In an age where our president can literally say (or tweet) anything he wants, and people who previously screamed at the top of their lungs for the head of other leadership with obvious moral challenges now defend the current administration with circular, straw man, and every other kind of bad arguments, I know now that the church lives in this same world of unaccountable leadership.

The gateway drug was “Velvet Elvis”, Rob Bell’s first book that anybody had ever heard of, and it was amazing!  I read through it in a matter of hours over the course of two days and afterwards I pretty much devoured anything he wrote or anything he said online via his messages.  I could not get enough of what Bell had to say, and it begun to have a serious influence in my life.  One book/video after another he began to break down the systematic theology I believed until I all of a sudden, it became easy to ask myself, “Is this ‘Jesus dying and rising from the dead’ thing just like all of the other things I broke down?”  And I was a pastor!

This is the hardest thing I’ve had to write. I’ve started and stopped a dozen times, unsure of what to write. Almost a year after our stepping out in faith came crashing down,I’m still trying to figure things out and where to go from here. Being in a “wilderness” certainly feels like an apt description.

The phone rang. It was our manager Jon. “Just heard from Virgin and Atlantic. They’re both interested. You had better get better, and fast.” Panic set in. We were not ready for this. Our songs were not ready. Our relationships were not ready. Our live show was sure as heck not ready. Jon was/is not one to mince words. “You better get your ass in gear” he said. More on that while I take you a few steps backwards in time.

How you approach it depends on how you might approach learning itself. My Dad is into origins, and enjoys studying original Greek and Hebrew. Some new believers might like this. They could read with a concordance, looking up “Grace” or “Love” or “Mercy” and be led to specific sections of scripture. This is great for people who like to chew their meat a lot. Others might want to start with more basics, such as the Gospels and, as Al mentioned, the three letters of John. I love Ephesians. It’s practical and offers great tools for new believers, such as putting on the armor of God, a powerful analogy for equipping yourself for the spiritual battles to come.

Currently we are adding writers to The Holman Report and one of those writers will be Clay Kirchenbauer, former lead singer of the band “The Undeserving”, and a “Christian in the wilderness”.  But we wanted to share with you his story, because it is awesome and also in 14 parts!  So buckle up and enjoy his story!

I made a mistake recently.  I attended a church meeting at a dying church where a denominational “consultant” came in and gave a report to the 20 remaining church members about how to change their status.  Honestly the consultant who gave the report was so rude and intense, I thought she knew the group of people who she was addressing.  But alas, she spent a half hour with each church member (before this meeting) and as far as a few of the members knew, she had never attended a service.  She was a consultant for the UCC denomination, and if you know anything about that denomination, you probably already know that a church growth consultant for them is an oxymoron.