Note: I originally wrote this piece on the date listed, but didn’t publish it on this site until 2025.

I feel like I’ve spent much of the last three years of my life unlearning many of the things I learned growing up, whether it was things I was taught in church, things I learned by osmosis from my parents and other family members, or things I’d really like to attribute to someone else but in reality I came to believe all by myself.

The things I learned in church were almost always taught as definitively true, without any mention of alternate Christian viewpoints or perspectives, which functionally left very little room for debate or dissension despite the fact that plenty of it exists between Christian denominations on all sorts of issues. And when I did have questions, I confined my research and exploration for answers to the comfortable safety net of my own Christian tradition. This was partly my own doing and perhaps mostly because of my personality, but it was also partly the result of my coming of age in a church culture where most alternative beliefs were to be viewed with skepticism. My predisposition for wanting to be right was satisfied and reinforced by a Christian denominational culture that held nearly all of its beliefs rigidly. As a result, at 17 and 18 I was as sure-headed a Christian as they come, preaching a gospel that I was largely parroting from the church and denomination I’d come to faith in. It was only much later, when I was 22 and nearing the end of college, that I started to reexamine my affiliation with this denomination and its culture and explore other Christian voices and traditions.

As I explored, I felt my heart and soul opening up to experience Christianity in a new way, and I saw for the first time how much beauty exists across so many Christian denominations and communities. I felt the heaviness of my rigid beliefs—the burden I’d taken upon myself to always have the “right” theology—begin to lift as I gradually accepted that I didn’t have all the right answers, that the right answers might very well lie within another Christian denomination or expression, and—most importantly—that looking for “right answers” is actually not what following Jesus is fundamentally about in the first place. I came to accept (and am still learning to accept) not knowing everything definitively and holding what I do believe with a loose hand. The reality is, truth exists in plenty of surprising places that I might otherwise be inclined to ignore or push away, but opening myself up to it, listening to it, wrestling with it, and learning or gleaning from it is the path to a fuller and richer experience of following Jesus.

I’m thankful to be living out a more ecumenical version of my Christian faith now, one marked by humility, grace, beauty, and a realness and intimacy with God that I didn’t experience anywhere near as deeply before. It’s an expression of Christianity that, in hindsight, my denominational upbringing was not conducive to. We kept to our menu of authors and blogs and pastors who aligned with our expression of Christianity (and I fell in line, for my part). Apart from the Holy Spirit working through some very specific people during my senior year of college, I may not have discovered and experienced, for example, the Spirit-filled expressions of charismatic Christians, or the beauty and complexity of contemplative mystics, or the simplicity and order and discipline of monastic life. It’s these Christian expressions (and many others) that have come to deeply shape how I follow Jesus and live in this world as a Christian.

To the friends and others along the way who have known me, I regret that you may have a certain image of what Christians are like and who Jesus is because of the immature ways I have lived out my faith. My hope and prayer is that the reality of Jesus’s extravagant love for you has won out as the core message of his life and teaching, and that through him you may “have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10)—not just believing a gospel of sin management, but rather a gospel that calls us as God’s beloved children to make Earth look more like heaven, to proclaim freedom for the oppressed, and to declare the good news of God’s redemption of all things.