“Tell it to the Church…”

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

‭‭Matthew‬ ‭6‬:‭19‬-‭21‬

“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…”

Romans 3:23

After my first blog post on this website I had at least half a dozen people reach out to me saying that they had similar experiences of pain in the church. I think it’s vitally important that believers acknowledge these moments of pain, talk about their genuine experiences, and learn from them to help grow the church in a way that benefits all believers. So, for the sake of transparency, I’d like to share some of the experiences I had growing up that fundamentally shaped my faith and formed the man that I am today.

I honestly can’t remember ever looking forward going to church as a kid. Church almost always felt like somewhere I had to go rather than somewhere that I wanted to be. Now that I teach public school and serve as a youth pastor, I talk with kids all the time who have similar experiences in the church. Some churches simply have not adapted themselves to become places where the youth, and sometimes adults, WANT to be. In worse cases, we have problems with leaders in the church acting so heinously towards children and members of their congregation that they don’t ever want to go back.

I’m going to tell a quick story that, if we’re comparing scales of magnitude, does not come close to what others have experienced, but was a tipping point for me in my own struggles with the church when I was a kid. (As you read this, understand that my mother and I have talked about this before, she also finds it humorous, and I do not blame my momma nor do I hold any ill will for the story I’m about to tell. In hindsight, I’m likely not the man I am today without this specific experience.)

I had a real problem with rules that I did not understand growing up. If you couldn’t tell me why we were doing something, chances are I would push your rule to an extreme, just to see if I could get away with it. To this day I make a conscious effort not to be the “because I told you so” teacher in my classroom at school because of my own experiences as a kid.

One Sunday morning when I was probably 12 years old, I got out of the car to head into church with a plastic bottle of water in my hand. I can still hear my mother’s words, to this day, as she told me that, “This isn’t a sporting event. You can’t take a bottle of water into church.” To be fair to my mom, this wasn’t her rule. The church we attended didn’t allow outside food or drink into the sanctuary. As I reflect on that experience, I can vaguely remember pushing back against what I considered to be a bunch of nonsense. In my head, based on what I had read in scripture, you could not sell me on the idea that Jesus would give a rip about a bottle of water, so long as we were joining for worship. So long as we’re there, he’s good, right?

As I’ve gotten older and (debatably) more mature, I realize that there’s probably at least a well-intended reason that our old church didn’t want water in their sanctuary. However, my mom and I get a great laugh every once in a while when I start to make fun of her for bringing coffee into the sanctuary at our family’s church, The Church of the Resurrection, in Blue Springs. Our church has a mini coffee bar sitting right outside of the sanctuary where guests can, for free, grab a quick cup on their way into worship on Sunday mornings. This to me is the embodiment of the Spirit of Christ. Come as you are. All of your faults, all of your sins, those who are well dressed and those who just woke up, and let’s worship our Savior together.

The second story I want to tell took place when I was 14 years old. I do want to warn you that the nature of this story is much more serious and graphic. From the time that I was roughly nine years old I attended Kanakuk Kamps down in the Branson, Missouri, area. I loved Kamp. There is nothing I attribute more to the development of my faith than the experiences I had at Kamp. I would not be the man I am today without the people who poured into me two weeks at a time. There’s probably no way I’d be involved in youth ministry without Kamp.

There was one man at Kamp specifically that really shaped the way I viewed Jesus Christ. His name was Pete Newman and he was an absolute legend at K-Kountry, the Kamp for 7-12 year olds in the Kankauk Kamps chain. Pete taught about a loving God that wanted to have a personal relationship with each one of us. He taught about service. Through Pete we learned how to live what he called an “I’m Third” lifestyle: God first, others second, self third. At Kamp, Pete exemplified what it meant to be a proud, crazy, loving, serving Christian.

Then in 2009, a couple years after I had “aged out” of K-Kountry, Pete Newman was arrested for sexually assaulting young boys. To say that I was a bit traumatized would be putting it lightly. I can remember to this day exactly where I was sitting when my mom told me the news. I remember vividly playing it off like it didn’t bother me. I want to be clear that I never experienced anything of the sort from Pete, and his direct victims suffered far more than I could ever imagine, but the idea that my hero, the man who I credit more than any other individual for the development of my faith could do something so evil to the very people he was preaching to, absolutely rocked my faith. I had no idea what to think anymore. To be honest, there was one time in particular where I can remember questioning how anyone could buy what he was selling ever again.

It was scripture that pulled me back to Christ. I want to reference back to the two verses I quoted at the beginning of this post. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasure on earth…” and “…all have sinned and fall short…”. At some point I had a decision to make.

Option #1: None of what I had experienced at Kamp was real, God therefore may not be real, and Pete Newman was just an example of how evil people can peddle a feel-good story to the most vulnerable in our society as a means to make some money.

Option #2: Everything I had experienced at Kamp was real, God is real, His Son is real, and bad people do bad things and that’s part of life. That doesn’t mean we have to give them the final say and detract us from our faith and the mission that Christ set us on. We can still pursue a relationship with Christ even though the people who introduced us may have fallen short of their own relationship with Him.

It’s probably not hard to see where I wound up. To be honest, it didn’t really take me too long to wind up there either, though it took me nearly a decade to really reconcile my own faith story with what I believed to be a loving God who both wants the best for me and for free will to exist in the world so that we can choose to love him on our own…or to not…

While it would be impossible for me to detail every important detail in my life that led me down one path or another, I do want to try to summarize everything I’ve said so far with a few key points:

#1: Nobody is perfect. People will fail you. CHURCH, therefore, will fail you. You cannot expect anyone, even your church leaders, to be perfect. If you set your eyes on Jesus and trust your treasure to Him, and allow Him to lead you through the leaders of His church here on earth, you’ll never lose sight of him, even when the waves start rocking.

#2: It’s okay to have doubt. In the Hebrew language the term “Israelite” translates to “he who wrestles with God.” In their own language, the very people God swore to protect identify themselves with their give-and-take with their creator. You also are not perfect. Give yourself some slack when you fail, and trust that your faith will make you well.

#3: Jesus himself came to dismantle the established religious authority in his own age. Even the Messiah didn’t like the way the church had evolved. Jesus put people before everything. He healed on the sabbath. He loved unconditionally. He mingled with outsiders. He broke the rules because he loved those the rules had ostracized. It’s okay to disagree with the rules sometimes when it is done out of an abundance of love for your neighbor.

#4: If you don’t think a church exists that fits the mold of what I’ve described…reach out to me. Boy do I have some good news for you.

In 2017 my mom introduced me to Church of the Resurrection. I was about to graduate college and she had been a member of the church for a couple of years while I had been gone. I went a couple of times with her over the summer while I was home, but I had never been consistently with her at any point. One thing I found funny was that Adam Hamilton, the senior pastor for all the church’s locations, preached through a video screen. This kind of made me not want to go for a while, but it didn’t take long before even videos of Adam Hamilton changed my life.

There was a point in my life when I swore I’d never go back to church. I’ve mentioned previously that I never lost my faith, in fact in college I grew closer to Christ through a series of struggles and pain. I was just done with organized religion, or so I thought. Adam Hamilton and the Church of the Resurrection United Methodist Church opened my eyes back up to what church can be. What it’s SUPPOSED to be. A loving, accepting, inclusive, serving community of believers that put Christ first, others second, and themselves third. I’m forever grateful for my mother for introducing me to this community because I truly don’t know where I’d be in my faith journey right now if it wasn’t for Resurrection.

I hope this has helped even one person out there. If you ever have questions you want answered, I’d be happy to try to answer them. If you feel like you’ve been wanting to give church a try again, but have been scared off in the past, I’d love to talk to you about my church. Human beings were designed to worship together. I’d love to have a chance to worship with you soon. God Bless.