Reviewing Two Decades of My Thoughts

A big chunk of effort in migrating the blog was going through each post to review and clean up content. On the technical side, I started by using a conversion tool that took the Wordpress data dump and transformed it into Markdown files. It was good as far as it went. But it was only so good. I ended up touching every post back to 2004, tagging, cleaning up formatting, improving links when possible, removing them when they were super-dead, etc. It took a while. But it gave me the opportunity to review my own progression of thought and growth in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, and that made it well worth it. Today I want to review some impressions this review left on me.

Post Content and Strategy

Man, back in the early years I posted a lot. Almost every day for a while, or at least multiple times a week. I started this blog a solid two years before Twitter went live or Facebook became available for non-students, and I used it for a lot of mundane life updates that would eventually move over to FB and Twitter. Once I started engaging on those platforms (and particularly Twitter), my blog posting tailed off to something closer to its current state - roughly one post per week at most.

One thing hasn’t changed so much: I post a lot about books I’m reading. I have written year-in-review blog posts since 2007. My books tag has 165 posts. At times I tried to post about every single book I read; now I’m doing that in short form over on my books site and only summarizing and sharing highlights here. Still reading lots of Christian thought and theology, too. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Evolution of thought

I grew up in a very conservative, nay, fundamentalist Christian household. Those lessons stuck with me long into adulthood. To steal a hopefully-not-too-outdated term from the youths, wow, a lot of my old content is cringe. To be gentle with myself: I was doing my best to fit in and emulate the examples of good Christian people that I saw and read. And boy, I was good at it. The evangelical-ese just dripped from my tongue. I was super-earnest (good, I guess) and super-presumptuous that I had it figured out (not so good).

I was not always an LGBTQIA-affirming person. I didn’t write anything super-offensive even in my non-affirming days, but I was very clearly non-affirming. You can see cracks starting to form in that wall back as early as 2007 when I pondered whether the church should be fighting same-sex marriage. In 2008 I was reading a bunch of Andrew Sullivan, and was more convinced that same-sex civil marriage should be OK. By 2014 I was fully uncertain what I thought about trans issues, but was sure that we shouldn’t be breaking bruised reeds. I was at heart fully affirming sometime before the COVID era, but I’m sad it took until 2022 for me to publicly post about it.

My journey through and eventually out of evangelicalism was clearly also a search for heroes I could latch onto. Sadly, my posting chronicles how one by one they have fallen. John Piper (eek). Mark Driscoll. Matt Chandler. More recently, and less notably, but still: John G. Stackhouse. I listened to them, quoted them, looked up to them… and then watched them fall by the wayside. Their less-famous acolytes championed so many others that also went off the rails: Mahaney, MacDonald, Mohler. Maybe this accelerated my departure from evangelicalism as much as anything.

I still have a long way to go to undo the tangled mess of my childhood fundamentalism, but I’m happy to see progress. We’ll see what another 20 years bring.

Random thoughts and Surprises

  1. If you’d asked me who was most influential in my theological evolution by default I’d say N. T. Wright. But if you look back through 20 years of blog posts, another name rises to the surface: Richard Beck. I guess if you need a complement to an Anglican bishop, a Texan Church of Christ psychology professor is a good fit. My nerd self has a ton of respect for the fact that Beck has been blogging on Blogspot since God only knows when and only recently added a Substack since nobody except me uses RSS any more.
  2. There is one song whose lyrics I quoted probably more than all other songs combined: Rich Mullins’ “Land of My Sojourn”. Amusingly enough, I don’t have those lyrics memorized. I quoted them first as early as 2005 and as recently as 2017 and I’m sure I’ll pull them out again before long.
  3. There have been friends along the way who are, amazingly, still there and still influential, many of whom I have met in-person rarely or never. We owe Geof (RIP) for being the community leader and glue who brought us together, and I’m not sure any of us will appropriately uphold his legacy. I risk disappointing many by naming any, but two must be named here. Kari (whom I have never met in person but someday simply must), a children’s- librarian-turned-ordained-Baptist-minister who gave me an example of what a Christian feminist looks like, and who always had a timely encouraging word even when I was much more stubborn and conservative than I am now. And then there’s Dan. Have we really only met up that once? Dan is my Canadian brother-from-another-mother, homeschool kid, pianist, sometime worship leader, programmer, armchair theologian, and, most importantly, the inventor of the bullet points format that I adopted. Before we met in person I thought there’s no way this guy could really be this awesome in person. Then we met and I found out I was wrong. One of these days, my friend, we’ll meet again.

Wrapping up

I’ll write a proper 20-year anniversary post when October 2024 comes. In the mean time, I’m glad I had the chance for this retrospective.

Life, man.

Migrating to Eleventy

If you’re reading this post, you’re seeing the updated ChrisHubbs.com as generated by Eleventy, a static site generator. After being on Wordpress for nearly twenty years, this was a significant change!

Why leave Wordpress?

I mean, twenty years of history can’t be all bad, right? Wordpress was originally released in May 2003, and by October 2004 I had a blog up and running it. (Well, Geof was administering it for the first couple years. RIP.) And Wordpress has had amazing growth over two decades and runs a lot of the internet’s websites.

But Wordpress was starting to get frustrating. They seem to be working harder and harder to monetize it, even for users of the free product. Want any social features, sharing, analytics, etc? Use the Jetpack extension. Which is free for some functionality, paid for other. OK, I guess. But then they start giving you dashboard “site health indicators” which will tell you that you have problems and the only solution is to subscribe to the paid service. No thanks.

Why Eleventy?

There are a bunch of static site generators out there. I considered both Eleventy and Astro and did some demo work with each. In the end, I found a nice site theme/template I liked build in Eleventy, and it managed to build my full site without any hiccups. It’s a big site, so that’s a win. My path to publishing is a little more intensive than it was under Wordpress, but when I only publish weekly at best, I can survive that. It’s not that hard.

So, almost twenty years?

Yeah, it was a lot of posts. I cleaned up some of them that were just dead links, but I kept most of them around. Once all the cleanup was done I have 1263 posts migrated over. This one now makes 1264. It feels both monumental and trivial at the same time.

I’ll do a separate post with some more personal thoughts that were prompted by going through almost 20 years of my written thoughts. But for now, hey, at least it’s functional!

Closing down iowadon.org

A year ago I set up my own Mastodon server at iowadon.org. Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and was quite obviously going to ruin it, Bluesky was still a very small beta test, and I thought hey, why not, I would enjoy the project and could try my hand at administrating a social media instance. So I dropped $15 for the domain name and $50 for a year of a cheap VPS and gave it a shot.

It was indeed a fun challenge getting it set up. Once I had it up and functional it was low-maintenance enough - an occasional small version upgrade, a couple moderation requests to resolve. I never promoted the instance much, and as a result I never had more than about half a dozen active users, most of whom I knew personally. And it was fine. But as my domain came up for renewal I asked myself if it was something I wanted to continue, and I decided the answer was no.

It’s not a cost thing. I paid $5/mo to Linode for object storage, and absorbed the server costs by sharing the VPS with some other websites I host. (The things you can get away with when your instance only hosts a few users…) It was a little bit the maintenance time. There was a major upgrade to the Mastodon server queued up and, for the first time in a year, it didn’t run smoothly. And I didn’t feel like spending hours trying to figure it out.

It was also a little bit that Bluesky has opened up, and my social network has hit a pretty good critical mass there. At the moment I’m keeping an eye on both Mastodon and Bluesky, but Bluesky is getting more of my time and interaction. And so I migrated my iowadon.org account over to mastodon.social, emailed all my active users to give them a month’s warning, and at the end of the month I shut it down.

It was a fun experiment, and I’m still bullish on Mastodon as a social network. But after a year of running my own, I’m happy to be just a user again on someone else’s server.

In Praise of Humble, Gentle Men

This morning a headline came across my social media feed, with a link to a remarkable interview with actor Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for playing Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation for seven seasons. In this interview with NPR reporter Rachel Martin, Stewart describes his time playing Picard with strong religious tones. When Martin noted that many Star Trek fans treat the show with almost a religious reverence, Stewart said this:

Yes. I see it very, very clearly and very strongly. It was about truth and fairness and honesty and respect for others, no matter who they were or what strange alien creature they looked like. That was immaterial. They were alive. And if they needed help, Jean Luc Picard and his crew, his team, were there to give it.

In a sense, we were ministers. And I have heard now so many times from individuals who have been honest enough and brave enough to tell me aspects of their life, of their health, of their mental health. And how it was all saved and improved by watching every week.

I came to ST:TNG right about the time it finished airing, and eventually caught up via VHS recordings. And while I may not be a full-blown Trekkie, TNG is my comfort watch. At its best, the Star Trek series—and especially TNG—portrayed an optimistic future where technology and diplomacy had taken care of systemic social issues; where the leading adults were grown-ups who behaved responsibly, admitted their faults, and worked for the greater good.

None was better in this regard than Stewart’s Captain Picard. He was the best of what you as a man might want to be - an accomplished leader, an artist, a man who put his crew’s needs before his own and held to his principles even when it cost him dearly. In a world of entertainment where so many actors turn out to be real scuzzballs in their personal lives, seeing Stewart reach old age and maintain, by all accounts, his reputation as a man of integrity, it’s hard not to feel his real-life person and his onscreen role merge just a little bit. It warms my heart to see this acclaimed example of a good man.

Whether Stewart attracted good people or just rubbed off on them I don’t know, but the men who acted around Stewart have also continued to display honorable attributes long after the show was done. Wil Wheaton, who played the teenager Wesley Crusher on the show, recounts in his memoir how Stewart and Jonathan Frakes (Commander Will Riker) were men who showed him what a real father should be like after Wheaton’s own parents abused him. And then there’s Levar Burton, who for the seven years of ST:TNG, and for 16 more years around it, hosted Reading Rainbow, encouraging a love of books and reading to children via public television.

None of these men went on to build great empires; none needed to play (or try to be, in real life) overly macho men. And yet here, decades later, they are beloved by so many simply because they have maintained integrity in their lives as men of gentleness and humility.

These led me to think about another humble, gentle man who I’ve written about before who fits the same mold, and who spent decades on television in a similar way. I’m talking, of course, about Fred Rogers. Again we have a man who in most ways wouldn’t live up to the expectations of American masculinity, but who portrayed love, care, generosity, and humility in a way that was as fully genuine in person as it was on the screen.

I can almost hear the response pieces being written at Christian outlets like The Gospel Coalition already. Clearly, they’d say, that as nice as Stewart seems, his “ministry” is some sort of false gospel since, well, he doesn’t believe in God. They’d say all his righteousness is false. They’d say he supports liberal social causes and calls himself a feminist, so clearly he’s problematic.

I have been out of evangelicalism long enough to not care what TGC says any more, but having steeped in it for so long, and having had so many people dear to me who embrace that kind of thinking, I want to offer an alternate take. It goes like this:

We don’t need to put scare quotes around “good” when we talk about men like Stewart, Frakes, or Burton. We recognize admirable characteristics in them because they are there. I might even crib a list that includes things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control…

Now here’s where I’m gonna get all heretical. If these men (or other people like them) are demonstrating the characteristics that Christians know as “fruit of the Spirit”, I’m gonna say that this is evidence of God’s spirit working in them and through them. They may not acknowledge it as such, or even that such a thing exists. But if God is “over all and in all and through all” (Ephesians 4), then does it have to be a big stretch to acknowledge people who model the virtues and priorities that Jesus taught, even if they ascribe them to somewhere else?

The freedom of seeing that God is truly reconciling the whole world has led to a glorious freedom to recognize, admire, and love the good in others without feeling the need to nit pick their theological beliefs. Those who practice the fruit of the Spirit, who do justly and love mercy, who cry out for the poor and oppressed—they will find entering the fulness of the kingdom of God to only be a gentle step from (to borrow Paul’s words) worshiping in ignorance to worshiping in knowledge. Those who carefully articulate a theological line while modeling arrogance, hostility, and gracelessness, though, may find the kingdom to be a bit more of an adjustment.

You get the feeling from reading them that we might be loved

This old concert recording of Rich Mullins at a Wheaton College chapel service in 1997 is an internet classic, but listening through it again today I was struck by his wisdom about the love of God:

I am at an academic place so I need to speak highly of serious stuff. Although I have trouble with serious stuff, I have to admit, because I just think life’s too short to get too heavy about everything. And I think there are easier ways to lose money than by farming, and I think there are easier ways to become boring than by becoming academic. And I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is not what the Theory of Relativity is. But I think what we all really want to know anyway is whether we are loved or not. And that’s why I like the Scriptures, because you get the feeling from reading them that we might be. And if we were able to really know that, we wouldn’t worry about the rest of the stuff. The rest of it would be more fun, I think. Cause right now we take it so seriously, I think, because of our basic insecurity about whether we are loved are not.

I think you should study because your folks have probably sunk a lot of money into this, and it’d be ungrateful not to. But your life doesn’t depend on it. That was what I loved about being a student in my 40s as opposed to in my 20s is I had the great knowledge that you could live for at least half a century and not know a thing and get along pretty well.

A Hymn Aptly Chosen

One of the fun things about attending a church in a new and unfamiliar tradition is that things that may be common, old hat, or even tiredly predictable to lifelong participants in the tradition are new and can bring delight to us newbs.

Current example: yesterday morning I thumbed through the worship booklet before the service and saw that the gospel hymn was familiar: Eternal Father, Strong to Save. I know this one primarily as “The Navy Hymn”, could probably sing the first verse from memory, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sung it in church before. A bit of an odd choice, I thought, but it’s at least fun to sing.

And it was, indeed, fun to sing. It’s in a good range, it’s got some fun harmonic progressions, and for being a small and older congregation, there are still some good harmony singers belting it out.

Then the deacon started into the gospel reading and suddenly the reason for the song selection became very clear.

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew 14:22-33

Well played, Father Brian. Well played.

An Appliance Installation in Four Lowe’s Trips

Setting: a local homeowner has an old dishwasher that is dying. A new dishwasher was delivered and is sitting in the garage, waiting to be installed.

Lowe’s Trip #1: Electrical Stuff

The old dishwasher had just a raw electrical cable coming from the unit. The wire ran through a hole in the floor and was connected up to the breaker box in the basement using wire nuts. The new dishwasher has a proper electric plug. So on the way home from work I hit Lowe’s for a grey electrical box, a GFCI plugin, and an outlet cover plate.

Came home, wired up the box before dinner. Got out a big drill bit and expanded the hole in the floor to fit the big plug.

Lowe’s Trip #2: Water line

I don’t do plumbing work that often, but when I do, it’s the little latent leaks that make me nervous. I read the installation manual for the dishwasher and it suggested “hook up the water line, turn on the water, and check for leaks before putting the unit in place”. Great idea, I thought. However, the existing water line wasn’t long enough to make that work.

Hit Lowe’s again, bought a longer water line. Hooked it up to the dishwasher. Ran the hose down through a separate hole in the floor, hooked it up to the water pipe in the basement. Turned the water on. No leaks.

Ran the electric plug end through the hole in the floor, plugged it in. We have power. Now we just need to hook up the drain hose.

The drain hose boot is marked that it will accommodate up to a 7/8” pipe. The PVC drain pipe plumbed up to the dishwasher location is marked 3/4”, but it turns out that’s 3/4” inside diameter. Outside diameter is a solid one inch. And the rubber boot doesn’t stretch that much.

Lowe’s Trip #3: Drain Pipe Fitting

Perused the PVC aisle. Then to the next aisle over with kitchen plumbing supplies. A “standard” dishwasher install would have it near the sink so the drain hose could tie in to the sink drain. Ours is on the opposite side of the kitchen, so whoever did the first dishwasher install here (sometime well after the house was built in 1959) ran the PVC drain line down through the floor and across the basement ceiling to tie in to the drain there. But I digress.

On the second trip through the PVC aisle, my wife notices the exact fitting we need. Sized to fit the 1” outside diameter pipe on one end, with a tapering ribbed end opposite it to grab a drain boot. I knew I had PVC glue at home, so paid for the fitting and headed back.

Grabbed the cans of PVC primer and glue from the basement. Opened up the primer and primed both pieces. Opened up the glue. It had solidified into jelly. Read the instructions on the back of the can. “Do not use if glue has hardened.” Deep, frustrated sigh.

Lowe’s Trip #4: PVC Glue

I know exactly where it is after perusing the PVC aisle less than twenty minutes previous. Head back home.

Glued up the fitting to the drain pipe. Let it sit for twenty minutes to harden up. Hooked up the drain hose. Carefully slid the dishwasher back into its slot. Confirmed that the hoses weren’t kinked. Nervously checked for drips under the water line fitting a couple more times. Still seemed ok.

PVC glue said to wait two hours before putting any pressure on the joint. Two hours later was getting close to bedtime, so we put the unit on the quick cycle to try it out. Had a minor heart attack when the display turned off every time we shut the dishwasher door. Found the full manual online and discovered that was by design. Let it run. 60 minutes later: clean dishes.

Here’s hoping I don’t have to repeat that task any time soon.

Christianity no longer has an Effective Cosmology

Some 18 months ago I was just getting acquainted with Dr. Ilia Delio’s writing, and shared a brief paragraph about getting our theology better aligned with our cosmology. Today I’m reading her book Christ in Evolution, wherein she provides a longer version of that insight. I heard her say something similar on the B4NP podcast, and it was the biggest lightbulb moment I’ve had in a while. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with it, but the core of the idea seems just right.

So from chapter 1 (paragraph breaks and emphasis mine):

In his book A Window to the Divine, Zachary Hayes writes that “a careful reading of the theological tradition prior to the modern era indicates that before the so-called Copernican revolution … there existed a religious cosmology that involved not only the insights of faith but the physical understanding of the cosmos as it was known at that time. The breakdown of such a cosmology by the shift from a geocentric model to a heliocentric model led eventually to the isolation of theology from the development of modern science.”

The most fundamental shift in our understanding of the cosmos is the move from the vision of a universe launched essentially in its present form by the hand of the creator at the beginning of time to a vision of the cosmos as a dynamic, unfolding chemical process, immensely large in both time and space…

According to Hayes, we live in two worlds. In our everyday experience we live in a culture deeply conditioned by the insights and theories of modern science. But in the context of the church, its theology and liturgy, we live in a premodern world. Christian theology, he states, no longer has an effective cosmology that enables believers to relate to the world in its physical character in a way that is consistent with their religious symbols. We need to reshape our religious understanding of the world, he claims, by engaging our faith with the best insights of science concerning the nature of the physical world.

Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution, Chapter 1

As I’ve listened to Delio on a number of podcasts and read a couple of her books (with more on the pile to read), I’m amazed by how clearly she can embrace the Bible’s teaching about Jesus but interpret it in ways that embraces modern science — ways that are very different than the anti-scientific approach most churches I’ve been a part of have held to.

My heart and imagination come alive as I consider these possibilities. “There’s so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see,” wrote Rich Mullins. And with these new lenses through which to consider the cosmos, I echo his next line: “And everywhere I go, I’m looking”.

Playing the Jeremiah 17:9 Card

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV

I had someone play the Jeremiah 17:9 card on me the other day. We were winding up a long email conversation wherein I finally was able to make clear that the standard evangelical hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures isn’t particularly appealing to me any more - that there are other approaches I find more compelling. (Brian Zahnd’s post Jesus Is What God Has To Say captures it pretty well for me right now at a high level.)

Once I got that message across, the message from my conversation partner was simple: beware your motives and understanding, because, after all, the heart is deceitful above all things!

In the evangelical circles I’ve spent my life in, Jeremiah 17:9 is used as a sort of ultimate trump card. If a discussion starts to go sideways, if someone comes to a logical conclusion that something they’ve been taught just can’t be correct, if someone questions how God could possibly be in the right for, say, ordering the murder of innocent children, this is the fallback. Of course your heart rebels against that thought. Your heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked! You need to accept that what we are teaching you is correct and ignore any prompting inside you that says otherwise!

There are problems, thought, with the Jeremiah 17:9 card.

Logical Coherence

First: playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card is logically incoherent. How did the card player become convinced of the rightness of their position in the first place? Undoubtedly through some combination of study, reasoning, and internal desire (even if subconscious) to hold that position. So how does the card player know that it isn’t his own heart that is deceiving him rather than yours deceiving you? If our heart (i.e. our reasoning as supplemented and powered by our instincts) is deceitful, what basis do you have for claiming that yours is so much less deceitful than mine that your conclusion is right and mine is wrong?

Other Bible Verses

I don’t recommend pulling single verses from their context and using them to justify positions. It’s a bad way to understand the Bible. But if you’re going to play that game, there is a broad selection of other verses about the heart that might provide an alternative perspective to Jeremiah 17:9.

Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” - This sounds like your heart has something good in it that needs to be protected!

Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” - The psalmist sure seems to think that purity of heart is a goal worth asking for and attaining to.

Proverbs 3:3: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” - We can have love and faithfulness written on our heart!

Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” - If God gives me a new heart and a new spirit, maybe that new heart is good?

2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” - This one is kinda fun… decide in your heart what to give! God will be happy with this!

Psalm 119:11: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” - This one speaks directly to the effects of discipleship upon the heart - the heart is improved and the result is less sinning!

Hebrews 3:12: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” - The existence of a “sinful, unbelieving heart” implies the existence of a holy, believing heart that is turned toward God.

Proverbs 23:15: “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed.” - Solomon suggests that a heart can be wise!

I hope the point here is clear - if you want to play the game of cherry picking to proof-text your point, why is the Jeremiah 17:9 card a more valid and applicable cherry than any of these verses?

Potential for Gaslighting and Abuse

Gaslighting is a strategy in which a perpetrator bends another person’s sense of reality and belief system, making that person second-guess themselves in a way that is beneficial to the perpetrator. Typical gaslighting phrases include things like this:

  • “Do you really think I’d make that up?”

  • “I did that because I love you.”

  • “You’re too sensitive.”

  • “It’s not that bad. Other people have it much worse.”

  • “I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”

It’s not hard to see how “the heart is deceitful above all things” could fit right in to a gaslighting strategy. A spiritual leader abuses a person in some way. That person responds with a concern. This doesn’t feel right. Something is off here. The leader points right to Jeremiah. Your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Don’t trust it. And the abuse continues as the victim is further confused between the truth of the matter clear to their conscience and the deception and malpractice of their abuser.

Finally

A robust examination of discernment - how it works, how we integrate our instinctual “gut feelings”, how we experience the influence of the Holy Spirit, how we come to understand God’s Word and leading through the wisdom of community - would require far more words than I could write here. Whatever discernment is, though, it’s certainly not so simply summed up as “your heart is deceitful, don’t trust it”.

Instead of living in a constant spirit of fear, Christians should live in a spirit of confidence that God is guiding them. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll forgive me one proof-text for this that also suggests God wants us to use our minds, too.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV

_Playing card illustration via the Redemption CCG Fandom wiki._

My own personal Philippians 3

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

–The Apostle Paul, Letter to the Philippians

I have many times read this passage and heard it taught with the message “your family history and good works don’t matter, only giving up everything and serving Jesus matters”. As I read it today, though, where I am in my Christian journey, it hits a little bit different.

My own personal Philippians 3

If anyone thinks they have confidence in their evangelical Christian credentials, I have more.

I prayed to ask Jesus into my heart when I was 3. I was baptized by immersion at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church after giving testimony to my faith when I was 7 or 8.

My church started AWANA clubs when I was in first grade. I completed 3 years worth of Sparks club in 2 years to get the associated trophy. I completed every year of AWANA after that, all the way through high school, memorizing hundreds of Bible verses. I was given the AWANA Citation Award at AWANA national Bible Quizzing and Olympics. My team didn’t win the Olympics, but won the sportsmanship award, which is probably even more meritorious.

I was homeschooled in a Christian homeschool grades 1 through 12. I learned from the best Christian curricula. I soaked up Ken Ham’s creation science videos in Sunday School and youth group. As a 7th grader I sent a letter to my best friend, aghast that he entertained the possibility of “long-day” creation. I quoted 2 Timothy 4 to him and said I would be one of the ones who stood up when others were going wobbly.

I attended an IBLP Basic Seminar when I was in high school. I bought and took home a cassette tape of their Gothard-blessed choir arrangements of hymns, excited to have Godly music to listen to. I attended a church with the authors of a Quiverfull book and the midwife who reported in Gothard’s newsletter that a Cabbage Patch Kids doll was being used by the devil to prevent a healthy home birth.

I was fully invested in the political implications of my evangelical faith. I speed-dialed Rush Limbaugh and tried to convince his call screener that I should talk to Rush about the dangers of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I bought a constitutional law overview book written by Michael Farris and was jittery with excitement when I got to hear him speak and shake his hand. I marched in a parade carrying a campaign sign for a Republican Senate candidate.

I sat in years of adult “precept by precept, line by line” Bible study. I went through Evangelism Explosion training, memorized all the cards, and went door-to-door asking people “if you died tonight, and God asked ‘why should I let you into my heaven?’, what would you say?”.

I passed up full-ride scholarship offers to public universities and instead took out loans to attend a Christian university. I lived in a dormitory that only allowed opposite-gender visits for 3 hours on Friday nights and 3 hours on Sunday afternoons under supervision. I took 15 credits of Bible and Christian ethics along with my engineering classes in order to graduate.

I started leading worship in church when I was in high school. I led worship at church and in college chapel during my college years. I joined a Baptist church within the first month of moving to Iowa and within the first year was leading worship there. I formed the team, led practices, led the music at multiple services every week for years. I met weekly with the church staff to evaluate the previous week’s services and plan for the upcoming week.

I became a deacon at that Baptist church before the age of 30. Then I became an elder. I attended the Emmaus Bible College pastor’s conference, the Moody Bible Institute pastor’s conference, and the Desiring God pastor’s conference. I led Bible studies, did in-home pastoral care visits, tracked giving and sent out yearly giving receipts.

I was part of an elder team that planted a new church in an under-churched neighborhood near downtown in our city. I did tech setup and tear-down and led worship there every week for two years.

I moved to a larger Evangelical Free church. I served on the worship team there and became the interim music ministry leader when the staff worship pastor left. For multiple years we did three-service weekends spanning Saturday night and Sunday morning with full band and tech team.

I read hundreds of books on theology and the church. I read John Piper, Tim Keller, Don Carson, Francis Schaeffer, Mark Driscoll, Russell Moore, and N. T. Wright. I led book discussions, wrote blog posts about them, and bought extra copies to give away to others.

I had three children and raised them in the church. I pushed for us to homeschool them. I dragged them to church every time we went. I did read-alouds of the Jesus Storybook Bible and all the Chronicles of Narnia with them. I drove them to youth group, encouraged them to volunteer, taught them instruments or got them lessons so they could join the worship team themselves.

But Jesus

Somewhere in all those years, Jesus stepped in.

Jesus opened my eyes to his love for every person. Even and especially for those who didn’t look like me or believe the way I did.

Jesus made it clear to me that all my book learning and ability to argue people into a corner was a harsh cacophony if I didn’t actually love those people and want their best.

Jesus showed me that God loves my loved ones even more than I do, and that God’s love is the same in kind, and infinitely greater in quality and quantity, as my own love for family is.

Jesus made it clear to me that so much of the memorization and learning and doctrine we were so proud of as evangelicals manifested as unloving, judgmental, manipulative gate-keeping to those who weren’t in our little club.

Jesus helped me see that God’s plan for the universe is so much greater and more redemptive than rescuing a small fraction of holy humans out of a burning earth into an ethereal heavenly plane.

Jesus made it clear to me that his desire is for followers who love God and love their neighbor rather than those who cling to power through politics, nationalism, racism, and misogyny.

Jesus showed me that loving my neighbor might actually mean directly caring for my literal next-door neighbors more than it means laboring to support church programs while I hold good intentions in my heart for others and invite them to those programs.

Whatever my accomplishments were to me, I now count them as nothing compared to knowing the freedom and confidence that Jesus has given me as I now know him as the true representation of God, a God who fully knows, loves, and embraces each one of us just as we are.

Amen.