I'm A Recovering Poisonous Preacher

My friend Stephanie posted a link to this blog on her Facebook page. Here's a snippet:

"The underlying foundation of all religion is performance, whether it's a tribal dance around a campfire to satisfy the fire god or a dead religious activity performed week after week by an evangelical Christian with the intent of impressing his God. It's all religious performance and God isn't impressed by our performance. What impresses Him is faith. 'Without faith it is impossible to please Him' (Hebrews 11:6). He couldn't care less about religious ritual void of life. God is in the business of Life. Nothing else interests Him. He is interested in living relationships, not dead religion."

The author references 2 Kings 4:38-41, and likens the story of Elisha's servant mixing fruit of a wild vine in with the stew to someone taking "the liberating gospel of God’s grace and mixed the wild gourds of religious performance in the same pot with it." He goes on to say,

"The idea of religious performance is a wild plant which poisons the grace of God and causes it to cease to be edible, although I did eat and serve it to my church for many years. The tragedy of this kind of poison is that it won't kill you, but will be just toxic enough to keep you sick for the rest of your life."

This blog hit home with me, as I used to do the same thing. I used to preach grace on one hand, but stress the things we had to continually do to "be a good Christian". I judged others based on their religious performance, and made decisions on whether people were good enough to be involved with certain ministries, or "be on stage", based on how well they lived up to what I, or my pastor, our our denomination, thought were God's standards.

I used fear and manipulation, disguised as "illustrated sermons", to dole out this witch's brew of grace and performance. I had no idea what I was doing at first. I truly believed that I was merely trying to help people have a better relationship with God, and to keep things pure so that God's presence was not stifled or quenched because of unrepented "sin in the camp". But as more and more people got hurt or left altogether because of what I, or the pastor(s), or the church had done, I began to question if what we were doing really had anything to do with God's love at all, or if it was really more about control. The desire for others to conform to OUR image, not God's.

More than anything else, this is what I regret about my time spent in "ministry"- that I was so ignorant, and arrogant, that I truly couldn't see that I was hurting people in my zeal to save them. I've made some really bad choices in my life, but for some reason I really have trouble letting go of the guilt from this.

If any of those I've hurt are reading this now, please know that I am very sorry.