Dear Tony,

Hey man, my name is Wyman Richardson.  I’m the pastor of Central Baptist Church in North Little Rock, AR.  I’ve been a pastor for 17 years now in churches in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Arkansas.  I hope you won’t mind this open letter.  It’s “open” only because it’s a response to a public post you made yesterday to which a friend of mine tweeted a link.  Also, I suspect some people may benefit from an open response.   Hope you won’t mind if I provide your post here for those too lazy to click the link and read it at your site.  You wrote:

This past Christmas was the first time in my life I didn’t go to a church for some sort of service. I’m not in a bible study or small group. In fact being a part of organized religion has completely melted out of my life in the last twelve months.

If you were to ask why, the answer is simple; I’ve not attended because after working in churches for 10 years – two of which some would claim are the best in the country – I haven’t found any value in going.

I’m over the concerts and speeches and the contrived effort to call a gathering of 3,000 people a family. I’m over being encouraged to move even further into the life of a consumer living “my” faith individualistically because that’s the kind of faith that best scales with the organizations efficiency scores.

In 14 months outside the small world of big churches I’m aware of how little of real life they have any grasp on. Of how made up their appearances are, and how little they have to offer at the distance they chose to live life from everyone around them.

What I value now is proximity. The only leaders I care to hear are those willing to know me and be known. Not in some official capacity over Starbucks with their church credit card in hand to take care of the employee expense. But with a friend, a person living honestly in their own right with no agenda or “line” to keep – but possessing the strength of character to have their own voice, doubts and convictions.

Simply put I don’t find that Pastors are honest people – but are purveyors of a culture and pure-breed politicians. They can only voice the culture they want or the one that they are employed by – and they dare not cross it for their honest beliefs (either in self-preservation or religious manipulation) for fear of offending the sensitives of the masses and their overseers.

And please don’t insult me by claiming I’m some bitter outsider speaking from ignorance and indifference. I’ve seen campus pastor after worship pastor after youth pastor at the best of places sleep with their secretaries, leave their families and dive into profound hypocrisy because they were leading a culture and championing a great cause of another man but never seen as valuable enough to be cultivated in their faith.

When an organization ensures culture is grasped but leaves real faith to odds – how could it’s priorities be in the right place?

Unapologetically, whether it be pride, a phase, misplaced angst or a hopeful burst of honesty – I see little value in our modern concert halls and hopeful authors. I find pulpits full of small minds, impatient elitists and disconnected politicians. I find them offering very little in comparison to the grand nature of our God, his Word, and the Faith his Son has left us to live out. I see none call people to greatness of soul, honesty of intellect, conviction of heart and freedom of voice – cause then they wouldn’t need them anymore.

Some will claim they do – but they never manage it without some hook or required subjection into a position and value below the leadership.

Why bring it up?

I’m relearning honesty after being in that world as a profession for more then 10 years. I’m still trying to find out what I think, what it means, and how a real faith in Jesus still exists in my life. I’m detoxing and looking for what remains that is real, that is love, and that is true. And this is simply one conclusion in the search, one that catches me by surprise for the ease of which it has been true.

After reading this the first time, I initially tweeted (admittedly, impulsively): “I’ll remember to inform my friends laboring in churches that we’re all, in fact, spineless vapid politicians per Tony Steward.”  Again, not the most nuanced response, but Twitter is a conduit for the blunt assertion if it is anything at all, right?  Anyway, after tweeting that it occurred to me that I’d like to figure out why your post led to that response within me, seeing as though I actually agree with so much of what you said.  This open letter is an attempt to understand my response and your post as well as to ask a few questions and interact a bit with your post.

Let me add another preface:  you tweeted shortly after your post that you were having to delete a lot of troll tweets and responses.  I’m assuming, from the timeline, that these idiotic responses were to your post.  As I have worked, again, for the better part of twenty years in institutional Christianity, let me say that I can only imagine what kind of verbal tripe has come your way from “good Christian folk” after that post.  Even so, some thoughts:

Hyperbole is understandable, especially in great intersections in life, but, honestly, defiant hyperbole is a bit much.  Here’s what I mean.  You say the following:

• “I haven’t found any value in going [to church].”
• “Simply put I don’t find that Pastors are honest people – but are purveyors of a culture and pure-breed politicians.”
• “They can only voice the culture they want or the one that they are employed by – and they dare not cross it for their honest beliefs (either in self-preservation or religious manipulation) for fear of offending the sensitives of the masses and their overseers.”
• “I find pulpits full of small minds, impatient elitists and disconnected politicians.”
• “I see none call people to greatness of soul, honesty of intellect, conviction of heart and freedom of voice – cause then they wouldn’t need them anymore.”

These are powerful assertions indeed!  You haven’t found any value in going to church.  Pastors are dishonest.  Pastors can only say what is advantageous or permitted.  Pulpits are full of politicians.  You see none calling people to genuineness.

Now, in and of itself, this hyperbole seems excusable enough.  After all, it’s born of your personal journey and experience and you’ve no doubt seen some terrible things in church (you mention the rampant immorality of the clergy).  Nobody, frankly, should have their personal pain parsed, like I’m doing here.  And, believe me, I normally wouldn’t do it.  After all, again, I resonate with the hyperbole and the pain.  “I feel your pain.” (Sorry, I live in Clinton’s home state.)  I am not reading you as an enemy.  I get it.  Believe me, I’ve been at this longer than you have and I totally get it.

But I am parsing a bit for this reason:  you buttress your hyperbole (which, by the way, I know you wouldn’t call hyperbole, but the literal, honest-to-God truth) with a defiant note that leaves the reader with the choice of either outright agreement in the most literal way or the charge of self-delusion.

For instance, to any anticipated protest against your sweeping and grand statement that pastors (the only way I can read that is you mean all pastors) are dishonest, you say, “And please don’t insult me by claiming I’m some bitter outsider speaking from ignorance and indifference.”

Well, ok, but I wasn’t going to say that.  I was going to say, “No, you’re mistaken, all pastors are not like that, though too many of us are, but in your pain you feel that way so it’s understandable you’d put it that way.”  But you don’t really leave me that option.  Do you see how buttressed hyperbole puts even your sympathetic readers in an awkward place?

Another example:  to the wide generalization that when you look at pulpits you see “none” (none!) that are calling people to “greatness of soul” (again, an excusable enough journey through pain-fueled hyperbole), you affix this: “Some will claim they do – but they never manage it without some hook or required subjection into a position and value below the leadership.”

Ah, so there you have it.  You must be literally right there, for even those of us who would say, “Well, I get what Tony’s saying given what’s he’s been through, but in truth there are numerous pulpits calling people to greatness of soul, probably including, at times, the one’s he disparaging,” must be wrong, duped by the mere appearance of such appeals of greatness but blind to the real, sinister motive within perceived by Tony Steward.

I wonder sometimes if we run afoul of the old Shakespearean “thou dost protest too much, methinks” because we are so needing people to get that we’re hurt and disillusioned and frustrated that nothing but a wholesale iconoclasm of more moderate outlooks will suffice?

In point of fact, let me challenge you here.  It will be a duel of the subjective, so there’s no way to actually carry it out, but trust me in the way you’ve asked your readers to trust your experience:  you do not feel the depths of disillusionment with the church that I feel.  I bet you I could one-up you in anger and frustration and disillusionment.  In fact, I guarantee it.

I don’t know why that is.  It just is.  I thrive on flagellating the body of Christ.  I love, LOVE, the angry parts of the prophets.  Luther is at his best, to me, at his most ferocious.  I could feed off Kierkegaard’s rage for months!  I used to bathe in the subcategory of Christian publishing devoted to Church-critiquing.  Seriously, man.  I want to meet Jeremiah when I get to heaven.  Amos is my homeboy.

When I was doing a DMin some years ago we went through a lengthy personality assessment.  We were then teamed with an older minister to help us dissect the results.  After reading mine, he said:  “You don’t need to pastor an established church.  You have a prophet’s temperament.”  I loved it!  Awesome!  I wonder now if it was really a compliment…

Now, I don’t apologize for a prophet’s temperament (and, by the way, you have one too), but for me (and, seriously, this is for me – it’s not a subtle dig at you, though, if it’s useful, go for it) I started noticing something about my prophetic temperament, my righteous indignation at the plasticity of it all:  I was exempting myself from it.  When it started to occur to me that my fits of righteous rage at the whoredom of the Bride of Christ were (again, for me) a cover for staggering self-righteousness, I grew uneasy.

One day it occurred to me that the Bride of Christ isn’t a whore…I am.

Ever since them, I’m very careful in how I criticize the ethereal other…the “them” and “they” at which I used to cast such fiery denunciations.  In truth, I see few mistakes in “the church” that I don’t find in some form or fashion in myself.  (I can’t help but hazard an aside:  upon re-reading your letter, do you spot the part where you sound very consumeristic, shortly after condemning the consumerism of institutional Christianity?  It jumped out at me.  Go back and look.)  Now I’m less prone mentally to step out and look in, for the simple fact that I can’t ever truly step out:  I am “the church.”  Me.  I can no longer speak of her as “they.”

Which leads me to my final thought:  at the risk of critiquing a bit more, I wonder how your letter looks when I put it beside something like Hosea.  Hosea felt towards Gomer exactly as you feel (and as I often feel):  that she was a whore who had abandoned her vows and was unworthy of the closeness that she once had with her betrayed husband.  Hosea took a break, rightfully so, and who could blame him?

Then God comes along and says, “Go back to her.”

Good grief!  Go back to my adulterous wife?  Yep.  Go love her again.

Talk about the search for “proximity”!  Whew!

I don’t know, man.  You know all of this.  You’ve heard it preached.  I guess my point is this:  remember that God is in the business of turning toward His undeserving, unfaithful people, not away.  I know that because God is in the business of turning to me.  (One odd thing:  am I reading you right that you’ve gone from 10 years in mega-churches to an entire year in no church?  Not even a smaller one?  There’s literally no church near you that begins to approach something like health?)

To my knowledge, God has never taken a year off from me.

My only hope is that He never will.

I do wish you a good and healthy community of believers in which you can be nurtured.  I believe you’ll find it.  I hate that you’ve had such an unpleasant experience.  You sound as if you’re still searching.  That’s great.  Please do continue.  I believe you can find a community of Christians to which you can belong with profit.

I hope you won’t mind these cursory thoughts, which, I hope, rise above the level of trolldom.

Wyman

This week I’ve had the privilege of leading the campus revival at Abundant Life School in Sherwood, AR.  As I’ve been speaking to the kids in the mornings, I’ve been taking them through “the story of the gospel.”  In particular, I’ve walked them through the four grand movements of the Christian story:  (1) creation, (2) fall, (3) redemption, (4) restoration.

            I believe increasingly that such a story-approach to the gospel (i.e., presenting it in terms of a narrative that shares the qualities of all great narratives – conflict, drama, a hero, unlikely resolution, etc.) is an effective means by which to introduce and re-introduce the gospel to people.  It has been an honor to speak to the students of our story…which has the distinction of also being the truth!

            Lest you think this approach to presenting the gospel is new and dubious, I’ll remind you of some familiar words composed originally in 1866 with which you are no doubt familiar:

I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story, because I know ’tis true;
It satisfies my longings as nothing else can do.

Refrain

I love to tell the story, ’twill be my theme in glory,
 To tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

I love to tell the story; more wonderful it seems 
Than all the golden fancies of all our golden dreams.
I love to tell the story, it did so much for me;
 And that is just the reason I tell it now to thee.

I love to tell the story; ’tis pleasant to repeat
 What seems, each time I tell it, more wonderfully sweet.
I love to tell the story, for some have never heard 
The message of salvation from God’s own holy Word.

I love to tell the story, for those who know it best
 Seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.
 And when, in scenes of glory, I sing the new, new song, 
’Twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.

The gospel is a grand story indeed, and presenting it in story form is effective for a number of reasons.  As I’ve reflected on this approach, a few reasons for its desirability have risen to the top.

• Stories are engaging whereas dry didactic approaches, even of great and grand truths, often fail to hold the attention of the audience.

• The story format carries implicit movement and expectation.

• The gospel really is an astounding story of an astounding truth!

• We live in a narrative-soaked culture.  Saying, “Let me tell you a great story…” carries great weight in our culture.

• Ending the story with, “Now here’s the really amazing part:  this story that you’ve heard…is actually true!” communicates the great drama of reality for what it really is – an amazing adventure.

• So many secular stories in our culture have (understandably) borrowed or even lived somewhat parasitically off of the Christian story that those unfamiliar with the gospel will still be somewhat familiar with some of its themes (the dying-rising hero, the fall of those who need rescuing, secured and offered salvation, etc.).

As I say, it’s been a joy to spend some time with these kids.  In particular, it’s been a joy getting to retell the story.  It is, after all, a story worth telling!

I awoke this morning to the distant sound of music that reached my ear only after washing over countless human beings between me and the speaker from which it came.  I don’t understand the words, or, really, if there are words at all.  There is a kind of rhythm to it, but it is very subtle.  It is more like a series of melodic waves coming one after another, speaking, no doubt, of the great powers to which the people look.  I am tempted to say it is “eerie,” but I suspect that is something we foreigners always say when we could just say, “very different.”  I do not lie when I say it is strangely beautiful and mesmerizing.  But it has stopped now and very soon, probably within minutes, I will hear the more discordant cacophonous sounds of the city coming to life again.

Five of us are in a mega-city in South Asia, an astonishing and astounding collection of seemingly innumerable human beings.  During the day there is a thrilling and exhausting kind of breathlessness about this place:  masses of humanity moving in constant motion in every single direction.  It occurs to me that never have I been among such numbers in all my life.  There…are…people…everywhere!  The behaviors are the same as you would see anywhere else in the world:  people walking, talking, buying, selling, laughing, arguing, eating, sleeping, staring, waiting, being waited upon, singing, worshiping, posturing, reflecting, begging, being begged.  The cosmetics of the city are also much the same as anywhere else: advertisements, political statements, religious statements, billboards, flyers, pictures of great powers, pictures of great leaders, pictures of corrupt leaders who no doubt want to stake claim to this or that part of the city, pictures of wealthy Anglos dressed in high fashion, pictures of stars, both domestic and foreign, images of American kitsch, images of un-American kitsch, pop-culture, warnings, instructions, health advisories, traffic instructions, driving instructions, food advertisements.  The smells are likewise overwhelming:  the smell of mass humanity, the smell of a thousand cooked foods from a hundred times as many street vendors, the smell of offerings to the powers, the smell of bodily functions, the smell of trash, of smoke, of burning, of refuse, the smell of construction, of welding, of shredding, of tearing, of hammering, of sawing, the smell of laundry hand-washed on stony ground, of men bathing at water sources on street corners.  And the sights, too:  skylines of unfathomable huts and shacks lining narrow, unending walkways and roads, labyrinthine passageways snaking between utterly incomprehensible mass dwellings that fluctuate between concrete rooms piled high in apartment complexes and rudimentary hovels constructed of wood and tarp and plastic and paper and trash, nice malls bedecked with Americanized advertisements for this or that clothing or perfume or sunglasses or footwear, tall office buildings, many of them largely empty, hotels, government buildings, houses of worship of every variety, symbols, signs, graffiti.

I am confronted repeatedly by my own foreignness:  my impulsive thought, “Why don’t they remove the trash from their roof?” followed by the immediate instinctive rejoinder, “Because maybe the trash makes the dwelling feel more stable or maybe it is just one more layer the rain would have to get through before reaching the inhabitants, or maybe it creates better shade or maybe that trash is their living and the roof is safest place to keep it.”  And so I have moved around this city, as I suspect our whole team has, with a kind of unending internal argument:  “Why don’t they…probably because they…”: a constant effort to understand, to comprehend, at least to accept all of this.

There was One who once stood above a great city and wept tears over it, moved by compassion for that city, saying that He could save it if only the people would consent.  I say that not to try to draw a parallel between me or us and that One, Jesus.  If anything, my coming here has reminded me of my great distance from Jesus, for Jesus’ compassion was untainted by shock, by amazement, by bewilderment…yes, even by the shameful thought, “At least I don’t live here.”  No, humanity itself, with no thought of escape, was the object of Jesus’ special affection.  Jesus knew the unfathomable depths of man’s lostness.  He was never deceived by the difference between humanity unmasked and raw and humanity well-dressed and polished.  Jesus knew that wealthy, progressive, “acceptable” humanity usually ended up carrying darker demons than the great masses who wore their lostness openly and naked under the sun.

Who, after all, are the true pagans today?  Who, after all, should be most-wept-over?

Jesus’ was a pure love, unadulterated, springing from pure and holy sources.  He did not recoil at the dirtiness and the trash.  He looked upon it rather with a sense of heart-rending but God-ordained vocation:  for the smells of suffering humanity would be His own smell, the sights of suffering humanity His own sights, the sound of suffering humanity would be His own sound.  In one great, startling, flabbergasting act on a single hill outside of a single city, Jesus would take all of the world’s lostness and paganism and refuse and pretensions and heartbreak and shame and crimes upon and into Himself, bearing it willingly, being crushed by God’s rightful sentence upon such.  He would not merely observe and weep and feel…He would act, plunging His whole spotless, sinless being into the great tapestry of human degeneracy and drowning in the mire, in the mud and the muck, in the swarming mass of human need.  And He would thereby obliterate it’s devastating effects, canceling out the curse by bearing the full brunt of it, emerging victorious in most-unlikely resurrection power, bursting forth in resplendent, uncontainable light, illuminating every dark corner, every collapsing hovel, every nook of every trash heap, outshining and out-sparkling every temple of every god with the love of the One True God, healing every wound, calming every troubled heart, wiping away every tear.

The nations need Jesus.   I need Jesus.  For in the end we who in our hubris have found ways both subtle and explicit to convince ourselves that “we” are at least not like “them” before God, that “we” are at least “advanced” and “socially evolved,” must have our arrogant and damnable pretensions shattered by the blunt and unalterable reality of the gospel:  that we are all pagans before a Holy God.  That “we all come as beggars to the cross.” (John Owen)  That we, that I, am unwashed humanity.  That we, that I, am teeming humanity, lost in backwardness and blindness.

The nations need Jesus.

I need Jesus.  With all the lostness and paganism that I still yet cling to in moments that are too frequent to be denied and too relished to be avoided…I need Jesus.

I will come to Him with all of it.  We all must come to Him with all of it.

He can bear it.

He has borne it.

I am currently in the process of constructing an audio archive of past sermons organized by books of the Bible.  You will note a new “Audio Archives” category on the home page.  I will be adding past sermon audio consistently to this category until I am finished…but it’s a good many sermons and will take a while.

Some of these sermons go back to my pastorate at Stonecrest Baptist Church in Woodstock, GA (1998-2002).  I’m struck by how much higher my voice sounds in these sermons and how much more quickly I spoke at that time.  The bulk of the sermons, at this point, will, obviously, be from Dawson, GA, where I pastored for almost 9 years.  And, of course, I will be weekly adding my Central Baptist sermons as well.

I will also be adding a “This Week’s Sermon Audio” link to the “Sermons” post under “About the Richardsons.”

Just a little update on the ongoing project to get the new site up to speed.

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost—how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.