On Wednesday night I finished reading Dr ’s When the Church Harms God’s People. It’s a brief but important book, and I recommend it, even though it kept me awake all night.

Why it kept me awake is because of Langberg’s incisive focus on institutions and systems becoming a vehicle for enabling abuse, and particularly this quote from Jerry Pournelle2:

If you’re reading this (unless you subscribed in the last month which—thank you! and welcome! and sorry this is probably about to get weird, although honestly it would have one way or another), you already know that last fall I incorporated the spiritual formation ministry I’ve been operating for the last ten years. You also know that said incorporation keeps throwing me for a loop, but the biggest loop, which I haven’t really articulated here yet, is an intuited concern about exactly what the above quote predicts. Because clearly, incorporating a nonprofit in a society set up the way it presently is in the United States of America in 2026, involves bureaucracy.3 Like for example the stuff I was wrestling through in the last post.4 And there’s already been some human fall-out. I don’t feel like we’ve been abusive, but maybe the system inherently is? I don’t know. Some of you would probably say so.

Yesterday I met with someone who reminded me of really important things like,

“All entities—including individual bodies—require definition. By virtue of that, there will always be people who end up positioning themselves outside any given entity.”

“You are working with a vulnerable population, some of whom may be reactive even to best practices.”

“You are not claiming to be anything other than human. You will make mistakes.”

“The question is, examining this going forward, how does this inform your practice, reducing harm as much as possible?”

I’m glad I met with that person. Because truly The Pilgrimage wasn’t going to be able continue as the fiscally sponsored, somewhat undifferentiated-from-myself ministry it has been. It was either going to need to shut down or turn into some different kind of entity that involves bureaucracy. It didn’t seem like it was time to shut it down, and so here we are. I just want to be alert to make sure that I, and it, don’t lose our souls and our first focus, who is Jesus.

I’m also glad I read Langberg’s book, though. I hope it, and items like it, will keep me honest, humble, and on-task. I hope it will help other individuals and organizations with the same thing.

If I had been writing here more frequently you would already know about this, but fellow spiritual director, Dan Lee, interviewed me for a spiritual direction podcast he has started for his DMin program (through another institution than the one where I’m getting mine). We both hope you’ll listen!

Coffee with Spiritual Directors

Why we’re talking about resurrection is that a) it’s my word for the year and b) in August I stepped down from pastoring Central Baptist Church so that I could transition The Pilgrimage from a fiscally sponsored, independently contracted, part-time ministry to a full-time 501(c)3.

Last January when I knew resurrection was the year’s word, I understood that in order for there to be a resurrection there has to be a death, but I hadn’t quite considered (until Sam’s reflections above) that even in resurrection there are some things that don’t come back.

When Jesus resurrected, He kept His scars and gained a glorified body, but His relationship to His followers, and even to the rest of the created order, wasn’t the same as it had been. He didn’t have the same limitations, and yet at the same time, there was more definition and distinction for the people who would continue to follow Him after that. Ultimately things were better, but they were still different. And sometimes even in good change there is grief.

-----------------------------

This is hitting home for me, because I really thought The Pilgrimage would just keep being exactly the same as it’s always been even after it separated from its most recent fiscal sponsor to become a fully incorporated nonprofit (incorporation happened on October 1). Turns out that was never going to be the case.

Along with the fact that a fiscally sponsored entity and an independent entity are literally two very different things, so it couldn’t stay the same, we’ve faced some additional unique challenges that have made this transition even more chaotic. Who knew resurrection was so messy? In some ways the old Pilgrimage is dying. The new one is still The Pilgrimage, but with both greater freedom and more definition and accountability...and also with everything starting over from scratch--including my Pilgrimage mailing list (not to be confused with my Substack mailing list, in spite of the fact that this one went to both of you and we do talk about The Pilgrimage on Substack, too) and my financial support base.

Starting now, I am rebuilding both via a different platform, Zeffy. I really like Zeffy. I hope you will, too. There’s stuff I share with that mailing list that never does show up over here. If you want to get more information about The Pilgrimage itself, you can subscribe to those “Notes on Pilgrimage” here.

The financial transition is also proving complicated. I’m running a one-time fundraiser for startup costs. I’m grateful for any help you can offer.

I’m also rebuilding The Pilgrimage Outfitters (financial donors) from the ground up, as a more intentional “sending” community to whom I have greater accountability and to whom I extend greater care. This “resurrected” group of supporters will be people who commit to ongoing monthly or annual financial gifts here. (Mailed checks and ACH transfers also work--let me know if you want one of those options.) If you’ve been an Outfitter, I hope you’ll continue and/or come back. I’m planning some extra goodness (and an exclusive newsletter with more specific prayer points) just for you.

You can also now sign up for Winter Solace! In hopes that more of you will join in on this beautiful new year’s reset, I’ve reduced the general admission price this year from $100 to $80.

Get Winter Solace

Meanwhile, the ministry of The Pilgrimage is getting clearer than it ever was. Here are our vision, mission, and purpose statements.

I hope you’ll come along with us. Thank you, and travel well.

On August 10th, I said farewell to the dear congregation at Central Baptist Church.

When we got home from that last day at Central Baptist, reflecting on the Good Farewell and the things we’d seen God do in the church over the last seven-ish years, Paul said, “The only thing about times like this is that there’s always a part of me that’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.” That used to be my default, too, but I wasn’t feeling it that day. I knew I was taking a huge, multilayered step of faith. But I’ve also had a whole year of confirmation of it, and there was just so much to celebrate.

Also: the last time I left a job at a church was in 2015 (directly related to the founding of The Pilgrimage the first time), and Paul and I entered a season of financial strain and simultaneous newer, higher, “expensiver” education for me. Now, all those pieces are in play again, in a ramped up version except the church-leaving part, which was so much better, happier, and intentional this time. So I was nervous about loss of income and increase of expense, as well as the general stress of learning new things. But I’ve also seen God do amazing things with just that same combination of challenges, and because I really do believe I’ve been getting nudged to this particular cliff’s edge the whole time, not taking the step no longer even seemed like a possibility.

Unlike for Indiana Jones during his (so called) Last Crusade, however—which apparently I will keep referencing as long as I need to—once I took that step over the abyss, a previously invisible landmass on which to cross to the Holy Grail has yet to appear, and five weeks later, I feel like I’m still free-falling. (It’s really not as fun as it sounds in that song.) The nonprofit application which I’ve been working on for months now with a coach is still not ready for submission, and there are a lot of things The Pilgrimage can’t do (or, in particular, receive) until it has received that nonprofit status which, from all accounts, can take up to nine months.

Meanwhile, a shoe (whose shoe, I can’t imagine) has dropped out of nowhere and, as I am still freefalling, it is now freefalling with me. This metaphorical shoe has something to do with convoluted transitional finances and something to do with what seemed like should be a seamless transition from being fiscally sponsored by a different nonprofit, to being an independent nonprofit, for varying reasons not playing out as smoothly as anyone thought. There are so many things that need to happen that depend on each other and I really have exerted all the control I have at the moment and that isn’t very much. Of course there isn’t control in a freefall. I don’t have enough core strength to do flips. And meanwhile there’s this random shoe. It doesn’t fit. It stinks. I don’t know whose it is. In moments, I’m just waiting to see which of us lands first, and which of us lands on top of the other.

One of my new Pilgrimage board members says, “Big things call for big responses,” by which he means something like, “When God gives you something to do that matters, be prepared for some commensurate opposition.” This, more often than not, I have seen to be true in real life, both in my own previous ministries and in those of other people.

And not to be grandiose or anything, but I really do think the Pilgrimage—and other quiet, formative ministries like it—matters. In some ways, in their smallness, are big. Especially now. I don’t have more words to say about the traumatic events of the last week, the last six months, the last year—how far back do we go?—than have been said all over everywhere already. But I do have The Pilgrimage, even if right now it feels like part of the path dropped off into a canyon of some kind. And you can have it, too, whomever you are. Whatever “side” you feel like you belong to, or especially if you feel like you don’t have one.

Meet me in the canyon, friend. I’ll land eventually, and then we can have tea, and tell our stories, and listen to the voice of Jesus together, and follow Him on our pilgrimage.

The Pilgrimage, founded as a DBA of an existing Christian nonprofit, began in 2015 as an effort to serve “church refugees”—the increasing number of people who were feeling distanced from their Christian faith communities for reasons ranging from cognitive dissonance to outright trauma and abuse. That year, the Pilgrimage’s founder, Jennifer Layte, was wrapping up another phase of an already significant ministry history in churches of many different traditions and backgrounds. Early in 2015, she experienced her own episode of church hurt. The experience gave her a greater commonality with and compassion for the people she was concerned to serve. It made her more intent on finding ways to help people navigate church fringes and the wilderness, whether those people were in the fringes and wilderness themselves, or trying to care for those who were.

Jennifer Layte began dreaming about creating an online community where people feeling marginalized by church could be free to explore their questions in a non-judgmental context, in order to draw closer to Jesus, offload harmful teachings, heal from abusive experiences, and ideally move back into more healthy spiritual community. In preparation for this work, she began training as a spiritual director, and then also as an interfaith chaplain, receiving certificates in both fields in 2017.

Since its inception, the Pilgrimage has existed as a part-time spiritual care project, while Jennifer has worked in other more traditional spiritual care settings—first as a hospice chaplain and then as a pastor of a church. The Pilgrimage has continued to be linked to pre-existing nonprofits for nonprofit status and financial accountability. But over the ensuing ten years, particularly since 2020, as politics and abuse continue to ravage the Christian church in the Western Hemisphere, the work of the Pilgrimage has faithfully continued, and begun to grow.

From offering asynchronous Bible studies and one spiritual development class, the Pilgrimage now offers live twice a month Bible studies for “people who don’t like Bible studies,” two spiritual development courses, individual spiritual direction sessions, group spiritual direction cohorts, and an online retreat every year. The menu of potential services continues to grow, incorporating more in-person elements as well. Participants report a “safe space to explore questions,” life-changing epiphanies, and greater closeness with God and community. The Pilgrimage has also grown to embrace a diversity of Christian and Christian-adjacent people, not just across denominational lines, but also across political, racial, and gender, and sometimes national, spectra.

The Pilgrimage has been caring for people for ten years on a part-time basis. It is time for it to become a full-time entity that can expand and grow into its own as an independent nonprofit.

I’m told waiting for nonprofit approval can take some time, and the application is just in the beginning stages; certainly it has not yet been submitted. In the meantime, operations will continue as contracted with Build a Better Us, and (at least for now) tax deductible donations can already be made to the Pilgrimage through them to ensure continuity of the work until the transition is finalized. Thanks for your help!

donate

Don’t forget you’re invited to the zoom anniversary celebration on July 30th!

rsvp

Now here’s a video about The Pilgrimage that the kind made. Hopefully you’ll see a few more of these between now and the 30th, and on the 30th, too.

Through the Pilgrimage, Jennifer Layte provides individual and group spiritual direction, small-cohort spiritual formation courses, online Bible study, as-needed workshops, and—increasingly—individual consults for people in ministry looking to diversify their own spiritual care offerings. Recently Jennifer has also been invited to provide workshops, plenary sessions, and micro spiritual direction sessions at denominational conferences.

Since its inception in 2015, the Pilgrimage has contracted—for nonprofit status and accounting—with other nonprofit ministries as follows:

• 2015-2019: a ministry of Missions Door, associated with their campus ministry, Campus Ambassadors

• 2019-2022: fiscally sponsored by The Sanctuary at Woodville, dba (doing business as) the Pilgrimage

• 2022-present: fiscally sponsored by, and independently contracted to, Build a Better Us

As of the spring of 2025, with the affirmation and support of Build a Better Us, Jennifer has begun the process of incorporating the Pilgrimage as an independent nonprofit by the end of the 2025 calendar year. From the end of August 2025, the Pilgrimage will also become Jennifer Layte’s full-time work.

The bulk of this report reflects the actual activity of the Pilgrimage since July 2024. The budget will be sent under separate cover before the end of July 2025, to reflect actual start-up/relaunch costs and significantly increased financial needs as the ministry itself expands in time and scope.

Objectives

To provide an online “safe place” for new or renewed encounters with Jesus Christ and the exploration, development, and growth of Christian spirituality.

To provide resources and spiritual support to pastors and other ministry leaders seeking to enfold a diversity of people in the love of Jesus through their ministries.

Goals

By God’s grace and with God’s help:

• To provide supportive yet gently challenging communities for people in spiritual transition.

• To equip people to find, engage, or re-engage with the Bible and churches/Jesus-communities on a more secure but less rigid footing.

• To encourage and facilitate the individual’s pursuit of, and connection with, the God who loves and pursues them through Jesus Christ.

• To educate and assist church/ministry leaders in a biblical understanding of stages of faith, so that they may be well-equipped to shepherd their members who are “in the wilderness” or “on the fringes” with wisdom and compassion.

• To provide individual or cohort spiritual care to pastors and ministry leaders to ground them as they provide care to others.

• To facilitate gracious interaction between wounded leaders and wounded congregants outside their in-person context.

Project Outline

The Pilgrimage was founded in October 2015. Initiatives continue to be prayerfully added. The following is a list of current active projects.

The Listening Post

• The Listening Post is a real-time, twice-a-month Bible exploration group where we listen to Scripture and listen to each other with respect and openness, in order to engage in fruitful, God-and-other-centered conversation.

• The group meets twice a month (second and fourth Wednesday mornings at 10:00AM Eastern) on Zoom.

• This initiative is a low-commitment, no-cost entry point to the Pilgrimage as a whole.

• The group has been shrinking over the last year and is in discernment about whether to continue as is, make some changes in focus or method, or discontinue for now.

• As part of this discernment process, and to accommodate the larger changes to the Pilgrimage beginning this summer, the Listening Post is on hiatus from June-August 2025.

Spiritual Direction

• Individual sessions facilitate people’s relationship and interactions with God.

• $75 per hour session. This cost is below standard for this service and will be increasing slightly in 2026. Directees with financial need may receive a 15% discount.

• Currently Jennifer works with approximately six women receiving spiritual direction once every one to two months.

• In May 2025, Jennifer was invited to be a plenary speaker at a denominational conference. She also provided 15-minute spiritual direction “taster” sessions and is now available to do this at other retreat and conference events.

The Pilgrim Caravan

In March 2025, the first Pilgrimage spiritual direction group was launched. The group meets for two hours per month and have a commitment to each other for 13 months. During sessions, participants share and lead each other in spiritual practices, and listen to God on each others’ behalf. The pilot group has been proceeding extremely well, and there is the possibility and hope of another one beginning in September 2025.

Individual Consults

In the last year, pastors and ministry leaders have occasionally reached out to Jennifer to request consultation about other types of spiritual care training (specifically chaplaincy and spiritual direction). Although not (yet) certified to train anyone in either of these spiritual care methods, Jennifer does have the experience to inform and advise about the differences between these types of care and what might be a good fit for each individual, as well as considerations for each. So far these consultations are free, but they absolutely fall under the purview of the work of the Pilgrimage and have happened enough times to be noted.

Spiritual Development Courses and Retreats

Jennifer created and teaches two spiritual formation courses multiple times each year. With the expansion of the Pilgrimage ministry to full-time, the possibility of the creation of a third course is very great—as well as hoped-for by Pilgrimage course alumni.

Stepping into the Story (SITS)

• SITS is the Pilgrimage’s flagship course and is 12 weeks long.

• There was one 2024 Summer/Fall cohort and one 2025 Winter/Spring cohort. Enrollment is open for two 2025 Summer/Fall cohorts.

• The course takes participants through 12 weeks of methodically looking at their lives in light of God’s story, journeying into more integrated lives.

• Participants practice journaling and reading the Bible through an ancient Christian technique called lectio divina, in order to create their own Life Map for presentation at the end of the course.

• SITS costs $400. Cohort size is no fewer than 3 and no more than 4.

The Walk

• The Walk (8 weeks) is another essential program in the Pilgrimage course line-up.

• Two spring cohorts of The Walk concluded in June 2025.

• The Walk provides context for those who are troubled/confused either by changes in their own faith, differences between expressions of Christianity, and people who are concerned about changes they are observing in the faith of loved ones.

• The Walk is a course in awareness and growing understanding of Stages of Faith, particularly but not exclusively designed for ministry leaders and teams, in order to help them minister effectively to those who may be “on the fringes” or struggling with their faith.

• Participants will discuss various readings (including but not limited to the Bible), in order to create a report on, or their own model of, their understanding of stages of faith, as well as their assessment of what stage they may be in, themselves.

• The Walk costs $300. The ideal cohort size is 6-8.

The Oasis

In the fall of 2024 a new offering was added to the Pilgrimage “menu.” The Oasis is an in-person small spiritual retreat offered to experiment with contemplative practices, experience refreshment from God, and enter into face-to-face fellowship with other humans on the journey. Six people attended this first retreat. It is not being offered in 2025 due to Jennifer Layte’s starting a DMin program at the same time, but the hope is to reinstate it in 2026 as a regular offering.

Winter Solace

• Winter Solace is an online retreat. First offered in January 2021, it continues to be held each year over the second weekend in January on Zoom.

• The theme of Winter Solace 2025 was “Still.” In 2026 it will be “Resurrection.”

• The retreat incorporates 5-7 additional presenters/faculty besides Jennifer Layte, each of whom (excluding Layte) receives an honorarium, amount partially determined by retreat enrollment.

• So far the retreat has hosted 30-40 people including faculty each year it has run, and participants report life-changing shifts in perspective and relationship with Jesus.

• In 2025, the presenters agreed that extending the event from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon was too taxing, and so the program concluded slightly later on Saturday evening than in previous years. This proved to be good restructuring, and we will follow this schedule going forward.

Other Aspects of Pilgrimage Ministry

Books

Jennifer A. G. Layte’s second novel, Favored One, was published in 2019 as a direct response to some biblical interpretation requests/needs from Pilgrimage participants. In the last year, she has been invited to visit multiple church book clubs to discuss this work.

Additionally, on April 2, 2025, Layte’s third book (nonfiction), Follower: How Getting Close to Jesus Brings You to Yourself was published. This book was born out of Layte’s pastoring an in-person church, but written for people like those who participate in and support the Pilgrimage.

Recruiting and Financial Support Development

Recruiting for Pilgrimage programs continues to be challenging in spite of the very enthusiastic reviews each program receives. So far the most effective (but nevertheless painstaking) method seems to be Jennifer’s relationship-building over time and then direct invitations. This process enables people to feel seen and known, which facilitates what they are able to glean from each course. This remains the preferred approach of both Jennifer Layte and Pilgrimage participants. However, as the Pilgrimage expands, realistically less time will be available for this long, slow process. Jennifer Layte will be grateful for counsel as to more efficient but still personal methods of recruitment going forward, and is also open to the possibility of a social media volunteer whose donation to this ministry would be to maintain social media presence while Jennifer continues to cultivate the relational side.

Regardless of method, financial support from donors and churches remains vital. As the Pilgrimage moves to becoming a free-standing ministry, significant new sources of funding will need to be found, partly to pay her newly full-time salary/health insurance, but additionally to cover nonprofit start-up costs, internet platform fees, and an accountant.

During the summer of 2025 and into the fall, while also beginning a DMin program, Jennifer will be engaged in increased financial support discovery. Any information about grants, or people who might donate their time to help promote the reach of the Pilgrimage, would be gratefully received.

The support schedule/annual budget of the Pilgrimage is still being researched and calculated for the coming year. Thank you for acquainting yourself with the above updates, and for your patience as you wait for the final segment of this report.

Respectfully submitted,

Jennifer A G Layte, The Pilgrimage

So even though I am the daughter and granddaughter of Baptist ministers, I’ve never really identified specifically as a Baptist. When I “asked Jesus into my heart” at four years old, it was because I was asking Jesus, not baptistness. When I got baptized, it was because I loved and wanted to demonstrate my commitment to Jesus (and also because then I could finally partake of the grape juice that got served during communion, which was forbidden fruit up until that point). When I formally became a member of my church, it was because, well, I was already going there and I wanted to be able to participate more fully in it.

After some church shopping during my freshman year in college, I did end up going to a Baptist church for most of my student years. But when I moved to London, I was placed with, and ultimately transferred my membership to, a URC with a decidedly charismatic/pentecostal bent. And since then I have belonged to and participated in an Episcopal church and a liberal-progressive UCC-like church near where I currently live. My training as a spiritual director was with the Anglicans, and my training as a chaplain was through two different organizations, both of which trained me in interfaith chaplaincy.

By the time both of those trainings were underway, so was the Pilgrimage, which I had already conceived would be distinctly Jesus-centered, but otherwise I had no desire to tie it to a particular denomination at all. So when I was invited to apply to pastor Central Baptist (after first dismissing the idea), I sent a cover letter with my resumé and doctrinal statement, explaining that while I hadn’t intended to pastor a church at all, I really liked this one and would be honored to pastor it, I would do so only on the condition that I not have to join the American Baptists.

This condition was not because I necessarily had anything against the American Baptists (although I will confess that they were the “mainline” Baptists I had been obliquely warned about in younger years). I didn’t want or intend to join any denomination at all (now that I had found an organization that would certify me as a chaplain without denominational endorsement). I was satisfied that I could pastor this tiny Baptist church according to Baptist beliefs and practices because for the most part I still held to them. (Although there was that one time shortly after beginning my pastorate when I hung a crucifix on the pulpit to make a point…) I understood the purpose behind denominations, but in my experience all of them had something to recommend them and all of them had something to…not…recommend them. By this point I had come to be suspicious of denominations as being somewhat restrictive, and I believed—and generally still believe—that they are becoming less helpful and relevant. Mostly I take “following Jesus” pretty literally (in spite of not being able to physically see Him), and will head anywhere I think He’s going if He’s inviting me along. I didn’t want to be tied down.

Central Baptist Church was willing to consider me even without my jumping through denominational hoops since I had a seminary degree and a pretty robust doctrinal statement to give them—and I was already known to one family there. Then they congregationally ordained me in May 2019. That service was by far more meaningful to me than a “by the book” one would have been. They were the congregation who made me a pastor, who even made me consider being a pastor. I was glad it came from God through them specifically.

Then about three years ago I got invited to join the board of directors for TABCOM, The American Baptist Churches Of Massachusetts. I thought that was hilarious, since I wasn’t even a member of the denomination. But the offer was serious, and so after praying about it for a while and not feeling a strong pull or resistance either way, I decided, “Why not?” and signed on.

And that’s how I found out that the hype I’d heard about the range of theological and social convictions in the denomination really was as broad as I’d been told, and that there really was the racial and ethnic diversity in the leadership that was important to me. And that also, I kind of liked these people. (Admittedly, it’s rare for me not to like people once I have a chance to get to know them.) I talked to a couple of people about the Pilgrimage and they liked it and thought I could get greater traction with it within the ABC if I had “standing” in our association.

So at the beginning of the year, just before my term on the Board expired and even more shortly before I would tender my resignation than I knew, I asked the Executive Minister, “Would it be worth my seeking standing in the denomination even though I’m going to be leaving my congregation within the year? I want to keep the Pilgrimage denominationally independent, but could it be considered more of a resource for TABCOM if I had standing in the denomination?”

Thus began my process of “seeking standing,” which might conclude a couple of weeks before my resignation at Central Baptist takes effect. During this process I had to read a book called Baptist Ways. I thought it was going to be mind numbing, but actually it was quite fascinating and comprehensive. In it, I found stories of other renegade people trying to follow Jesus wherever He led, sometimes in groups, sometimes forging out on their own.

I realized that I got here—to formalizing my relationship with the denomination I had been pastoring within for six years—entirely backwards, and probably the most Baptist way possible. And that they were probably the only denomination who would let me in. It was an epiphany along the lines of “do I want to be a Baptist? Not necessarily. But I don’t think I am or can be anything else.” (Okay, I mean, besides a follower of Jesus which I still feel is my identity baseline. But as for the kind of follower. Well, I guess it’s Baptist.)

The term Baptist carries a lot of weight…if by “weight” you mean “baggage.” It seems like daily there are new reports of misogyny and clergy sexual abuse by Southern Baptist pastors—or reports about the sobering effects of these sins. To be fair to myself, I couldn’t join that denomination right now. But they wouldn’t take me anyway—I’m an ordained woman. American Baptists have historically done a much better job with social justice (and if the books I read recently are right, have also retained the traditionally Baptist distinctives better than the Southern ones), but Baptistic theology also has risks and challenges of divisiveness like this, due to its renegade roots (and adherents, probably, if I’m in any way representative). There are other traditions I sometimes think it would be “cooler” to be, but then again, not everyone has to be the trunk of the tree. Branches without a trunk might be dead but…a trunk without branches is probably dead, too. I think we need all of the Christian traditions in the tree, and I guess I’m finally ready to acknowledge where I (at least mostly) fit.

1. If you grew up highly churched and found yourself squelched, you might resent my insistence that the way to discover yourself is by getting close to Jesus.

2. If you’re still contentedly (or newly) churched, the focus on self feels idolatrous and highly problematic.

I sympathize with both of these misgivings, I really do. Especially the second one. Therefore it has not surprised me at all that I’ve gotten more than two or three private messages of respectful but unrelenting consternation that invariably go something like this:

Like I say, I sympathize with this. I spent much of my youth and young adulthood in a desperate bid to erase myself while still alive so that God could “have His way with me” (as the saying went) and there would just be no part of Jenn that got in the way. I wrote poems about it. I prayer-journaled this request with tears. Yet the more I tried, the more obstacular1 (to coin a word) I became.

Then in 2013, at the end of a required seminary class which subsequently morphed some years later into Stepping Into the Story, God confronted me with the fact that if He really is going to express Himself through me (a human created in His image to reflect Him to the world), if I successfully erased myself, there would be no sign of Him at all. Okay, maybe not at all—but not around or through me.

God is the essence of existence, and if God just wanted to make stuff and orchestrate everything Himself, He could have made a terrarium. And I guess He kind of did, but then He put some creatures into it which He made in His image, yet distinct from Him and from each other—so that He could express Himself in distinct ways with us. Not in spite of us. Not over and above us. With us. The fact that God’s image in us is marred by sin does not negate that we still bear it, or that God intended us to be different from each other. In fact, I would argue that it makes it necessary to come to our true selves. And that the only way that is possible is through closeness to God Incarnate, also known as Jesus Christ—the one who showed us what humans in general are to be like, and also the one who can show us what each of us in particular was created to be.

As for the time Jesus tells His followers that if they want to come after Him they have to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Him, I don’t think what I just said precludes that, or vice versa. It’s certainly possible for a human being made in God’s divine image to create their own perfectly plausible version of themselves without Jesus. I’m just skeptical that that person will be the truest or intended version of themselves.

If we follow Jesus, He tells us the main thing we’re going to be doing with Him is carrying some kind of cross, which already goes against the grain of most if not all of us (particularly as it will more than likely be a cross particularly tailored to challenge the less Christlike or godly parts of ourselves). In that way, denying ourselves is a default part of the package. We literally can’t follow Jesus without learning to deny those parts of ourselves that get between us and Him. But as we do that, as those marred parts of us either heal or fall off like a spent scab, the more we become fully ourselves.

In days of old (I’m not sure how old, because I read lots of advanced books as a kid and I’ve just never been great at pinning lingo with era), people used to say a man who returned to sanity or reality had “come to himself.” I’m playing on that a little bit with the subtitle to Follower. But also, I think my subtitle is not only biblical, but something Jesus literally promised: Getting close to Him brings you to yourself.

Jesus followed up His “deny yourself” statement by telling the disciples that whoever tries to save their life—that is for whomever self-focus and self-preservation is the motivating life force—would lose it. We see that all the time. I absolutely agree that we live in a self-obsessed continent in a self-obsessed age, and it’s not doing anybody any favors. But then Jesus said whoever loses their life for His sake would find it again. The idea is not to give up our lives and never find them again. Great harm can occur at the hands of people who have no self-awareness. The point is to focus on Jesus and then we receive both Him and ourselves at the same time. And that’s when His dream comes true—of expressing Himself most fully with us, in all our distinctness, imaging Him.

In my opinion, Ruth is one of the best-told stories in the Bible, and also hands down the best love story in it. The wedding of Isaac and Rebecca is pretty sweet, but they have devastating communication problems later. Song of Songs is erotic, but what exactly is the story it’s telling? Who’s speaking? What’s going on? Do I actually want to know? And Esther is all drunken misogynistic politics where the doughty heroine has to fall back on “feminine wiles” to get her voice heard.

Ruth, though? Ruth is sweet through and through. This morning, a small group of us discovered that the sweetness isn’t saccharine, but substantial. In fact, although the story is really quite romantic, the romance is a subplot. The story itself goes much deeper. We just needed to listen together.

Have I told you about the Listening Post? I feel like I haven’t really, at least not here on Substack, so before we go any further with Ruth, allow me to explain a little. The Listening Post is the Pilgrimage’s twice a month Bible study on zoom, primarily for people who (have less traditional work hours and) are triggered by the Bible. It gives them a place to engage the Bible, other people who are still trying to hang onto Jesus, and even Jesus Himself in a nontraditional format, without set questions or an interpretive agenda. I’m going to be talking about it more in the coming weeks and months, probably, because the way we read the Bible there is pretty much the way I read the Bible when I’m writing books like Follower or preparing sermons on biblical narrative, and it’ll help give you some context for much of the rest of my creating. Plus you can join us if you want.

Anyway, today we looked at Ruth chapter 2. We noticed an awful lot of things. Like how the story doesn’t spell out anything about the characters of either Ruth or Boaz, but how we can tell that these two are rock star human beings, because usually the biblical writers aren’t shy about pointing out the so-called heroes’ feet of clay, but neither Boaz or Ruth seem to have that affliction.

Boaz arrives in his farm fields and blesses his employees, and they bless him back, which is how we know that when he asks who Ruth “belongs to,” he’s asking it in a kind and protective way on behalf of a vulnerable person, not in a possessive and acquiring and abusive way. And then as the chapter plays out, what he does matches the good things we have already surmised about him.

As for the young widow Ruth, we already know from the previous chapter that against all reason, she has given up her rights with her own people and pledged her life to her widowed mother-in-law Naomi and to Naomi’s God. In chapter two, even though she’s an immigrant from an enemy people, Ruth takes the initiative to do the work she needs to do to support herself and her mother-in-law, and then when she finds favor with Boaz, she works hard and consistently to continue to support the two of them through two harvests.

We really like and admire these people. They’re not cardboard cut-outs. They aren’t shallow. They’re genuinely good people of substance, whose mettle has been (or is being) tested. But today at the Listening Post we noticed a couple of other things that made them shine even brighter for us in a world where the metaphorical sky is glowering.

The first thing is that this whole story takes place, as the author tells us at the beginning of the first chapter, in the time of the judges. [TRIGGER WARNING HERE: SEXUAL ABUSE] I don’t know if you know anything about the biblical “time of the judges,” but you could read the book of Judges and be appalled. (You might also be appalled to know that as a child it was one of my favorite biblical books. I don’t know what else to say about that.) The book is famous for the refrain,

The refrain brackets a cycle of more and more violence, but what I’ve never heard anyone unpack in satisfying enough detail (so please! let me do it in a book sometime!) is how the trajectory plays out in the lives of women. As the book progresses and God’s chosen people get more and more corrupt, women go from having positions of leadership and agency to being raped and dismembered. It doesn’t seem like an accident to me that the author of Ruth—another story about women—makes sure that we know that this story occurs in the same time period.

You know those days when a storm is brewing but the sun manages to slice a ray through the lowering clouds and shine directly on them, so they somehow glow slate grey and everything else is tinged with gold? So that even if the storm does come after all, you can’t help but remember that the sun is still there, that the sun is the reality, that the sun made even the dark clouds beautiful? That’s what the book of Ruth felt like today, as we examined it in the context of the slate grey, rumbling-cloud backdrop of the book of Judges.

In the days of the judges

when everyone did what was right in their own eyes,

and women were used and thrown away,

and oppression was rampant,

and there was a famine,

and a foreign widow going to glean in a field was taking her life in her hands,

and a field-hand-blessing mensch still had to tell his field hands not to touch the women…

Well. Ruth took her life in her hands, and Boaz told his field hands not to touch her, and they were faithful and solicitous of others less fortunate than themselves (Boaz of Ruth, Ruth of Naomi) and did good hard daily work and that, pointed out one of my friends at The Listening Post, is the part of “the time of the judges” that the later Hebrew prophets seem to hark back to when they recall that time, even when they are calling out the evils of their people in their own time.

And one other thing.

In our final aloud-reading of Ruth 2, everyone’s locked onto Ruth 2:2:

And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.”

Not only did Ruth take the initiative in a risky climate where she was one of the most vulnerable, but she had enough imaginative hope to suppose that she might not just find a place to glean—a way to support herself and Naomi—but that she would find favor there. When Boaz does show her favor, she seems surprised, but in fact, she called it. She has only just changed her allegiance from whatever gods she was worshiping in Moab to the the God of Israel, and on the basis of The Time of the Judges and what we know of her loss-filled life experience right now, there’s absolutely no reason she should have imagined favor, let alone hoped for it, let alone acted on that hope. But she did. And her hope was fulfilled, beyond what she asked or, we might imagine, imagined.

At the end of The Listening Post we prayed. We asked God to help us, as one person put it, “go out into the field in desperation, hoping to encounter the One in whose sight we’ll find favor.”

Go in hope, friends.

True confessions: seminary or not, I’ve never thoroughly learned koinē Greek. But I do know some, and I’m decent with etymology, so I’m not sure why I never paid attention to this: Fr. Len taught us that the Greek word for resurrection, anastasis, literally translates as “against stasis/status quo/death.” I’m not going to beat myself up for not having figured that out before, because I’m pretty sure I just discerned my new word for the year.

Because the thing is, Sunday was the third time I’d been confronted by the Lazarus story in the space of a week, through three different sources and types of media. Prior to that I had been wondering if the word for the year was something huge but nebulous like life. Now I know it’s even huger, but maybe less nebulous: anastasis or (for shorthand, even though the etymology of resurrection is less compelling) resurrection. Life beyond death. Something more than just life. Something supernatural, even.

Last week I posted that Things Are Going to Be Different Around Here from Now On, and I still don’t know exactly what that means, but I really do feel like in the last month some things in and around me that needed to die off have either done so or are in the process of it. And maybe some other things are still going to need to die this year. But it doesn’t feel like death as a finality. Even before I noticed that Lazarus kept coming up, so to speak, I had been noticing the dying and the absolute orientation toward life.

Something is happening with the Pilgrimage this year. I was already anticipating a period of dormancy, but it’s possible it will be coming earlier than I thought. I’m seeking God and clarity and you praying, if you do that. There are a couple of other-people’s-decisions I’m waiting on, and a couple I will need to make after that, and then maybe I’ll be able to understand better myself, and explain better, too. In the meantime, though, this isn’t the end. I’m anticipating resurrection all over the place. I’m looking for it. I’m paying attention. Want to notice it together?

In case you missed it:

Thanks for being part of this successful fundraiser. You can still help! The Kickstarter is officially over on Monday, but you can make retroactive “late” pledges which I’ll leave open as long as I can or until Follower is published in March—whichever comes first. My hope is that now people will use the Kickstarter as a “pre-order” tool. You can currently order an individual copy this way for yourself (incentive tier: “Just.The.Book.”), or if you think you’d like to discuss this in a group, you can order a batch of ten for the price of nine (incentive tier: “x10”). Of course, you can also back at whatever other tier you want! (Might I recommend the Book Bundle, where you can get all three of my books at once?)

If we manage to raise another $2,000, it’ll give me enough to work with to also fund an audio version of this book. If not, consider that any overage results in an author getting fairly compensated for her work, which isn’t always a foregone conclusion in the industry, so either way, thank you!

Buy the Book

On Sunday a childhood friend of mine and her husband attended my church. After the service (during which I had had the entire congregation yell out with Bartimaeus, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”) she said, “I just really love the way you preach.”

“Aw,” I said, never sure exactly what the appropriate filler word is when responding to a compliment, “thank you.”

“I love how it’s so…” she tried to continue, but I interrupted, guessing.

“Interactive?” I guessed.

“Well, I like that, too,” she said. “But I was going to say deep.”

I paused, partly to focus on cutting a slice of green tomato cake with cream cheese frosting which I had brought for fellowship time, and partly because that is just not an adjective I associate with my preaching. It’s not that I phone it in when I’m preparing a sermon. On the contrary; most weeks I start drafting on Tuesday, let the thing percolate until Thursday, let it percolate some more after some more tweaking, and then often retool the whole thing before church on Sunday morning. Usually the passage is “running in the background” of my brain all week like an app I forgot to turn off, and my spiritual antennae keep alert to things the Holy Spirit might have to say about it, directly into my brain, or—more often—via circumstances or conversations that occur while just generally living.

But see, for better or worse, I grew up in (what I am coming to suspect was the least toxic form of) Evangelical Christianity. In that stream, especially back in the day, Scripture knowledge was primary. You memorized it, you studied it on your own, you went to Bible studies, you took classes. Everybody knew that some ways of approaching the Bible were better than others. When it came to Bible study, you wanted inductive.1 When it came to sermons, you wanted expository.2

I still think there is real value in these practices, but there are also real limitations. In my experience, one of the biggest ones is that they are so analytical, you can do them yourself without the Holy Spirit’s being involved at all. Since I no longer see any point to Christianity—or even reading the Bible—without a real interactive, back and forth, developing and growing and shifting relationship with God Godself, taking the Holy Spirit out of the equation of reading Scripture feels like a really big downside. (I would argue—maybe will argue some other time—that it is a really big downside which affects life in the real world quite negatively.)

That’s not consciously why I don’t usually preach expositorily. But it is de facto why. I can’t read the Bible analytically anymore, because when I read it, I’m having a real conversation with God. And just like I probably couldn’t break down a conversation with you into sentence by sentence analysis for the consumption of others, I can’t often do it anymore with the book God inspired to initiate conversation with us, either. Thing is, when people call a sermon “deep,” my brain still assumes that only expository sermons deserve that description. Also, keep in mind that my friend using that word and I grew up attending the same church, and until somewhat recently, she was still going there. Accordingly, I had absolutely no idea what she meant.

“Um…really?” I said.

“Yeah,” she replied, not batting an eye. “You go really deep into the emotions and the psychology.”

And that, I realized, explained a lot. I’m not a psychologist, but as you can tell from the above, I am very relational, and I have been told by multiple sources that I’m good at “seeing” people and reading people. Also at this point Jesus and I usually have a running dialogue going on in the background (along with the sermon Scripture—or maybe that’s part of it), and I think He helps me see what’s going on under the surface, too—of people and of Scripture.

I liked that feedback from my friend. I’ve been trying for a while to figure out what it is about my approach to Scripture that makes it different from a lot of other people’s. I can’t tell you how often someone has said, “I never thought of that before,” when I teach on something. Usually I hadn’t thought of it before, either. But after I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it, and the things I notice are never (except maybe according to that one publishing house) heretical or unorthodox. Just unexpected—and almost always related to some emotional or psychological component that sheds new light on a familiar passage. It occurs to me that expository preaching has depth…but maybe relational preaching (or at least well-informed and lived out relational preaching) can go even deeper.

I think that’s probably what makes Follower different and difficult to categorize, too. An early-reader said it reads like I’m having a conversation with him. Not everybody likes that approach, I suppose, but if you do, I hope you’ll preorder a copy. You can see if you agree.

Thank you.

Pre-order Follower

I loved that he was praying that. I loved how he used an image from Simon Peter’s story (about whom the book is) to tailor his prayer request—a commendable way of praying Scripture. But he was wrong. He wasn’t praying that with me, because I wasn’t praying that. In fact, I hadn’t been praying about this Kickstarter or the book I’m trying to fund for some time.

Well, that’s not quite accurate. I have been asking God about the direction for this book, and when the opportunity came (just last week) to pitch it again to a traditional publisher, I asked my friends in ’s Storyteller’s Network please to pray that I would know what to do. But really, I already knew that, in spite of what I had thought at the beginning, traditional publishing is not what this book needs. (The wonderful publisher I met with did have a promising conversation with me about a future potential book, though, so stay tuned, maybe.) I have talked to God about the Kickstarter—about setting it up—and even the $8000 (a number far higher than seems plausible to me, for me) felt like a nudge from Someone not-Jenn.

But I haven’t even been praying that the Kickstarter will make it, let alone that the “net will overflow.” For all my upbeat assertions that we can do this, I have been brainstorming contingency plans for weeks.

But after my friend’s message, I felt something like conviction that I’ve been inviting people to be part of a story I evidently felt was destined to short-circuit. I didn’t exactly hear God saying, “You won’t need a contingency plan” (which is how it came out when I tried to talk to a couple of you about it on Friday), but I did feel like God said, “Don’t do that.” Like, at least hold off on the contingency plan. Don’t worry about contingencies. Wait to see what God does with this decision (the decision to hybrid publish and the decision to run a Kickstarter to fund it) first.

Here’s the reality, though. Some people (looking at you, Uncle and Pastor ) can run fundraisers for their creative and/or theological endeavors and there is no question in anyone’s mind that their project(s) will fund. And their projects do fund. But I am neither famous, nor am I those two guys. (This is not a value judgment either way. Just a statement of—pretty obvious—fact.) For Jennifer A. G. Layte (that’s me), setting a Kickstarter goal of $8000 is, frankly, insane.

Like—miracle-level insane. This Kickstarter funding at all, let alone that the “nets will overflow” will, no matter how it happens, if it happens, be a miracle. So then, after some version of all of the above hit my brain, I started thinking about all the other little miracles that will go into the $8000+ miracle, and all of them are “yes.” Including some earlier yeses I said myself.

You may not know this, but I wasn’t planning to write Follower until at least 2026.

In 2026, I will have pastored at Central Baptist Church for seven years, and for a while I was thinking (even though we as a church can’t afford it) of asking for the first ever sabbatical of my life. When that happens, I thought, I will write all the books I don’t have time to write right now. But in 2022, a specific person said yes to Stepping Into the Story while simultaneously taking ’s Tell Your Story workshop—which is how I found out about ’s writing workshop.

And suddenly I began to feel one of those God-nudges: First a hint that perhaps I was simply procrastinating by waiting for some unspoken sabbatical to write anything other than sermons. Then a hint that maybe the way to get back into it—and to redirect from fiction (which is what I’ve published before) to nonfiction—was to take ’s workshop for myself. So I said yes to her workshop. I said yes to writing Follower—four years before I intended to. I wrote it faster than I’ve written anything of similar length. (Maybe also faster than I’ve written this post, considering it’s been brewing for about five days now.)

Then some people said yes to being part of my early- (a.k.a. beta-) reader team. Then some more people said yes to writing endorsements of the book for when it gets published.

Then I said yes to the hybrid publisher, and yes to trying a Kickstarter, and have been repeatedly saying yes to throwing the net into the ocean as many times as I have to—in other words, to inviting you into the story through this Kickstarter (even though it’s uncomfortable and the timing—as hurricanes ravage the southeast of the United States—seems TERRIBLE). As of this writing, 35 of you have said yes to being part of the story of bringing this book into the world. I’d love it if you said yes as well.

Back the book

One at a time, all of these yeses might be small. But when I lay it all out like this, I do think God’s involved in this book. Hopefully you do, too. In light of all these yeses, I am now saying yes to praying with my friend—not only asking God to fulfill this Kickstarter campaign, but to “overflow the nets”—like He did with the guy the book is about. (Even the fish said yes!)

I’m hoping that God will also say yes. And then we’ll know we’ve all been part of a miracle.

More recently, I keep reading books (novels and otherwise) quoting T.S. Eliot’s famous lines about stillness, which I had forgotten about until said books reminded me.

I also have to keep being reminded to take time to be at the still point. I don’t believe that every life experience is a lesson intentionally tailored by a micromanaging God to “teach me something,” but the longer I follow Jesus, the more I experience my experiences as things that happen through which God invites me to more fully participate in Himself. And so covid, while frankly horrible, was, to me, an invitation to stillness. And trying to work from a campsite on Cape Cod, during which devices ran out of charge or data or just plain wouldn’t connect, was another invitation to stillness and presence.

Of course, if I were more intentional about seeking or carving out stillness, practicing stillness, maybe I wouldn’t need as many “enforced” reminders of invitation to it. Maybe you can resonate. It’s a good reason, even though it’s only September, to schedule in a weekend of presence and refreshment and stillness in community. I hope you’ll join us at Winter Solace ‘25. At the still point, there the dance is. I can’t wait to see what kind of dance we’re dancing together.

Register for Winter Solace

Please note that there are at least three other fellow substackers ( , , and ) in this line-up. The cost of admission is more than worth it for the richness each member of this faculty brings to this event.

After the Starbucks stint which lasted just over half a decade, I worked for a church as a Christian Education Director, and much like Starbucks, that era has its own stories. Unlike Starbucks however, the final stories involving me at this church were deeply painful—to me, at any rate. (Painful enough that when I entered the building last year for a funeral, and for the first time since my departure from that job, I almost exploded back out of it due to the unexpected intensity of the trauma triggers.)

I don’t need to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that when I left that place I was feeling extremely burnt out on church and tempted never to darken the door of another one. Flight is not my default response, though, ever. (Thus, I guess, my white-knuckling it through the above-mentioned funeral last year.) I haven’t really ridden a horse, but metaphorically, I’m decidedly a get-back-on-the-horse girl. So my husband and I found a church that had been founded by other pastors who had recovered from church hurt, and for three years it provided the safety net and healing that I, especially, needed. Additionally, I began training both as an interfaith chaplain, and with the Anglicans as a spiritual director.

I felt spiritually and emotionally raw after this, though, for a long time. Fortunately, in this season of darkness and pain—and healing—I was not, unlike during the previous one, mad at God. I was hurt by a particular church. But also, before things there had reached untenable levels, I had already been learning about an increasing exodus from churches generally. I had already been pondering ways to help people who still wanted connection with God but were having a hard time connecting with His people for various reasons. I had also already had two coaching friends independently of each other suggest that I could maybe take some of the programing I had already started developing at my former church and put it online—create my own ministry, as it were.

I thought I could probably do spiritual direction online once I got certified, and maybe I could teach some classes? Do some online Bible studies as I had already been doing at the former church? I wanted to create some safe place for people who were out of church or on the fringes of church or had questions that their churches hadn’t allowed them to ask. What to call it, though? Titles are not my forte. I considered and tossed The Safe House. The Cobbled Way. Probably two or three other ideas cropped up and scrapped. And then one afternoon when I was verbally mulling over the project idea itself, and not what to call it, Paul said something about “helping people on their pilgrimage” or something.

“Oh duh!” I exclaimed, smacking myself on the forehead. (Probably harder than was warranted. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.) This thing already had a name. I just didn’t recognize it because I thought the name stood for something else—a glorified coffee shop. But it definitely, definitely, stood for this online place of caring for people in process in their faith. With a name, and a fiscal sponsor (which, more about that next month), The Pilgrimage was ready to hit the road.

And then…nothing.

I had a plan. Kind of. I’m not very great at plans, goal setting, that kind of thing. (I might be better at them if I believed in them more.) But see, just at the time I was coming up with the idea of this Pilgrimage Coffee Shop, there were two couples around my parents’ ages (and my parents’ friends) who were active at the church I grew up in, each of whom had some experience with starting and running small businesses. They loved my coffee-and-more shop idea. They indicated a willingness to help me get started.

I was going to go back home and move in with my parents briefly, and work with these couples to get the Pilgrimage off the ground. (In hindsight, that seems like a terrible mixture of metaphors. Unless you pilgrim via hot air balloon or something.) Also, I planned to work at Starbucks. I was going to do that for six months so I could get a sense of “the coffee business.” Then I would quit and get my own place and start my own coffee shop. Also there was a guy back home I thought something was going to happen with.

I drove from Colorado to Massachusetts all by myself at Christmas time.

Within the next six months, the only part of my plan that actually happened was that I got a job at Starbucks. (Someday I will write some posts about Life Lessons I Learned from Working at Starbucks. Or you can just go read my original blog, Jennwith2ns, actually.)

The two couples I thought were going to help me had their own lives going on and I evidently interpreted their interest and affirmation of my idea as more of a commitment than either of them intended. The guy situationship fizzled. And Starbucks had a non-compete clause that extended to something like a year beyond such point as I left the company.

By the time I got moved into an apartment, lived there for a year, figured out how to make syrupy coffee beverages for a major international coffee chain, and then moved back into my parents’ house to caretake it because they were suddenly following a ministry call to Ireland, I was exhausted. I was also going through what I now know was some version of a Dark Night of the Soul. I had no more desire to open a coffee shop or any other kind of shop. I did not want to venture out on my own at all. And even though I was, in fact, literally talking to (or sometimes at) people about Jesus over coffee (dark night notwithstanding) I had no more desire to make a job out of it. The dream was dead, and I didn’t even feel sad about it. I forgot about the Pilgrimage.

I answered each of these people individually in the context where they asked me, and I don’t want to stop having individual interactions like this because—well, for one thing, this kind of interaction over time is where probably 95% of Pilgrimage participants come from. On the other hand, you can’t fit a ton of information into a tweet, and when I tweet links to the website, the app suppresses the tweets.

I also no longer have a Pilgrimage Twitter account, and I’m not sorry, but it does mean I can’t send people from my personal account there to a Pilgrimage one for them to find out more for themselves. Therefore, it seems like maybe it’s time to give you guys a little history. Here’s the first part.

Slightly after the dawn of time, when I had graduated college and paid off my loans thanks to my grandparents and a live-in nanny job, I flew off to East London, England, to work with some local churches ministering to refugees. I lived there for over five years. That’s it’s own story, but you need to understand that all the way up until six months before I stopped living there, I thought I was going to live there and “be a missionary” forever.

Then a bunch of things happened and I believed God told me to come back to the US, but didn’t tell me what to do next. This sudden redirection—combined with reverse culture shock, suddenly turning 30, and desperately wanting to be married but never having really dated and also not coming from a culture where arranged marriages are a thing—sent me into something of a tailspin for a number of years. While I was spinning, I asked myself,

And I answered myself,

I decided that I didn’t need an MA in Counseling—which is what I was trying to get at the time—just to drink tea and coffee with people and talk about Jesus. And what’s more, if I had an MA in Counseling and were using it, I wouldn’t be able to drink tea and coffee and talk about Jesus with those people. So I quit the program and moved back to my parents’ for a bit. I had decided that I was going to open a coffeeshop.

This coffeeshop was not only going to have coffee and tea, but books and art, and host English as a Second or Foreign Language classes, and have rooms where people who actually had degrees as therapists could practice. And we would form a community and maybe every once in a while we’d close and do service projects together, like a workday with Habitat for Humanity or something. And it would be called the Pilgrimage.

You’re probably not going to have to wait a whole month for the rest of this. I might post a little extra over the next few weeks.

In 2019, along with beginning to pastor a church, I returned to Twitter (which was still officially Twitter) after a years-long hiatus. I had to make new friends there because the space and groupings and people had changed since the last time I was on there, when I was getting booted in slow motion from a church I had served for seven years, when I was graduating from seminary, when I was starting up the Pilgrimage online.

I’m not sure why I re-entered the Twitterverse, but it was fortuitous. Because then covid hit and social media dynamics (along with many other, bigger things) became actual news, and Suddenly I was making friends with the kinds of people I had been trying to tailor the Pilgrimage for to begin with, all those years. Some of them (some of you) started taking my classes and attending Winter Solace and although I had been following deconstruction trends for at least half a decade already, now I was becoming more experientially conversant in trauma concepts and more adept at carrying people’s trauma stories.

Probably it helped that between First Twitter and Second Twitter I had also been a hospice chaplain for three years.

Subscribe now

Every so often people whose faith journey has been more even keeled and/or otherwise are still content to inhabit and worship in traditional churches will ask me some version of

These days, when people ask me that, I tell them a little something I learned in hospice care:

Your pain is what you say it is.

I don’t get to tell you if you have trauma or not. If you’re experiencing it as trauma, if you are responding in a traumatized way, for you “it”—whatever it is—is trauma.

Over the past year, I’ve been blessed (or something) to experience some genuine trauma responses of my own—responses to things that triggered memories of past negative experience patterns. I say blessed because I think these experiences help me be even more compassionate to others when they describe themselves as “triggered” or “activated.” Now I know what they mean. The responses I had were completely involuntary. I didn’t realize how deeply I had been impacted by this specific repeating pattern in my life until my body and brain started reacting to new but similar stimuli in really extreme, uncontrollable ways.

If someone—probably even a trauma survivor—were to analyze the events to which I was responding traumatically, probably nobody would call the events themselves trauma. Even I’m not sure they qualify according to any supposedly objective metric. But some part of my brain or soul or psyche or however one breaks down one’s inner essence, feels traumatized by those things, and I guess I’ve healed enough for my body to feel safe enough to register it, so that I can heal some more, on an even deeper level. If you tried to argue with me about whether or not I had really experienced trauma back then, we’d be arguing beside the point, and short-circuiting any growth or health I might be moving toward. My pain is what I say it is.

When I teach Stepping Into the Story, I always start the course now with a conversation about this. I tell people that everyone needs to be able to share their story, but when our stories interconnect, sometimes we might trigger each other. I tell people if they feel triggered, they can leave the call and return when they’re ready. I tell them their pain is what they say it is.

I also tell them,

Comparison is the devil.

I tell them this after we’ve read about the temptation in the Garden of Eden, where the core of the temptation was “you will be like God” (when, just a few chapters before, we’ve been told they already were).

Allow your stories to connect you, I say. But don’t compare your stories, and especially don’t compare your trauma. Don’t beat yourself up for reacting so badly to something that happened to you which, you feel, doesn’t compare in severity to someone else’s in you cohort. And don’t secretly (or out loud) ask what on earth is wrong with that other person who has never had it as bad as you did. Comparisons like this compound pain…and trauma. Let each other’s pain be what we each say it is, and then let’s link arms and see if we can move forward, and even start to move out of it, together.

This wasn’t supposed to be an advertisement—just a reflection on something that’s been coming up in conversation a lot lately—but while we’re talking about Stepping into the Story, I’d be remiss not to tell you that we’re enrolling for the fall cohorts now. Thursday evenings start on August 1st and Friday mornings start August 2nd. Cohorts are small, so sign up sooner than later.

Stepping Into the Story info and reg

As young adults raised in late Western Evangelicalism, where an unspoken ideal seemed to be some sort of upward straight-line trajectory to heaven, this was at least frustrating if not completely demoralizing. It was then that our therapist/instructor gently suggested that maybe the journey of life was traveled neither in a straight line (West) or a closed loop (East) but something more like a spiral. Ideally, if we were following Jesus along the way, we were, in fact, progressing in some fashion, but a spiral would suggest that we would periodically revisit the same locale (i.e. struggle) we’d been wrestling our whole lives, just from a different and hopefully more healed position.

This might be true in some ways for The Church, too.

Five hundred years ago or so, give or take a few decades, the Church in the West was going through some upheaval. The Roman Catholic Church had fallen into several layers of corruption, and men (mostly) were starting to rise up and call it out. Some of them tried to stay in the church and were ousted against their will. Some tried to oppose the corruption and what they saw as idolatry by intentionally forming new kinds of Christian communities. I am, of course, talking about what is commonly known as the Protestant Reformation. Possibly a little bit less well known is the story of the Counter-reformation, in which some men and women tried (and in some ways succeeded) to reform the Catholic church from within. Other things were also in play during this period. Things like mass media (the printing press), ground-breaking scientific discoveries (like the earth not being the center of the universe), and the Spanish Inquisition (which maybe could have been expected).

Sound familiar?

In the middle of all this (sometimes directly in the middle, as she did not manage to fly under the radar of the Spanish Inquisition), lived and loved and wrote and served a small and feisty Spanish nun known as St Teresa of Ávila

One of the things she wrote (maybe a little against her will) was a book describing the individual human soul as a crystalline castle in which a person journeys toward the center, where Jesus is. Her description seems like a modification on the spiral idea—maybe a little more like a labyrinth.

I didn’t know about Teresa’s Castle until many years after that group therapy session in Seminary #1, and even after learning at least tangentially about James Fowler’s Stages of Faith (which I am now convinced he ripped off from her). But it seems to me her model is at least a good starting place for contemplating and maybe even beginning to understand what’s going on in the Western Church (of all types) and in individuals on what we might call the “deconstruction spectrum.” So I created a course for just this purpose. It’s called The Walk.

The next two cohorts set out in less than a month, and if you find yourself baffled by what you see going on in the Church or in churches around you, or baffled by what’s happening to you in the mix, please join us. There are still open spots. It’d be an honor to explore the castle, the spiral, the labyrinth with you.

It's time to take the Walk

One of the things we do in this course is walk a labyrinth. The next Notes on Pilgrimage letter a month from now will go out after The Walk has already started, but if you would find it helpful to read more about labyrinths here, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll put out an extra post about them just for you before the course starts.

Of all the crimes against humanity that do not really greatly harm humanity, but which everyone seems to agree is just “not done,” spoiling—that is, revealing—the end of a story before you get there is probably at the top of the list.

Read more

In order to conserve writing time (I have a few other projects on the go right now as well), I have therefore decided to set up, via some screenshots, a topic I’d like to discuss with you. The topic is the conundrum of charging money for spiritual care services. I’ve seen (and directly received) some critique on this again lately, and I think the questions are important, so I hope you’ll respond to this post so we can talk about it more openly. I’m not really addressing the question here—more just setting it up so you can nuance it for me if you share the concern, and then I can give you my best effort at addressing it in future.

The following are images of tweets so old that they were still legitimately called tweets—and also so old they no longer show up in my Twitter archives, which is why they are horrendously cropped for also-old Instagram. I will include the text in the captions as well, for potentially easier reading. The context is a question my friend Dayle asked me when I invited her to attend the first Winter Solace online retreat.

I still think that last bit is probably true, and I’m really curious about your response. I never did write about “my own experience and conclusions” because no one took me up on my questions the last time around, but you sure could.

Here are the couple of responses I did get when I posted that on Instagram in 2021.

Subscribe now

I don’t know about you, but I grew up with an ardent desire for my life to bring glory to God. I’m sure I was taught this, but I don’t remember the teaching—just the wanting. I belted out the glorias in the Christmas carols I learned as a child. As an adolescent I wrote poems about wanting to glorify God. I also tried to convince my more popular and musically creative classmates at my Christian school (the ones who formed a high school rock band) to sing songs more about God’s glory than the other stuff they were singing about. (It didn’t work, but I sure tried.)

If you’ve grown up in nearly any form of Western Christianity, you’ve probably encountered the word yourself. It’s pretty ubiquitous. Not only does it show up in carols and other traditional hymns, but it appears as the whole point of human existence in the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man?

To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Nowadays I work with adults in or emerging out of traditions where God’s glory—and the idea that we can somehow contribute to it—was strongly emphasized. A lot of times, even when these folk have been hurt by their faith communities or apparently by God himself, they still have this innate push—whether it’s duty or remnants of longing—to make sure God gets “the glory.”

Whatever that is.

Read more