I, King Laugh, your brother and partner in the affliction, kingdom, and endurance that are in Jesus, was on the isthmus called Pine County to support my family in its hour of need. I was searching for a church at which to worship, and I took a notion to write in seven Substack posts what I have seen in seven archetypes of disease within the Evangelical churches of this locale: Edifice 69, Outside Baptist Church, Non-Dairy Creamer Bible Fellowship, Leavenedhole First Baptist Church, Presbyterian F.C., Rockefeller Baptist Church, and St. Napoleon Anglican Church.
To the splinter of a church about which I am exceedingly conflicted,
There are so many redeeming qualities to be found in each one of you and I want to commend and encourage you in them. You are not ashamed of anyone, you do not consider yourselves too good for anyone, and no one is unwelcome to join with you. You have taken care of the least of these at great cost to yourselves and endeavor to disciple each of them as you would your own children. You care for one another, ensuring that no part of the body is naked, hungry, homeless, or without some work to do. You give generously to missions, leaving no circle of human society without some witness to the gracious gifts of God in Christ. You visit the sick, adopt the orphan, treat with dignity those society abuses, and in innumerable ways seek to do to others the good that has been done to you by the good God.
Further, you are led by a man who is diligent, studious, vigorous, self-controlled, frugal, and fastidious, and who is not afraid or ashamed to enter the pig stye and minister to the prodigals. Such men are rare and your loyalty to him for all that he has so faithfully done for you no one can condemn. Your gratitude is wholesome, and the fruit of his commitment to you is abundant and clear in the love you have for one another. His combination of insight and vigilance permits the kind of hurting that heals and there are many among you who have been so benefited. The practical nature of so much of his wisdom stems from tending his own little familial vineyard manfully, and this is also a rare jewel for a pastor to possess.
It is with great grief and sorrow, then, that I must write to you of anything save that which I so cherish in you, but I would be a poor steward of the lessons I took from my time with you if I thereby prejudiced myself against the lessons I learned which, to my chagrin, apply to you as much as come from you. I will try to spare you from all but the most necessary wounds. You are ignoring some subtle prides in your leader, and you are as much at fault for permitting them to continue as he is of letting them creep into his heart.
The first pride arises from your teacher’s relationship to his teachers. A guileless man, his respect for his professors and temperamental credulity as a student led him to view his upbringing as a pitiable falsehood. A gentle soul, he felt abused and misled by those who ought to have nurtured him and, as great souls often do, pitied them in a way that inoculated him against the possibility of his enlighteners being cut from the same human cloth. In this way, the vicarious pride in those who taught him The Truth™ made them into a new magisterium. In this, I can only say that there is a kind of stupidity that is not a moral flaw, per se, but which is terribly dangerous in an educated man: to fail to feel small when sailing across the ocean; perhaps he feels small, but the truly wise grow to understand that even maps are made by men just as diminutive.
The second pride arises from your teacher’s relationship to his peers. I learned long ago that as long as a man is talking about someone not in the room—particular when said person is portrayed negatively or is the foil—he cannot do any good for the people in it; if a man makes a habit of so speaking, even when he turns his attention to those in the room, it is always with those external “others” in mind. No man with such an outlook will long be guiltless of mutilating those for whom he is responsible as he inevitably tries to cram people into boxes designed for someone else.
The third pride arises from your teacher’s relationship to you. If even the translators of the English Bible have an agenda that makes them untrustworthy and ad fontes is required to know what God has said, should not all of the congregation be taught to read Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew? That such skepticism is sowed—almost every Sunday—about the untrustworthiness of the English Bible, that the pastor reads solely from his own translation, makes mountains out of semantic molehills, and that no one else is taught or expected to know the languages gives all of you two choices: accept what he says as what God says or reject it. Given that you trust him, you are unlikely to do the latter, meaning that you have ceased to be Bereans—who tested even the Apostle Paul against the scriptures—and become his peons.
The fourth pride arises from the teacher’s relationship to himself. When a great man condescends to those who are or that he perceives to be beneath him, it can become difficult to discern the line between patience and patronization. Is this young man confronting me about his concern with how I am handling this in need of my patience, is he a dangerous wolf to be kept from the sheep with violence, or is he the prophet Nathan? Well, if I am a very wise, good, and loving man, gracious and giving to even the dregs of humanity, I will likely find many and more pronounced faults in the young man than I find in myself and assume that he must be one of the former two categories of person, likely coming to the same conclusion with every person who comes to me as anything other than a meek and mute little lamb. The more lambs one has willing to follow without question, the less likely one is to hear any criticism—no matter how delayed, gentle, respectful, or humble it may be—as anything other than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram getting the band back together. The humbler one is, the more likely one is to be inoculated against the possibility that one could be proud.
Freed from whatever restrictions he has chafed at before the split, he has begun to fixate on phantoms, fantasies, and bogeymen of the past and other places. His elders are his elders, and they think of him whatever lets them sleep at night. After what he has done for them—and looking at his personal discipline and sacrifice on behalf of others—it seems absurd that he could be proud. It helps that half of what he says is incomprehensible to them and their worries and cares let the other half pass in one ear and out the other. So it seems that the chasm between the stoic scholar battling the ether and the almost pathologically grounded suburbanite acts like a firebreak for the spread of ideas.
For this is the sad truth: your beloved pastor has taken to Christian feminism and let on precious little of it to the elders. He engages with a new cabal of enlightened ones while he cock teases the ideas from the pulpit and plays equal parts coy, mum, and stupid when asked about it by a congregant. As for the elders, they swear up and down that he does not believe what he would seem to mean to anyone not in his pocket and refuse to properly confront him for an answer themselves. In the end, they sold out the congregant to him because they have no spine themselves and are just glad to return to their cowardly silence as soon as the “troublemaker” goes their separate way. Do not think that I missed his sermon on “men who are like unstable buildings”; I am just wryly amused that nobody paid heed and refused to speak with me and my family, as instructed. As violent as his intent was, so, too, was your persistent habit of largely ignoring the main thrust of his message.
The issue is not with his position—I grasp the difference between gifts and offices, think that women can, ought to, and even must lead, and have no issue with someone other than an elder speaking from the pulpit on Sunday morning, nor do I have some fifties domestic nostalgia or pants-wearing fetish—but with two things: firstly, that he has not been honest—seemingly, by design—with the elders or the congregation about where he is heading with what has clearly captivated his teaching interests and will not answer straightforward questions about it; and secondly, that he is focusing on something that is unnecessary and unhelpful to the members of the church for which he bears responsibility.
The women in our congregation are strong, independent, competent, involved, and vocal; the men are weak, dependent, mediocre, uninvolved, and silent. No one is saying that we need to reverse polarity, but we can safely cease trying to polarize it farther. While the women suffer with the children, bereft of family, neighbors, or many of the social institutions that tried to compensate for the industrial man’s absence from the home, the men work eighty to ninety hours a week, watch thirty hours of football, and are not meaningfully part of the institutions of family and church. These people need to work together to build something they share, not change more diapers or punch the clock; nor are women the lone excluded group from the work of the great commission! If the good shepherd would quit trying to preach the homiletic equivalent of the latest blog post about Junia the Apostle, he might see the actual problems the people of his church have and use his substantial gifts to fix those.
Children, you cannot carry on like this. The church who cast you out, in truth, jettisoned the Jacobin—for he refused to meet with the elders for years before they, belatedly, made the divorce legal. That body has begun to lick the wounds that he gave it and to grow healthily under a pastor who, like Aslan, is good but not safe. That other man has begun to pour into the existing elders—rather than just stacking the deck with his own young bucks who don’t know better—and to reattach the amputated congregation to the broader body of Christ in this county. It is in speaking with him that I realized how much relational damage has been done by this man who is currently being enabled by your negligence as priests of God yourselves. I let a cocktail of my former wounds, my love and admiration for him and you, and my fear of being divisive blind me to what my intuitions bristled at and, when I finally awoke and tried to lovingly confront, the ship had sailed for me; It does not have to be so with you.
I love each and every one of you, even and especially the man who leads you. I am indebted to him for planting seeds that have grown into healthy fruit trees in my thoughts, words, deeds, marriage, parenting, vocation, and service. He is a better man than most and than I will likely ever be, and God continues to use his gifts for the kingdom. I wish all of you nothing but the peace and joy of the Lord in the service of His kingdom and I pray that nothing I have here identified harms you the way that I know it can and has others. I always prefer to rejoice in the good God’s mercy and grace than be right. I repent of the times that I, like Jonah, would prefer the brimstone fall on the city than sinners to their knees, but I beg you, with tears in my eyes and a pit in the bottom of my stomach, to see the hurt that you spiritual father causes that doesn’t heal and help him to grow beyond it, to see the times where his strengths lead him into a particularly beautiful dead alley or his great learning drives him mad and actually say something to him about it. More than anything, begin to think for yourselves and to insist that you be given the tools to follow along with the moves being made.
I had the unfortunate and tragic responsibility of disciplining my own father in his sinful and unrepentant affair. I did so for the sake of his soul, for the love of my mother, for the witness and testimony to Christ that is imperiled by flagrant sin, and because God has said that the people closest to someone are the most responsible to do something about what ails them, their spouse, children, neighbors, and friends, and those of the body of Christ gathered on the corner. I did not do it perfectly and I was certainly not in a better place than he was, but the church was doing nothing, and my little pinky did infinitely more than nothing. You may well be far less wise, good, or loving than this man who is like a spiritual father to you, but it is not loving to permit him to crawl up his own ass and pretend like it’s a cozy, wood-paneled cabin with a fireplace.
Your Grateful Son, Brother, and Unstable Building,
King Laugh