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