The People’s Revival

A lot of folks know me from the short videos.

The 30-second rants. The stories.The red-letter preacher hollering from the front porch.

But before all of that, I was writing.

This is from the introduction of the book I’m about to publish. I’m not asking you to buy it, I’m just hoping you see yourself in it.

Looking back, I think it explains a lot about who I am and why I see the world the way I do.

I’ve never been very good at fitting in.
Not in church. Not in social circles. Not in polite society.

I grew up poor in Appalachia, came up as a punk and a skinhead, and spent most of my life feeling like I missed a class that everybody else attended.

So I spent years trying to wear the right clothes, say the right things, and become the kind of Christian I thought I was supposed to be.

It didn’t work.

Eventually I learned that God wasn’t asking me to become somebody else.
He was asking me to become myself.

God bless y’all.
❤️✊✌️

Here’s the introduction:

“Many times over the years I have walked into a church building and felt uncomfortable. There was no single source that I could point at for what I was feeling, just that feeling of discomfort and the overwhelming desire to be out of there as soon as I could.

I had a tough time putting my finger on the problem- everything seemed to be normal. The people were nice enough; there were no obvious signs of something being amiss that I could see right away; only the discomfort and the acknowledgment that for some reason, I just didn’t quite belong.

I have had this feeling in other places as well, sometimes in a home where the income level or manner of the persons living there is way beyond what I am used to. Or, maybe it was in a store or restaurant with successful businessmen in suits sitting just across the way from me in my steel-toed boots.

Anyway that you look at it, it boils down to the fact that I was different somehow than my surroundings and had become painfully aware of that fact.

There must be a class somewhere that I missed. I remember missing a day in school and looking at the assignments that were handed out upon my return and thinking to myself, “I get this that was taught the day before yesterday and I understand that assignment from today. The middle one, I have no clue what that is about.”

Like being the one “who should have been there” when you hear an inside joke, I have always felt a little uncomfortable around those people who made the class that I obviously missed.

I imagine that somewhere in the discipleship process, there was a workshop given detailing how to act in church.

The teacher (who happens to look an awful lot like Martha Stewart) would stand very erect in front of the class, her posture speaking in great volume, teaching in proper English how to dress, how to smile just right so that you give no clue to those around you as to your real thoughts or intentions, how to emote all of the right things to all of the right people.

Perhaps included in that workshop is a lecture on the art of small talk as well; I also seemed to have missed that one.

More than the way the people around me are acting though, it is the feeling of being somehow different that gets me every time.

Like when I first entered ministry, I actually tried to dress up when I preached. I saved all of my money so I could buy a few cheap suits at JC Penney’s. I had a black one and a blue one.

I also bought a shiny pair of shoes because all the other preachers that I saw wore shiny shoes.

And I felt transformed. I came up as a Punk and a Skin. My hairstyles ranged from the bald uniform cut of a skin to the 9-inch purple Mohawk.

And now, here I was, a citizen. I wore the same clothes that they all did; I was obviously the same, right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong and I should have known that better than anyone.

You see, we had a term we used quite frequently to describe someone who dressed the part but was something different than the façade they were displaying; a poser.

There were very few things worse than being named poser, honestly. Anyone who was seen to be a poser knew then that everything they were projecting about themselves was a lie.

You were acting or dressing differently than the person that you really were. It was the lowest of the low.

Back then who you really were inside was more important than what you appeared to be to others. Anyone could cut their hair funny or shave it off. Anyone could don the apparel and act out a role. To the real Skins, Punks and Metal Heads, the outside display was just a manifestation of an inner working.

And if you didn’t really believe what you were doing then you just needed to go away.

So there I was with my black suit and blue suit (and shiny shoes) and I tried to do street ministry with all the “street cred” that my apparel afforded me.

And I found that the ones that I identified with the most – identified with me the least.

Without meaning to, I was preaching a message before saying a single word.

And that message was “all that I was before I became a Christian was an act- I was just a tourist”. Needless to say, not many listened to what I had to say.

I went home dejected utterly. Ad I believe that God finally illuminated something to my spirit that I will never forget- He did find ne where I was so that I could be like every other Christian.

So, I got rid of all of those things that were not really me almost immediately. I made a call that has influenced everything in my life ever since- I will be myself, be that good or bad, ugly or beautiful, right or wrong. I will never pretend to be something that I am really not in order to please you or to be seen as “safe” by the Churchian community.

So I have become an iconoclast of sorts. I am not safe to bring in to preach because I will do what God tells me regardless of how people feel about it or if I will get invited back or not.

I am not safe to have in your clique because I will not adhere to your rules just because everyone else does.

But thanks be to God, I may be ugly but at least I am real.

We must be ourselves, no matter what it looks like. We must learn to hate the Churchian mask with every fiber of our being. We must discover the fighter that the world has tamed before it is too late and the battle that we were meant for is over and the looting begins.

Find your war cry, folks.

Then scream it with all of your heart no matter who approves or disapproves.

Cast off Saul’s armor and find your stones and run to the battle. Who cares what everyone else is doing or what is considered appropriate Christian behavior at the moment?

That is nothing but a spiritual flavor of the month club and is utterly useless in real application.

We are a generation that could not see who we really were in any of the Christians that were around us and so we figured that it was us who were wrong.

So we bought the clothes, the bumper stickers, donned the hairdo that we saw everyone else wear and became Christian posers. When that failed to satisfy or when the utter hypocrisy ate at us too much, we just quit.

But who you are inside is tailor made for the hell you live in today. You are God’s answer for the enemy’s advances.

But the fake can never make the cut. Only the genuine heart roar has a place on the battlefield of today.

So shut up and preach.