Watch Out for Tiger Snakes

You're not likely to find a church that celebrates the work of both Charlie Kirk and Rob Bell. Every hero is someone else's villain, even when the tribe looks similar. I've spent my whole life inside this, and I still hold out hope for what the church can be. Which is exactly why navigating it feels like I'm being forced to accept both confession and denial at once.

Most people who have been in church for a while will have a list of ugly experiences they will confess to in their honest moments. They've seen the student pastor who took advantage of a student, the senior pastor who leads with an iron fist and doesn't allow for difference of thought, the way purity culture taught women to see themselves as disgusting, or the ways in which Christians often become fear-peddlers. The church has a long history of not confessing. And I'm only mentioning a few of the current ones.

Unfortunately, most people who have been in church for a while also have a strong sense of denial about these types of things. They seem unable to see them, or, when these realities are exposed in a way that must be addressed, they tend to dismiss them as anomalies. Indeed, many of us who try not to live in denial with the church are told that we are putting too much value in one particular bad experience or in one bad church. Denial is the easiest way to stay involved in the church despite the ugliness that often emerges.

To be fair, I wouldn't want any one experience overvalued either. That's why many people who react to my work without knowing the context of my story assume I'm either new to Christianity or I had one experience in church that didn't go well. Discovering that I grew up in this environment, earned advanced degrees studying it, then spent decades working in it tends to complicate that dismissal. One failing of the church does not prove anything. But how many of the same failures do we need to see before we acknowledge that there's a problem?

I recently read my first Bill Bryson book, and I have no idea how this brilliant author stayed off my radar for so long. It certainly is a failure in my own development. Bryson is the kind of writer who makes you enjoy the words he chooses as much as the ideas he writes about.

My first Bryson book is In a Sunburned Country, and it tells about his experiences in Australia. It highlights both a love for the people and an outsider's insight into what makes them unique. Here's a passage that captures this:

Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.

One wonders at the absurdity of both being true. Yet there's something of that ethos in what I do. I'm a storyteller who spends much of my time in confession mode while still inviting people not to give up on Jesus. Ironically, I get both reactions in my social media comments each week. It is often the Christians who chide me for my willingness to confess the flaws in what I believe, and it is often the atheists or exvangelicals who chide me for being in denial since I'm not walking away from all of it.

Can we have confession without denial? I don't see why not. The biggest risk is that those Christians who have committed themselves to the way of denial will likely view it as a threat. After all, it's hard to maintain plausible deniability when someone keeps showing you something. It's certainly easier to look away. But I believe there are enough people following Jesus who are willing to confess how we've messed it up without resorting to denial to make ourselves feel better. Instead, we realize we've got work to do. And because we believe it's possible to create something better, we get to work.

But you still need to watch out for tiger snakes.

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Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

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