In Which I Repent & Stand In Awe

After thirty years in ministry—thirty years of wrestling with scripture through the lenses of exegesis, literary criticism, and the accumulated wounds of church conflict—I find myself, if not cynical, then at least cautious. These decades of ministry have not been gentle. I entered this calling at a moment in the church shaped by the twin forces of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the prevalence of “church hurt.” Those discussions weren't abstract to me; they were the backdrop to my ordination, the climate into which I began preaching week after week. My early sermons, my pastoral care, my whole way of relating to scripture and church life, were shaped by this atmosphere: a necessary skepticism toward power, disdain for traditionalism, institutions, and even faith itself—a skepticism so many found justified by their own wounds and disappointments.

In those years, the “hermeneutic of suspicion” became both my shield and a lens. I learned to approach Biblical texts with a wary intelligence, always probing for the unspoken motives, the buried wounds, the social and historical contexts that had shaped, and sometimes scarred, the church. “Church hurt” conversations were not peripheral—they sat at the heart of ministry for an entire generation. We heard again and again that the church was not exempt from complicity in sin, injury, or betrayal. Academic literary training reinforced this: every text is context, every claim to truth is colored by power dynamics. Add to that that I came of age in ministry during the “worship wars” and the boom of church planting, which held at heart the wrestling away of the church from early boomers to late boomers and GenX believers.

Everything felt like a fight. My teaching and preaching became exercises in nuance, careful footnoting, and warning against easy answers.

Nights Without Armor

Ministry has a way of making you armor up—not just intellectually, but emotionally. The gallery of bruises is real: faces and names who, for their own reasons, chose suspicion, opposition, or even personal attack. I have stories—some I could tell in print, others only to a trusted friend—of being targeted, misunderstood, or scapegoated by the very people I was called to serve. Over time, these wounds risk forming a kind of internal callus. The heart, wary of its own vulnerability, turns reflexively toward critique and away from trust. It's not just the public criticism or the muttered kitchen-table conversations; it’s the secret loneliness pastors carry as both the objects of hope and the targets for church members personal animus and existential despair. There was no way for a pastor for be what people wanted and needed and they let you know it.

But that was then and this is now. I’m older. I’m gray. I’m more mentor than leader now, and I am discovering that it’s may be time for me to repent. In fact, as I gray and wrinkle, I have to repent in order to be useful, not to my generation, but to emerging ones.

Unprofessional Christians

Ministry is no longer simply a study in suspicion and church hurt. Each weekend, I gather with the Church —people who are, in the best sense, unprofessional Christians. They are not shaped primarily by centuries-old debates or by the semantic skirmishes of academic theology, but by hunger and hope. I watch them show up, week after week, sometimes with questions and doubts, sometimes brimming with faith I haven’t managed to muster since seminary. They talk—intuitively, sometimes awkwardly—about chasing after Jesus, about centering their lives on Christ, about wanting to become more like him in the middle of the ache and exhaustion of real life. For many, their faith isn’t ignorant of pain; it’s an act of deep yearning, a refusal to settle for cynicism, a holy longing to be close to Someone who will not let them go.

In a textureless, flat chatGPT world, where everyone from testosterone filled uneducated bros on X to overly made-up, unaccomplished “influencers” offer their philosophies of life on YouTube and TikTok and where cruel, unembarrassed ignorance controls the reigns of government, thoughtful emerging generations are seeking something, not inerrent, but solid; a place to stand that feels less like the shifting sands of our culture and feels like the rock that Jesus built.

When I listen to them something unfreezes in me. Their faith, shaped less by critique and more by courage, turns me from analysis to awe. They remind me that there’s a Spirit at work who is neither harnessed nor domesticated by my careful readings or defensive teaching. There is a Person whose power cannot be explained away, systematized, or managed by even the most finely tuned hermeneutical suspicion.

Now That I’m The Youngest of the Old

What’s even more striking is how the questions have shifted, especially among young people. I came of age in ministry listening for inquiries about authority, trust, trauma, and hypocrisy. Now, so many of the questions I hear are about meaning, identity, community, and hope: Is there anything in the world really worth belonging to? Is it possible, not just to critique institutions, but to be genuinely seen, loved, and sent? This next generation is not simply interested in how the church has been complicit in woundedness—they want to know if there is anything worth giving themselves to at all.

Every Sunday, my congregation—wounded healers, hopeful skeptics, and everyone in between—dare to believe that Jesus is after them, is for them. Their pursuit of Christ is not naïveté; it’s an act of holy resistance.

In those moments, I repent—not with sorrow so much as surprise. All my analytical sophistication, all my hard-won scars, cannot grasp or contain the wild, free grace of Jesus among His people. I am reminded, again and again, that the gospel is alive not because we master it, but because Christ refuses to give up on any of us, least of all a jaded pastor still learning to hope.

My Sunday repentance is less about regret for the past and more about a return: the childlike faith that called me to my vocation, a coming home to that uncontainable, ever-surprising power—the living Jesus—transcending all my study, my caution, my wounds. It is a reminder that, in the end, the power to renew souls and seed hope in tired leaders does not come from critique, but comes from Christ’s steadfast refusal to leave His church, or its shepherds, behind.

And for the ability to repent, I am grateful.