Dear Brothers in Christ,

A few years ago I told my friend, Ed Stetzer, that, whenever he hears the news that I’m on my deathbed, he’s to elbow his way through my family members to interview me about what it’s been like to be a female leader in the conservative Evangelical world. He responded, “Why can’t we do it before then?”

“Because you know good and well what will happen,” I answered. “I’ll get fried like a chicken.” After recent events following on the heels of a harrowing eighteen months, I’ve decided fried chicken doesn’t sound so bad.

I have been a professing Evangelical for decades and, at least in my sliver of that world, a conservative one. I was a cradle role Southern Baptist by denomination with an interdenominational ministry. I walked the aisle to receive Christ as my Savior at 9 years old in an SBC church and exactly nine years later walked the aisle in another SBC church to surrender to a vocational calling. Being a woman called to leadership within and simultaneously beyond those walls was complicated to say the least but I worked within the system. After all, I had no personal aspirations to preach nor was it my aim to teach men. If men showed up in my class, I did not throw them out. I taught. But my unwavering passion was to teach and to serve women.

I lack adequate words for my gratitude to God for the pastors and male staff members in my local churches for six decades who have shown me such love, support, grace, respect, opportunity and often out right favor. They alongside key leaders at LifeWay and numerous brothers elsewhere have no place in a larger picture I’m about to paint for you. They have brought me joy and kept me from derailing into cynicism and chronic discouragement amid the more challenging dynamics.

As a woman leader in the conservative Evangelical world, I learned early to show constant pronounced deference – not just proper respect which I was glad to show – to male leaders and, when placed in situations to serve alongside them, to do so apologetically. I issued disclaimers ad nauseam. I wore flats instead of heels when I knew I’d be serving alongside a man of shorter stature so I wouldn’t be taller than he. I’ve ridden elevators in hotels packed with fellow leaders who were serving at the same event and not been spoken to and, even more awkwardly, in the same vehicles where I was never acknowledged. I’ve been in team meetings where I was either ignored or made fun of, the latter of which I was expected to understand was all in good fun. I am a laugher. I can take jokes and make jokes. I know good fun when I’m having it and I also know when I’m being dismissed and ridiculed. I was the elephant in the room with a skirt on. I’ve been talked down to by male seminary students and held my tongue when I wanted to say, “Brother, I was getting up before dawn to pray and to pore over the Scriptures when you were still in your pull ups.”

Some will inevitably argue that the disrespect was not over gender but over my lack of formal education but that, too, largely goes back to issues of gender. Where was a woman in my generation and denomination to get seminary training to actually teach the Scriptures? I hoped it would be an avenue for me and applied and was accepted to Southwestern Seminary in 1988. After a short time of making the trek across Houston while my kids were in school, of reading the environment and coming to the realization of what my opportunities would and would not be, I took a different route. I turned to doctrine classes and tutors, read stacks of books and did my best to learn how to use commentaries and other Bible research tools. My road was messy but it was the only reasonable avenue open to me.

Anyone out in the public eye gets pelted with criticism. It’s to be expected, especially in our social media culture, and those who can’t stand the heat need to get out of the kitchen. What is relevant to this discussion is that, several years ago when I got publically maligned for being a false teacher by a segment of hyper-fundamentalists based on snippets taken out of context and tied together, I inquired whether or not they’d researched any of my Bible studies to reach those conclusions over my doctrine, especially the studies in recent years. The answer was no. Why? They refused to study what a woman had taught. Meanwhile no few emails circulated calling pastors to disallow their women to do my “heretical” studies. Exhausting. God was and is and will always be faithful. He is sovereign and all is grace. He can put us out there and pull us back as He pleases. Ours is to keep our heads down and seek Him earnestly and serve Him humbly

I have accepted these kinds of challenges for all of these years because they were simply part of it and because opposition and difficulties are norms for servants of Christ. I’ve accepted them because I love Jesus with my whole heart and will serve Him to the death. God has worked all the challenges for good as He promises us He will and, even amid the frustrations and turmoil, I would not trade lives with a soul on earth. Even criticism, as much as we all hate it, is used by God to bring correction, endurance and humility and to curb our deadly addictions to the approval of man.

I accepted the peculiarities accompanying female leadership in a conservative Christian world because I chose to believe that, whether or not some of the actions and attitudes seemed godly to me, they were rooted in deep convictions based on passages from 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14.

Then early October 2016 surfaced attitudes among some key Christian leaders that smacked of misogyny, objectification and astonishing disesteem of women and it spread like wildfire. It was just the beginning. I came face to face with one of the most demoralizing realizations of my adult life: Scripture was not the reason for the colossal disregard and disrespect of women among many of these men. It was only the excuse. Sin was the reason. Ungodliness.

This is where I cry foul and not for my own sake. Most of my life is behind me. I do so for sake of my gender, for the sake of our sisters in Christ and for the sake of other female leaders who will be faced with similar challenges. I do so for the sake of my brothers because Christlikeness is at stake and many of you are in positions to foster Christlikeness in your sons and in the men under your influence. The dignity with which Christ treated women in the Gospels is fiercely beautiful and it was not conditional upon their understanding their place.

About a year ago I had an opportunity to meet a theologian I’d long respected. I’d read virtually every book he’d written. I’d looked so forward to getting to share a meal with him and talk theology. The instant I met him, he looked me up and down, smiled approvingly and said, “You are better looking than _________________________________.” He didn’t leave it blank. He filled it in with the name of another woman Bible teacher.

These examples may seem fairly benign in light of recent scandals of sexual abuse and assault coming to light but the attitudes are growing from the same dangerously malignant root. Many women have experienced horrific abuses within the power structures of our Christian world. Being any part of shaping misogynistic attitudes, whether or not they result in criminal behaviors, is sinful and harmful and produces terrible fruit. It also paints us continually as weak-willed women and seductresses. I think I can speak for many of us when I say we are neither interested in reducing or seducing our brothers.

The irony is that many of the men who will give consideration to my concerns do not possess a whit of the misogyny coming under the spotlight. For all the times you’ve spoken up on our behalf and for the compassion you’ve shown in response to “Me too,” please know you have won our love and gratitude and respect.

John Bisagno, my pastor for almost thirty years, regularly said these words: “I have most often seen that, when the people of God are presented with the facts, they do the right thing.” I was raised in ministry under his optimism and, despite many challenges, have not yet recovered from it. For this reason I write this letter with hope.

I’m asking for your increased awareness of some of the skewed attitudes many of your sisters encounter. Many churches quick to teach submission are often slow to point out that women were also among the followers of Christ (Luke 8), that the first recorded word out of His resurrected mouth was “woman” (John 20:15) and that same woman was the first evangelist. Many churches wholly devoted to teaching the household codes are slow to also point out the numerous women with whom the Apostle Paul served and for whom he possessed obvious esteem. We are fully capable of grappling with the tension the two spectrums create and we must if we’re truly devoted to the whole counsel of God’s Word.

Finally, I’m asking that you would simply have no tolerance for misogyny and dismissiveness toward women in your spheres of influence. I’m asking for your deliberate and clearly conveyed influence toward the imitation of Christ in His attitude and actions toward women. I’m also asking for forgiveness both from my sisters and my brothers. My acquiescence and silence made me complicit in perpetuating an atmosphere in which a damaging relational dynamic has flourished. I want to be a good sister to both genders. Every paragraph in this letter is toward that goal.

I am grateful for the privilege to be heard. I long for the day – have asked for the day – when we can sit in roundtable discussions to consider ways we might best serve and glorify Christ as the family of God, deeply committed to the authority of the Word of God and to the imitation of Christ. I am honored to call many of you friends and deeply thankful to you for your devotion to Christ. I see Him so often in many of you.

In His great name,

Beth

A number of years ago, fifteen or more I think, I was invited for the first time to speak at The Cove, the Billy Graham Conference Center. I was honored to be asked and had looked tremendously forward to it and prepared diligently, prayerfully. I’m also a mountain girl and I never met a Blue Ridge Mountain I wouldn’t have married. It was the first weekend of November. I remember the time of year distinctly because it holds a significant place in this story. I almost always travel alone to conferences to minimize any distraction to a sense of Christ’s presence as I prepare but my wonderful hosts at The Cove had set aside a two-bedroom cabin for me that was perched, I was told, in a spectacular spot on the mountain, just above the conference center.

My friend, Jan Silvious, was within driving distance of it and I knew she’d be the perfect cabin companion for those three days because she also travels and speaks and teaches and knows what it takes. And she’s refreshingly low maintenance. We rarely get to be in the same place so it couldn’t have been a better time to pull off a reunion.

When I arrived at the conference center, I was taken aback by its beauty. It remains, to date, one of the most breathtaking places I’ve ever served. It was late Fall but Fall nonetheless and girlfriend’s a sucker for Autumn. I recall it being a pleasant kind of chilly. I’m not even sure I wore a coat. A sweater and a jacket was more like it, I recall. The young man hosting me asked if I’d like a tour of the building and the grounds. Yes, yes, of course, I would.

It happened almost immediately. This is the wretched side of having a rough and sinful background. You supply the enemy with so much material for condemnation and your self-destructive human nature is more than happy to double-team with him. I say this is the wretched side but, make no mistake, there is a good side. God’s grace to me is not in vain. I never, not for one minute, forget what Jesus pulled me out of. I never walk toward a microphone that I do not remember my past. I am not remotely tempted to believe any hyped-up press. I don’t know how leaders with a more righteous track record handle all of that but God is faithful to guard us and uses other means I’m sure. These are the means He uses very effectively with me.

How I have learned through the years to recognize the difference between God making the best use of my sinful past and Satan capitalizing on it is, of course, the result. The outcome of the Holy Spirit whispering, “No matter where I send you, never forget from where I saved you,” is humility. The outcome the enemy whispering, “No matter where he sends you, never forget what all you’ve done,” is misery. You’d think after a while I wouldn’t fall for it but sometimes it still rolls over me like an avalanche. That afternoon was one of those times.

No thinking person imagines Billy Graham was a perfect man. We all recognize there is no such thing. We are all weak in our natural selves. Christ alone was utter perfection wrapped in bruisable flesh. But, touring those grounds, it is absolutely impossible to miss how much the man did right. There’s also just this sense of sacredness there that I can’t explain. Perhaps even righteousness. Whatever it was, I suddenly felt woefully out of place. Jan arrived and we settled in our delightful, cozy cabin. I never said a word about what I felt. I spoke that evening for the first of what would be three times over the next 24 hours. The group was warm and welcoming and God seemed present. When we got back to the cabin that night, Jan looked at me and said in the plainspoken way that makes her one of the most fabulous people on earth, “What is wrong with you?”

When you are trying to hide how you really feel about something, never invite a Christian counselor to join you. They’re onto you. And they don’t mind confronting you.

“Nothing’s wrong with me!” I smiled my happiest. “I think I’m just tired. The time change and all.”

“It’s a one hour time change,” Jan quipped, deadpan expression. “Beth Moore, I know you. Something’s wrong and I want you to tell me this minute what it is.”

I mean, what was I going to say? “I feel bad about myself.” Oh, brother. Get a grip. Have a little cheese with that whine. I knew she’d roll her eyes and should. I wasn’t new to this thing. I teach the power of the cross continually and pound heavily on the difference between Holy Spirit conviction and self-condemnation. But, for the life of me, I could not pull myself out of this one. It was not that I felt guilty. It was that I felt heartbroken. Even the recollection causes tears to sting in my eyes.

I hugged my friend, told her how happy I was that she’d come, assured her I was OK, which she, of course, knew was bull, and we each headed to our rooms and went to bed.

The only person in the universe I wanted to talk to was Jesus. I lay in that bed and sobbed and sobbed with a wide-open Bible on my heaving chest. I suppose it was open to the Psalms. I’m not sure. I couldn’t have seen through my tears to have read a single word. Sometimes you just hold the Scriptures. I said in whispers between sobs, “You were worthy of that.” “I wish so much I’d done it that way.” “You were so so worthy of that.” “I wish I could do it all again.” “I am so sorry.” “I am so, so sorry.” My past relationship with defeat was complicated. I covet those with backstories filmed in black and white. “I was in terrible sin. Then I met Jesus. Then I never terribly sinned again.” If that’s your story, you are so blessed. Depart from me, I never knew you.

I was a little girl when I came to know Jesus. A very troubled little girl who would cycle in and out of the pit for years and years. My darkest time of sin and defeat did not occur out of rebellion. I was not looking for trouble. I was awakening to the brilliance of Scripture and was becoming increasingly enraptured by Jesus. I’d already surrendered my life to ministry at 18 and pledged to be faithful to Him all my days. I wasn’t. I have no explanation for the darkest season except that Satan placed a bet on my well-hidden brokenness wrought by victimization and unrelenting instability in my childhood home. At the time I fell into the deepest abyss that would ever swallow me, I was a young adult who genuinely loved Jesus and never let the sun come up without meeting with him. The devil’s mean. The flesh is stupid. And together, they team up for a trainwreck.

That dark time was years behind me as I lay in bed and sobbed that night in the cabin above The Cove. I’d long since had counseling over it. Long since, by the grace of God, broken out of the pattern that had dogged my young years. Long since lived in the light. I’d truly repented and never returned to that pit. Still, the regret at times was almost more than I could bear. Every wave of fresh love I’d have for Jesus would be followed sooner or later by a fresh wave of heartbrokenness over old sin.

Jesus was strangely quiet that night as I wept. Often in a wave of despair like that one, His Spirit will remind me of certain verses or I’ll sense His comfort. I didn’t feel like He wasn’t with me. I just felt no response at all. Not even a good, swift kick in the pajama pants like, “Oh, get over it.” Nothing, just quiet. Just despair. I cried until I was empty, my hair sopping wet at the temples. I fell asleep with that Bible wide open on my chest.

The next morning I awakened well before dawn and crept quietly, so as not to awaken Jan, into the small den between our two bedrooms to turn on the coffee maker. I looked out of the picture window of our cabin and saw a strange and unfamiliar sight. I squinted my eyes and looked as hard as I could. I walked over to it and tried to make out what I was seeing. I hurried over to the door and opened it and everywhere I looked, it was the same sight.

I ran into Jan’s room and said, “Get up! I have to show you something!”

“What on earth?”

“Jan, get up! I need you to see something! I need to ask you something!”

I got her by the hand, dragged her onto the porch of that little cabin, both of us in our pajamas, and I turned her toward me, held her by the shoulders and said, as seriously as I have ever said a word in my entire life, “Jan Silvious, I have a question to ask you and I need you to think about it and be very sure about your answer before you give it to me.”

“OK,” she said, looking completely confused and coffeeless.

I pointed toward the limbs of the trees right in front of us. “Jan, is that frost? Or is that snow? I need to know.”

“This is what you got me up for?”

“Jan. Frost? Or snow?”

She shook her head and laughed at her friend from the hotlands of the Texas Gulf Coast and said, “Beth, that is not frost. That is snow. Frost does not heap up on the branch.”

And I began to jump up and down right there in my pajamas and I yelled from the top of my lungs for that Blue Ridge Mountain and every soul on it to hear, “Whiter than snow! Whiter than snow! Jan, Jan, Jan! I’m whiter than snow!” Got her by the arms. Made her jump with me.

“We’re whiter than snow!”

That morning when our host greeted us, he said, “How about this snow? We weren’t expecting it this weekend. It’s pretty early for these parts around here.”

Oh, no no no, Brother. It was right on time.

It was one of the best days of my life.

Today, on this day, we remember the best day of our lives.

Christ’s worst day. Christ’s best day. The day toward which the first day dawned. The day heaven and hell crashed violently in the skies and the devil who’d shown up for his big triumph was put to open shame.

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. Colossians 2:13-15

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:

       though your sins are like scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow;

       though they are red like crimson,

they shall become like wool. Isaiah 1:18

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Psalm 51:7-8

Whiter than snow, loved one in Christ. The nightmare is over. You’re clean.

Whiter than snow.

The choirs of outcries from Hollywood over the Harvey Weinstein scandal concerning crimes against women and those echoing globe-wide over the atrocities of USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar against children drop a question of epic proportions into the lap of the church:

Why are we who preach and teach “the truth will set you free” largely bound by silence regarding sexual assault and abuse?

Rachael Denhollander’s cogent courtroom testimony, masterfully articulating both the grace and justice of Jesus Christ, made her identification as a Christian beautifully clear. We were immensely proud to be her sisters and brothers and to stand with her in the public square. Then came the irony of discovering that her advocacy for sexual assault victims had cost Rachael her church. What’s more, most of us suspect her congregation wouldn’t have been the only one. What are we to do with this disparity? Why would followers of Jesus be among the least vocal and the slowest to respond when Christ, whom we are called to imitate, was a relentless defender of the powerless, misused, victimized and abused? In specific regard to children, why do we – activists in numerous other streams of concern – choose reserve about wrongs for which Jesus reserved a titanic threat?

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!” (Mt 18:6–7 NIV). 

A few of the most obvious reasons have been discussed and cussed in recent months. Protecting powerful people (which can include ourselves), institutions and systems from shame, accusation, desertion and defunding are a few major contributors. Throw alongside those a nobler rationalization: the preservation of the “greater good.” This, of course, is an absurdity since hiding abuse will ultimately and absolutely be the institution’s (and the person’s) undoing. God just really doesn’t let us get away with that kind of thing forever. He’s too faithful. Christ’s own theology of secrecy can be summed up in two simple words: secrets manifest. Thankfully, the assurance is true in regard to good secrets as well as bad. (Matt.6; Mark 4) The faster we uncover the toxic ones before God (Ps.32:5) and before proper authorities, the better. Lastly, what we’ve proved willing to overlook for political gain has rendered us mute lest our hypocrisy know no bounds and, although that matters to me, that’s not the fish I care to fry today. My purpose in this article is to throw another possible explanation on the table for consideration.

I wonder if much of our silence, our squirming and palpable discomfort, regarding the exposure of sexual abuses is wrapped up in our guilt, shame or brokenness over our own sexual sins. After all, who among us hasn’t committed sexual sin whether in imagination or action? I will leave room for perhaps three of you out there somewhere who are now officially excused from this discussion. Please go reward yourselves with a half gallon of Ben and Jerry’s which we ask you to consume in one sitting just to make the rest of us feel some level of comfort over your gluttony or go covet your coworker’s car or at the very least be visibly proud of your purity over all aforementioned transgressions so we can be consoled by your sinful pride. Maybe the rest of us could sit around here for a second and give this theory some mild consideration. Even if our sexual sins belong to our pasts and our lives bear fruit of true repentance, we may still have an enormous reluctance to bring sexual misconduct to light.

And for good reason. Take John 8, for instance, and the woman caught in the act of adultery dragged into the temple courts and Christ’s response to whether or not she should be stoned. “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” Every accuser fell silent to the thuds of rocks dropping at their feet. Which of us has the right to throw a stone? None, of course. That’s the way of Jesus. That’s the way of grace.

The thought that it could be our own sins shamefully exposed is so horrifying that we’ve ripped off a piece of duct tape and slapped it across our mouths. Most of us have not only committed some form of sexual sin. We’ve also grappled at one point or another with some level of sexual dysfunction, however well we hid it or quickly we moved through it. The statistics on pornography alone testify to our skewed sexuality. We understandably feel guilty about pointing out such weaknesses in others and our sensitivity to hypocrisy is appropriate. We see the faces of the accused all over the media and imagine our own mugs between their crimson ears and the sordid reports of our own sinfulness in print instead of theirs.

But here are a few questions I’d like to pose: do all sexual sins call for the same response? Are we meant by God to respond to the sexually abusive the same way we respond to the sexually immoral? To be sure, all stones of condemnation drop to the dirt in the presence and perfection of Jesus, crucified for our sins and raised from the dead so we can walk in newness of life. His grace extends to all. His forgiveness is earned by none. All sexual sins have negative repercussions but all sexual sins don’t cause the same level of repercussions. Likewise, all predators are immoral but not all immorality is predatory. Do we walk away from an unrepentant rapist because we’ve all sinned sexually in one way or another or do we apprehend him? Do we ignore a church leader’s sexual harassment because we slept with people in college? Forgive me for being so direct but these things need sorting out.

If we are going to move to a place of healthy community in the church where there is thriving instead of conniving, where the sheep are protected instead of the wolves, where the abused find shelter instead of the abusers, we’re going to have to sort out our convoluted thinking about sexual misconduct.

It is imperative that we learn to differentiate between sexual immorality and sexual criminality.

Both are sin.

Both call for repentance.

Both require grace.

Both can be forgiven, slates wiped clean, by our merciful God though the cross of Christ.

Where church and ministry leaders are concerned, both also call for proper action. But one calls for a different proper action. It calls for the police. While all sexual sin is immoral, not all sexual sin is criminal. There is sexual sin in general. And there is sexual assault in particular. There must be a distinction drawn between the two.

Here’s the bottom line. The problem is enormous but it doesn’t have to stay that way. We’ve helped blow it up to its current size with our breathy silence. We won’t be able to eradicate sexual crimes – only the coming of Christ’s kingdom will accomplish that – but, by His grace, power, wisdom and courage we can lessen it in our own midsts by a landslide. We have victims of sexual assault, molestation and abuse all over the church – 1 in 4 females and 1 in 6 males – just as we do in virtually any community. We also likely have some predators and abusers in our congregations. So, do we quit going to church? No, unless we want to quit going to work, too, and to malls and social gatherings and sports events and concerts. Anywhere you have a crowd of people, you are among those who have abused and been abused.

So, what can we do? We address it head-on. We start making it well known – wisely and without witch-hunting histrionics – that the church is henceforth an unsafe hiding place for predators. It’s a great place for them to go forward and repent and turn themselves in, casting themselves on the grace of God with the rest of us but it must cease to be a safe harbor where they can hide and perpetuate their crimes. We need pastors and teachers who are willing to address these realities often enough to alter the silence culture.

I think numerous Christians genuinely just need to know it’s God’s will to expose such things. After all, love covers a multitude of sins. And, thank God, it does but love does not perpetuate victimization by covering for a victimizer. Love that uncovers one in order to cover another is by no means loving. We’re smarter than this. We can discern better than this. We know in our gut that covering up grievous wrongdoing because the individual is a fellow believer can’t be what 1 Peter 4:8 means.

Ephesians 5:11 says “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness but instead expose them.”

Ephesians 5:13 follows it up with these words: “But when anything is exposed by the light it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light.”

We don’t expose darkness darkly, with condemnation, hatred and vengeance. We expose darkness by the light of Jesus. Anything – absolutely anything – the light reveals, the light can also heal.

God alone knows the impact Rick and Kay Warren will have on churches all over the world because they were audacious enough last Sunday to address the topic of sexual abuse and assault from the platform in all their services. Kay courageously, shamelessly told her story, shared ramifications of the abuse and the road to healing and Rick preached on the themes from Scripture. I will long remember Rick’s address to his congregation. After nearly weeping with compassion over the hurt many had suffered and saying the simple but fitting words “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he said this: “God has made me shepherd over this flock. I will do everything I can to make Saddleback Church a safe place for the sheep but it will not be a safe place for wolves. If you are a predator and you prey on my flock, I will hunt you down and I will turn you in.” He also invited abusers to the cross of Christ, to repentance and forgiveness, and prayed for them. It was not the abused that left church frightened that day. It was the unrepentant abusers and make no mistake. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (Prov.9:10)

We need more than a handful of people to activate. We need church and ministry transformation. We need brothers and sisters who are brave enough to sort through their own sexual messiness, to repent where it’s called for, to be infused by the Holy Spirit to discern wisely and to distinguish accurately, to love healthily, comfort and protect valiantly and to help create an atmosphere where people thrive and healing really can take place. We need us all. We need all of Jesus.

I’ll end with this. A few days ago my morning Scripture reading included the first two chapters of Ruth. I was halted by Naomi’s statement of affirmation regarding the field of Boaz as a safe place for Ruth to work, even with many men close by (see Ruth 2:21). In Ruth 2:22, Naomi used these words: “It is good…lest in another field you be assaulted.” What the chapter conveyed about both Naomi and Boaz as alert, aware and proactive protectors was profound. Women, let’s be like Naomi, informed, smart, discerning, and like Ruth, willing to listen to sound counsel – not fear-mongering but sound counsel – about safe versus dangerous places. Men, take up the mantle of Boaz and see to it valiantly, wisely and shrewdly, that in your field, whatever and wherever it may be, no one gets assaulted. And, should anyone be harmed despite your watchfulness, you know what to do.

Do what is right.

I think it’s time to say something. I’m going to keep it pretty short because I’m not ready to go long on it. Still processing it. Still trying to figure things out. One day maybe I’ll write on it with some length and depth but not until God has done a longer and deeper work in me.

I’ve been through the identity crisis of my adult life in the last year. No exaggeration. It has been one of the most excruciating things I have ever endured. After a lifetime of belonging – which, in itself, betrays a certain privilege – I tumbled into a season marked by the most alien sense of unbelonging. Some of it was imagined. Some of it was startlingly real. Some of it was temporary. Some of it painfully endures. I disappointed people I’d so wanted to please and I was disappointed by people I demanded to be heroic. In some very painful respects, I’d given the benefit of the doubt where I shouldn’t have and withheld it in a few places worthy of it.

Numbers of us who’d previously aligned and agreed – not on everything but on enough – were cracking and crumbling. Some people I thought I knew felt like strangers to me and I, to them. Each of us Christian, some of us would talk and talk and truly attempt to understand one another only to hang up or walk away exasperated, incapable of grasping the other’s view. New teams were forming and I felt like I was slipping on ice, scrambling to find the right one.  The one that would always be right on everything.

A fog had cleared that I couldn’t cloud back up.  I saw things I couldn’t unsee and, for a while, a dark cloud descended where that fog had been. I had the unshakable sense that, though it was dark, I was not to shut my eyes. That I’d see more in that dark place than I’d seen in years of sun-up.

Still navigating some of it. Still trying to keep my eyes open.

And mostly to things that need changing in myself. Ways I’ve been kidding myself. Ways I’ve been part of the problem instead of the solution. Ways I’ve been a coward. A people pleaser. A crowd pleaser. Ways I’ve been acceptably Christian in many circles maybe, but not Christlike. Make no mistake. There can be a wide gulf fixed between those two things.

My entire identity has been steeped in the church. In a people, not bricks and mortar. Started serving the church in 6th grade when I’d graduated out of VBS and began helping the grown ups. Church has been good to me, a harbor amid the stormy unstable home life of my upbringing. I have no horror stories about church. I’ve known love, acceptance, forgiveness, grace and growth in each congregation and never loved a church more than the one I’m presently part of. I can’t imagine life without church. I will serve it till I die.

But my identity is having to be reshaped in Christ alone. He alone cannot change. He alone remains unswayed. He alone is Savior. He alone can take the pressure of being adored. Everyone else we set up high is just another Humpty Dumpty waiting to fall.

I am sanguine to the bone. I love a group. I love my friends. I love my associates. I love familiarity. I love knowing what to expect and getting it. I love being able to fill in a sentence like this with confidence: I am a ____________________.

But the only label I know for certain I want to wear is this one: Jesus-follower. I want to go with Jesus. When pilgrimage gets to be a group fare, fabulous. Nothing is more fun to me. But when pilgrimage with Him requires more aloneness or more traversing with unfamiliar sojourners who make me feel awkward, that has to be just fine, too.

I want to do people good. I want to go to those margins where people need the gospel most. I want to love. Sacrifice. Wrestle. Change. I don’t just want to go where I feel like I belong. I just want to go where Jesus points.

Months into this ridiculous identity crisis, it turns out I didn’t lose as many friends or as much community as I feared. But what I lost was my naivety.

Good riddance I guess. Good but hard riddance.

I want to be brave for the sake of the gospel. Too much is at stake and too many people dying and suffering to take the cheap route. This was meant all along to cost us something.

Maybe fitting isn’t the point. The fact is, we don’t fit here. We fit someplace we’ve never been. Maybe the holes we feel in our lives aren’t all supposed to be filled. Let them sit there awhile and ache. Let them sit there awhile and speak. Maybe they’ve got something to say.

The following article is a tweaked version of a message I gave recently. It’s something God has really been pressing on me in recent months in my personal time of prayer and Bible study. I cannot shake it. I can’t shake the feeling that He may be waiting for many of us to admit to our dissatisfaction and lift our chins toward heaven and have guts enough to ask, “Is this it, Lord? Is what we are seeing of the work of Your Holy Spirit all we can expect? Is this what You meant?”

If it is, then may God give peace and acceptance and understanding to those of us who are unsettled. But, what if our dissatisfaction isn’t inappropriate? What if it’s God-stirred? What if it has nothing to do with cynicism? What if God is sitting on His Throne, shaking His head with our willingness to accept so little evidence of His promises and He’s waiting for a number of us to say, “Is this all we can expect of the outpouring of Your Spirit in our day and in our part of the world?”

We’ve seen drops. Even seen a few showers but I’ve taken longer showers than those on a Monday morning running late for work.

I just keep staring at accounts of those early Jesus followers then into the mirror, bewildered over the dissimilarities.

Hebrews 10:32-39, for example.

³² But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, ³³ sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. ³⁴ For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. ³⁵ Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. ³⁶ For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. ³⁷ For, “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; ³⁸  but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” ³⁹ But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls. 

And Acts 5:27-29 and 40-42.

²⁷ And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, ²⁸ saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” ²⁹ But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. 

⁴⁰ and when they had called in the apostles, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. ⁴¹ Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name. ⁴² And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus. 

This is our heritage. The early followers of Jesus were unstoppable and not just unstoppable in works but unstoppable in faith and unceasing in joy. Do we look joyful to us? But what was given to them that drove their unstoppable work, unstoppable faith and unstoppable joy is the exact same thing we have been given.

Same exact Savior. Same Holy Spirit. “The promised Holy Spirit” (Eph.1:13) whose indwelling power turned fumbling followers of Jesus into unstoppable forces of the Kingdom of the living Christ. My daily Bible reading has recently had me in the pages of Jeremiah. The twelfth chapter records the prophet Jeremiah registering a complaint with God. He’d done so earlier and received reassurance from God. This time, God met Jeremiah’s complaint with a different response:

“If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land you are so trusting, what will you do in the thicket of the Jordan? (Jer. 12:5)

Something about it rang true to me concerning our present Christian atmosphere here in the west. We’re so preoccupied competing with one another for the spotlight that the real darkness rages on undeterred. We have lost our tolerance for discomfort and renamed it pain. And we have upgraded pain to torture. The least insult and we cry persecution. Because we react to every day frustration at a 10, when we encounter real opposition and oppression, we’ve got nothing left. We’re too exhausted from carrying our purses to move mountains. I don’t think we meant to be reduced to this. We were just picnicking by the brook of culture, wading knee deep when the flood came and engulfed us. We’ve had an outpouring alright but it’s the spirit of the world.

The thing is, we like it. It offers instant pain relief for our paper cuts and microphones for our ceaseless opinions. And, anyway, why get ourselves all scratched up in the thicket when we can perform in costumes on stage?

We’ve atrophied in our affluence. In some respects our quality of life has diminished our quantity of Spirit. We need less so we pray less, plead for less, believe for less, live for less. I’m not proposing we go sell everything we have but I am proposing we not sell our souls to everything we have.

The earth is quaking with peril. Injustice abounds and we throw it pennies and post selfies doing it. We’re preoccupied with our race against one another while the eyes of heaven search the earth for servants of Elijah’s ilk willing to pay the price, pray earnestly for rain with such fiery faith that, at the sight of the first fist-sized cloud, they’d run like the wind, leaving the chariots of the world’s proud and mighty in clouds of dust.

“The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently…” (James 5:16b-17a)

We’ve lost our tolerance for pain and given way to whining and it does not look good on us. But here’s the question that keeps needling at me: Could it be possible that our habitual whining is the result of failing to wail when we should have? There’s stuff to wail about. The condition of the world, the sufferings of the masses, the hemorrhaging of the truth and the colossal loss of Christlikeness in the church are wail-worthy. What would happen if there was less long term whining and more rightly timed wailing?

Over the course of the last five years, one of the things I believe God has consistently made clear to me is that He’d require more in my later years than less.  Coasting was out of the question. If I wanted to teach and minister under an increasing anointing, for instance, or bear fruit more profusely or see bona fide breakthroughs in the Body of Christ and true wonders of God in the midst of ministry, I’d have to press in further, go deeper with Him in His Word, get bolder in love, service, prayer and get mightier in battle. Humbler in spirit. Some of the need for pressing in further as time goes on can probably be explained by Revelation 12:12. Satan is furious because he knows his time is short. Each generation will either get stronger in battle or sink further and further into defeat. But I also think God’s increased requirement was for my good. What once came a little easier, I’d now have to fight for. I’d have to want it desperately. Cry out for it.

This has been the gift of my older age, not the curse. I bring it up only because I wonder if I’m not the only one to whom Jesus is, in effect, saying, “It’s going to take more than this.”

John the Baptizer said Jesus would baptize us with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

But where IS our fire? Where IS the Holy Spirit?

It LOOKS like the Holy Spirit.

It SOUNDS like the Holy Spirit.

It often ACTS like the Holy Spirit.

But here’s the pertinent question: Does it WORK like the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is effectual. His work bears abundant, lasting fruit.

I keep reading and reading the New Testament. I keep studying those early followers, noting how the Holy Spirit looked on them and operated through them. I don’t think this is it. I think we’re settling for woefully less than Jesus promised us He’d do. He is unfailingly faithful so He’s not the problem. Where are the “greater works than these” among us? Don’t tell me they were meant for those first followers alone. I won’t believe you and I won’t because I don’t think the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation supports it.  We’ve lowered the bar and exchanged the spring of living water for the spiked Kool Aid of cool cultural Christianity.

Yes, it is incumbent upon us to be relevant because we are not the church of a century ago. We are the church here and now. But what will make us relevant is the fact that our faith actually works. That we really are who we claim to be. Evidences that Jesus does what He says He does. To have an appearance of godliness but lack its power was a sign of fraudulence in 2 Timothy 3:5. We’re called to a fearlessness in the Spirit that results in authentic power, love and self control.

Good Lord, where is an ounce of self control among us???

If we were experiencing more than a few splatters of the Holy Spirit, we’d see evidences like…

Repentance of sins, then FRUIT of that repentance. Salvation of souls. Freedom from bondage that outlasts the weekend. Release from oppression. Transformation. True humility. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. The impossible made possible. Deliverance from addiction that takes less than 20 rounds of rehab. Remarkable reductions in pornography. (I’m talking about among US. The church. Forget preaching it the world when we’re neck deep in it ourselves. Pornography is leaving us impotent spiritually as much as physically.) Real, live healing from brokenness and brokenheartedness. JOY abounding even in suffering.

Some hint of real unity.

I just keep looking around, reading, watching podcasts, listening, trying my best to pay attention and I keep thinking, “is this it?”

Looks like the Holy Spirit.

Sounds like the Holy Spirit.

Acts like the Holy Spirit.

That’s not enough.

We cannot let up until we see the EFFECTS of the Holy Spirit. And if we’re not seeing them, let’s have courage enough to ask why. Galatians 3:3 says we can start something genuinely in the Holy Spirit but finish it in the flesh. Sometimes we lose heart but most of the time we just lose interest. Oh, to fall back on our faces that the Holy Spirit would fall back on us.

Leadership keeps talking about our corporate need for repentance but have we led the way? Are we even really praying anymore? Do we read our Bibles anymore? As hard as this is to accept, reading a blogpost does not qualify as reading the Bible.  For crying out loud, we’re getting push notifications on our phones for our daily Scripture readings and calling it spiritual discipline.  The way to the altar of repentance is so overgrown with the weeds of neglect, it’s not even visible. It’s up to us to hack the way through it and make the way clear again. It’s up to us to weep and wail for the church who has lost her way.

We are suffering from anemia. We need iron back in our blood. Calcium back in our bones.

In 1 Thessalonians 2:13, Paul refers to “the word of God which is at WORK within you.” If we were in the Word of God, it would be at work in us.

In Colossians 1:29 he says,, “For this I toil struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me.”

Many of us working hard in the Body of Christ. We are exhausted and unfulfilled and perhaps for any number of reasons but maybe chief among them is that we are empowering the powerful instead of the powerless.

Is this what the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was supposed to look like? The powerful keep getting more powerful? We’ve become wolves among sheep rather than sheep among wolves.

There are many upsides to the access the internet gives us to see innumerable events and concerts and church services where the Holy Spirit is powerfully at work but one downside is that we can inadvertently create the same atmosphere but without the authentic anointing of the Spirit.

Our biggest hindrance can sometimes be the fact that we’re just good at what we do. And we know how to do it. We’re huge on hype and hype is posing as the Holy Spirit.  A few weeks later when the adrenaline fizzles out and we’re back to our old selves and the environment is back to its old climate, why aren’t we asking,

WAS THAT IT? Is that all there is to it? All we can expect? All we should expect?

It’s risky to wait on the Lord and rely on His Spirit. It’s so much easier to default into what has worked before. The crowd pleaser. The crowd rouser. But what if we got the nerve to quit defaulting? What if we risked feeling the lack of His Presence if that’s what it took to send us to our knees to cry out for Him? What if we no longer relied on what we know would rally and we started admitting to Him in corporate and personal prayer that we’ve grown inept and ineffective and we’ve faked half of what appears to be working and we want Him back in the worst way?

I want holy fire. Bona fide holy fire. I don’t think what we’re seeing is what Jesus was saying. I want to see the real thing. Feel its heat. See its effects. There are glimpses here and there – a few campfires smoking – but I don’t think anybody’s got gall enough to say that the Body of Christ is glaring with the evidence of the Holy Spirit. In the words of Moses, what else but His Presence will distinguish us from the rest of the world?

“O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us,

what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old.” Psalm 44:1