Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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The One True Church
Chapter 8 – What I Learned from Leaving Church
I had stumbled my way to finally understanding what made the New Testament church different from all churches that came after it. More importantly, I had stumbled my way into discovering that the kingdom of God had come. I was thrilled to know these truths, but shocked to learn firsthand how little interest other churchgoers had in them.
With a dwindling congregation, I hit on the idea of writing books in place of face-to-face teaching. I wrote three in a matter of months (Everyone Is Going to Heaven, Whatever Became of Jesus Christ? and A Nonchurchgoer’s Guide to the Bible). I was able to find a literary agent in New York to take me on, and we managed to get tentative offers from two major publishers (Doubleday and Warner Books). Both publishers ultimately declined to publish my books. The only reason I was given was that they were “too controversial.” (Modern media loves controversy, but not the kind that promotes Jesus and the Bible.)
I could find no way to continue my ministry without 1) begging people for money or 2) going into debt. I was 100% sure God didn’t want me to do either. My wife and I were in our early 40s and had four children (ages from 9 to 20). We had used up all our retirement and savings funds to keep our church, and then the ministry, afloat…and were down to our last $400. (Oddly, this was the same amount we had when we started married life some 22 years before.)
To digress for a paragraph, one of the books (Nonchurchgoer’s Guide) was later published, but by a lesser-known US publisher. Before publishing, they took out the chapter of the book that dealt with the revelations about church because they said it would have alienated their typical readers. This book was later published by respected publishers in the United Kingdom as Crash Course in the Bible, and in Germany as Der Bibel-Crashkurs. It is no longer in print but you can still find used copies for sale and in libraries. The income stream of that single book would not have been enough to support a family – so my hope of putting bread on the table by professional writing was still crushed. (For reasons not worth going into here, I have never received a penny in royalties from this book and, happily, never will. All my books are free online.)
Back to the main story line, having to support my family meant leaving the ministry and returning to my former business career after having been away from it for 15 years. (This was the decision I hadn’t wanted to make, but was forced by circumstances to make.) I had been involved in information technology, which had changed radically during those years. From the moment of my reentry into this field, I had to drink from a fire hose.
I was ultimately able to return to success at being a corporate executive. But it came at great cost. Most costly of all was my abandonment of daily Bible reading. I wanted to continue practicing as a layman the things I had learned as a minister, but I used the business demands on my time to justify dropping my Bible reading habit. I thought I could practice a life with Jesus just on the memory of what I’d learned during my 15 years of faith.
I learned the hard way that without daily reading of the Bible, I did not have the spiritual strength to live up to my convictions. I fell back into some of the unrighteousness that had marked the years before I came to Christ.
In leaving the church, I had thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Jesus without daily reinforcement from the Bible was a nonstarter.
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