a kingdom. And the people listening to him knew, in their bones, what kingdom they were already living under. They felt it in the taxes they paid to Caesar, in the soldiers they had to accommodate, in the religious economy that was deeply entangled with Roman occupation. When Jesus said blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, those words landed in a specific world where meekness was weakness, where there was no peace, and where justice was something the powerful decided on your behalf.

The Sermon on the Mount is political because it describes a completely different ordering of human life than the one his audience was living under. It says the people Rome has decided don’t matter are the ones the kingdom is actually being built around. And whether we like it or not, that is a political claim. The fact that we domesticated it into a list of personal virtues is one of the stranger things Christianity ever did to itself.

Political But Not Partisan

Now, here’s the thing I want to be careful about, because I think it matters a lot.

The Jesus of the gospels resists that pretty aggressively. He frustrated everyone who tried to make him a straightforward political actor. The Zealots wanted a military revolutionary. The Pharisees wanted a Torah purist. The crowds wanted a king. But he kept being something none of them could fully domesticate.

What he offered was a vision. A picture of human community organized around the dignity of the poor, the welcome of the outsider, the rejection of redemptive violence, the subversion of systems that grind people down. That vision has political implications without being reducible to political positions, which is actually harder to sit with than a simple party alignment. It means you have to keep thinking. It means you can’t just vote your values and check out. It means the church is always going to be in some tension with whatever power structure it finds itself inside.

Why This Matters Right Now

If you have been around for a while you know that I write about politics sometimes in this newsletter and I get occasional pushback about it. “The church should stay in its lane.” “Faith is personal.” “Keep Jesus out of it.” I understand that instinct, especially from people who watched evangelicalism turn itself into a political action committee over the last few decades. The desire to have a faith that isn’t weaponized for someone’s agenda is completely legitimate.

But I’ve come to think that the answer to a politicized church isn’t an apolitical church. It’s a church that is honest about the fact that Jesus was not apolitical, that the kingdom he announced has always been in tension with empire, and that following him faithfully in public life is going to look like something. Not a party. Not necessarily a candidate, but something. A set of commitments about who matters and how power should be used and what we owe each other that will always be, in some sense, political.

I’m still working out what that looks like. I think most of us are. But I’m not going back to a Jesus who has nothing to say about the world we’re actually living in. That Jesus, it turns out, was never in the text to begin with.

This newsletter is free to read and always will be, but if it's been worth something to you, a paid subscription is the best way to say so. You will get early book content, and everything that doesn't make it into the free essays. It's a few dollars a month and it directly funds this work.

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One year ago this week, I published my first essay on Substack. I had no idea if anyone would read it. I just knew the conversation needed to happen and I figured if even a handful of people found it useful, it would be worth it.

Over 5,000 subscribers later, I’m sitting here a little stunned.

So first—thank you. Genuinely. You didn’t have to show up, and you did. Week after week. That means more than I know how to say.

And now I have some exciting news. Drum roll please*

I signed a book deal.

The book is called A Different Kind of Christian: A Guide to Faith, Scripture, and Church After Evangelicalism, and it will be published by Abingdon Press in Fall 2027.

And a quick shoutout—none of this happens without my literary agent at The Bindery Agency, who believed in me and this work before there was much evidence she should. She is so knowledgeable, has been endlessly helpful, and I feel so blessed to have her in my corner.

To be honest, this is the book I wish existed when I was making this transition myself. It’s a practical, pastoral guide for people who’ve left evangelicalism but still want a thoughtful faith and a church community they can actually trust. It walks through the grief of leaving evangelicalism, introduces mainline Christianity in plain language, helps readers find a tradition that fits, and rebuilds a relationship with Scripture and worship that doesn’t feel coercive or fear based.

I can’t believe I get to write this thing, y’all. I really can’t.

But here’s what I know for sure: this newsletter is a big part of why this book exists. You showed up. You shared these posts with people in your lives who needed them. And you told me this stuff matters.

Which brings me to something I want to offer you:

Get Access

If this newsletter has meant something to you over the past year or helped you feel a little less alone , becoming a paid subscriber is the most direct way to keep it going and be part of what’s coming next.

$5/month is a big ask (I know) but you will be a part of something special and I will do my best to make it worth it.

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If $5 a month isn’t in the budget right now there are other ways to support this work that costs nothing. Share this news on social media. Recommend this newsletter to your friends. Those things matter more than you know, and this newsletter will always be free for the people who need it.

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Thank you for a year I won’t forget. Cheers to whatever comes next. I am believing that the best is yet to come.

-Beau

I had a different essay ready to go but I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened last Saturday night, and I’ve learned that when something won’t leave you alone, that’s usually the thing you’re supposed to write about.

A man named Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher and engineer from Torrance, California, charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, apparently targeting officials in the Trump administration. A Secret Service officer was struck by at least one round but was protected by a bulletproof vest and is expected to be okay. Nobody died, the suspect is in custody, and by every measurable standard, the security apparatus worked.

The Thought That Scares Me More Than the Shooting

But here’s the thing I keep circling back to. Within hours of the incident, people on social media (not fringe corners, but people I know, people whose judgment I generally trust) were already asking whether this was staged. They wondered if this was political theatre, or a manufactured villain for a moment that conveniently needed one.

Now, I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that’s true. The evidence points to a real person with a real grievance who made a genuinely evil choice. But what I am saying is that we now live in a country where the thought “was this staged?” is no longer absurd to a meaningful portion of the population.

That’s what years of trust erosion does to a culture. It changes what they’re capable of believing.

Before I say anything else, I want to say this plainly. Whatever your politics, whatever your grievances about this administration or any administration, what Cole Allen did was wrong. Charging toward a room full of people with a shotgun and knives is ridiculous. Rage is real and sometimes justified, and it is still not a reason to try to kill people. Violence doesn’t become righteous just because it’s aimed at people we despise, and anyone who tries to quietly cheer this or explain it away is doing something morally dangerous that I think they need to sit with. And I say that as someone who has plenty of my own grief and frustration about the direction of this country.

But Here’s What’s Also True

Some of us have been saying for years that this trajectory leads somewhere dark. Nobody predicted a California teacher charging a hotel security checkpoint with a manifesto and a 12-gauge, but the general shape of it, the fracturing, the radicalization, the collapse of shared reality, this has been visible for a long time to anyone willing to look.

When you treat truth as a rhetorical tool rather than a moral obligation, you lose the social fabric that holds disagreement inside some kind of livable tension.

The Washington Hilton, where Saturday’s dinner was held, is also the site where President Reagan was shot in 1981. American political violence has a long history, but there’s something different happening now, something that feels less like isolated eruptions and more like a culture that has genuinely lost its bearings about what’s real and what’s at stake.

The grief of watching that unfold is hard to describe. It’s not “I told you so” grief. It’s quieter than that. It’s the grief of someone who loved a thing and watched it get hollowed out slowly, and then one day looked up and couldn’t quite find it anymore.

The Prophetic Task Right Now

The Hebrew prophets were not popular people. They didn’t get speaking invitations or book deals. They said what was true when the people in power were actively invested in everyone pretending it wasn’t. That’s not a comfortable role. It’s also not optional for those of us who take the tradition seriously.

The prophetic task right now is not to have all the answers. It’s not to be the smartest person in the room about policy or to produce a perfect political program. It’s actually simpler and harder than that. It is to refuse to pretend we can’t see what we’re seeing. To keep saying, out loud, that democracy requires truth-tellers. That leaders who treat reality as something to be managed and shaped for political convenience are doing damage that outlasts their administrations.

That a country where half the population can’t agree on whether an event even happened is a country in serious trouble.

The church (the actual, historic, confessing church) has something to say in this moment because we are people who believe that truth is not a commodity. We believe the logos, the Word made flesh, is the ground of all reality, and it has consequences for how we live in public, how we speak about power, and how we refuse to normalize the slow death of honesty in our common life.

You don’t have to have perfect clarity right now. I don’t. But if something in you is unsettled right now, trust that. That unsettledness might be the most honest thing you’ve felt in a while.

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Jason and I grew up in the same Southern Baptist church in Amarillo, TX. We heard the same sermons, sang the same songs, and were shaped by the same faith tradition. He went one direction, and I went another. But I've been thinking a lot lately about how we talk about honoring people of different faiths but rarely extend that same dignity to people who walked away from faith entirely. Jason did the hard, honest work of following his questions all the way to the end, and I think that deserves honor. This is his story, and I'm grateful he trusted me with it.

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I have been sitting with a strange feeling all morning, trying to figure out what to call it. It is not quite shock (nothing feels shocking anymore) and it is not quite anger, though there is some of that too. It is something closer to recognition. Like watching a scene you have read about in a book play out in real life, and realizing the book was trying to warn you about something.

This week, the President of the United States attacked the Pope. He went on social media and called Pope Leo XIV weak, terrible, and suggested that Leo only has his job because of Trump. THEN, forty minutes later, he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ with robes, glowing hands, healing the sick, American flags and fighter jets filling the sky behind him. This is the literal definition of blasphemy, y’all.

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You don’t need me to list it all out, you already know. You’ve already seen the headlines this week, probably more than once, probably late at night when you told yourself you were just going to check one thing. The economic anxiety is real, the political noise is real, the sense that something foundational is shifting beneath your feet and nobody in charge seems particularly concerned about it is real. And if you’ve spent any time at all in deconstruction or reconstruction, you came into this moment already a little tired or already a little tender. Probably already carrying more than most people around you probably realize.

The world actually is a lot right now. This isn’t anxiety lying to you. Some of what you’re feeling is just honest grief about real things, and it deserves to be treated that way. What I want to gently push back on is the idea that consuming more of it is the same thing as caring about it, or that staying perpetually activated is the sam…

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I’ve told this story before, but it matters here so I’m going to tell it again. In the summer of 2022, I stepped away from pastoral ministry completely. I had spent a decade leading a non-denominational evangelical church and I was done. Not just tired. Done. Done. The kind of done where you’re not sure you’ll ever go back.

I wasn’t angry exactly, I was something worse. I had become cynical. I had seen too much. Too much politics disguised as theology. Too many power plays wrapped in prayer language. Too many leaders who cared more about the brand than the people. And somewhere in the middle of all that I had lost the thing that had called me into ministry in the first place. I couldn’t feel it anymore. The fire or the pull or whatever you want to call it. It was just gone, and I didn’t know if it was coming back.

We were living in Texas at the time and my wife, and I spent two years trying to find a church that felt like home. We visited dozens…

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A few months ago a guy I grew up with sent me a message here on Substack. We played baseball together as kids. He said he used to think the world of me and my brother. He said he’d been praying about it and felt like he couldn’t stay silent. And then he told me he was genuinely worried about my salvation.

He wasn’t mean about it. That’s the part that made it so hard. He wasn’t trolling or picking a fight. He was a guy from my hometown who remembered me as a kid and believed with every fiber of his being that I was in spiritual danger. He told me my writing was misleading and manipulative. He told me I was bending scripture to fit the world. He quoted 1 Timothy and begged me to reconsider the path I was on. And then he signed off by saying he prayed for me to have the peace and love of Jesus.

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Everybody has an opinion about everything now. And not just an opinion but an urgent, fully formed, publicly stated opinion that needs to be shared within the first fifteen minutes of any event happening anywhere in the world. A politician says something controversial and within seconds your feed is a wall of hot takes. A celebrity makes a statement and suddenly everyone you know is a cultural commentator. A tragedy happens and before the facts are even clear there are already a thousand threads telling you exactly what it means and who is to blame and what you should think about it.

We are drowning in words. And I don’t think most of us realize how much it’s costing us.

I read somewhere recently that the average American consumes somewhere around thirty-four gigabytes of information per day. I don’t even know what that means exactly but it sounds like way too much. We wake up and reach for the phone before our feet hit the floor. We fill the c…

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