How an IFB Kid Found Rest

My Story of Detangling Faith and Learning to Rest

I grew up Independent Fundamental Baptist, and I know that sentence will mean different things to different people.

Some may think of the more super strict groups like the Duggars, while others may think of more mainstream independent Baptist churches that would distance themselves from much of that world entirely.

So to be clear from the outset, my experiences are not identical to every expression of fundamentalism, so I do not want to flatten a broad movement into its most extreme examples.

I also want to be very careful because I am not telling this story as someone who has some kind of disdain for the people who I was raised around, or the churches that were a part of this world. Nor would I ever want to give the impression that nothing good came out of growing up in that type of culture. Even looking back, I can still recognize how much of my Christian faith was first cultivated there.

I am not telling this story from the outside of the faith. Much to the contrary. By the grace of God, I am a pastor in a Baptist church, and I can say without hesitation that I am more convinced of the authority of Scripture, more serious about holiness, and more confident in Christ than I have ever been.

Having prefaced these things, let me tell you my story.

Growing Up IFB

My profession of faith came very early in my life. Even though it was 32ish years ago at this point, I can still visualize it in my mind. Honestly, if you were alive in the 80s, you can probably come pretty close to visualizing it too.

It happened on a couch (the one with windmills on it) in the wood-paneled living room of a single-wide trailer.

The couch was actually extremely easy to find a picture of…

At the age of 5, I obviously could not have explained the whole process with the categories I would now use as a pastor/theologian, but what I had come to understand even at that young age was that I was a sinner, and Jesus had died to save sinners.

So after a talk with my mom, we prayed, and I asked Jesus to save me. In all honesty, that is really all I remember. I don’t remember a lot of what led up to it, nor do I remember the conversation, or even the words that I said. What I do remember is that was the point that I first believed.

I am going to fast-forward some at this point, and probably become at least somewhat scattered, because as I said, I don’t remember a lot, spiritually speaking, after that. However, what I do remember is that over the next 10 years or so, I lived in fear. And although fear took different forms (like going to hell, getting dragged away by demons, or getting left behind in the rapture), it all basically came down to a question of whether or not I had believed correctly.

Unfortunately, for a kid, questions about the nature of faith do not stay neatly tucked away in the theological part of your brain. Especially when you are growing up in a world where the rapture threatened to happen at any moment.

I can remember many times waking up in the middle of the night in a panic, and running to make sure everyone was still there. Typically, I would check my parents’ room, or the crib of one of my brothers, because if they were there, I could at least know that I had not been left behind to figure out the whole Tribulation thing by myself. (And yes, my undiagnosed ADHD brain was always making contingency plans for what I would do if that happened).

I remember trying all kinds of things to get some peace. I tried praying again and again, although in retrospect it makes sense why that didn’t work. I meant, how could you be sincere enough to ask God to save you if you weren’t really sure that you were really unsaved?

From there, I would try to remember what I had said the first time, or try to figure out the way I felt so that I could convince myself that there was somehow enough conviction. It is exhausting to think about it now, so you can imagine how hard it is to explain all the things running through the mind of an elementary-age kid.

In the same search for peace, I even remember laying out the proverbial fleece many times. One in particular was contingent on whether I could get a basketball through the hoop, which seems harmless enough, except for the fact that I didn’t have an athletic bone in my body.

This continued in one form or another until I was around fifteen, when I had what I would have called at the time a moment of “full surrender”.

To be fair, for years afterward I was never entirely sure whether I had surrendered my life then or actually gotten saved for the first time. (Which would later make me question the validity of my baptism at 9 years old. Go figure.) This may sound weird to some, but if you have spent any time in the kind of churches I grew up in, it was not uncommon to hear a testimony where someone had a childhood profession and later really got saved.

Even into my 20s, I was convinced that to really settle things I would have to answer that question. But for what it’s worth, I would eventually become much less interested in determining whether the couch around 5 or kneeling at a chair at 15 was right, because I would come to understand that the important question was about the existence of faith and less about the exact moment that it started. But I digress. I did not have those categories, and what I did have was a great deal of zeal, so I threw myself into every form of Christian service I could find.

From that point forward, church and ministry became an enormous part of my life. I became involved in different ministries at church, camps, and just about anything else that needed a young guy who was willing to do the work.

I still look back on that season with a great deal of gratitude. Many people poured into me, trusted me, taught me how to serve, and showed me genuine love. I learned how to serve without needing to be noticed, and how much joy there can be in giving yourself to others. This is also the period of time that I met my wife while we were both working at a youth camp during the summer of 2007.

Even if these years were bad, which they were not, it would be difficult for me to spin it that way. Unless, of course, I am prepared to explain to my wife why she belongs in the “unfortunate consequences” category, which seems like a poor way to keep the story moving.

Some of the Lord’s kindest gifts to me came through that very season, and I have no desire to erase any of that simply because my theology would eventually change. Those years also matter because, at that stage of my life, I could still toe the line. I knew what serious Christianity was supposed to look like in that world, and for the most part I could do it. Christian service can be a wonderful thing, but it can also become a very effective place to hide from questions about your own soul, because there is always another visible reason to reassure yourself that you must be doing okay spiritually because, after all, look at everything you are doing.

When It Stopped Making Sense

I got married at the age of 20, which was wonderful for many reasons, including the fact that I married well and I married out of my league, but marriage also has the inconvenient habit of making you responsible for things other than yourself. It is much easier to maintain zeal when the main question is whether you can satisfy the expectations than when you are trying to make that same system work inside a marriage, responsibilities, bills, and the general reality of living with and for another person.

At 22, my wife and I moved to North Carolina and eventually became part of an IFB church for which I remain sincerely grateful. I know I may sound like a broken record in that regard, but I want to keep saying that because I know how easily stories like this get turned into stories about villains and victims when real life is more complicated than that. We were loved there, and there were many people there who helped us bear the burdens of early married life.

It was at this point in my life, however, that things stopped making sense.

One of the main problems, in my case, was that I have always been an almost annoyingly analytical person, and apparently that trait is hereditary because my children now regularly subject me to the same kind of logical cross-examination that I have spent my life inflicting on myself and everyone else.

I’ve always needed things to fit together logically, and when two ideas seem to contradict each other, I have a difficult time simply setting the questions aside and moving on.

Around this point in my life, I was also trying to recover some of the zeal I had once had, while at the same time an acquaintance had begun asking me doctrinal questions about things like the Trinity that I had always affirmed but had never really been forced to articulate with so much precision. In trying to answer those questions, I was unknowingly beginning to learn something of systematic theology. I was not content to know that I believed certain doctrines; I needed to know what they meant, and how they related to one another.

That changed the way I thought more than I realized at the time, because once you begin learning to connect doctrines, it becomes much harder to keep the different parts of your theology separate. I was beginning to see that what I believed about the gospel had implications for what I believed about the Christian life.

Everything came crashing together around 2012, and the issue that finally brought it all to a head was tithing, which sounds almost anticlimactic when I say it now. Many people that I’ve talked to had this same thing happen because of some dramatic scandal or church conflict, while my crisis was basically caused by thinking too hard about Malachi 3.

The problem was not that I suddenly became opposed to giving, because I believed then and believe now that Christians should support their churches, and should be willing to sacrifice for the work of the gospel.

What I couldn’t make sense of was being told that a Christian who failed to tithe consistently would be placed under a curse while, at the same time, I was reading Paul say that Christ had redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

If Christ had borne the curse for me, then what exactly did it mean to tell me that God would place me back under a curse for failing to give 10% and how was I supposed to hold those two things together without changing the meaning of one of them?

Once I started pulling on that thread, several others came with it. Come to find out, the tithing question was really part of a much larger question about how God related to His people, and eventually that question moved out of the realm of theology and into one of the most painful memories I have from that time of my life.

The 1st Hospital Room

Like many semi-newly married couples with young kids, we were struggling financially during this period of our life. There were months when tithing and paying the bills was simply impossible. At the same time, I was being told that if I did not tithe, I was under the curse of God. In addition to being under a curse because I was robbing God, I was in sin and could not expect him to hear my prayers.

This finally broke something in me the night that one of my children was sick, and we were in the emergency room with him.

I was sitting on the floor of one of the bathroom stalls crying because I wanted desperately to pray, to anything, to get God to do something to help my child, and yet I had become convinced that I did not have the right to ask Him, and even if I could somehow reach Him, my cries would fall on deaf ears. My son was sick, and it was probably my fault, because I had brought this curse on us.

To this day, I still get physically sick to my stomach when I remember the feelings that I had that night.

Looking back, I think that emergency-room bathroom was the moment when the whole system that I had grown up around finally broke. Whatever theological vocabulary I would later acquire, I already knew enough of the gospel to know that something was badly wrong with a brand of Christianity in which a father united to Christ believed he could not ask his heavenly Father for mercy because there was not enough money left after the bills to pay a required percentage.

Eventually I remember telling my wife, probably with more drama than the situation required but with complete sincerity at the time, “If this is Christianity, I’m out.”

I did not mean that I had suddenly stopped believing in Christ, but that I could no longer reconcile the Christ I was beginning to see in the gospel with the God I was hearing about at church.

I was exhausted, confused, and honestly a little angry, although underneath the anger was probably fear, because for all the theological growth that had happened since childhood, I was still living with a version of the same question I had while checking the house to make sure my family had not been raptured.

Detangling

Some people have called this part of their life deconstructing, and perhaps that word works for some people, although I have always felt like “detangling” is a better description. I was not trying to destroy Christianity and build something else in its place; I was just trying to figure out which pieces actually belonged to Christianity, which pieces belonged to the IFB.

The next 6 months or so after that are probably less organized than I would like to remember, but somewhere during that period the Lord graciously began bringing me back toward Himself.

I started reading, encountering voices outside the theological world I had known, and discovering that Christians had been asking many of my questions for centuries.

In some ways, that season felt less like constructing an entirely new house than standing in the middle of one that had partially collapsed and trying to determine what could still be used. Some pieces I picked up and realized were solid enough to put right back where they belonged, while I tossed others to the side. I was not interested in throwing everything away, and I certainly was not starting from scratch; I was trying to rebuild so that what I had could actually bear weight.

I am admittedly leaving a lot out here, because that rebuilding process involved more reading and more conversations than I could fit into one story, but as the pieces started coming back together, I found myself drawn toward the Lordship circles, largely because they seemed to be the ones that took Christianity seriously.

After questioning so much of the system in which I had been raised, the last thing I wanted was a Christianity with no demands. I had seen enough easy-believism to know that simply swinging to the opposite extreme was not going to satisfy me. The Lordship emphasis made sense to me because it spoke seriously about repentance, obedience, discipleship, fruit, and the claims of Christ, and at that particular point in my journey, seriousness felt safe.

For a little while those categories were helpful, but eventually an old problem began appearing again just under a different terminology.

I could start wondering whether my faith had produced enough fruit, whether I had really surrendered everything, whether my repentance was genuine enough, and whether the evidence in my life was strong enough to justify the confidence that I belonged to Christ.

Then, ironically, another hospital room broke me.

The 2nd Hospital Room

In 2018, I had a seizure during a high fever and ended up in the hospital.

Before I turn this into a deathbed scene, I should probably say that I was being way more dramatic than the situation actually warranted and was still a little loopy from dehydration. Which, spoiler alert, is generally not when people typically do their best theological thinking.

Nevertheless, I remember lying there, staring at the fluorescent lights and wondering what would happen if I died, and the old question came back harder than it had in years.

Had my faith been enough?

I knew immediately that the answer was no if “enough” meant strong enough, sincere enough, fruitful enough, surrendered enough, or consistent enough. I knew myself well enough by then to know that there was always another failure, another inconsistency, another mixed motive, another sin, and another reason why anything in myself would never make the cut.

But thanks be to God, somewhere in that fog, the words of Paul came to mind:

“Even when we are faithless, he remains faithful.”

I had read those words before, of course, but in that moment those words did something that years of questions had failed to do. They moved my attention away from the strength of my faith and toward the faithfulness of Christ.

Finding Clarity

That experience did not immediately change my theology, and I certainly did not leave the hospital with a copy of the Marrow of Modern Divinity tucked in under my discharge paperwork, but something had shifted. I began recognizing that the question I had been asking for most of my life had been doing the same thing. It had been consistently turning me on myself.

As a child, I wondered whether I had prayed correctly; at fifteen I wondered whether I had really been saved before; during years of Christian service I found confidence in how much I was doing, and later I asked whether the fruit was enough to prove the reality of my faith.

Somewhere after that, through my best friend (to whom I must give credit, IYKYK), several conversations, and a niche theological controversy that I am not going to explain here, I encountered Sinclair Ferguson’s The Whole Christ.

That book gave words to things I had already begun to feel without knowing how to explain them, especially the idea that the Christian life can become distorted when it gets turned in on itself. From there I eventually found The Marrow of Modern Divinity, and for reasons that probably make me stranger than the average person, an old theological controversy from several centuries ago felt like someone had finally handed me my life back.

For someone who had spent years asking whether he had been convicted enough, repented enough, believed enough, surrendered enough, or produced enough evidence, it was relief. I slowly began to understand that faith does not save because faith itself is impressive, and the value of faith is not measured by how intensely I can feel myself believing at any particular moment. Faith receives Christ, and the weakest hand of faith still receives a whole Christ.

The rest of the theological trajectory does not really matter to this story.

What matters most is that I found the answer to my question.

I am a sinner, Jesus saves sinners, and I can take him at his word. Not because I am enough, and not because my faith is enough, but because He is enough and He is faithful.