I’ve spent the last several days going through the 20 years of my blog archive on Jekyll to fix bad html. (For example, a <blockquote> doesn’t render properly in Jekyll if it occurs inline in the code.)
In the winter and spring of 2009 there are some in-depth posts on reformed theology, a very long sermon manuscript, several posts about the Fourth Commandment (keep the Sabbath), and then all the sudden we’re “providentially” at another church, and I’m making a point about how this new church has nomination for elders, which was funny because the church we had helped plant for the previous two years had no elders.
So what happened?
Forensically, you can look back at this post regarding adopting the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Then following posts about the fourth commandment… Some of which come before The Event as warning, and some of which come after, as justification. And then there are later posts about evolution that took another whole year to percolate.
Then there is a 7-year gap in blogging between 2012 and 2019, in which I come out the other side with cannons blazing and address the fallout directly.
[It] came time to settle on a statement of faith, and we were leaning towards the 1689 London Baptist Confession (LBC) […] But exceptions were going to be made. A decade ago when John Piper began to accept Presbyterians into membership at his Baptist church, he said: “Beware of making the doors of your church narrower than the gates of the Kingdom.” I had the same feeling, that we shouldn’t draw lines where they shouldn’t be drawn.
My wife’s brother-in-law, our pastor, had proposed an “amendment” to the 320-year-old historic confession, as if our tiny church knew better than those Particular Baptist representatives who first adopted it, having just won religious freedom in Britain for the first time. The amendment was to say that the Fourth Commandment didn’t apply. (This was because one of our biggest donors didn’t actually come to church on Sunday.)
At the time, I thought this was very uncool. So we opposed the amendment. How can you claim that nine commandments have to be adhered to but deliberately reject one of them? Not only that but require people to reject it?
We also had a question about whether the phrase in the Confession about creation happening “in the space of six days” was meant to be taken literally, or if we were excluding legitimate Christians who had other interpretations, i.e. that the description of days in Genesis was meant poetically.
We raised these concerns. But when it came down to the vote, the church membership voted unanimously–except for us. I was a worship leader and secretary of the board, and I would have been unable to continue in these roles if it had been adopted.
The vote came down, my wife and I were the only ones to vote no. The whole rest of the fellowship were basically voting that I should be disqualified from leadership; because even though I subscribed to the entire Reformed confession I wouldn’t agree with the one exception they made to it.
Well, then we went home and blogged about it, and immediately got in trouble. We had to delete the blog posts, and we can’t find them even for reference purposes. (I probably backed it up to a “draft” in Blogger but it didn’t port over to WordPress and therefore didn’t make it to Jekyll. Neither of us has access to Blogger’s creator view anymore so we can’t find the posts.) We got church disciplined (which is virtually excommunication when it causes the offended parties to leave in not-good standing).
For my wife, it basically entailed leaving her family, as her sister was the pastor’s wife, and her several nieces were the pastor’s kids.
We left our church, we left my family, and soon we realized that we had to fully rely on God’s grace, God’s providence and God’s sovereignty like we had never really had to in the past. Perhaps the final catalyst was so hard and painful […] I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my sister and my beautiful nieces.
We have since restored our relationship with my mother-in-law, who remained faithful with the church. My wife was able to reconnect with her sister for some very important conversations, and some of the nieces even helped us move after we rebuilt our A-frame.
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| A family reunion of sorts, at my daughter’s 5th birthday party, in front of one of the big, ancient trees we had before the fire. |
But other than my wife’s mom, and my daughter’s school friends, we’re all pretty much alone here. When so much of your community revolves around religion, a lot of isolation can result when you leave it behind. Even friends we’ve known for decades had become estranged as there was so much we no longer had in common with them. It’s been good to see others deconstruct or otherwise become more liberal and tolerant and be able to connect with them online. Though online friendship is legitimate community, sometimes it’s just not the same…