Epilogue

There is a version of this book I would have written differently.

The man I was at thirty had questions. The same ones the preface describes. The institutional failures were accumulating, the text kept saying something different from what he had been told, and the quiet conviction was forming that the version of God he had been handed was not the whole story.

But he still loved the institution. He questioned it the way you question something you are loyal to — from the inside, with the hope that it was better than its worst moments. He thought the problems were fixable. He thought the right congregation, the right pastor, the right tradition might be the one that finally held.

Twenty more years settled the question.

What he came to understand, slowly, at the cost of the kind of clarity that only hurt produces, is that the institution of today is doing what the religion of the first century did. It is the thing Christ was speaking to in Matthew 23. Not in every congregation, not in every pastor, not in every expression. But in its instincts: the titling, the positioning, the mediation, the gatekeeping, the arrow pointed the wrong way. He was not looking at a thing that needed reform. He was looking at the pattern the New Testament named.

The book you have just read could not have been written at thirty. The argument was not yet visible. It took everything that came after to see it.

It arrived late. Jonah did not take the direct road to Nineveh either, and the fish was not the point.

The point is that God sent the fish.

He still sends it.

On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.