Interview: Caffeinated Faith

I love being interviewed. It’s an enjoyable process for me. It helps me not only articulate what I’m going through, but it even helps me to understand what I’m going through a little more clearly. Each interview is interesting in its own way. Just last Sunday night I was interviewed by Caffeinated Faith. Check it out. I was surprised what they dragged out of me about my departure from my role as pastor of my congregation.

I listened in on their conversation after they interviewed me. You can too at the end of the podcast. One guy said that when he heard they were interviewing nakedpastor, he expected me to totally trash the church. But I didn’t. But they believe I said a lot by what I didn’t say. Take a listen here.

I am amazed by how different things come out in an interview. These guys were very interested in how I left the church. During our discussion, I discovered that these guys also have interesting relationships with the church.

The longer I’m out, the more people I meet that have left the institutional church. For various reasons. You can name them all. Abuse. Fed up with the silliness. Intellectual dissonance. Tired of the politics. Victims of fallout. On and on. A person struggles within the church for so many reasons. Then another person finds herself outside the church and struggles to define her faith without the institutional structure to dictate it. Another person experiences intellectual conflict with traditional faith and dogmatic theology, and to keep his own integrity and not offend his conscience, he has to choose to leave the church and as a result the faith. I’ve always been interested in this person.

I strongly believe we need to interrogate, investigate, and fabricate new ways of understanding truth, articulating theology and defining faith in a way that doesn’t offend our conscience or our intellects or damage our selves. This, I believe, will bring true wellness to our spirit.

This interview convinced me of this even more.