I didn’t graduate in 1996.

Instead, I walked the stage at Hancher auditorium in Iowa City a year earlier, ahead of the friends and classmates I’d kept pace with since moving to Iowa in 2nd grade. However, when the class of ‘96 has a reunion, I aim to be there. It’s where my story started in Iowa, where my people are.

I’m never disappointed by these events, with the exception of missing a classmate who can’t or doesn’t, for a variety of reasons, come. When I reunite with Kirstin (who doesn’t have any social media for me to track her life in pseudo-real time), or “Heather B.” (without a big digital media footprint either), I see the 3rd grader and 9th grader and the nearing-50-years-old versions of themselves all at once, and this helps me see those same versions of myself—re-firing my connection to a time that was in many ways innocent, a time in which I wish I could reach back and squeeze that younger self and tell her things would get hard, but everything was going to be okay and that she probably wouldn’t recognize the future, full-grown version of herself who would do hard things in the midst of hard seasons and still try to be the most conscientious person she could be.

(Conscientious…a word that popped up a couple times in my end-of-year elementary school report cards.)

It’s an ache—but a good one—to see those friends. They are the people with whom I rode the bus for years, with whom I ate lunch, played at recess, passed notes, got in trouble, and went to the awkward junior high and high school dances. If you think about it, the people we go to school with for years are the next-closest thing to siblings and cousins—except that when we grow up, we don’t usually see each other on holidays.

Garrison Keillor, when writing about the death of his brother, said, “When your brother dies, your childhood fades, there being one less person to remember it with, and you are left disinherited, unarmed, semi-literate, an exile. It's like losing your computer and there's no backup.”1 Having a sibling still in the world means there’s someone else to bear witness to a part of your story, to the person you were then and the person you’ve become since. In the same way, being at the reunion felt a bit like unearthing an old hard drive full of photos from my childhood that someone else had taken. (Mike, a classmate since second grade, quite literally brought along his copies of the Coralville Central yearbooks I somehow lost track of so many years ago.)

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But I haven’t acknowledged the elephant in the room—that some of us didn’t have great K-12 experiences, didn’t ever make close friends or feel we belonged. Maybe our families moved around a lot, and we couldn’t put down roots. Maybe, by the time we got to junior high and high school, some of us felt like we were on the outs because our families were poor, or we were overweight or covered in cystic acne. Or perhaps—surrounded by friends and resources and good looks—we still felt like we were on the outside looking in. It happens. Because adolescence.

By the start of my junior year, my sense of belonging had shifted. I didn’t realize it when I graduated, but I left high school early because a friend and coworker I admired ended his life suddenly and violently. He was older than me and almost no one at school had known him, so there was no sense of collective grieving. Several months before his death, the father of our closest family friends died in an accident while driving his son to the high school one icy morning. Also, my home life was a wreck.

I figured it out years later, looking back through the journals I filled with song lyrics littered with references to death and refrains from Psalm 88 (look it up). There wasn’t anyone in my life, least of all myself, who had been able to connect the dots for me between traumatic loss, the drama at home, and my sudden loss of interest in high school extracurriculars. I was the feature editor of our school newspaper and on track to be, possibly (probably!), the editor-in-chief by senior year. I up and quit the newspaper well before my early graduation. I may have assumed life would get better sooner if I grew up faster. What did I know?

I was sad to leave my small circle of high school friends. I would not be there to throw caps in the air together or smile at the actual cameras some of us owned. I think the grief of missing that rumbled around inside for 30 years. Truth be told, I wanted to want to stay and experience the same joy my girlfriends got out of all the high school things. But in 11th grade, their apparent enjoyment and seeming contentedness was a foreign language to me—I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t speak it. And this alone was enough to make me feel like an outsider.

Fast forward thirty years. It’s been long enough for every ’96 grad to have a dark night or two of the soul. Said one friend, giving a quick synopsis of the last 15 years (and I paraphrase): “I got married, got divorced, and now my teenager wants to live with her dad…I didn’t have that one on my life’s Bingo card.”2 Others have experienced divorce, remarriage, separation, the incarceration of family members, children with life-altering special needs, mental illness, immense health challenges, invasive surgeries, unwanted singleness, unwanted infertility, and teens, spouses, or parents needing more support than we feel capable of giving. On top of that, we’ve lost our grandparents, some parents, and even siblings.

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But now, despite having had plenty of dark-soul nights in high school (and since then), I have learned to access what I couldn’t back then: pleasure in the ordinariness of routine and daily life in the company of other humans. I figured out how to unearth the joy of an unplanned lunch companion, an audiobook read by Trevor Noah or Tina Fey, a power stare from my quirky Goldendoodle, home-grown raspberries, watering houseplants, crocheting a woolen granny square, slicing summer cucumbers. These days, I sometimes even giggle at the repetitive silliness of a conversation with a family member who has lost some of his short-term memory (because laugh or cry, right?).

Thirty years later, the ’96 graduates have their Bingo cards filled up, every square covered with pieces of the good and joyful, the heartbreaking and bleak, all of them utterly human experiences. That’s why, I think, classmates who weren’t really ever very close back in high school are hugging each other goodbye after a leisurely brunch—the last event of the weekend with the least number of people in attendance. It’s also why I stand around the table with a group of women, trading the most intimate details about our bodies, marriages, spouses, and hormones right before we walk out of the winery on a cool summer morning, ash from Canadian forest fires hazing the sky, back to our cars, our lives, another decade.

It can be deeply reassuring to exchange stories with the strangers we once knew, a lesson that—in the broad scope of this vocation we call being human—we were never outside the circle looking in. The circle was much wider than we ever realized, making room for everything and everyone.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

This is not a question I came up with. It’s part of a curriculum I inherited for a college-level writing class designed by a previous instructor for English language learners. Many of my students—all of them Black or Brown—spoke one, two, three, or four other languages before learning English, but they’ve come to America where, for practical reasons, learning English is a necessity.

It is always a benefit to speak the “official” language of the nation you reside in. But in this multi-lingual and ethnic world God created, many of us have internalized not just ethnocentrism but also a linguistic racism: English isn’t just practical in the United States; it’s morally superior, a badge of belonging.

My students write about learning this superiority through expressions of disgust from bankers, doctors, TSA agents, and the like. Even if they now have a particularly good grasp of the language, they carry with them memories of their first days and months and years in America—the utter alienation of being without the words they needed and the faces of those who dismissed, avoided, ignored, or preyed on this vulnerability.

In class, I introduce my students to first-generation American writers who have grappled with the linguistic tensions of communicating with parents in “broken English” very different than the English of academia or the workplace. Despite the constant pressure to perform official academic English, these writers have purposefully reclaimed the dignity of the different “Englishes” they speak, such as the English they speak with Trinidadian or Chinese or Sudanese parents, “each English” a shared system, with predictable linguistic patterns. Indeed, there are many kinds of Englishes.

As we make our way through various texts, I can see the lights come on in my students’ eyes as I preach the gospel of multi-linguality. I see chins rise a notch over the course of a week. Relief is writ-large on relaxed foreheads, replacing worry lines camped out there before. If it hadn’t already, the students’ writing now shows me they are converted to belief in the goodness of a polyglottal world, the inherent goodness of their home language and the non-academic/non-formal English they may speak with family members or friends (what some might call “broken”).

I am surrounded, however, by Christian Americans who have never heard the gospel of polyglottism and multilingualism. My newsfeeds are full up with rantings about those who belong or don’t belong because of race, nationality, religion, and also language. I wonder if they have never meditated upon the scene in Revelation 7, where the nations (“from all tribes and peoples and languages”) come before the throne and the Lamb and praise God: Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen. Pentecostal scholar Daniela C. Augustine writes about this, saying, “[The nations] are distinctly identifiable; they have not lost their ethnographic uniqueness in that redeemed oneness….They stand before God not only as Christ’s one body but also as persons, nations, and cultures, for he has preserved diversity with oneness.”1

The nations around the throne are certainly not all praising God in modern formal English, no matter what our NIV Bibles say. In fact, it’s a wonder to realize that Christian faith is a translated and translatable faith. Jesus is recorded as speaking in Aramaic, the common language for first-century Galilee and Judea. But the writers of the New Testament wrote in Greek, the language of the Roman Empire, which allowed the Jesus story to spread and move easily from city to city. From there, the Scriptures translated their way into new countries in new languages, including King James’ English, a historical antecedent (but not superior!) to our modern English NIVs and NASBs and NLTs.

In the Genesis account of the tower of Babel, multilingualism appears to be a divinely devised barrier between people groups, but God overcomes this division on the Day of Pentecost in which the disciples suddenly find themselves, possessed of the Spirit, speaking in the tongues of Jews “from every nation under heaven…Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2: 5, 9-11).Each human being heard the “wonders of God” spoken in his or her own tongue.

If you’ve only ever spoken one language in your whole life, the language you speak is the language of home and heart, primally secured to your identity in the world. Such is often true for a “first” language, the one that is learned in infancy and at a breast, in growing attachment to (with some exceptions) our mother. The first language is the language of our roots, our origin, identity, family, and name.

God, in God’s infinite wisdom, desires to meet each one of us there, in the language of heart and home. And so God preserves multilingualism, never requiring anyone to learn a new language in order to respond to the good news that God the Son came down to us in the particularity of the Aramaic-speaking Jesus of Nazareth—who shared Godself with Jewish tax collectors, Roman officials, and a Samaritan woman with five husbands to her name.

When we hear English accented differently and altered from our own, may we be reminded that it points to a home, a linguistic home, which God blesses and baptizes with the Spirit so that the wonders of God might be revealed to nations.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Her reason was, as I would describe in my own words, despair.

From her vantage point (even before Covid-19, the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2020 election), the world was on fire. There were of course literal fires raging across the country, as well as the widely reported violent deaths of minorities at the hands of law enforcement. There was growing political division across the nation and in the churches, and people who had abused powers (of social station or biology) were being appointed to some of the highest offices in the land with a commitment to undoing protections to the environment and vulnerable people groups.

She was not alone in her despair and moral outrage. The world was and has always been a devastatingly dark place as much as it has been a beautiful one. Less than a decade later, I’m hearing Gen Z express their concerns about bringing children into the world as well—the reasons are sometimes political, but often they are economic. My young-adult daughters live in an age that seems so foreign to the one I inhabited thirty years ago, and they do not see childbearing as an obvious next step. The Telegraph published an article last month that accords with what I have observed, predicting that Gen Z women in Britain will have their first children at 35, even later than Millennials who were also delayed in having children compared to the previous generation.

There are so many factors related to this—some being that women have more vocational and educational opportunities than they have ever had and that much of the working industrial world is not friendly to mothers, particularly breastfeeding ones (We could take a note on doing better from Sweden). Because of this, some women feel they can either do motherhood well or a career well—but not both. Others simply can’t imagine being responsible for someone else’s life when it feels hard enough to navigate their own, afford groceries, and secure reliable transportation and safe housing while (in some cases) paying off college loan debt.

The myriad social, cultural, economic, and medical reasons that women do not or cannot bear or raise children are actually outside the scope of what I want to say here. Nor do I even aim to convince anyone here of the worth-it-ness of raising children (which in my own experience has been a blessed and fiery adventure resulting in my being a kinder, better, more patient human and a Christian who has learned to trust more deeply in God’s generous abundance and care).

What I wish to say is three-fold, with the first being a disclaimer of sorts. I say the following from what I hope is a theologically Christian perspective (because I am a Christian and an ordained minister. If that’s not your worldview, feel free to disregard.)

First (and I suspect the speakers at the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit last month would disagree with me), it is not a woman’s or a man’s highest end in life to procreate, bear, and/or raise biological or adopted children.

For a very long time, conservative evangelicals and complementarian churches have taught that a woman’s “biblical” place is in the home, churning out children who will become Christians and change the world for Jesus. The “tradwife” movement has also drawn attention to and elevated women who choose to work inside the home and engage in more traditionally domestic activities (homesteading, raising chickens, canning produce) while raising children and possibly homeschooling them. I haven’t studied the tradwife movement, but I venture to guess it is inspired by a combination of fresh-baked-apple-pie social conservatism that imagines returning to “good” old days and certain beliefs about “biblical” womanhood.

In response to this, however, I feel it necessary to point out that the apostle Paul, in our Christian Scriptures, urged believers not to marry and (so it would follow) have children.1 Marriage was not to be held in contempt of course, but Paul worried about believers being tied down by the concerns of caring for a spouse and managing a family and household. He wanted as many of them as possible to be free, instead, to be about the Lord’s business. I don’t think Paul would go so far as to say marriage and children have nothing to do with the Lord’s business, but I do think he thought there was a more efficient way to go about it. Marriage was fine, but singleness to “secure undistracted devotion to the Lord” was much, much better.

That right there should give pause to any and all claims that a woman’s “biblical place” is in the home, bearing and/or raising children. While raising children is an honorable vocation for both men and women, the Christian faith does not uniquely or particularly demand that each individual procreate (good news because this is an impossibility for many). However, the faith does demand that we recognize the goodness of procreation—even, and perhaps more so, in the face of economic strain and socio-political turbulence.

The choice to bear and/or raise children is an utterly radical act of Christian hope.

Choosing, if one is able,2 to bring a child into a world filled with despair, greed, global warming climate disasters, racism, food insecurity, epidemics, pandemics, and poverty is to shake one’s fist at the dark powers of this world and say that creation is good and human beings are particularly good, as God called them in Genesis. To engage in procreativity, designed by the creator for our good, is to put our stake on God’s claim.

To procreate is also to put our stake on another of Scripture’s claims. One of the core tenants of Christian faith is belief in resurrection of the dead and the reconciliation of all things in Christ. We hold to Scriptures that teach us to look forward to a day where a new heaven and new earth will manifest, a day when wickedness will be punished, when those who tread on the backs of the poor and abuse the powerless will be judged, and when the “first” in this world will be last, while the last in this world will be first. We understand that God wants to put our world to rights again, and therefore, we should also understand that, until that day comes, we—in whom the Holy Spirit dwells—have the very real privilege, honor, and responsibility to live in such a way so as to contribute to that robust and beautiful vision of new creation. In short, if our gospel leads us to hope in a renewed world, why would our actions not witness to this hope?

There are infinite manifestations of Christian hope. Getting out of bed in the morning may even be one of them. Doing good work that contributes to the good of our world and our fellow humans is another. But bringing other humans into the world—if you have the privilege of choosing that—may be one of the biggest gambles we can make on our Christian hope. We don’t know what kind of people our children will turn out to be, or how they might be pierced by illness and harmed by evil. We don’t know the pain we will feel in our own bodies when they hurt. We may suspect that we aren’t even up for the task, having no real knowledge of what may be required of us—the limits of body, mind, and spirit that will be tested. We don’t know yet how we will pay for daycare or groceries or dance lessons or how desperately we will try to console (without success) a despairing, depressed, or anxious teenager—which is why I say Christians should, when they procreate, do it in hope—hope in the One who told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, trusting that this same One will be our daily Bread in the parenting journey.

When we welcome a child in Jesus’ name, we welcome Christ and we welcome the Father.

The world has shown us all sorts of ways of welcoming children. Sometimes they are welcomed into a web of parental keeping-up-with-the-Joneses narcissism. Some are welcomed into color-coordinated nurseries decked out with the latest newborn must-haves (15 years ago we were thinking about baby cams, Bjorn carriers, and Boppy pillows). Yet others are “welcomed” into an austere life of slavery (historic or modern-day), “just” another asset to be used and abused by those in power.

In the midst of an argument about who was the greatest, the twelve disciples were interrupted by Jesus who drew a small child near to him. “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me,” he said. “And whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.”3

With childhood comes vulnerability, meekness, and helplessness—qualities the world around Jesus despised, but qualities, nonetheless, that Jesus said particularly suited a person for blessing in the Kingdom of Heaven.4 Jesus himself embodied these qualities, humbling himself to take on human flesh, a child-turned-man with no earthly glory. For all their vulnerability and meekness, Jesus identified with children.

The physical journey of pregnancy, childbirth and sometimes breastfeeding hitches a biological mother to her child’s vulnerable state as well. And, let’s be honest, any biological or non-biological parent who prioritizes the well-being of a child above their own has necessarily locked themselves in, too, to a life of vulnerability and meekness. (What parent hasn’t felt helpless in the middle of the night with a feverish and listless infant?)

To welcome a child—one’s own offspring or not—in Jesus’ name then, means, I think, to offer shelter to the least, remembering that Jesus also appeared to us as one of them. To welcome a child in Jesus’ name—whether we’ve chosen to become parents or not—is to live in such a way as to make room for and give honor to the stranger, the immigrant, the prisoner, and the sick, knowing that our Lord Jesus, too, was stranger, prisoner, and crucified One.

Perhaps those of us who sense the Lord leading us to the vocation of biological or adoptive parenting should take the posture of the unwed mother Mary: I am the Lord’s servant. Be it unto me according to your will.5 The optics of her circumstances were, frankly, terrible. And, despite the joy of her son’s birth—shared with anonymous shepherds, wisemen, and prophets and intercessors in the temple—she was warned that this mothering business would involve loss. Tragedy. The splitting and splintering of her own soul.6

Mary’s consent to become a mother is perhaps as big a gamble that any parent’s could be, staking a claim on a God reputed to bring down rulers from their thrones and lift up the humble, scatter the proud, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty.7 If we are called to this vocation of parenting, let it not be done with nostalgia for the good old (fictional) days of June and Ward Cleaver. Nor let it be done as political statement—an attempt to re-colonize the country with future members of our own political party. Nor should we—despite a right desire to introduce our children to Christ and his Way—expect to control the outcome of our children’s future church attendance, what kind of church they attend, or whether they attend at all.

What I think we can hang our hats on, however, is that the God who is with Mary will be with us in our humble, helpless, welcome of Himself in the form of a child, trusting that he who began the Very Good project of creation, and welcomed us to participate, will bring it one day to a joyful end.8

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

But what happens when we don’t heed the Spirit when the Spirit nudges us to go? Perhaps we cling to what is familiar, predictable, and routine as we avert our gaze from the inner road signs alerting us to a detour ahead: prepare to slow down.

I have a friend who went through a Very Hard Situation in a para-church organization she worked for for over two decades. It was the hardest of Hard. She did all the things, as far as it depended on her, to make the Hard Situation right for all the people involved. But, it didn’t seem like others were doing the same. It resulted in one-sided attempts at reconciliation and a very anemic sense of “peace.” Facing this, she realized she needed to leave the organization.

Five years after she left, I asked her if, in hindsight, she thought God had been wanting to move her to a new ministry assignment all along. She heartily answered yes, and admitted her recent prayer had been “Lord, help me to have better discernment when you want me to go next time so I don’t have to go through something like that again.”

Not long ago, I was navigating a hard situation of my own at a church I care deeply about.1 At a certain point, after efforts to bring it to some resolve, I sensed that it was probably not going to be resolved (at least not anytime soon). But, I also realized that the lack of resolution would be a very clear and obvious exit sign blinking at me and my husband: we were to take a different path, and (I somehow knew) the Spirit wanted us on it. Knowing that God’s hand was working through the situation—to pick us up like a rook on a chess board and plop us down in a new church community we didn’t anticipate calling our own—is what kept me—oddly and inexplicably—anchored despite the sorrow I felt.

I felt worn out during the first few months at our new church—drained and grieving the difficulty of the transition. And yet slowly, over these last six months, I have come to such an assurance that we are where God wants (and wanted) us, and I have, to my utter delight, discovered just how delightfully our new church “churches” (a verb just for today!). I’m remembering how wonderful small church life can be—where I know every kid’s name and they know mine, the way it’s easy to pray spontaneously with a few folks off to the side of the room during communion at the end of the service. To top it off, we are in church community again with dear friends who were led by the Spirit at the exact same time as us to the exact same church. More delight. God works in mysterious ways. Whether God moved us all for our own sakes or for the sake of the church is a false binary. I’m sure it’s both, interdependence being key to life in the body of Christ.

All this is to say that sometimes a Very Hard Situation will happen, and while you may label it “Very Bad,” some very good things may be working out on the other side of it. I’m sure Saul/Paul realized this truth months after his hurried and undignified exit (let down in a basket, through a hole in the wall) from Damascus.2 That exit sent him on his way to Jerusalem to meet the apostles. And yet, he wasn’t there long either. Another hasty exit to escape death in Jerusalem (!) resulted in Paul’s relatively quiet tenure in Tarsus, a time about which we do know the Lord was working: maturing and preparing him for the missionary and church planting work he would do through to the end of his life. (At a time in history when he could never dream of staying connected to friends via app or smart phone, I’m confident Paul wished for lengthier and more leisurely farewells than the ones he got.) And, even of a long prison stay, Paul was able to speak of God’s providence, saying his imprisonment “actually served to advance the gospel” and revealed to the whole palace guard that Paul was in chains for the sake of Christ.3 Further, his imprisonment emboldened other believers to share the gospel without fear. Win-win, I think he’d claim.

This is all to say that God may move through hardship to bring you to a place that serves his purposes better than if you had stayed right where you were. Please don’t misunderstand me to be saying something like “God gave you cancer so you could learn long-suffering.” That kind of theology isn’t good enough even “for the birds,” as they say. That God exchanges beauty with the ashes of our lives tells us something only wonderful about God and God’s character. It does not tell us that God devises cancer (evil) just to replace it with a bouquet of flowers (beauty) pulled from a hat like an old-fashioned parlor-trick.

Do I wish we all had the discernment to know when, how, and where the Spirit is clearly leading and that we could all just easily cooperate (like that time Paul had a rather straightforward dream of a man from Macedonia begging for Paul’s help)?4 Of course I do. But there are some places God wants to take us that will only be gotten via the vehicle of a Very Hard Thing.

We have to grieve those Hard Things, of course.

We have to let our hearts stay tender.

And we must look at what God is doing on the other side. It may be that you are blessed with simple gifts of grace, like neighbors helping clean up your yard after a very bad storm. Or, it could be you are flooded with recognition that the new, unexpected place you find yourself is exactly where God was wanting you all along.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

However, rather than focus on my costume attire, I want to tell you what makes A Wrinkle in Time so wonderful to me. It’s that Meg Murray teaches us how to be Christians in the world. Let me explain.

The drama occurs in the climactic scene between Meg and the giant mind-controlling, all-knowing “IT” (described as a “strange, light, pulsing dome”) who has temporarily gained control over Meg’s little brother Charles Wallace.

As Meg fights to stay free from the clutches of IT’s mind control, she is simultaneously and frantically trying to find a way to snap her brother out of the cold, hypnotic state she finds him in as he speaks the words that IT puts in his mind, words designed to decimate Meg’s sense of belonging and rootedness in the realities of all she knows to be good and true.

At one point, Charles Wallace tells Meg she is “hated” by a character Meg loves and trusts, and in a flash, Meg realizes that she’s found her edge over IT. IT doesn’t have love—only hate. Tempted to succumb to the power of IT’s words, Meg gathers her strength and courage to stand her ground by calling to mind the identity forming love she has received from her father, mother, siblings, and the quasi-angelic characters of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which. And while Meg concludes there is no way to love IT (representative of evil itself), she knows “she could love Charles Wallace.”

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A decade ago, when I was a new church planter, I dreamed I had a baby whose name was Charles Wallace. The dream led me to revisit the novel I’d loved as a kid but had mostly forgotten after three decades. I hadn’t remembered that L’Engle put the words of the apostle Paul into the mouth of a character who encourages Meg before her big stand-off with IT. In that battle, Meg feels foolish and weak, but Mrs Who had coached her ahead of time with Paul’s ancient words (maybe you’ve heard them before):

“The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men….God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”1

With these words, Paul had reminded the believers in the city of Corinth of the seemingly foolish message of the gospel—that Christ who died a criminal’s death is the wisdom of God and that the One with no earthly glory or crown is God’s strength. Christ is God who took on human flesh, subject to all kinds of vulnerabilities and degradations, only to be raised from death and ascended to his place as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

The Corinthians had been jockeying for position, dividing into factions, and one-upping each other. Paul puts them in their place to remind them that not many of them were noble by birth or wise in the world’s eyes, but that “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”2 (Read: y’all have no earthly reason to gloat over one another, and that’s a good thing!)

Meg felt lowly in the presence of IT and betrayed by the barbed words of her beloved brother; I felt lowly as a church planter with a message that is quickly mocked by a world God loves. And don’t you, if you are a fellow Christian, feel some lowliness and foolishness when confronted by all that is seemingly and wrongly “strong” in the world? I feel lowly in the face of corrupt political systems, the abuses of power by governments and leaders who should be working for the good of nations. I feel helpless when the greed of this world contributes to ongoing fires in Canada and California that darken the sky and drive me inside on a summer’s day in Iowa to use my inhaler. Heck, I sometimes feel foolish and weak when I pray for a friend or family member who is in the clutches of mental anguish, illness, or addiction.

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It would be so easy to despair at the state of the world, to give in to powers of cynicism and consumerism (focused on making us so comfortable that we could pretend that all is well), to harden our hearts to the suffering around us, to say there is no God, no cosmic Persons of triune, divine love—no deeper reality behind what we see with our eyes. Wouldn’t it be easier to medicate our weakness with the illusion of strength and denial of the realities of hate, evil, and death? We could stream, scroll, shop, eat, drink, and—if we’re rich or have the credit line—vacation ourselves into apathy and indifference. In sum, we could become like so many beloved-but-captive Charles Wallaces.

To live “foolishly” (in the biblical sense) is not easy. But that is not to say we have no agency. We should—surely—do good works toward our neighbors for the glory of God. But wisdom leads us to recognize that loving Christian agency is framed by self- and God-awareness: we are small and he is not. Like the children’s song, “we are weak but he is strong.” We love because he first loved us.3 We love the world because he loved the world first.4

To live foolishly (lovingly) in the world is a danger to our pride, possessions, reputations, and relationships. L’Engle allows Meg to face the wickedness that wants to destroy her, but Meg is sent in the cocooning, triune love of the “Mrs.” angels.5 And so, too, are we sent by and in the triune love of Father, Son, and Spirit to go where we have no courage to go in our own strength, knowing our courage “doesn’t matter…it’s the only thing to do” and that it is a “privilege to accept this danger”6 so that we might love with the love of Christ in the face of all that seeks to destroy us, our neighbors, and the created world.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

But the eyes of them were held in order not to recognize him….
And they were standing with a sad look....
“But we were hoping he is the one…”
-Luke 24 NRSV Greek/English Interlinear New Testament

I was 16 when the young adults group leader asked me to lead the Bible study for one of our meetings. I wasn’t quite in college yet (though I started young), but somehow I found myself an honorary member, a peer to college students and young (barely) professionals. And Steve asked me to “teach” Luke 24, the story of the two disciples walking on the road to a village called Emmaus when—after the crucifixion, after the resurrection they didn’t think had happened—they were suddenly accompanied on the road by a man they didn’t recognize.

“What are you talking about?” the man (Jesus) wanted to know. Cleopas then asked him (in essence) if he’d been living under a rock for the last few days, because anyone coming from Jerusalem should have heard about Jesus who was powerful in word and deed and had been handed over by the chief priests and put to death by the Roman rulers. With tragically sad voices, the disciples made it clear to Jesus-in-disguise that they had been hoping that Jesus was the one they could pin their hopes on. The narrative implies this pair believed the time for hope had passed them by. They were on their way (home?) from a confusing, empty grave and the bewildering testimony of women who said they heard from an angel that Jesus lives.

Jesus’ response likely surprised them. “Oh foolish ones,” he said, “and slow in heart to believe in all which spoke the prophets.” If you’ve read the story, you know that Jesus preaches a sermon to them as they walk to the village—reminding them of all the scriptures concerning the Christ who would suffer before entering his glory.

It’s only when the trio have stopped off at the village for the night that the disciples recognize Jesus in a split-second as he breaks bread at the table—and then he vanishes before their eyes. Then, they name what had been happening during their entire exchange with Jesus: that their hearts had been “burning” within them as Jesus spoke to them on the road.

I don’t know how I fumbled through leading my older friends through this passage. I’m sure I was terribly awkward. What I do remember is the profundity of the thought, in my own quiet study ahead of time, that Jesus was with the disciples even when they couldn’t see it. And that Jesus was with me, too, when I couldn’t see him either.

This past Holy Week and Easter, the Spirit drew me back to this story because the thoughts of my heart of late have echoed the posture of Cleopas and his friend. I’ve “stood with a sad look” at something. And I “was hoping” for a situation to present differently. This can become a way of walking through life, if I (we) are not careful. Crestfallen, dismayed, orphan-hearted, and resigned to things being exactly what they appear to be. Our eyes “held from” recognizing Jesus at work in ways beyond our ability to predict.

As I read the story again, my heart burns and I think the Spirit chastises me in a kindly way. Oh foolish one, slow in heart to believe…I dare you to believe.

I am dared by the Spirit to trust that the Lord is as close to me now as his physical body was to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Because the Lord walks with me, I am dared to bundle up all my doubts and fears and cast them, with an Olympian’s arm, far from me and enter the coming day a blind woman with confidence in the One who sees.

Christ is Risen.

He is Risen Indeed.

I told my kid she was lucky when she got this job—that handling newborns all day is a fast-and-sweet dopamine rush that won’t make you high.

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And, I thought nothing of the shadow side to this industry: bereavement photography. I’ve now learned there are newborn deaths in the hospital nearly every week. Sometimes a single. Sometimes twins. Sometimes one twin but not the other. Sometimes a premie. Sometimes a full-term baby. Sometimes a three-inch fetus. My daughter doesn’t shoot these photos herself but she edits them after the nurses take pictures. And because she lives in the same house as me, I have spent far too many minutes scrolling bereavement photos for which I have no words that do honor to the dead or to their parents, who sometimes pose in photos with their beloveds snuggled against their chests.

At times these deceased newborns look alive or at least recently animated. And other times, there is clear degradation of their features that likely began in utero. My daughter and I have talked more about pregnancy and fertility in the last two months than we have in the last 23 years, and I’ve found myself transported back to some truly awful obstetric experiences and some truly joyful ones. I know what it’s like to glow with victory after labor, and I know what it’s like to recede into bed pillows, devastated by pregnancy loss and emergency surgery. Both new life and death are sacred spaces, but outsiders can’t easily enter the latter space.

How does anyone other than a parent behold and bear the image of a living twin snuggled against her dead brother? How does a parent behold and bear the precious face of their deceased, nine-inch-long baby, her features like melted wax? Hamilton lyrics beat through my mind as I write this:

There are moments that the words don't reach. There is suffering too terrible to name.
You hold your child as tight as you can and push away the unimaginable.1

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If you follow me on social media, it’s no secret that I post stories about detainment centers around the country. I share stories of children whose parents have been abducted by ICE while they were away at school, stories of non-criminals and legal residents who have been arrested and detained and held without legal counsel or due process, stories of citizens who experience the same. In the news last week, a Human Rights Watch report2 stated that the men at Florida immigration centers were forced to eat like dogs with their hands shackled behind their backs; detainees were denied medical care and meals and sanitary conditions. Some have died since arriving:

“Based on interviews with 11 current and former detainees at Krome North Service Processing Center, the Broward Transitional Center and the Federal Detention Center between January and June, as well as data analysis and conversations with 14 immigration lawyers, Human Rights Watch concluded in its report that people at these facilities were subjected to ‘dangerously substandard medical care, overcrowding, abusive treatment, and restrictions on access to legal and psychosocial support. The report also found that detainees were forced to sleep on cold, concrete floors without bedding and were given ‘substandard’ food.’”3

When I read about the conditions in the detention center, grief twists in my stomach the way it does when I look at curated photo galleries of deceased newborns and their parents. Shielded from view in the hospital are parents suffering the unimaginable. Shielded from our view—with the exception of some written reports and interviews—human beings made in the image of God long for their families and plead for medical care, food, and water. Some of them die.

These spaces are the very definition of godforsaken. The spaces where God is petitioned, cursed, and bargained with. The spaces of Job and Hagar.4 The spaces of Jairus5 and Joseph.6

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When I’m feeling particularly wordless with grief these days, I pull up a morning prayer liturgy arranged by Brian Zahnd.7 As I pray through it, lines of the beatitudes leap out. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And another line from the liturgy: Be mindful of our frame, we are but dust / we can only take so much.

I cannot save detainees who are unjustly imprisoned, although I call my representative and senators frequently. I cannot reverse the death of a newborn or erase the pain in bereaved parent’s heart, although I grieve for and with them (and they will never know). The one and only thought that comforts me is this: Alligator Alcatraz may keep the public out, but it cannot keep God out. In fact, God is there among the poor and the suffering who are surrounded by alligators and pythons.8 While in one sense Christ is a detainee,9 in another sense God is with the detainees. God is, as one of my New Testament professors said in class, “on their side.”10 While Christians are compelled by Christ to seek justice for others when it is within their power to do so, Hagar’s God—the God who sees11—never abandons the powerless and the suffering.

While justice for the powerless delays, it is the great Christian hope that full justice and the eradication of evil will one day be fulfilled in the reappearance of Christ. On that day, I pray we shout these words triumphantly:

Blessed are those who ate with hands tied behind their backs, for they will freely feast.

Blessed are those who were denied medical care, for they will be made whole.

Blessed are those whose parents were stolen during the school day, for they will receive mothers and brothers and sisters and fathers in abundance.

Blessed are those whose children died, for death will be reversed.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

This year, I also planted baby’s breath from seed. The seed packet came wrapped in a trio of packets, a May birthday gift from my youngest daughter. I strewed the seeds, covered them with shallow soil in the raised garden bed, and hoped for germination (because it’s not always a given). A week or so later, the seedlings were arcing their way toward the sky but so was an invasive, shallow-rooted weed that was springing up all over the garden bed. The weed threatened to choke out my seedlings, so every day, I gingerly—tenderly—pinched and uprooted the “weedlings” growing up around the baby’s breath.

It was delicate work, and as I bent over the raised bed I remembered Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the chaff. In the parable, the servants ask the master, “Do you want us to go pull up [the weeds in the field]?” The master answers with a firm “no” because, he says, “while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.”1

The memory gave me pause as I rooted and pinched around the baby’s breath seedlings. And for a few days I decided to let them grow a little higher, root a little deeper, before tackling the weeds closest to them. Better safe than sorry and all that.

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While Jesus, in his original context, was using the parable to describe to his disciples what the kingdom of heaven is generally like, I’m aware that the kingdom of heaven is also at work in me, specifically, as it is in you and as it is in all creation.

And because I am habitually obsessed with gardening metaphors, and because I have some very real weeds entwined around some real seedlings in the garden, the parable got me thinking about what’s growing from the soil of my life right now.

For the past three years, I’ve been in a season that was unexpected in quality, variety of experience, and duration. I didn’t want a future as an elementary orchestra teacher, and yet I taught orchestra for three months at seven schools in our district—painstakingly tuning violins, gingerly restringing cellos, waving my hands around like a real-life conductor while the fifth-grade ensemble played Hot Cross Buns. I hadn’t planned a career as a high school English teacher, and yet, for three months, I graded essays and consulted rubrics with the utmost attention and care. Additionally, I served for six months as an interim pastor at a church an hour from my home, and it was good to find out that pastoring God’s people felt a little bit like riding a bike. I knew how to love and shepherd them—it wasn’t hard—but I knew they weren’t the people I was supposed to serve indefinitely.

And now, I’m teaching the English language to immigrants and refugees at a local community college, and it’s not what I envision doing forever even if I think I’m good at it, even if I feel a little bit like a pastor in this setting, even if I love my students, even if this work matters, and even though their education is high-stakes (the difference between making a true living wage and continuing to work at Walmart while supporting children and displaced elderly family members abroad).

What I miss in this season is pastoring people, as a vocation, in a congregational setting, over an extended period of time.

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What is a weed if not something we didn’t intend to grow, something that apparently displaces that which we desire? The weeds might be beautiful and robust, colorful and alive, and yet unwanted, apparently crowding out the plants we would prefer bear fruit. If each of my vocational experiences during the summer of my mid-forties was something growing in the garden of my life, I surely would have plucked them out in favor of a harvest of my own design.

As time passes, however, I’ve become gradually aware that there is something else springing up in my garden alongside these unplanned vocational excursions. It seems that Master-Gardener Jesus snuck some seeds in the soil under cover of night, without my notice. To root out all the seemingly random vocational experiences would be to forgo the sort of harvest I sense he’s keen on me reaping.

How do I describe that harvest?

It consists partly of a deeper knowing of who I am no matter what I am doing, a knowing of what values shape my life whether I am in vocational ministry or teaching myself to play Mary Had a Little Lamb poorly so I can teach eleven-year-olds to play Mary Had a Little Lamb poorly. The harvest consists partly of a deeper freedom to live integriously without the constant temptation we pastors have to “perform” our integrity on a platform or in an office (because it’s our job and people expect us to). The harvest consists partly of greater confidence in my own relationship with God apart from vocational identifiers and titles. And, it consists of better sight and deeper love for people of all walks of life, ages, skin colors, religions, and cultural backgrounds—churched and unchurched. If and when my vocation takes me back to a full-time ministry context, I won’t be the person or pastor I was before.

To appreciate a harvest-in-the-making is a prophetic act of trust in Master-Gardener Jesus. Not only that, we are invited to trust him in every season no matter what he allows to grow in our lives. The weeds we’d rather pluck up and toss in the fire will always be with us. These unwelcome visitors are inconvenient, distasteful, disappointing, and sometimes heartbreakingly painful. Should we uproot them, we risk uprooting the harvest he wants us to reap.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

I tried to embrace the day by celebrating it as a rite of passage. But to be honest, the night before, as I waited for nightly meds to engulf me in a fog of sleep, a few tears slipped down my face as I revisited our last 20 years together.

There are so many ways I’ve grown up, just as she’s grown up. So many things I’ve learned about parenting, about myself, and about the unique and specific individual that is this human I was allowed to raise. And for a minute, I wished I could take back some time and do over a few turbulent evenings, weeks, and seasons.

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If you’ve been a parent longer than five minutes, chances are you’ve wished for a do-over simply because you learned a better way. The irony, though, is that we learn these better ways by living out the inferior ones, which makes the start of each new parenting step not so much a leveling up but a leveling out, a regaining of our footing just before we fall short—again. And, this constant sense of being a little bit off our games (at least with our first, and maybe second and third, child) is what tempts me to imagine a parenting do-over—one with more wisdom, grace, and winsome appeal, bestowing lessons on a (perhaps) more grateful recipient (because of my more winsome approach).

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It so happened that the week before her move, I’d picked up a book about Christian discipleship and maturity by Ron Rolheiser. I had no expectation that it would speak to a mother letting her adult child fly the nest, but Rolheiser likens the journey of discipleship to the stages of a life, and specifically likens the setting out of the prodigal son to the wanderlust of youth with its powerful temptations in all directions. This paragraph stopped me up short:

“Fortunately…nature and God are persistent and lay their own traps and enticements to lure us into adulthood. Puberty drives us out of our first home, and though it may take 10 or 20 years, most of us eventually find our way back home again, to a new home, one that we have created for ourselves.”

It is a comfort to remember that not all lessons can be learned under a parent’s roof. God knows I did so much learning when, at 18, I moved into a tiny basement apartment in my college town and then into another (this time moldy) basement apartment at 19 and newly married. In fact, it would be impossible to learn what can be learned on one’s own before one is actually on one’s own.

With our perpetually flawed execution of good intentions, we parents spend approximately 18 years laying our own traps and enticements to lure our children into adulthood. Chore charts, consequences, allowance, and driver’s ed—complete with enticements to forgive, cooperate, suffer long with siblings, love God and Scripture, lean into the voice of the Holy Spirit—well, these were our enticements to design. And now, paradoxically, we must of course remain parents while simultaneously handing our baton off to “nature and God,” trusting them to do the work that only God and nature can do, to lure our children home, but not to our literal houses, mind you. No, we must trust God to lure them home to their centered-in-God selves.

Parent friends, I pray we would feel able, willing, joyful in releasing our grip on that baton, knowing we’ve sprinted our quarter of the track with as much faithfulness and doggedness we could muster. Let us let God take it from here.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

In his working days, one man was an officer of the law, hunting criminals for a living. His life’s work was confounded by a particularly elusive ex-con—a man who took on false identities to evade the shame of his past.

The other man I’ve come to know is the ex-con himself, who lived life as the hunted, in violation of his parole. Decades before, when food was lean, he stole a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. His five-year prison sentence swelled to nineteen after failed attempts at escape. Once released, he forged a new identity, got falsely identifying papers, disappeared from view of his parole officer, and managed to earn the respect of his community, contribute to the welfare of the poor, and seek to protect the most vulnerable under his influence, including a single mother and her child. When the officer of the law finally closed in on him, Jean Valjean sequestered himself behind the walls of a convent.

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It’s possible you know these men, too. Their stories are set in pre-revolutionary France, where the [self-proclaimed] righteous hurry past and cannot seem to hear the little one’s crying. Where winter is coming on fast, ready to kill. The men of Les Miserables sing me their songs, and I fumble to accompany them at the antique, ivory-keyed piano in my sunroom.

Tracking down and arresting Valjean became Javert’s obsession, believing himself an agent of divine justice against the criminal, but Javert’s definition of justice has only to do with punishment under the letter of the law.

Valjean, on the other hand, has his finger on the pulse of what the prophet Isaiah describes as God’s brand of justice: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow."1 At great risk and expense, Valjean takes up the cause of the orphan Cosette.

Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, biblical justice isn’t wholly about retribution, punishment, or vengeance. And it’s not about “law and order.” Biblical justice includes the reversal of wrongs. It (biblical justice) often takes a half-empty cup of humanitarian aid and fills it back up to the top, like the overflowing oil in the widow’s jars.2 Often, it includes reversals of social marginalization and economic vulnerability.

For this reason, God is on the side of the Biblical Israelite who must sell his land and indenture himself to another in order to feed his family. One day, in the year of Jubilee, that man’s descendant’s will receive his land back in full.3

God is on the side of the single mother and the orphan,4 and wags a finger at the Israelites, Don’t you dare even think about mistreating them.5

God is on the side of the bleeding woman who spent all she had on health care and continues to “pollute” every person she touches.6 The great reversal performed by Jesus is not just a stopping of the flow of blood, but a pronouncement of her inclusion in the family of God.7

God is for Cities of Refuge for the Israelite who doesn’t deserve death and yet his enemies seek to kill him.

God is on the side of the concubine and refugee, afraid of dying with her child in the desert.8

God is on the side of abused children.9

God is on the side of hungry children.10

God is on the side of refugee children.11

And, I dare say God is on the side of refugee parents, fleeing gang violence, sweating their way through jungles with children on their backs and blisters on their feet, who are turned away at the border or, later, separated from their families and forced onto a plane headed for a high-security prison in El Salvador.

These parents often leave their home country because there is no justice to be found in the forms of economic security, food security, and safety from violence. So they cross a border in order to keep their children alive for one more day. They steal the emblematic loaf of bread.

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Back to Javert and Valjean.

One man follows the laws of the land as if they are God’s laws. One man follows the laws of God at whatever cost.

Javert, the eighteenth-century ICE agent, is sure that he, like those who follow the path of the righteous, shall have their reward. But, if they fall as Lucifer fell, well then: the flame, the sword! (CECOT!)12

His self-righteousness is ebullient: Stars be my witness, I never shall yield….He [Valjean] knows his way in the dark, but mine is the way of the Lord.

I know Javert can’t hear it, but when he sings, I hear a harmonic line from the Pharisee in Luke 18: Thank God I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.

Valjean, who cannot bear the possibility that another should suffer unjustly. Valjean, when faced with a dilemma to lose his freedom or send an innocent man to prison in his place, speaks up to spare the innocent man. How can he so bravely step into this self-sacrifice? He sings:

My soul belongs to God, I know. I made this bargain long ago.
He gave me hope when hope was gone. He gave me strength to journey on.

In Valjean’s moment of decision to choose justice for another over his own safety, he mulls over the question, Who am I? I cannot help but think he asks it in light of who he now knows God to be. Perhaps he has memorized Isaiah 11:

but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.13

It stands to reason that if God is just in his dealings toward the world, then Valjean must be so, too. Who is God? He is just. Who is Valjean? He is God’s.

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These days, I’m seeing a lot of copy-and-pastes of Romans 13:1-7 on social media. The passage reminds Christians not to stir up trouble with the authorities. Their new Jesus-allegiance is not to lead them to revolt or rebellion against governing authorities, and it seems the apostle Paul wanted them to recognize that, however broken the system, human government can be God’s tool for deterring wrongdoing, safeguarding society, and preventing the rule of evil.

But we can’t pretend that human government is perfectly just. We know that even on its good days, some “ruler” somewhere is benefiting from their position at the cost of the vulnerable. And, on some very bad days (and weeks and years and decades), some rulers embrace demonic ideologies of oppression that allow evil to thrive and wreak havoc on the lives of the poor.

A law is not just simply by virtue of being codified into law. Nor is a lawmaker just by virtue of being elected, appointed, or descended from a king.

Valjean’s song reminds me of the God of justice. The one who sees, the one who, ultimately, will “give decisions for the poor of the earth” and will hold nations to account for their unresponsiveness to the poor, the prisoner, the stranger, the hungry and the sick.14

His song bears resonance with the knowledge embedded in the prayers for migrants and refugees in the World Relief Prayer Guide.15

I leave you with the words of pastor and activist Sandra Maria Van Opstal:

God of our ancestors, God who journeys with us,
We come to you as a people who have been pressed but not crushed,
Displaced but never without a home in you….16

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

“I’m not going to die,” he would say with bewilderment at the strength of my anticipatory grief. He wasn’t much comfort. Of course he was going to die. We all were.

Most young adults I’ve known are not overcome by grief at the thought of a loved one’s death, nor do they seem to dwell on these possible scenarios. My own seemingly immortal children turn up their noses at death-related subjects like they are ugly sweaters at a thrift store.

Twenty-eight years after my wedding, I can only guess at why death made such an impression on my younger self. Four years before I married, a family friend (a father and husband) lost control of his car on an icy stretch of roadway while doing his teen-aged son’s school drop-off. The man died. His son survived, barely. A year later, a friend and coworker died by suicide, three months after his own wedding day. I didn’t understand then how death by suicide breaks limbs in us that never fully set straight. All I knew was a shattering so severe that it limited my ability to perceive or understand all that happened afterward—the deterioration of my mental and physical health and constant, plaguing thoughts of death for the rest of my junior year of high school.

I was a Christian, for whom death should, technically, not sting. Or so I was told.1 Instead, death created a festering gash in my person. The idea of resurrection amounted only to, as Christian Wiman writes, “a fiction and a distraction;” I didn’t understand that “to see…despair clearly is the first step to being out of it.”2 I was seeing through a fog, and continued to do so as death reprised its part in every act of my story: miscarriages, a brother—suddenly and violently in his thirties—grandparents, and even an aging father whose gray hair reminds me our days are indeed numbered.

What I’ve come to realize, however, is that it wasn’t just death I hated. It was Time. Time that could not be unwound or undone. A past that could not be gone back to. Relationships that could not be reconciled on this side of heaven, or so it seemed. Days, weeks, and years of aging bodies and dimming minds. I’ve hated Time with so much vengeance and, it turns out, so much pride.

“To resent mortality is a mark of hubris. When we resent our own mortality, we resent the fact that what is given is not eternal.”3 James K.A. Smith’s How to Inhabit Time caught me off guard, reminding me that just as I’ve always been a created being, so is Time God’s creation. A gift, in fact. A vehicle through which God chooses to allow us mortals to encounter eternity. God enters Time by his Spirit, speaking in dreams and whispers as we alternate between sleep and waking. God providentially arranges circumstances on some days, is (apparently) silent on others, and entered history (Time) by donning flesh and blood that looks like ours.

To claim Time as a gift seems all wrong, and yet it is the holy how of God’s choosing to reveal himself to us—in seasons of youth, middle years, and final chapters. And even then, when “our” Time comes, we are not done with Time. We Christians anticipate another Time—for resurrection and redemption. It could be that, all these years, my weeping was simply a longing for new creation.

But even if this is the case, Smith cautions that while we may know the end of the story, it’s important we allow it to recalibrate our present: “The question is not whether we know what’s coming, but how we live in the light of such expectation.”

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It so happens that today is my youngest child’s fifteenth birthday. Like many mothers, I am nostalgic for the years of her childhood, which were tender and sweet. But because nostalgia can so easily turn to a resentment of Time, I am practicing (sometimes flaggingly) two things: 1) love for the time I am in now, which is the “arena of God’s redemptive action,” and 2) allowance for “God’s covenantal faithfulness across time” to “fuel [my] hope.”4

This morning, this practice looks like garden roses, pancakes, and syrup at the breakfast table; an embrace of my daughter as she heads off to school for her last day of 9th grade; our family’s favorite Chinese take-out for dinner, and gratitude that God has given Time as the canvas on which her life is painted and blooming.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

In the aftermath of the Chi Alpha sex abuse scandal becoming public, I’ve read student testimonials and news and feature articles. I’ve read the published letters that warned, five years earlier, our national leadership of a sexual predator working with Chi Alpha students. I’ve listened to the results of scholarly research that analyzed the power structures and language in our governing and policy documents that created ambiguity about who should intervene and how it should be done.

But, I have not heard lament from those in AG leadership.

I thought I might hear it in August of 2023, a few months after the scandal became public, when AG ministers from around the country and world gathered in Ohio for the Assemblies of God’s General Council, the largest gathering of AG ministers in the nation that occurs every two years. I was not in attendance that year, but around lunch time on the last day of business, a pastor friend texted me: “The rumor is that legal counsel is going to address the Chi Alpha situation at 12:30 today…if you can livestream.”

Chi Alpha falls under the division of the “U.S. Missions” department. A little after 12:30 p.m. local time, the then-U.S. Missions director (not legal counsel) came to the stage. I waited with bated breath for his comments, anticipating a word of acknowledgement, sorrow, or lament over what had come to light only a few months before.

However, the U.S. Missions director never mentioned Chi Alpha by name. His comments were generalized and only hinted at something “broken”:

Our future’s promising. We’ve worked through some difficult times, and we have really aligned ourselves with some areas that were broken. You’ve heard it said that the bird with the broken wing can never fly as high again? Well, I want you to know with man it’s impossible….but not with God, for with God all things are possible. I want to declare that God has given U.S. Missions wings that will take us higher than we have ever flown before. Amen.2

After expressing gratitude for the directors in U.S. Missions, he left the stage with applause. As he left, the General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God offered, from his seat as chair in the middle of the stage, these comments:

We don’t always mix inspiration and business and business and inspiration. I want you to know that this fellowship has an incredible, incredible ministry that’s reconciling students to Christ, and it’s the ministry called Chi Alpha. And we’re grateful that God is raising up people who feel a call of God who will go on to perhaps the greatest mission field here in the United States, and that’s universities, campuses.

I get it. Along the spectrum in ministry lines there are times when there are hiccups, there are times when there are shortcomings, there are times when there are failures, but the failure of some individuals never trumps the strength and the purpose and the vitality of the particular ministry.3

Without naming the sex abuse, each set of comments tiptoed perhaps as close to the issue as legal counsel advised. I will try to be as generous as possible in my interpretation of these comments. I recognize that the men who spoke them were engaging in the courageous task required of pastors in difficult times: they were encouraging the flock—pointing them to the God through whom impossible things are made possible and celebrating the service of young people responding to the call of God.

And.

I have learned in recent years how important it is to be able to acknowledge two seemingly opposing truths without allowing either to cancel the other out. Let me demonstrate this here:

1. The men who made these comments are good, God-fearing, well-intentioned men. And, their comments did not satisfy the desire I and many others have for transparency, acknowledgement, accountability, truth, and lament.

2. I can be generous in my reception of their comments. And, I can say it is impossible to reconcile the word “hiccup” with a massive sexual abuse scandal.

3. I am encouraged by remembering the God who does the impossible. And, it is difficult to reconcile the triumphalist tone of “flying high” absent an acknowledgement of all that has brought us low, all that has broken our “wing.”

Without allowing space for both the triumph and the brokenness to breathe together, each set of comments nodded at the elephant in the room and minimized its enormity.

It was only as I drafted this post that I learned, from those who have been following this story closely, that an official statement of lament and acknowledgement was in fact published on the AG.org website in 2023. You can read it at the link and you can see that heartbreak takes up space in the language.

However, there is currently no direct link to the statement on the AG website (that I have found to date). The link shared in the paragraph above was given to me through an online forum. Multiple people who have followed the story closely even told me that no such statement ever existed. When I went to the AG website’s “Official Statements” page to look for it while writing this post, there was a page error and no content. Using the website search feature, I searched for “chi alpha,” “Savala,” and “statements.” Searching for “Savala” did result in a link to a statement in Spanish. However, when I clicked on the link, it took me to a dead page on the Spanish-translated site.

To this day—to my knowledge—there is no obvious and accessible public acknowledgement or lament about the harm that was done and the suffering that continues for many victims. To quote the movie Encanto, all of this gives “We Don’t Talk about Bruno.”

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While Daniel Savala and some of the Chi Alpha ministers who engaged in sexually abusive behavior have been arrested, charged, and/or convicted, I still long to hear from our leaders who existed in the grey periphery of the scandal. I long to hear their lament and resolve to examine our practices of governance so abuse on this scale can never happen again.

As I said in Part 2, these Substack posts are not meant to demonize those leaders in the “grey zone,” nor are they meant to demonize Chi Alpha. Faithful ministers can be found in every division of the Assemblies of God; many are my personal friends.

And. We know that well-intentioned people can make harmful decisions when the political current of an organization encourages a particular kind of bureaucratic response to difficult situations. (In this case, as Ryan Beaty has explained,4 the national and local governance structures and lack of specificity in policies regarding accountability for Chi Alpha missionaries made oversight difficult to implement.)

And. It is my personal opinion that our ministerial culture often equates rebuke of our leaders and/or critique of our movement with disloyalty and dishonor. For the sake of the church and the gospel we preach, we need to redefine our ideas about loyalty and honor so that they are no longer contingent on office or rank and fully contingent on a love for accountability, justice, and truth (and, by the way, we can’t have unity if we don’t have truth). On the Chi Alpha and the Lion’s Den website, there is testimony from many students who learned from their Chi Alpha leaders what I can only call a twisted teaching about “spiritual authority,” which in application seems to have looked like a veneration of, a radical deference to, and a refusal to question their leaders. I fear a version of this exists in pockets of our broader fellowship. At the end of the day, blind deference and a refusal to critique our movement will result in a loss of credibility with a world we seek to win for Christ.

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When I go back to the words of my dream, that “pruning will bear much fruit,” I remember that pruning is costly. Every year, I cringe as I cut back my rose bush, fearing it will not blossom as beautifully as it did the season before. Pruning costs us the potential fruit from the part of the vine that is cut off. The gardener must be willing to forgo that fruit for the sake of greater fruitfulness in the season to come.

Pruning is also an act of intentional vulnerability. It creates a wound that heals in the long-term, but bleeds in the short.

What does pruning look like for the Assemblies of God or any organization that must account for systemic failures that lead to the unintended enablement or hiddenness of widespread sexual abuse? And how can we be cleansed if we cannot admit to ourselves and the world that we’re in need of washing?

It’s important we recognize that one barrier to intentional vulnerability is our litigating culture. The church in the United States has, for better and worse, bowed to the advice of secularly trained legal counsel, which often stands in direct opposition to restorative practices such as corporate confession, corporate repentance, and corporate lament. In conversations about the Chi Alpha scandal, I have heard versions of the sentiment, “So-and-so would have done/said such-and-such but legal counsel advised against it” multiple times. We need to be honest about the fact that fear of litigation and financial loss seems to have impaired the corporate body’s ability to confess the truth, lament, heal, and restore credibility to our witness of the gospel we preach, as well as earn back the trust of college campuses, students, parents, and a world that is watching.

There are no easy answers here, I know. But these are questions worth asking. And these practices are worth questioning. So what, I’ve often wondered, if courageously lamenting the heinousness of the abuse and the failure of our systems makes us vulnerable to further financial loss? If we do truly serve the God of the impossible, wouldn’t we have to trust him with our bank accounts?

Friend, I know you may be thinking, “This is all so easy for her to say. She doesn’t have to make the hard decisions and steward the money that has been sacrificed so that the gospel can be preached through our ministers and ministries.” I agree with you. It is much easier for me to tap out these words in a Substack post than for any leader, aware of the true cost of confession and lament, to put our resources on the line.

And. I wonder what kind of gospel we are protecting if we are unable to demonstrate the humility that confession, repentance, and lament require. Every Sunday, Assemblies of God ministers around the world invite congregants and church visitors to altars where confession, lament, and surrender are met with strength, hope, and redemption. We, too, must be willing to go to the altar.

In closing, I would like to suggest a few altar-embracing courses of action that may still be attainable for us in this significant moment. There are surely others, and there are minds smarter than mine that will certainly have more and better things to say. Nevertheless I believe these ideas are worth considering (or at the very least improving upon):

First, let the members of the institution steady themselves to accept some degree of financial loss through pending lawsuits. Allow this loss to drive us to investigate every nook and cranny of policy that needs clarification and improvement.

Second, at some point, the truth of what has happened must be acknowledged broadly and widely—and not just by journalists outside of our movement. When lawsuits are settled and done, members of the institutions have a right to know how resources have been spent. Talk about what has been learned and regretted. Identify best practices moving forward.

Third, lament. Make clear and easily accessible statements of lament verbally and in writing.

Fourth, create a fund so that ongoing professional counseling is available to every victim of AG clergy sexual abuse or malpractice from now until Jesus comes back.

Fifth, invest in trainings across the country for district leaders, pastors, and board members to be able to recognize spiritual and emotional abuse and the warning signs of sexually abusive behavior.

Six, create policies that encourage and protect employees from punitive measures if they, in good faith, publicly “blow the whistle” on questionable activities outside their own departments or “zone” of ministry. Despite popular opinion, we have a very good biblical precedent for the public rebuke of Christian leaders.

At the end of the day, I long for us to embrace the vulnerability of pruning—to welcome its wound—so that we can prepare for a better harvest, a better future.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

It’s still mid-April, 2022, a week in which I had three intense dreams. Here is the third and final dream that week—a sequel, so to speak, to the dream I shared in last Friday’s post.

I am standing on a gorgeous well-manicured green lawn resembling the grounds around the Old Capitol building at the University of Iowa, my alma mater.2 Here, I am talking to Q.3 At this point [in the timeline of my dream—not in real life], the abuse/scandal I saw in my previous dream has been revealed, and the Executive Presbytery (EP) of the Assemblies of God (AG) is deliberating on the grassy lawn of a college campus: what will their response be?

Q tells me they trust the EP will make a good decision about “who could preach.” In the AG, we call one of our ministerial credentials a “license to preach.” I know that Q means that the EP was in the process of deciding who would undergo discipline and have their credentials revoked because of the abuse that had come to light.

But I’m concerned the discipline will not go far enough or that removal of these ministers will be only temporary. Surely, I hope, whoever has done the abusing would not be able to continue on in ministry—ever. But Q and the EP are distressed over the idea that some of these ministers might never preach again, that their credentialed ministry could be terminated.

It is a sunny spring day, and Q steps away from me for a moment and goes to speak to a colleague about the situation she and I have just been discussing. In the shade of a hundred-year-old tree, the colleague tells Q that, in their opinion, what needs to happen within the organization is “pruning” in order for the AG to be more fruitful and healthy again.

When Q hears the word “pruning,” their face fills with wonder because they have heard something somewhere about pruning before. In fact, Q thinks they remember hearing that “pruning bears much fruit,” but Q isn’t totally sure if this is a trustworthy metaphor for church discipline.

At this very moment, Q spots the groundskeeper of the institution working near the foot of a tree, tending to it, and Q runs up to him and asks, “Is it true that pruning bears much fruit?”

“Yes,” the groundskeeper says. “It is.”

At this, Q begins to rejoice openly, to the point of weeping with joy that there could be much good fruit in the lives not only of individuals but also within the entire AG if this pruning could occur.

Then, the scene shifted and I am at a home with Q and her colleagues, who are eating dinner around the table. Q however, is still weeping with joy and relief. As the dream is wrapping up, Q remembers that their own “father” (who is in heaven) had been a gardener (one who prunes!), and Q’s thoughts are turned toward him with love and relief.

End scene. End dream.

If you are in any way familiar with the teachings of Jesus in the Gospel of John chapter 15, then the metaphors from my dream are probably screaming at you.

“My father is the gardener,” Jesus says (v. 2). “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”

The “vine” is an Old Testament metaphor often used for the nation of Israel. Various prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) employed the metaphor as a means to describe God as a gardener/vinedresser/caretaker of Israel, desiring it to be abundantly fruitful. Marianne Meye Thompson writes, “Jeremiah speaks of a vine that had born fruit ‘in all truthfulness’ but had subsequently become degenerate and was in need of washing.”4 Ezekiel portrays lopped-of branches that are discarded and burned in order to encourage the vine’s fruitfulness (15:4).

Scripture consistently speaks of God’s desire to restore the vine and its fruitfulness once again. And Jesus, in John 15, plucks this metaphor from the Hebrew scriptures and uses it in his discourse to the disciples. To describe the vine’s pruning, John’s Jesus uses a Greek word that can also be translated as cleanse, which offers us a nuanced way to think about pruning as purifying as well as a cutting off.

Thirteen months after my series of dreams, in May of 2023, news of the Chi Alpha sex abuse scandal became public. While the Assemblies of God boasts of a rich pentecostal history filled with faithful and integrous people, it is clear to me (and many others) that our “vine” has been sullied by the heinous acts of some of our ministers as well as by the ways in which district office and national office systems of governance interfaced so as to make it possible for a convicted sex offender to continue working with students.

While the sexually abusive behavior of Chi Alpha ministers should be unequivocally condemned, this Substack series is not meant as an indictment of any one leader who knew Savala volunteered in Chi Alpha ministries (but did not know that abuse was occurring). For one, I am not qualified to appropriate blame. I haven’t been part of any investigations; I do not know enough about behind-closed-doors conversations, directives from supervisors, advice from legal counsel, or other pressures that may have informed the actions that were or were not taken at any given point in time. (Although I hope, by now, hindsight has provided perfect clarity about what should have happened.)

If I’m indicting anything, it’s a system that lacks clarity, as well as a ministerial culture that sometimes ranks departmental, district, and ministerial autonomy above accountability.

I see how the world looks at us in light of this scandal. They see so clearly what we all need to see: For the sake of the gospel and the world, our fellowship should embrace an opportunity to be pruned.

I’ll have more thoughts about this in Part 3. Subscribe below for delivery direct to your inbox.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Today, I want to tell you about an experience I had one year before the scandal became public and continue on next week with a series reflecting on how the AG (and any movement in a similar situation) might embrace the opportunity for refinement and pruning that presents itself whenever abuse has thrived under cover for years. But first, you may need some context. Here is a condensed overview of the scandal as best as I understand it:1

In the spring of 2023, stories of cult-like behavior and sexual abuse enabled by college campus ministers in my fellowship, the Assemblies of God, broke the news cycle. The roots of the abuse spanned decades, a continent, and several Chi Alpha campus ministry chapters from which ministers took students to visit a convicted sex offender, a man named Daniel Savala. In short, college students (and the young children of one minister) were pressured by leaders to practice nudity, masturbate with others, and/or they were sexually assaulted by Savala.

While many students did not know of specific acts of sexual abuse that were occurring behind the scenes, “nudity is unity” or “nudity brings unity” reflected the unorthodox practice, encouraged by their Chi Alpha leaders, of getting naked together. Leaders suggested that group nudity was somehow linked to Christian bonding and emotional/relational vulnerability with one another.

Although both district and national leaders in the Assembly of God were notified several years before the story became public that Chi Alpha campus ministers were presenting Savala as a spiritual mentor to students, no district or national leader stepped in in such a way so as to insist that student exposure to Savala cease. As a timeline of events unfolded, it became evident to many that ambiguity existed concerning governance over the Chi Alpha ministers involved—where did the buck stop? With the national office or the local districts? This ambiguity delayed justice and was costly for many.

The experience I had a year before the scandal went public might be a little woo woo for some of my readership, but please charitably keep in mind that we pentecostals are by definition a little woo, given that we believe the Spirit is still pouring out dreams, visions, and prophecies two thousand years after the first “tongues-of-fire” Pentecost (read all about it in Acts chapter 2).

Here’s the scoop:

I’ve been a dreamer for the last twenty-five years. My dreams, at times, have been so explicitly detailed and profoundly true to events I could have no possible knowledge of that I learned to take them seriously—to lean into the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, to ponder, to pray, to discern what God might be saying and whether he was saying something for me alone or as a word of encouragement or direction to others.

Reader, I should also tell you that I’ve had plenty of non-spiritual, unspectacular dreams, too—dreams I initially thought were prophetic or full of promise but were not. Who can say if they were byproducts of my desires or a green smoothie I drank? Regardless, the last two-and-a-half decades of dreaming have caused me to remain on a journey with the Lord, to stay close to him in order to discern how to weigh what I hear and see in my dreams, and to become more fluent in the “language” the Spirit speaks to me in my dreams.

April of 2022 was no different than other months in that regard, but the dreams were frequent and far more intense.

In the middle of the month, I had a series of three in one week. Today, I’ll tell you in detail about one of them. For brevity’s sake I’ve collapsed some of the details and left out some parts that don’t seem relevant to the main message.

I am in a building in Springfield, MO, surrounded by ministers from my fellowship—the Assemblies of God. One by one, these ministers leave the building and I remain alone inside. In search of a restroom, I wander the halls for a while and stumbled upon a door that opens up to a college dorm-style room.2 A bit later, as I come out of the dorm room, I stumble upon a scene of horrific physical and sexual abuse taking place in a hallway near a set of stairs leading down to the lobby. A man is abusing a woman and a child in one of the most heinous ways I could ever imagine (on the level of the abuse and dismemberment of the concubine in Judges 19). The man abusing the woman and child is not an AG minister, but somehow he is there, in a context dedicated to ministry [just like the sex offender, Daniel Savala].

Uncertain as to how to stop him, and shaking with fear and horror, I race down a large staircase into a rotunda-like lobby. Flanked against the curving walls are a row of old-school pay phones. I grab one off its receiver, frantically dial 911, and shout at the operator, “I am in the Assemblies of God Historical House. Someone is being sexually assaulted right now.” [Friend, you should know there is no such building as the ‘Assemblies of God Historical House.’ I knew, even as I was shouting those words at the operator that they represented the institution and governance of the Assemblies of God.]

In my dream, I can see the 911 operator tracking my location on her video displays of the city’s street grid. The ‘AG Historical House’ was in a section of the city lit up with flashing white lights on her screen, and the operator tells me that my call is coming from “neutral territory.” By this, I know she means the police will not come, that local authorities will not intervene. In desperation, I scream into the phone again, thinking she doesn’t understand: “Assault is happening right now in the Assemblies of God Historical House!”

As you might imagine, I was shaken by such a pointed and horrifying dream. As I woke up, the face of one of the members of the AG’s executive presbytery (EP)3 floated into my mind, and I felt prompted to email them. In fact, earlier in the week, I had had a dream in which I was wearing a t-shirt from a ministry this EP member was involved in. (I’ll refer to this person as “Q” since they could not give consent for showing up in my dreams.)

I felt certain that I was being led to share the dream with Q because I know them to be someone who hears from the Lord and functions in prophetic gifting. I knew Q would hold the disturbing dream with me in prayer as something of importance—asking and praying with me that the Lord would reveal any hidden evil within any AG ministries and heal the destruction wrought by it. Q did just that, and said they would let me know, without breaking the EP rules of confidentiality, if and when they saw something come before the EP that matched the magnitude and import of my dream.

Just one brief aside (because hindsight is always 20/20): At the time I had my dream, I couldn’t have known what all the details signified, but now I understand that the lack of intervention by the local authorities mirrored a posture of non-intervention by various parties who were given reason for concern about Savala. Ryan Beaty, a PhD candidate in the Department of Communications at the University of Oklahoma, demonstrates in this podcast interview4 how the language of governing documents and policy within the AG create gray areas and opportunities for good leaders to “pass the buck” to another leader, department, or district—resulting in delayed or non-intervention. As I mentioned above, this dynamic enabled abuse to go on for years.

I assumed God had given me the dream so I could pray—for truth to be known, for victims to be healed, for evil to be stopped. I watched and waited, wondering if anything would come to light. Thirteen months later it did.

But, that week’s dreams weren’t yet over. I’ll share more next week in Part 2. Subscribe below to get posts delivered to your inbox.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Earlier this week, I began a series examining the conflict between the apostles Peter and Paul about table fellowship with Gentiles and what it might teach us about the public rebuke of Christian leaders. Read the first installment of the series here and follow along from there. 

Yesterday, we took a little segue into the questions, “But what about Matthew 18 Didn’t Jesus say to rebuke in private?” Today, I offer some final reflections on the series’ exploration of the Antioch conflict.

CONCLUSION

Paul’s rebuke of Peter was performed in front of the church and in his letter to the Galatians because Peter’s social behavior threatened to corrupt 1) the message of the gospel, which provided the basis of unity between Jews and Gentiles, and 2) the local multiethnic fellowship in Antioch. Paul was direct; he pulled no punches. He condemned, lectured, chastised Peter “to his face” and in front of everyone else because “life [in Christ] together requires accountability for the good of each and the good of all.” Indeed, togetherness would have been lost along with, perhaps, the faith of Gentile converts had Paul not delivered a public rebuke.

Two thousand years later, our speech in local and digital public spaces has the potential to be “heard” in front of everyone at any time. The age has been labeled one of outrage, filled with performances of outrage on social media platforms where cancel culture can decimate the possibility of second chances for those whose behavior fails, disappoints, or offends our sensibilities of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Given these trends, Christians must not be careless about their public critique or rebuke of leaders, digital or otherwise. The goal of our public critique ought to be the same as Paul’s: to protect the unity of the church, to protect the faith of the most vulnerable, and to curtail the impact of leaders’ social behavior that would corrupt or pervert the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Arguably, the most vulnerable people in our churches are new believers, children, ethnic minorities, and victims of sexual or other kinds of abuse at the hands of church leaders. When a leader’s social behavior jeopardizes the faith of the vulnerable (or their understanding/reception of the gospel), Paul’s public rebuke serves as a powerful model for correction and restoration of the church’s embodiment of the gospel message. While I, like many, strongly believe behaviors such as sexual and physical abuse are “forever” disqualifiers from church leadership, in the Paul vs. Peter conflict we see that public correction of a leader’s social behavior does not necessarily require their exclusion from the church community or demotion from church leadership, although it does require repentance.

In addition, it is not always possible or desirable to privatize the rebuke of a church leader’s social behavior so that it stays within the walls of one local community. Even Paul did not see it in the early church’s best interest to keep Peter’s sin and subsequent rebuke hidden. Rather, it needed to serve as a teaching point for another congregation where Jewish members caused Gentile believers to question their place in the family of God.

Today, because of internet technology, one Christian leader with global influence can cause immense harm to the church worldwide. Therefore, in our desire to be good stewards of the gospel message, which outranks any Christian leader’s office, Christians must be willing to discern when it is appropriate to publicly rebuke leaders whose social behavior is out of line with the truth of the gospel. We must also discern where and how. Whether we rebuke in a coffee shop, a church building, a denominational meeting, or on Facebook, this work of discernment is for the sake of God, his church, and the world.

Thank you for reading this series! Follow me on Substack, or click the “Subscribe now” button below to have future posts delivered to your email inbox.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Earlier this week, I began a series examining the conflict between the apostles Peter and Paul about table fellowship with Gentiles and what it might teach us about the public rebuke of Christian leaders. Read the first installment of the series here and follow along from there. 

Yesterday, in part 4, we examined the tone, intensity, substance, and necessity of Paul’s rebuke. Today we take a little segue into the questions, “But what about Matthew 18 Didn’t Jesus say to rebuke in private?”

A NOTE ABOUT MATTHEW 18

At this point, it would be sensible to summarize what we’ve gleaned so far in regard to Paul’s manner, method, and seeming rationale for rebuking Peter publicly. However, I must note the apparent contradiction between Paul’s style of rebuke and Jesus’ teaching about confronting sin in Matthew 18. Students of Scripture may express concern: why didn’t Paul follow Jesus’ instructions to first go in private to a “brother or sister who sins” in order to persuade them to repent (v. 15)? According to Jesus, if the sinning believer is unwilling to listen, only then should a larger group (2-3) come to confront him or her; if that fails to bring about repentance, then the issue of the believer’s sin should be told to the church (v.16-17).

Surely, Paul did not have access to the written gospel of Matthew as we do today, but whether he had access to Jesus’ teachings through Scripture or eyewitness accounts is a moot point because there is no actual contradiction between Paul’s behavior and Jesus’ instruction. In Matthew 18, the sin of the confronted believer is private. In Antioch, Peter’s sin is public: it has already been “told to the church” through his social behavior, which is imitated by others who are being led astray.

Without public rebuke, the sin would be normalized and infect the church community. Anna Case-Winters astutely points out that the context surrounding Jesus’ teaching on confronting sin demonstrates the Father’s concern for “little ones” who may “perish” (Mat 18:14); perhaps, she argues, these “little ones” are actually “members of the church who are weaker in faith and more easily scandalized.”1 The context, then, surrounding Jesus’ teaching on conflict reflects that “the disciples as church leaders must take care not to put any obstacles” in the path of believers who are more susceptible to sin.2 Such obstacles surely include social behavior that perverts the gospel message by encouraging ethnic division. Therefore, we may say that Paul’s behavior is certainly not misaligned with Jesus’ concern for the handling of sin in church community.

A reflection on the series’ content and what we can glean from it about the public rebuke of Christian leaders comes in Part 6 tomorrow. Follow me on Substack, or click the “Subscribe now” button below to have it delivered to your email inbox.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Earlier this week, I began a series examining the conflict between the apostles Peter and Paul about table fellowship with Gentiles and what it might teach us about the public rebuke of Christian leaders. Read the first installment of the series here and follow along from there. 

Yesterday, in part 3, we examined the scene of Peter and Paul’s conflict. Today, we’ll examine the tone, intensity and necessity of Paul’s rebuke—the longest portion of our exploration in the series.

THE REBUKE

Because Paul saw himself as called by God and not “under” the authority of the Jerusalem apostles, he exercised freedom to rebuke Peter’s social behavior despite Peter’s “primacy” as a disciple during Jesus’ earthly ministry.1 Augustine also rightly interpreted Paul’s rebuke as an assertion that the truth of the gospel outranks a leader’s position of influence.2 The tone, manner, and content of Paul’s rebuke may offer guidance to Christians when, for the sake of the gospel, they find themselves considering public rebuke of a Christian leader. Additionally, the type of witnessing audience, along with an understanding of the risks associated with allowing Peter’s behavior to go unchecked, may prove helpful.

Tone

In no uncertain terms, Paul makes clear to the Galatians that he boldly opposed Peter: “...I opposed (antisthēmi) him to his face, because he stood condemned (kataginōskō)” (v. 11, emphasis mine). Consider two word studies that illuminate the tone of Paul’s confrontation.

Word study: Antisthēmi

• Range of meaning: to oppose, resist, stand out against, rebel, withstand.3

• New Testament usage: Antisthēmi is used fourteen times in twelve verses and typically connotes a face-off between good and evil.

Five times it is translated “resist”: the disciples’ adversaries would be unable to
“resist” the wisdom Jesus would give his disciples (Lk 21:15); the disciples shouldn’t “resist” an evil person (Mat 5:39); and believers should “resist” the devil (Jas 4:7; 1
Pet 5:9).

Once, antisthēmi is translated as “rebel”: one invites judgment when one “rebels”
against authorities God has instituted (Rom 13:2).

It’s twice translated as “stand up against”/“stand your ground”: Stephen’s
persecutors could not “stand up against” the wisdom of the Spirit speaking through
him (Acts 6:10), and Paul instructs the Ephesians to “stand [their] ground” in the
“evil day” (Eph 6:13).

In all other cases, antisthēmi is translated as “oppose/d”: a Jewish sorcerer on the
island of Paphos opposes Paul’s gospel (Acts 13:8); false teachers oppose truth (2
Tim 3:8); and Alexander the metalworker harmed Paul and opposed his message (2
Tim 4:15).

• Authorial Usage: Paul uses antisthēmi in relation to God once, human government once, the “evil day” once, and humans who oppose truth three times. What’s at stake in these contexts is weighty: judgment, salvation, and truth.

Word study: Kataginōskō

• Range of meaning: to condemn, convict; to be in the wrong, condemned; to determine against, blame, reprehend, convict.4

• Authorial, NT and LXX5 Usage: Kataginōskō is found five times in the Bible and used only once by Paul—in Galatians 2. The two instances found in 1 John, related to personal assurance of salvation, were likely written approximately twenty years after Paul’s estimated death and therefore would not have been familiar to him.6

Paul would, however, have been familiar with two usages in the LXX: Judges should
“condemn” the guilty in court (Deut 25:1) and a poor but discerning man is able to
see how deluded (“condemned”) the rich are because they think themselves wise
(Prov 28:11).

Dunn says Paul’s use of the kataginōskō in Galatians could indicate either that “all
right-thinking people would acknowledge Peter’s” unethical behavior, or “that
[Peter] was condemned before the bar of God’s judgment.”7 Either way, kataginōskō
doesn’t soften our sense of Paul’s tone and judgement. He condemns Peter’s
“wisdom” of separating from Gentiles, and like a judge declares Peter’s guilt not
only to the Antiochian Christians but also to the Galatians long after the matter is
settled in Antioch.

Content of Rebuke

Paul does not simply chastise Peter from withdrawing from Gentile/Jew table fellowship. Peter’s error is greater than this: he is not “acting in line with truth of the gospel” (v. 14), which has ecclesiological implications for the first-century and future church. First, Paul points out Peter’s hypocrisy: Peter’s a Jew who lives like a Gentile, but his current behavior suggests he expects Gentiles to become more like Jews through adherence to Jewish law (v. 14). Second, Paul reminds Peter of their shared theological conviction that Jewish people, like Gentiles, are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, not by Jewishness.

Paul’s initial rebuke is followed by a “public lecture about freedom, equality, and new life in the gospel of Jesus Christ,” which leaves no room for argument.8 You can read it here. R. A. Cole offers a helpful paraphrase of part of the “lecture”: “‘If, at the very moment when we say that we ourselves are justified by faith alone, we turn out to be preaching to others that ‘faith alone’ is inadequate…does that not mean that trusting in Christ is only leading them into sin? (vv. 17-18).9” In other words, Peter’s behavior has the potential to relegate Gentile believers to a wilderness of soteriological contradiction (i.e. confusion about how salvation “works”).

What’s at Stake?

Because of Peter’s apostolic influence in Antioch, his behavior called into question the established truth that Jews and Gentiles find a common identity and basis for unity through the gospel of Jesus Christ. His hypocrisy may have left the Jewish Christians relatively unconflicted, but Peter’s behavior implied that the Gentile sheep of the Antiochian fold were simply “not as good as Jewish Christians.”10 If Paul did not rebuke swiftly, “there would have been ‘two communions’ in Antioch, two Christian groups existing side by side…unable to share the Lord’s Supper together.”11 On into perpetuity, the world-wide church, too, could be divided along ethnic lines based on the precedence of Antioch.

We must understand that Paul’s was not a “Jesus-died-so-I- can-go-to-heaven” gospel. The gospel he preached involved “the restoration of all things” through Christ, which “included ethnic, social, and gender reconciliation” at its heart.12 If the multiethnic nature of the church was lost, it could no longer prophetically witness to the reality that Christ holds all things together and reconciles to himself all things, chief among them Jews and Gentiles (Col 1:17, 20).

Audience

Presumably, Paul rebuked Peter “in front of” (v.14) the Jews who imitated Peter’s hypocrisy and perhaps even in front of the “circumcision group” (v. 12). It is unclear if Paul’s rebuke took place in front of Gentile Christians also, but it would be sensible for Paul to do so “since the consequences and implications of Peter’s action were so destructive to the unity and spiritual integrity of the church.”13 The whole church had witnessed Peter’s “social deviance” from the true gospel; to accomplish restoration, the whole church needed to witness social behavior that corrected Peter’s unorthodox theology.

Tomorrow we’ll take a little segue into the question, “But what about Matthew 18? Didn’t Jesus say to rebuke in private?” Follow me on Substack, or click the “Subscribe now” button below to have the series delivered to your email inbox.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Earlier this week, I began a series examining the conflict between the apostles Peter and Paul about table fellowship with Gentiles and what it might teach us about the public rebuke of Christian leaders. Read the first installment of the series here and follow along from there. 

Yesterday, in part 2, we examined the early church’s grappling with issues of Gentile inclusion. Today, I’ll shortly and sweetly set the scene of the apostles’ conflict.

THE SITUATION

Galatians 2:11-20 describes Peter’s visit to Antioch sometime after the Jerusalem Council. Here, Paul writes that “before certain men came from James, [Peter] used to eat with the Gentiles.” (v. 12). Peter had, most likely, been accepting invitations to eat in Gentile homes and enjoying table fellowship, which was rooted in the “sacred obligation of hospitality to the stranger” and an “expression of acceptance” of the other.1 When the “men from James” arrive, Peter “began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group” (v. 12). These men were probably conservative Jews, “tracking Paul’s travels” to ensure that Gentiles in Jesus-centered communities followed the laws of Judaism.2

We may, at best, imagine Peter was trying to be hospitable3 to these men who would not have been comfortable eating with Gentiles. Nevertheless, his behavior was in conflict with the Jerusalem Council’s decision. Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentiles disrupted and called into question the reality that Jews and Gentiles are made one together in Christ. And, because of his apostolic influence and reputation, other Jews—“even Barnabas”—followed Peter’s example (v.13). Paul identifies Peter as the instigator of widespread hypocrisy and behavior that is not in “line with the truth of the gospel” (v.13-14).

Come back tomorrow for a deep dive on Paul’s rebuke of Peter. Follow on Substack, or click the “Subscribe now” button below to have the series delivered to your email inbox.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

Earlier this week, I began a series examining the conflict between the apostles Peter and Paul about table fellowship with Gentiles and what it might teach us about the public rebuke of Christian leaders. Read the first installment of the series here and then come back for part 2. 

Before we examine the gritty details of Peter and Paul’s conflict, let me set the proverbial stage by taking us back to the most difficult issues navigated by the early church and its leaders.

BACKSTORY

In Galatians 1-2, Paul offers a history regarding his gospel ministry to the Gentiles—how he was called by God’s grace (1:15) and how his ministry was approved by the Jerusalem apostles—James, Cephas, and John (2:9-10). Further, Paul references a meeting in Jerusalem, typically referred to as the “Jerusalem Council”1 (described in Acts 15), where church leaders, notably including Peter, decided that circumcision should not be required of Gentile believers. Paul’s recap of this event in Gal 2:1-10 seems intended to persuade the Galatians on the same point. Presumably, the issue disputed at the Jerusalem Council was disputed among Christians in Galatia, some of whom were “turning to a different gospel—which is really no gospel at all” (Gal 1:6-7).2

The Problem of Gentile Conversion

That the Galatians and Jewish converts to the way of Christ wrestled with the requirements for Gentile inclusion isn’t surprising. During the Second Temple Period, there was a general expectation that male Gentile converts to Judaism would undergo circumcision and baptism;3 this was a sign of their sincerity and zeal4 for participating in Israel’s covenant with God. However, many Pharisaic and Hellenistic Jews did not require circumcision for Gentile converts, and so, as there was diversity among the Jewish community regarding Gentile conversions, opinions among Jewish Christians were probably also diverse.5 What was likely more confounding to Jewish Christians was that Paul ultimately expected Jews and Gentiles to form “a single new community and freely interact” through shared meals and even marriage; Jewish Christians were concerned that forming this type of community would inevitably lead to a violation of purity laws.6

Paul’s “multiethnic gospel,”7 working out on the ground in Antioch, spawned difficult-to-navigate realities that led Paul to seek common ground with the Jerusalem leaders over the issue of Gentile conversion requirements. This desire flowed out of his value for unity in Antioch and in the wider church.8

The Council’s Decision

In Acts 15, where the council’s deliberation is recorded, Peter argues against requiring Gentile circumcision. He testifies that “God…showed that he accepted [them]....He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith” (vv. 8-9). Peter’s testimony is followed by James’ summary determination that Gentile converts should be required only to “abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood” (v. 20). While some of these requirements are moral in nature, others would “preserve the unity and peace of the church” given the cultural sensitivities of Jewish Christians.9 These requirements would make table fellowship between the two groups more practically achievable, without levying heavy burdens against Gentile converts.

Thus, in his letter to the Galatians, Paul establishes the narrative that 1) his gospel was not “of human origin” but from Christ (Gal 1:11) and 2) that the Jerusalem leaders endorsed “Paul’s” gospel,10 eschewed circumcision for Gentile converts, and welcomed Paul into fellowship despite his unique missional focus on ministering to Gentiles.11 The facts presented in the letter are paramount in “establish[ing] [Paul’s] authority independently from Peter and the Jerusalem apostles while [also] asserting their agreement with the gospel he preached.”12 Striking a balance between these two realities is essential for the story he conveys next.

Follow me here on Substack, or click the “Subscribe now” button below to get the rest of the series delivered to your inbox.

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Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.

When the story broke, I was struck by a catch-phrase known to students. While many did not know of specific abuse that was occurring, “nudity is unity” or “nudity brings unity” reflected the unorthodox practice encouraged by their leaders—young Christians getting naked together. Not all of the students knew of explicit sexual activity and/or abuse happening behind the scenes, but they were aware of the ideology, as taught by their leaders, that group nudity was somehow linked to Christian bonding.

To state the obvious, the social behavior and teaching of these leaders perverted the gospel message of Jesus Christ, which claims that unity comes through Christ’s reconciling power on the cross (Eph 2:14-16). Over the years, many individuals objected or expressed their concerns in private about the ministries’ activities and its association with a volunteer who was a known sex offender. However, while many private objections were made to leaders at the local, state, and national level, there was not one resounding authoritative and public Christian voice that was able to nip these practices in the bud.

Since the scandal became public, I have often meditated on the New Testament conflict between the apostles Paul and Peter at the Antioch church. Here, Paul rebukes Peter for behavior that perverts the gospel message. I wanted to formally examine the conflict in light of the way M. Sydney Park describes Peter’s behavior as a “social deviance from [orthodox] theology.”1

In Antioch, Peter withdraws from table fellowship with Gentiles, and Paul’s unequivocal public rebuke is necessary for rescuing the church from an unorthodox gospel. In this Substack series, I hope to shed light on the intensity and tone of Paul’s public rebuke, why it was necessary, and how it may guide us today as we consider the necessity of publicly rebuking leaders whose social behaviors “preach” an unorthodox gospel message.

In my experience, intra-denominational Christians seem reluctant to openly rebuke their leaders. There are certainly appropriate times for reluctance and restraint, but I am concerned that restraint and silence has become our default setting, to the detriment of the church. What if there had been an outspoken “Paul” in the early years of every ministry that turned perverse?

Hence, my examination of Peter’s very public rebuke and Paul’s narration of the event to another group of Christians (the Galatians). This is certainly not an exhaustive examination of all the New Testament (or all of Scripture) has to say about conflict between believers. Consider it a one-inch-by-one-inch square of much larger tapestry, a square inch that offers valuable insight despite being small.

If you’d like to follow along with this series, you can follow on the app or subscribe below (for free) so new posts go directly to your inbox.

Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.