“After the disruptions of the past few years, though, the primary critique of evangelical Christianity — from the outside world as well as from those of us who’ve found ourselves accidental exiles within the church — is not that evangelical Christianity believers and practices all these things, but that we don’t.” (Losing Our Religion, p. 20)

The brokenness over the past few years in my own life over what I thought I was a part of… then wasn’t… isn’t really centered on any particular theological stance. It is that we had a “position”… and then come to find out we really didn’t believe that position. We touted particular beliefs that are truly core to the Gospel of the Kingdom of God with our mouths… and it turns out we weren’t really practicing those beliefs.

One of my early shocking moments (just into 2017) was having a discussion around the newest president of our country with a group of pastors in my own denomination. I could have sworn that in 2015 we would have been talking about pastoring in the city with a different tone than in 2017. All of the sudden there was unleashed a language about “those people.”

A group of people I thought believed in missions all of a sudden unleashed a theology of missions I just had not heard quite articulated before: we do missions because “they” are “over there” and that keeps them from being HERE (which is how we prefer it).

That was the first shock wave.

Even years later, I deal with the residuals of a denomination that from the beginning ordained women into ministry… and then found ways to keep them frozen out of true leadership positions in the denomination. Then it begins to ripple in the waters that this organization is almost in a “too big to fail” mode because some stories of abuses of power and harassment of women ministers are being told… and roundly ignored.

It’s not that we BELIEVE certain things about the Kingdom of God… it’s that we DON’T believe and practice what we think we preach. This is the hypocrisy.

It’s that in the Clinton era we preached on ethics and character in the life of the president, but as soon as a president was one who shouted about being our champion, we completely slid his brazenly horrifying character aside. Hypocrisy.

It’s not that we DO believe in “character”… it’s that we say we do… and then act in contradiction to what we just declared.

In this journey over the past several years I’ve had to learn all over again what was truly core. I’ve learned all over again that I truly want is to cling desperately to Jesus and hold on to him alone. I still love HIS Church. He isn’t just the head without a body. I know his body is in this world. And I find it. And I’m grateful.

I don’t have a “just Jesus and me” mentality. I love HIM… AND I love his Church. Finding his Body in different places has been my absolute joy.