Unraptured Read online

  I was.

  And so are countless other Christians who have been conditioned to believe that if they don’t believe all the right things and do all the wrong things and don’t say the right prayer, God will torture them with unimaginable horrors for all eternity. That fear drove my faith for years. It sent me running into the warm embrace of end-times theology, which promised to ease my fears with clarity about the ominous future it predicted and a guarantee that I would be rescued from torment to come.

  That was how I understood Christianity for much of my life. Even today, long after I lost my faith in the rapture, the fear of being left behind still haunts me. If I find my wife’s pajamas on the bed when I didn’t know she had to work early that morning, I panic. I know better. I really do. But the rapture is hard to give up.

  Why?

  Because when your faith is focused on the end of days, they can very easily become a paranoid obsession that takes over your life. Everything I thought about, talked about, and did or didn’t do revolved around making sure I wasn’t going to be left behind. So when that cornerstone was removed, I was left wondering, what was the point of having faith at all? Why bother being a Christian?

  When my faith became unraptured—when I stopped believing that one day other believers and I would disappear in the twinkling of an eye and leave the heathens behind on earth—I had an existential crisis. All I knew was the Christian life, and all I thought the Christian life was about was not being left behind. So without the rapture, who was I? Why did I need to be saved if the point of salvation wasn’t all about escaping earth and getting to heaven?

  Those questions drive this book, and they are why this book isn’t really about the rapture at all. Sure, the word rapture is right there in the title, and we will certainly spend a lot of time talking about it. But this book is about what Christianity looks like without the rapture (which doesn’t even appear in the Bible—but that’s for a later chapter). It’s about what Christianity looks like when we stop focusing on trying to escape earth for heaven and start trying to bring heaven to earth.

  This book isn’t about the end of the world.

  It’s about the here and now.

  It’s about what Christianity looks like when salvation isn’t something that happens to us in the future but rather something that God does through us in the present.

  Branded with hope

  When I first got saved, the fear of being left behind and going to hell had yet to take over my life, but not because it didn’t have the chance. I was in church before I had my first diaper changed. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite that quick, but that’s how the story goes. My preacher grandfather had to show me off in church the first chance he got. And he did. I was born on a Tuesday. By that following Sunday, I was in church. I was back in church again for midweek services on Wednesday, then back again Sunday morning, and back yet again Sunday night, wash and repeat every week. Growing up, I was in church almost as often as I was at home.

  The first time I got saved I was four years old. Or maybe I was five. Truth be told, I don’t remember—not because it wasn’t a profound moment in my life, but because when you grow up in conservative evangelicalism, you get saved so many times they all start to run together. The details get blurry.

  I’m grateful to say that my first time getting saved wasn’t because somebody literally scared the hell out of me. It was because somebody showed me what it means to be loved, what it means to belong, and what it means to be valued and cared for. It was because someone showed me that all that love and belonging and caring came from Jesus.

  Her name was Grandma Ruthie, but she wasn’t my grandma. She was everybody’s grandma, and she had been teaching Sunday school at my church long before I arrived on the scene. She was everything you would expect a Grandma Ruthie to be: kind, loving, welcoming, generous, and diminutive in stature, but no pushover. She was a grandmother straight out of central casting. Outside of my family, she was the first person who really showed me what the love of Jesus looked like and why that Jesus was worth loving back. There wasn’t anything dramatic she did for me to show me that love. She didn’t donate a kidney or pay for me to go to college. But she was relentlessly kind and welcoming. You knew the moment she smiled at you that you belonged, that she loved and accepted you just as you were. There was no need to try to impress her. Simply existing was enough for Grandma Ruthie to show the kind of unwavering love, kindness, and generosity that only comes from, well, a grandmother.

  Her life was an example I’m only now really beginning to appreciate. Don’t get me wrong. Like everyone else who ever crossed her path, I’ve always been thankful for having Grandma Ruthie in my life. But it wasn’t until my faith began to mature and I saw how much my fear of hell and the fear of being left behind had shaped my faith that I became truly grateful for a foundation that wasn’t built on those things—a foundation that was built on their complete opposite.

  That’s not to say Grandma Ruthie didn’t believe in hell. I’m sure she did. But I can’t recall her ever really bringing it up with us. I’m sure she probably mentioned it once or twice, but the good news she preached to us was driven by love, not fear. Her life was animated by a deep, abiding passion for bringing others into the warm embrace of the God she loved. She knew beyond any doubt that God loved her and was literally dying—or had died—for us to love him too.

  If my journey of faith had started out differently from that—if I didn’t have a memory of something better than the fear of being left behind—I don’t know where I would be today. If my first encounter with God was one of abject terror of eternal torment, and if that was the only God I ever met, I probably would have lost my faith long ago, never to find it again. I likely would have decided that this Jesus fellow really wasn’t someone worth following. But that foundation of love permanently branded me with hope—hope that, despite the terrifying images of God that I would later encounter and even come to believe in, this was not, in fact, who God really was.

  Unrapturing Revelation

  Revelation is a favorite book among the end-times crowd. What the multimillion-dollar end-times industrial complex doesn’t point out, though, is that Revelation is about foundations as much as it is about the future. Revelation is as much about beginnings as it is about endings. It’s about the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth but only because the old order of things has been transformed, not destroyed.

  The foundation laid in Genesis doesn’t crumble at the end of Revelation. It’s restored as the promise of paradise is made real once more. The foundational relationship between creation and Creator that Jesus built upon with his life, death, and resurrection is made complete, as the world God created is turned into the Eden it was always meant to be. We are the ones who took things into our own hands and transformed the paradise of Eden into the hell on earth so many of us experience today. But Revelation tells us to fear not. Where Genesis plants the tree of life, Revelation sees it blossom. Soon and very soon, Revelation promises, we will be invited back to eat from its branches for all eternity.

  But Revelation does more than that. It also proclaims that tomorrow is already beginning to dawn today, because the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t just a onetime, one-person event. The moment Jesus walked out of the tomb on Easter morning was the dawn of a new era. His resurrection was the firstfruits, or start, of a transformation that extends to all of creation and continues to this day.

  That’s not just the message of Revelation; it’s the good news of the gospel, the very foundation of Christianity. Christianity isn’t just about getting saved and going off to heaven. Christianity is about “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10 KJV). That’s what makes the gospel “good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). It’s the promise that God isn’t sitting around, waiting for some distant unknowable day in the future to act. God is at work in the world today, making the lives of the least of these better now.

  It’s so important
to rediscover and reclaim the book of Revelation because, ironically, as much as rapture theology has caused us to lose the true message of the gospel, rightly understanding the apocalypse can be the very thing that starts to repair the damage done by the rapture. For as we rediscover what it truly means to live in the last days, Revelation reminds us of the true foundation of the Christian faith and the good news that God is already at work in the world making all things new in and through us.

  That’s not just the story of Revelation; it’s the story of the entire Bible. The story of the Bible isn’t the story of a God who whisks people away to safety when trials and tribulations are on the horizon. It’s the story of a God who became flesh and who walks beside us even through the valley of the shadow of death. God doesn’t promise that the walk will be free of pain. But God does promise we will never walk alone. It’s a testimony both to God’s faithfulness during times of trouble and to the role of God’s people as agents of grace in and for the world.

  That was the promise I saw embodied in Grandma Ruthie—the love of God incarnated in my life in the present. It was a foundation of love that left the door cracked open just enough for me to one day walk back through and rediscover my first love or, more accurately, the One who first loved me.

  Of course, this book wouldn’t exist if my faith had stayed that way. My faith would not have needed “unrapturing” had I stayed on the path of love instead of abandoning it out of fear and self-preservation.

  So what happened?

  Ironically, I forsook my love for Jesus in the same place that taught me that love drives away all fear: church. I don’t mean my local church or even my denomination is to blame for this. At least not exclusively. I mean the church universal—from the local church and denomination to parachurch organizations, citywide revivals, Christian media, youth events, church camp, regular old church people, and everything and everyone else in between—became a catalyst for fear and intolerance and legalism in my life.

  I know how confusing that might sound to someone outside the church. It would make for a nicer, cleaner narrative if I had one antagonist in my story—if the “bad guy” wasn’t also the “good guy.” But that’s not how my story unfolded. The church that wrapped its arms around me and showed me the love of Jesus? That’s the same church that instilled the legalism and fear of hell that drove my faith for so much of my life.

  Unrapturing the church

  That’s what this book is about: complexity, messiness, and how the same source can be molded for good or for bad. I’m not looking to trash the church or Christianity or the tradition that shaped my faith. Yes, there will be critique aplenty in the pages to come. But that’s not why this book exists. The bad is there with the good because that’s the reality of my faith journey, and maybe of yours too. Breaking away from the traditions we grew up with is hard. There’s a lot about them that we love. More importantly, there are a lot of people in those traditions whom we love, even if we no longer see eye to eye with them.

  So while I have plenty of not so warm and fuzzy things to say about the faith of my past and the overall state of the church today, Unraptured is not part of a master plan of attack to bring Christianity crashing to the ground (as if I had such power to begin with). It’s just the complex reality of life if you grew up in and around a certain type of church. Good people can go astray, or be led astray, even in the most noble of pursuits.

  Most Christians we clash with aren’t altogether bad people. Their lives are fairly normal, and they are frequently kind and compassionate. We would probably think of them as good, decent people were our encounters with them not defined by objectively bad actions and behaviors—racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, you name it. Our sisters and brothers in Christ likely don’t see how or why what they’re doing is wrong or un-Christlike. They may even see their actions as an important part of taking a stand for their faith. What we might describe as hateful they see as loving, because they believe their words or actions will keep people out of hell. Meet them at church, work, or the store and they’re nice to be around. They’re otherwise good people, but that blind spot is so dark it makes the light in their lives difficult for others to see.

  I know.

  I was once one of them.

  I was one of those Christians you so often hear caricatured on the news: known for who they hate, who they’re trying to deny service to, who they’re trying to keep out of the country, and what horrible politician they’re supporting. They are just as confused and angry with us as we are at them because they think of themselves as good people who are simply being true to their sincerely held religious beliefs.

  I was once one of those otherwise good people, and honestly, I wouldn’t want to be friends with that version of me either.

  So how did I go from Grandma Ruthie to apocalyptic fearmonger?

  How did I go from falling in love with Jesus to being terrified he would send me to hell?

  And how did a Christian faith founded on the good news of God coming down to earth become an escape plan?

  As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  2

  Old-Time Religion

  Do you handle snakes?” It was the last question in my very first interview for a full-time job in ministry.

  The interview was held in the youth room of Covenant United Methodist Church, a cavernous space overlooking the church’s gym. Huddled around a rectangular table that had been hauled up to the youth room just for the occasion were the associate pastor, a parent, a youth worker, a couple of teenagers, and me. My interviewers were all wonderful, welcoming people with whom I would soon get to share several years of my life. But the thing I’ll always remember about that first interview is the last question.

  “What was that?” I replied.

  The parent asked it again. “Is it true that Nazarenes handle snakes?”

  There was a moment of silence as the rest of the interview committee leaned in anxiously, waiting to hear my response.

  I let them squirm for a bit, and then deadpanned, “Only on the weekends.”

  Just so we’re all on the same page: that was a joke. Thankfully, they recognized it as such, and we all had a good laugh. The tension of the moment gave way to friendship that would last for years to come.

  Personally, I hate snakes. I’m sure some Nazarenes have pet snakes at home, but you won’t find snake handling happening on a Sunday morning in any Nazarene church anywhere. Nevertheless, it’s a question you get a lot when you tell people you belong to a little-known denomination with a funny sounding name. But again—and I can’t stress this enough—we don’t handle snakes. We don’t speak in tongues either, something else outsiders assume we do. Not that I can blame them. The Church of the Nazarene was originally named the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, but we changed that not long after our founding to distinguish ourselves from our more charismatic brothers and sisters.

  That’s not to say the Church of the Nazarene lacks charisma. It has some—or at least it used to. We have people raise their hands during church services and shout “Amen!” most Sunday mornings. I can still remember Sunday services and camp meetings I went to when I was growing up, where some of the older Nazarenes ran the aisles during worship. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anyone running the aisles. We still have camp meetings, although they’re typically less rustic than they used to be. If you were looking for snakes in the Church of the Nazarene, that would be the place to find them. The old open-air tabernacle at my church district’s campground in the woods of Dickson, Tennessee, was known to have snakes drop down from the rafters and into the choir loft during service. Sadly, future generations of Nazarenes won’t get to enjoy such a spectacle, as the open-air tabernacle has been replaced with a modern air-conditioned facility.

  But holiness, that stalwart of old-time religion and revivals, is still managing to hang around in the Church of the Nazarene. I don’t mean that in a negative way, m
ore in the sense that a lot of Nazarenes of my generation don’t give holiness the attention that it used to receive in our tradition. Pastors are an exception. When we fill out the annual paperwork for our minister’s license, there’s a question that reads “How many people have been entirely sanctified under your ministry in the past year?” Entire sanctification is our term for holiness. Even as a lifelong Nazarene and ordained elder, I find it to be, at best, a strange question. But among many lay Nazarenes, especially those who might be new to the denomination, holiness doesn’t come up as often as it used to.

  Entirely sanctified

  The old-timers understandably lament the fact that holiness has fallen off the radar in some Nazarene churches. Holiness is why our denomination was created in the first place. The first Nazarenes were largely Methodist preachers who believed that Methodism had lost its zeal for holiness. Holiness doctrine is not exclusive to Methodism, but thanks to its founder John Wesley, it is a distinguishing emphasis in Wesleyan theology and the Methodism he and his brother Charles created.

  The basic idea of holiness is that God has called Christians to a life set apart from the ordinary ways of the world and devoted completely and in every way to following Jesus. It’s not a bad idea—really, it’s just Christianity 101. But over the years, holiness has developed a . . . well . . . not-so-great reputation. If you were to ask someone what they know about holiness, their thoughts would probably land somewhere between “What is that? It sounds weird” and “Isn’t that just a bunch of legalism?” To be fair, there’s a little bit of truth in both assumptions.

  In the early days—and by early days I mean up until the early 1980s, when I was born—being entirely sanctified didn’t just mean you didn’t lie or steal or cheat or commit other Ten Commandment–style sins. Sanctification also meant you didn’t smoke or drink or play cards or dance or go to the movies or wear gold jewelry or pants (if you were a lady) or . . . well, you get the picture. A lot of that legalism has, thankfully, gone the way of New Coke. But a lot of it remains. Nazarenes are still teetotalers, at least officially. Until fairly recently, boys and girls weren’t allowed to swim together at church camp. At my Nazarene college we couldn’t wear shorts until the afternoon, and never in class. And you’re still not likely to find a Nazarene on the dance floor (though that is more likely due to a genetic lack of coordination than any legislated prohibition). Nazarenes are now free to dance, according to our denominational manual. We can also go to movies, play cards, and wear jewelry, and we have finally permitted women to wear pants and everyone to wear shorts on campus before three in the afternoon.