The Uncensored Room

For the past year or so, I've quietly pulled myself out of what I would call conventional church. Younger generations may call it the emergent church and older generations may call it something that doesn't look like the church they once knew. It's the church of Sunday sermons, uninspiring music, over-worshipped pastors, and spectatorship. Why have I pulled away? I found myself so sucked into the system of church, that I was becoming a stranger to the outside world- even a segregationist- and this eventually began to bother me. So I left.

Since then, my questions have become irresistible to ask. Questions like...

Was this straight and narrow path of church community in fact more community-less that I thought? Why did it seem as though my unchurched friends who hang out at bars accept and respect each other, while my church friends sit around arguing theology, constantly bickering about whether or not Mark Driscoll is a chauvinist asshole and if Rob Bell is indeed a universalist? Why in all of this bickering am I so lonely? Why am I so filled with fear operating inside of the church, maybe even more than outside of the church? Are we actually worshipping dynamic teaching pastors rather than this entity called God? Does God even exist?

So while the pastor was preaching his Sunday sermon, I quietly opened the back door and stepped out into the fresh air that I have been longing to breathe. This is where I am now and it is here that I want to write my thoughts to those who will listen. These thoughts are unbound and to many, maybe even vulgar (you may have cringed at the word "asshole" that I used in the previous paragraph). I guess that I just don't care about censoring what I see and how I see it anymore and I think that somehow, there is a profoundness that thrives there. I want to witness the profound.

I started this "Between the Waves" blog a while back and I must say that it isn't until now that I actually feel as though I AM finally between the waves. I was on the shore when I started this thing and maybe my previous writings give you a glimpse of that. Many Christians do what I did for so long and fantasize about being in the dangerous waves, even write about it and reading about it from others who have taken the leap. They convince themselves that they are fearless Christians- they do this as they hide behind their favorite podcasts of pastors that they listen to each week, filling themselves up with more and more knowledge- LOTS of speculation and very little experience. My hope is that my writings will encourage you to put down the books, take the leap, risk the safety, and begin to be more honest at this very moment.

So get ready to lose the religion and put your faith on the stand. Get ready to risk becoming an atheist and an agnostic and on the contrary, quite possibly become a deep lover of a mysterious God and of wounded people. Get ready to be offended and pissed off and quite possibly, find a new joy within the conflict. Stuff I say is going to rub you the wrong way and that's ok. Our ugliness is radiant with beauty and we need to reveal what we are indeed so scared of... our ugliness. We live in the dark, calling it light, when most likely, we've only seen specks of light in the distance. Honesty welcomes light and the light is good.

Now, let's turn on the lights...