A Stone in My Shoe

Confessions of an Evangelical Outlier

J. Michael Walters

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781666702002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

What's more miserable than trying to walk with a stone in your shoe? Many American evangelicals are experiencing pain and discomfort in their relationship to the church. "Stones" in their shoes make the faith journey uncomfortable and increasingly untenable. They either leave the church altogether, become "church shoppers, " or live on the margins of the church as outliers. This book presents the vantage point of a lifelong evangelical pastor and religious educator who sees himself as an outlier. Walters draws on decades of pastoral life and classroom experience to engage the church in a conversation aimed at clarifying the concerns and discomforts of evangelical outliers. While this is one person's story it intersects with the stories of many others in American evangelicalism, especially clergy. In identifying the stones which trouble and discomfort so many like him, Walters continually calls the church, his church, back to its biblical and theological foundations.

Chapter 1

The Making of an Outlier

Fear of being written off by friends, family and colleagues is frightening, but something is more frightening: living a life of faith that is fake and inauthentic. Silence, like every form of dishonesty, is life-destroying.

—Jacqueline Bussie4

No one starts out with the goal of becoming an outlier. I mean, who honestly wants to be an outsider? Being outside looking in through the window is not anyone’s dream scenario. And when those windows are stained glass, the prospects of such an outside vantage point become all the more unappealing. But outliers persist nevertheless, and some accounting for that persistence must be made, for the simple reason that there are a lot of us sitting in the pews of evangelical churches these days, unsure of what to do. “Do I stay, or do I go? And where would I go?” This is my dilemma as I write these pages. “Am I still an evangelical?” “Do I even want to be?” “Can I remain in a church where it seems that I have so many minority opinions?” I have found such questions persistent and torturous as I try to discern just how I ought to relate to the church tradition in which I have been born, raised, and nurtured. In many cases, particular circumstances or an obvious force would appear to explain how persons become marginalized from their original place of refuge or safe harbor; a hurtful church experience, an overly authoritarian pastor, or an intractable theological issue can all be the source of one’s outsider status. In my case, it’s more complicated. That’s what this chapter aims to explain. Previously, I suggested that some of my personality traits might help explain my feelings towards the church. The role of temperament in one’s choice of a church is much more significant than we might imagine, and I’ll admit to feeling intuitively much more at home in some of the mainline churches. But because that’s far from the whole story, I’ll fill in some further context and background that should map out my journey to the margins and clarify how I have come to view myself as something of an evangelical black sheep.

Beginnings

I am awake. With a nod to Charles Dickens, these words aptly describe the beginnings of my journey in the church. I can’t prove this, but for all of my conscious life, my earliest memory has been one of me waking up on my mother’s lap in church. That’s not hard to imagine; my family spent a lot of time in church! I am the eighth of ten children (seven girls, three boys) and collectively we logged more time in church buildings than many pastors. So the odds are pretty good that my first memory would be located in a church environment. “Waking up” also serves well as a recurring metaphor of my relationship with the church of my youth and adolescence. I have awakened often in church, in a variety of ways.

My early faith was nurtured in the congregation of a small “holiness” sect centered, mainly, in the state of Ohio. Shortly before I was born, my family had moved from central to southern Ohio (technically, Appalachia), where I spent my first ten years. Our church would rightly have been viewed as “revivalistic,” and worship was a lively, intense, and often highly emotional event. In my youth I observed people shouting spiritual words and phrases, running through the aisles waving handkerchiefs, and actually walking on the backs of church pews in a demonstration of religious fervor. I even saw people “slain in the spirit,” which struck me at that stage of life as strange and even a bit frightening, but it was how our faith was “done.” We prayed “unitedly,” or all together all at once; we were “almost Pentecostal,” stopping short of glossolalia. That was forbidden in no uncertain terms! My own children grew up in a much more reserved, formal kind of church atmosphere and never saw or experienced anything remotely similar to what I’ve described above. When my son was in seminary, he sent me a paper he’d written, needing a proofreader, and I noticed he mentioned that his father had grown up in the Pentecostal tradition. Based on what he’d heard from me around the dinner table, that was a reasonable conclusion!

I spent my early childhood carving Bibles from huge bars of Ivory Soap, turning Quaker Oat boxes into ersatz drums for the annual Vacation Bible School rhythm band, and going to camp meetings in the summer. I was raised on Southern gospel music, creek-side baptism services, and innumerable potlucks and church picnics. For reasons I can’t recall, in those days, attending Sunday school was considered even more important than attending morning worship. I can remember skipping the church service from time to time to get an early start on a day trip, but we would never consider missing Sunday school. I have, even now, a medal I received for not missing Sunday school for six consecutive years! I wore that medal every Sunday with childish pride, and only our eventual move away from that small community prevented me from adding another bar or two to my trophy. Church was clearly the centerpiece of the Walters family. All this seemed very normal. I didn’t know anything else, and at that point in my young life I considered churches where things were done differently inferior to my own. So, I cut my religious teeth in the heart of the southern Ohio Bible belt in a church that was revivalistic, sect-like in its wariness of other churches, and highly emotive in its worship and practice of the faith. My initial awakening in church introduced me to a particular expression of Christian faith that seemed right to me in that moment, but I would come to question elements of that early faith heritage as I grew older.

In the spring of 1960, the Walters family was rocked with news that would forever alter my life. My father was diagnosed with a serious lung disease, most likely attributable to his work as a foreman in a steel mill during World War II. There was no cure for his condition, only remedial steps that could slow the development of the disease and prolong his life. The doctors recommended a major step: a move from southern Ohio to a dry climate.

We learned of our father’s illness in April. Four months later, my parents—having sold their business and their home—loaded up their six unmarried children, said goodbyes to their four married children and a dozen or so grandchildren, and moved southwest to Tucson, Arizona. The eight of us made the trip in a 1959 Ford station wagon (un-air-conditioned!) pulling a U-Haul trailer that held whatever household belongings had not been sold at auction.

Moving from southern Ohio to the Sonoran desert was the mother of all paradigm shifts for our family! In Ohio, my parents had owned their own business, but now they sought employment wherever they could find it. My older teenage sisters struggled with leaving their friends and adjusting to new schools. My young brother and I, blissfully oblivious to these concerns, reveled in our new surroundings. We had traded in the oak, mulberry, and hickory trees for saguaro and prickly pear cacti, mesquite and palo verde trees, and neighborhood streets paved with sand. The lizards, horned toads, and tarantulas we found right around our house made us think we’d moved to Mars! But beyond the change in flora and fauna, the human world suddenly grew much larger for me. In Ohio, I had rarely seen people of color. I doubt that I’d ever seen a Latino, Native American, or Asian person. I had only glimpsed an African American from a distance when we went to a nearby city. But in Arizona all that changed. I encountered not only different races, but different religions; there were Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons and every kind of Protestant you could name. Our immediate neighborhood was heavily Roman Catholic and I suppose, given the number of children in our family, neighbors easily assumed we were as well, at least until they saw how often we went to church! We went Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday evenings and any number of other occasions when there were special services such as fall and spring “revivals” every year. The availability of a church in the same holiness denomination we had associated with in Ohio was an important factor in choosing Tucson for relocation.

I spent the next eight years of my life in that church, constantly aware that the virtually endless variety of faith and life that the city and culture presented was both invigorating and threatening. As my own personality and temperament developed, I also increasingly sensed a subtle disconnect between my inclination toward shyness and aloof rationalism and the overly demonstrative brand of Christian faith I saw modeled in our church. Not that I doubted its validity in the lives of those who embraced it, not at all. My own parents remain, to this day, two of the most consistently Christian people I have ever known. Whatever I say in this book, I feel nothing but deep gratitude for their faith and the heritage that I received from them in authentic Christian living. But as far back as Tucson, expressions of faith in the emotive vein didn’t readily appeal to me.

During my sophomore year in high school, I began to deal with what I would eventually come to see as a “call” to ministry. Initially, I found this appalling. As an introverted, painfully timid person, not given to the kind of emotional expressions that I associated with Christian faith, there was nothing I wanted less than a life in the church! I dealt with this as best I could—in other words, I kept it to myself hoping it would go away. It didn’t! It was always there, somewhere. I graduated from high school and entered the University of Arizona, still edging away from this strange sense of calling. After one year of denial marked by a number of personal failures, which seemed at the time to be unmistakable omens, I relented and applied to a denominational Bible college affiliated with our church.

It was the late 1960s. In that era, moving from the virtual anarchy of a major university campus to the completely regimented life of a tiny Bible college was a complete culture shock to me. But I did my best to adjust. I believed I was doing the right thing, my dis-ease notwithstanding. I found wonderful friends there who loved God deeply and served Him wholeheartedly. Inwardly, though, I continually struggled with my inability or unwillingness to join in the highly emotive expressions of personal faith. Mercifully, I found ways to cope. One of my strengths—and weaknesses—is the ability to blend in, to “go along to get along.” It’s a necessary survival tool for outliers! I employed it as needed. Fortunately, I met a new faculty member during my junior year who became a mentor and later a life-long friend. He encouraged me to consider going to seminary following graduation, even though that was not at all typical for graduates of this college in those days. The prevailing feeling was that “Bible School” was sufficient “book-learning.” I actually had a meeting with an administrator who tried to talk me out of my decision to attend seminary. Happily, he was unsuccessful.

Seminary opened the Christian world up for me in important ways. I met men and women from different backgrounds and faith contexts who clearly loved God as much as I did. I discovered worlds of scholarship that I didn’t know existed. Best of all, I met my future wife, who was matriculating across the street at a small Christian liberal arts college. My seminary years represented the beginning of my desire and willingness to “color outside the lines” with respect to some of the things I had been taught and ha...