An Invitation to the Margins

If you feel lost in this landscape of politicized faith and celebrity Christian subcultures, if you're hurting without a community to call home, come hang out with me at the margins.

I stepped into my first corner of the internet a world and now, more than a 1.5 decades away in Africa.

I typed out stories of the events unfolding around me to flickering kerosene lantern light on a waning laptop battery with a dusty keyboard missing keys.

A few years later my health crashed and organizational situations I could have never imagined landed me back in Florida. I tried to keep writing, but my heart was in 10,000 pieces.

Sometimes our stories need silence to become what they truly are.

Stories with skin made real in seasons that leave stretch marks on our souls. 

Seasons change and we change with them.  We ebb and flow, and old words and worlds fall away.

I committed to myself, that I would only write here when the words had been written by my life first. So for the better part of a decade, I have been silent.

That and a brain injury in 2018 stole my words. It’s taken me 6 years to get new ones. (Yes, I’ll share more about that in other posts.)

I worked and led in ministry settings for 2 decades, on or between 4 continents.  I saw wonderful things and met dear people.  But I also experienced a system whose shards frequently wound the people it claims to serve.

Over the last decade, I turned my ordination back in and stepped into the unknown.  This is the story of my undoing and becoming.  This is the story of finding my voice, and the courage to use it.

I don’t write here to give you answers and I certainly don’t write to tell what you should believe. I write with the wild hope that candidly sharing my journey might give you permission to embrace more of your own.

Whatever that journey looks like.  Wherever these words find you.  However they encourage or challenge you.  Take the ones that give you life.  Leave the rest.

I write about faith.  About finding it in unexpected places. Having it stretched, shredded, shattered.  Then reframed, renewed, and remolded. All in ways I could never have imagined.

Christ is still central to my story.  But not the neatly packaged, often very white, GQ Jesus I saw in Sunday School books and films.  Not the God with a doctrine ruler sternly checking to see if I said the right words and measured up to muster. Not the patriot Jesus used to back nationalistic slogans.

Rather, my story is about the Love who has met me again and again in the middle of my deepest fear and pain. The One who so often looks utterly different from the institutions that bear his name.

Over the last decade, I’ve found my center again in the contemplative models of faith that first gave me language for my experiences and beliefs 30+ years ago.

I’ve found wholeness in solitude and have taken refuge in silence. I’ve found strength in searching for beauty and cultivating wonder.

My lived theology has been reduced to one verse. One aim. To live in Love and have Love live in me.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. -John 4:16

Everything in me wanted to leave the two decades of ministry life and experience in the past. To be where I am now and move forward.

But if I did that, I’d leave huge parts of myself in the process. For me, that wasn’t a way forward into wholeness.

And I cannot in good conscience walk away from dynamics I believe are detrimental to people’s well-being and threatening the very fabric of our democracy.

Even more so, I cannot turn away from those who have come out of spiritually abusive situations, specifically from the independent charismatic ministry world, and feel like they have no understanding place to land.

What I wouldn’t have given to find a place like this when I left. There are so many survivor spaces for varying groups and movements these days.

However, I have yet to find one for this specific lived experience and subculture. So I’m throwing down a welcome mat.

This is an invitation to join me at the margins. You aren’t alone. There are others of us out here ready to hold your story with the tenderness it deserves.

I’m chasing hope into the labyrinth of my own pain and finding the bravery to believe and trust that even the sharpest fragments of my story are worthy of belonging. 

And every sliver of your story is worthy of belonging too.

If you’re heart-weary, soul-crushed, chewed up, and left wondering where home is, I have a pot of tea on the stove.

Spiritual abuse is real. Religious trauma is real. Gaslighting is real.

You aren’t being over-dramatic or too sensitive. It’s not your leader’s job to control, contain, or corral you. No one should insinuate if you just forgave you’d get all better.

You deserve to be heard and believed, seen, and celebrated.

I deeply desire that this would be a place where we can explore and embody that reality together.

Because, you, my friend are wildly loved. And you are welcome here.