Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And those of you who have been part of the Bare Marriage community and were listening to me for awhile know that sometimes I get a lot of pushback for what I’m saying because what we are talking about is very much against what a lot of the powers that began evangelicalism have taught over the years.  We’re calling for things to get back to what Jesus intended, away from the idea of power and hierarchy, and into the idea of mutuality and health and, hopefully, we’re setting people free.  But one of the things about pushback is sometimes you can feel very alone.  And today I am so excited to bring to you an interview, which shows me that we are not alone.  The amazing Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, is here to talk about her new documentary, For Our Daughters, and Pastor Trey Ferguson is here to talk about an incredible article that he recently wrote about reframing sex.  I’m not alone.  There is a whole army of people tackling this from all different directions and tackling all different parts of it.  But together we are calling the evangelical church back to health.  And so if you sometimes feel alone, I hope that this can be an encouragement to you, too, that just as God said to Elijah that He has preserved a remnant and that he wasn’t alone, well, we’re not alone either.  And Jesus is on the move, and we’re seeing a lot of things getting shaken up right now because things are getting put back in their rightful place.  And I’m so excited to see what God is doing both through this documentary and what Trey is saying online and what I am saying.  So that interview is awesome.  But before we get to it, here’s another way that you can feel not so alone.  Our patron group is such an incredible place.  We have a wonderful Facebook group that you can join when you start becoming one of our patron supporters, and it’s kind of like my safe space on the Internet where I can go and bounce ideas off of people and say, “Hey, is this a good idea for a podcast?  Or, hey, I’m being attacked on Twitter, and I’m in a car.  And I don’t have time to respond.  So do you guys all go—want to handle it?”  It’s really fun, and people share a lot of their confusion as they’re trying to reevaluate.  What am I looking for in a church?  So check that out.  You can join our patron.  It’s patreon.com/baremarriage for as little as $5 a month, and you’ll get lots of extra stuff including some behind the scenes podcasts and things like that.  So go check that out.  The link is in the podcast notes.  And, of course, if you wanted to donate something and get a tax deductible receipt within the United States, you can do that through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation, which supports what we are doing and which helps fund a lot of our research and our ongoing papers and even translation projects.  So go check that out.  The link to that is in the podcast notes.  I would also like to give a big thank you to our sponsor for this podcast, Baker Books, and it’s a book, Recovering from Purity Culture by Dr. Camden Morgante.  We had Dr. Camden on last week.  We had an amazing webinar with her on Monday, and that book is now available.  So go check that out.  And now without further ado, here is our interview with Kristin and Trey.  This is going to be an awesome one.  I am so glad to have with me Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who is—she’s been here lots of times to talk about Jesus and John Wayne, about her biography of Katherine Bushnell, and now her new documentary, For Our Daughters.  Hi, Kristin.

Kristin: Hey, Sheila.  So good to be back again.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I have one of my favorite people from both Twitter and Threads, Pastor Trey Ferguson form Florida.  He runs two different churches.  One is an online church.  He’s a theologian.  My husband just loves your Threads too, and, Trey, so good to meet you kind of.

Trey: I appreciate you all letting me crash the party.  This is going to be fun.

Sheila: The funny thing was I was supposed to meet with them both separately.  And then I announced this on Twitter that we were doing a podcast, and they were like let’s just go all together.  And we’ll have a party.  So I want to talk about Kristin’s documentary and about Trey’s article that he wrote which, actually, intersect, so this is going to be fun.  We will start with For Our Daughters.  So, Kristin, can you explain what this documentary is?

Kristin: Yeah.  This documentary presents survivors’ stories, survivors of sexual abuse in evangelical churches, and it really gives them the floor.  It lets them speak and, in their own words, explain what happened to them and also explain how.  And all of the women in the film are really perceptive.  They’ve been living with this.  They’ve been speaking, advocating for some time now, and they just bring such a level of nuance and understanding to the conditions that made their abuse possible and, importantly, to the conditions that led to it being covered up or them being blamed and for their abusers to be quote unquote restored, defended, protected.  And so it’s a familiar story if you are attune to this.  But so many people aren’t.  And so we wanted to center their stories and then reframe this in the context of Christian nationalism.  Because it just so happens that, it’s not just the ideologies of hierarchy and submission and authority that create dynamics that ripe for abuse, but some of the very same men who are preaching this patriarchal Christianity are also the ones pushing for a Christian nationalist regime.  And so we are very clear about that.  And we think that these women’s stories matter for Christian women inside evangelical churches, Christian spaces, but they matter for all Americans and for all American women because these are the guys who want to take over the country.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think what I really appreciate about this documentary—and it’s only 30 minutes long.  It’s not overly long, but it packs a really big punch.  Is that I don’t believe that we are going to address the abuse crisis in the church until we deal with the things that are allowing abuse to flourish which is basically two things, I think.  One is they’re totally dedicated to power for a certain group of people, and the other is they have a totally warped view of sex.  

Kristin: Yes.  Both.  100%.

Sheila: And they’re intersected.  Now, Trey, I know you watched this documentary, right?  Before this podcast.  What were your first thoughts?

Trey: It was heavy.  It was heartbreaking for the simple fact that this is something—I often joke a lot of times online about trying to stay out of white people business.  And it will be very easy for me to cast this off as white people business except this is something that pervades faith spaces of all cultures and not even just faith spaces.  Anywhere patriarchy is implicit, right?  Is just naturally present.  We are susceptible to this type of abuse and offering much more grace and cover for the abusers than their victims, right?  And so watching this documentary was harrowing especially considering what it is that I do.  I feel called to do for a living.  Oh, at the end of the day, I have to examine the ways that I’ve been complicit in either participating in or cultivating environments where things like this could even happen.

Sheila: Yeah.  So let’s give you all a quick clip of the documentary.  And this is a bunch of clips of some of the worst misogynists in the Christian world talking about what women are for.

Documentary: Godly women want to feed their men.  Godly women are designed to make the sandwiches.  But this is not an absolute law like going about making babies.  Christians need to be thoughtful about this with our kids.  They’re all arrows, but they’re all to be sharp.  And they’re all to do damage to the enemy, but we want our daughters to grow up seeing what they’re for.  We’re just going to outbreed these people.  We are.  

Sheila: What does believing that women are just for having babies have to do with the abuse crisis, Kristin?

Kristin: Yeah.  And it’s a small sampling.  One of the things I realized as the writer of books and now producer of a film is that there are so many quotes out there but far fewer with relatively high production quality caught on camera.  Thankfully, some of these guys have top of the line podcasts where they say a lot of things.  So kudos to them for that.  Yes.  What we have here is the objectification of women.  That women are useful as a means to an end.  A means to a sexual end.  It means to all sorts of ends, to serving men’s interests.  So men are the leaders.  Men are the initiators.  Men are the deciders.  Women submit to them, and they serve them.  And they find their fulfillment by obeying as these preachers tell them God’s plan for them which is really you serve us.  So you serve God via serving us, and that is a prevalent theology throughout these conservative evangelical spaces.  And it is an incredibly harmful one.

Sheila: Yeah.  And by that way, that’s idolatry.  Okay?    

Kristin: Also that.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s putting man in God’s place.  And here.  Let’s just turn into Joel Webbon for a minute talking about who he controls.

Joel: I have four people in my life that I dictate the hours in their day.  I dictate what time they go to the bathroom, when we eat, what we eat, what we wear.  Those are the people that I have almost limitless authority with.

Sheila: Trey, he said he even controls when his family goes to the bathroom.  Is that not insane?

Trey: No.  Mostly definitely.  And I think it’s important to note that there are a multitude of Christianities practiced around the world today, and the interesting thing about this one, in particular, is that it has no real need for Jesus.  Jesus is, ultimately, a mascot, right?  Because if it is the image or Jesus is who we’re supposed to be imitating, that we’re striving to be like Jesus, where do you even get this ethos from?  The idea that, oh—first of all, Jesus never married.  For all we know, Jesus—unless He was getting His freak on in a way that nobody was recording, the idea that making babies was central to what it means to embody the love of God is not found in any of the Gospel story.  And so this image for this utopian society where Christians are on top and everything is not at all predicated on the life, the death, the burial, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And I think it’s important for us to name that at a certain point we have to acknowledge that what we’re witnessing—I’m not going to call it not Christian.  I don’t believe in a no true Scotsman thing or anything.  But it doesn’t have anything to do with the stories that we’ve received from Jesus.  And if that is the case, I think it’s fair to question where did this come from and why is it worthy of aspiring to.

Sheila: Yeah.  I want to just say—I want to highlight something Trey just said because, remember, Trey is a pastor.  This is not the story of Christendom the world over.  And there are good churches that do worship Jesus.  This is not the worship of Jesus, what we’re seeing in this documentary and these horrible men saying these things.  This is not the worship of Jesus, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t places that do worship Jesus.  And so I just encourage you, if you are in a church which likes Doug Wilson, get out and find a church that worships Jesus.

Trey: Immediately.

Sheila: Yes.  Okay.  If you grew up in the church and you heard some of the terrible messages about sex that Kristin was sharing in her documentary, For Our Daughters, then you probably could really use today’s sponsored book, Recovering From Purity Culture by Dr. Camden Morgante.  Purity culture and just this whole way of talking about sex has left a lot of wounds on an awful lot of people.  And it should never have been that way because this was never about Jesus.  But it’s great to know the source of these wounds.  It’s great to be able to voice them and say, yeah, I understand.  But we also need help healing.  And that’s what Dr. Camden’s book does.  Dr. Camden is a licensed psychologist.  So she’s actually qualified to write this book.  Yay.  And she’s going to take you through helping to identify which of the five big myths of purity culture that she identified that you may fit with and then also take you through some really healing grounded exercises to get over those myths so that you can live in freedom.  So please check out the book, Recovering from Purity Culture.  The link to it is in the podcast notes.  Okay.  So I think the point that you’re trying to make, Kristin—and I know you said that when you wrote Jesus and John Wayne that the chapter on sexual abuse—I think was it like four times as long?  And you had to get it—

Kristin: It was.  It was, in the words of my editor, a sprawling and undisciplined.  So I had to cut a lot.

Sheila: You have a mean editor.  

Kristin: I do.  I do.  I love him.  And yes.  It was much, much longer.  I had so many more cases.  And it was just too much to handle.  It was too much to carry—for the book to carry.  And so there are so many  more cases out there, and I ended up just kind of filing things down to if somebody connected to the abuse case had already gotten a shout out in the book up to that point they got to stay in.  And all of these other cases just had to end up on the cutting room floor.  Just paying attention.  And I should say.  I started researching this book and this chapter before Me Too.  And so one of the first things that I did when I decided I need to turn this into a book and it was in the fall of 2016 after Access Hollywood, one of the first things I did actually was consult a lawyer because so many of these stories were public.  But they were not covered by national media.  They were not vetted.  And so can I even talk about these things?  Then Me Too happened.  That took care of the liability issues.  But I just want to say.  These stories were out there for anybody who cared to pay attention.  This should not come as a surprise.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I just want to clarify.  2016.  The Access Hollywood tape.  That was with Donald Trump, and that was his famous one where he said that you didn’t have to ask.  You could just grab women by the you know what.  Okay.  So in this documentary, you have a bunch of these clips of men saying horrible things.  And you could say, well, it’s just a few men.  It’s not every Christian.  But over and over and over again, we see things like this.  Even just last week, Doug Wilson.  Doug Wilson, who has said slavery wasn’t that bad—he’s written—he’s a slavery apologist.  All right?  Josh Howerton, who we talk about a lot on this podcast.  He tweeted him.  He promoted him in his tweets and on his Instagram.  So Doug Wilson is becoming more and more mainstream.  John Piper once called him John the Baptist or something.  It’s wild.  Okay?

Kristin: Yeah.  I really want to address that because this is also a struggle as I was writing Jesus and John Wayne, right?  Are these guys fringe?  Are they mainstream?  So I actually use Doug Wilson as a case study in the book showing how, yes, he started fringe.  And arguably, he was fringe.  He took delight in being fringe.  He would be insulted if you called him anything but a fringe character in evangelicalism.  And then over the course of the late 90s, especially into the early 2000s, you see him moving closer to the center.  You see him platformed by Christianity Today, platformed by John Piper, defended by these eminently respectable evangelicals.  And now we’re in the next phase.  And now we see him—Mother Jones just had a piece on him and Joel Webbon and other guys in the documentary just last week that came out connecting these guys to the Christian nationalist network with close tied to J.D. Vance, to Kevin Roberts, to Project 2025, and to the next Trump administration, if Trump wins in November.  Right?  So these guys are not fringe characters anymore although they are extremists, right?  So they are extremist, but the dynamics that I look at in this film and in my book are, not just looking at the perpetrators, all right?  We can focus on them, but I also want to keep our focus on the good Christian people in these churches who are complicit, actively complicit, passively complicit, who repeat these patterns over and over and over again.  Siding with the perpetrator, blaming the victims, and that’s what we’re looking at here.

Sheila: And so let’s take one of those complicit moments and talk about that.  And that’s the moment that you drew attention to so well in the documentary.  In the documentary, you follow—is it four different women’s stories of abuse?  And one of them is Jules Woodson, who was sexually abused by the pastor, Andy Savage, when she was 17 and he was her youth pastor.  And she was one of the first big Church Too cases to come to light.  I think that was in 2018.  I was actually booked to speak at Andy Savage’s church that year.  

Kristin: Small world.

Sheila: Yeah.  It is.  So Jules sent an email to Andy Savage saying, “Hey, do you remember me?”  And that Sunday he confessed.  He read a confession off of his iPhone about how he had sexually abused this girl.  And the church stood and gave him a standing ovation.  That’s complicit.    

Kristin: Absolutely.  And did he use the word abuse in that confession?  

Sheila: I don’t think he did.  

Kristin: Or was there a sexual incident with—yes.  Yes.  So yes.  That story is in the film.  Jules presents so clearly.  It was really actually important to me when I invited women to participate in this film that I only went with women who were already out in public on their own terms because you and I both know that it is brutal out there.  And the backlash is vicious.  And I didn’t want to invite a woman, even if she thought she knew what she was saying yes to, in to this space, if she didn’t know exactly what she was signing on to.  And so kudos to Jules and to Christa and to Tiffany, and then we also have Rachael Denhollander and Cait West, who bring context for taking this on and, yet again, stepping into the fray.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And then Rachael said this really powerful thing that it is so much easier—it doesn’t cost you anything to give the pastor a standing ovation.  It costs you something to share it—to stand with the victim.  And, Trey, this must be something that you’ve worked with over the course of your life.  How do you get people to care about justice?

Trey: I think it’s a tough question on a couple fronts.  Theologically and ecclesiologically—oh man.  You all know what I’m trying to say.  I can’t get the word out right now.  That one is always tough because of the patterns that we inherit, right?  There’s this implicit understanding.  The pastor is someone who is worthy of deference in a lot of our communities.  I’m not entirely sure where that came from.  I just know that it is a very real thing that we have to contend with.  But then when it comes to dealing with justice as a society, right?  That goes beyond the church because the church is but a part of a society.  A lot of times our vision for justice and our understanding of justice is hampered by who we consider fully human, right?  And to who justice is owed.  And so if we view men as somehow more human than women or on a different level of citizenship and worthiness, then, of course, justice looks like standing with men when there is something untoward happening, right?  We have a hard time conceptualizing an injustice perpetuated against somebody or a class of people that we don’t see as worthy of the same rights and dignity as somebody else.  And so I think we have to examine what our societal imagination perceives of as who the stewards of rights and dignity are and what bestows those rights.  I know we have this intrinsic understanding of inalienable rights and everything, but I think most of us, if we’re honest, can acknowledge that those haven’t really been applied evenly across society.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  Because the people that need justice are often invisible to us because they’re not at the front.  They’re not the ones in power.  And that’s why I think it’s so important in For Our Daughters, this documentary, that you’re bringing out that it’s both this quest for power, but it’s also the way that we see women.  And those two things interacting with each other create this horrible abuse crisis.  So I want to turn to Rachael, again—Rachael Denhollander said something really insightful.    

Rachael: Sexuality really is taught as existing only for men.  Women exist as a means to an end.  The sexual satisfaction of their husbands or a danger to a godly man.  And then coupled with that is often a strong teaching that this need that men have, this sexual need that men have, is absolutely irrepressible.  Right?  That it’s God given and that they must have sexual release.  And what that really does is it places the responsibility for sexual purity in every single instance squarely on the shoulders of the woman.  If something goes wrong, if a man abuses, if he lusts, if he has sex outside of marriage, right?  Well, that’s the woman’s fault.

Sheila: I’ve heard Rachael say things like this quite a few times.  And I know she’s a big fan of The Great Sex Rescue, and she loves—or not loves.  But the wording from Every Man’s Battle about physical release really grossed her out when she wrote the endorsement for Great Sex Rescue, and she uses that a lot.        

Kristin: She was channeling—yeah.  No.  I was thinking about your work absolutely front and center here.  And Rachael just has a way with words.  She is so concise and so on target every single time.

Sheila: She must be fun to edit.  It must be so easy to get a clip from her.

Kristin: Okay.  So here’s a very funny story because I didn’t know editing, right?  I’m not the film maker here.  But when we had reviewed one of the first cuts—actually one of the executive producers reached out and gave a lot of notes and then one of the notes was, “Oh, and that Rachael person.  Did you speed up the audio on her?  Because she is really fast.”  And both Carl and I just laughed.  No.  She literally talks and thinks at that speed.  Should we slow it down?  He’s like, “No.  No.  No.  Keep it.  Keep it.”  But she is just that sharp all the time.

Sheila: She’s incredible.  I admire her so much.  But what she said about how you either see women as—you exist to either sexually satisfy your husband, or you exist as a temptation.  And it just reminds me of SBC mega church pastor, Josh Howerton, who just a few weeks ago told women—told men in the congregation—sorry.  If you go out in the church parking lot after church and you see the literal devil, you’re supposed to stand and fight.  But if you see a shady, little girl in a miniskirt, run, Forrest, run because you’re no match for that enemy.  So he called little girls in church parking lots men’s enemies because they will have such temptation, which is the same language that Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, authors of Every Man’s Battle.  They say that female coworkers are your enemy.    

Kristin: And can we just pause and say this is bizarre.  And for people who spend time in—too much time in evangelical spaces, I just need you to know that people outside of that world don’t talk like this about little girls.  They do not.  And if they would, huge red flags.  It’s just not appropriate.  But it’s not just a matter of political correctness here.  They aren’t voicing these thoughts because these are not the thoughts that circulate in those spaces.  Thankfully so.  But in the world of evangelicalism and when you’re getting into this—any talk about sex and sexuality and temptation, there is this massive industry.  Sheila, you know this better than anybody.  You’ve written books trying to take this apart.  But this is millions of copies of books.  Not just sold.  But read and read in groups, spiritual groups, as God’s Word.  And it is garbage.  It is totally garbage, and we are now reaping the fruits of that awful teaching.

Sheila: Yeah.  So, Trey, let me ask you.  Can you be with a woman and not think of her as your enemy?  

Trey: Yeah.  And I found out a very useful skill.  It makes it much easier to navigate the world because there’s enough enemies out there.  I don’t have to start turning everybody lacking a Y chromosome into one.  In all honesty, it sounds exhausting.  It really and truly does.  And the very interesting thing about it is that it, again, is not really something that you can find ground in Scripture particularly when we focus on the person of Jesus who when He was in a situation—He’d be like, “Yo, what are you doing alone with a woman?”  He was like, “Yo, what are you talking about?  We were just talking.  It’s a thing that I do.  It’s a large part of what I do.  I go around, and I talk.”  And this idea that every single woman is a trap and a temptation is ground in men being unable to reckon with our own insecurity and the fact that so often we’ve taken up from—and, again, it’s not even something that you need to go into a church to find.  You can just find it in society around us that if I want to prove myself as a man I need to conquer as many women as possible.  And then not being about to separate ourselves from that ethos, we now turn this into something that, oh, obviously, this is something that all men deal with.  When no.  There are lots of men, who have become self defined and self differentiated enough to realize that I do not have to operate as a creature of pure instinct where if I see something then all of a sudden I’ll go haywire.  No.  I think it’s a very embarrassing way to talk about and represent ourselves.  And it’s kind of a shame that we accept that as a narrative that is not only logical but somehow indicative of our identity in a God that we claim to be loving and powerful.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s embarrassing.     

Trey: It is.  It is.  Have some dignity.  Have some dignity.

Sheila: Thank you.  Okay.  Speaking of Every Man’s Battle that has sold millions of copies, I have something to show you from my store.  I’m going to send you some of these, Kristin.  But these are hazardous material stickers that you can put on a book.  Here’s a copy of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and then the sticker just goes around the book.  And it says, “For research purposes only.  This book contains teachings statistically proven to cause harm.”

Kristin: I’m going to need a few dozen because the book shelf that I have all that stuff on is right over here.  And yes.  

Trey: Yeah.  You all playing with fire right now because somebody else going to get their hands on them stickers and start them on all our books.  

Sheila: Well, that’s fine as long as they buy them from our store and whatever.

Trey: I love it.

Sheila: But here’s the thing.  Okay.  So these guys are saying that women are their enemies because, like Rachael said, they only see women in sexual terms.  They do not see women as fully embodied as made in the image of God.  And then this—and I think this is why pastors don’t think it’s that big a deal when women are sexually abused.  Tiffany Thigpen’s story really got to me from your documentary.  I think that she’s the only one I’ve never actually to in real life.  I talk with her on Twitter all the time.  But I had never actually heard her story in her own words.  And really powerful story.  And she was abused by a pastor, Darrell Gilyard, who had already abused many women.  And those above him, Jerry Vines, Paige Patterson, already knew this.  And after she came forward, they just restored him immediately, and he went on to do it some more. 

Kristin: Dozens of times.  Dozens more.

Sheila: And he later served time in prison.  But when Tiffany went to Jerry Vines, who was her pastor, he said, “These things have a way of going away.  You don’t need to worry about it.  It just goes away.”  And he doesn’t care.  And he said, “If it were to get out, it would be so embarrassing for you,” right?  So she was the one being shamed.  And I just find this so interesting that this documentary is coming out right now at the same time as the Gisele Pelicot case in France.  

Kristin: Yes.  Not my shame to carry.  Not my shame to carry.

Sheila: I so admire that woman in saying, “Yeah.  This isn’t my shame.  You can show the videos.  I want the videos to be seen because this isn’t my shame.”  And I love that.

Kristin: Exactly.  And I think that Tiffany’s story shows us so many, many things.  First of all, her remarkable courage.  I mean, first of all, it’s like she goes.  She does the right thing.  She brings it to the pastor assuming—girls, we grow up in these spaces talking about purity, talking about being good Christians, being obedient, being pure, being all these things, telling the truth.  So then you go and you fully expect the man, who is God’s representative, is going to also think these things are bad.  But that is not what happens over and over again.  The first thing he asks her, “Have you told anybody?  No?  Good.  Keep it that way.”  Right?  So already started.  And then also who are we talking about?  Jerry Vines and Paige Patterson.  Two of the most powerful men in the Southern Baptist Convention.  Christa Brown makes this point over and over again too.  These are the top dogs.  They are.  And they are the—

Sheila: Paige Patterson had a stained glass window of himself made.  

Kristin: Seriously.  And these are the guys who orchestrated the whole conservative resurgence, conservative, fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.  That’s who we’re talking about, so don’t tell me these guys are outliers or these are fringe figures.  No.  This is endemic, and it is deliberate.  Designed into the entire system.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Exactly.  When I heard that Jerry Vines said these things have a way of going away and how he just completely dismissed and they restored Darrell Gilyard—this was before his arrest later.  But it got me wondering.  I wonder what’s happened to Andy Savage, who had abused Jules Woodson.  And so I Googled it.  And I looked it up.  And sure enough.  He does have a new church now.  So he has been restored to ministry in Memphis even after he lost his former church after the outcry about that standing ovation.  And I want to read to you—and I will put a link in the podcast notes, so you can all look at his new page.  But this is how he describes what happened.  Okay?  “Andy Savage serves as the lead pastor of Grace Valley Church.  Grace Valley was started in Andy and Amanda’s living room in late 2019 with a group of friends after a very difficult and life changing valley season in Andy’s life.”  And valley is in quotation marks.  “The valley, although painful, served as a crucible of transformation for Andy.  His values and convictions were challenged and galvanized.  He truly embraced the growth God intended for his life through this challenging time.  The valley is where the truth and grace of Jesus stripped Andy of many false and worldly identities and restored him to a lifelong pursuit of humility and serving.  Andy is now a self-proclaimed valley person and seeks to help people find the grace of Jesus in their valleys.”  So Trey, what do you think of calling being outed for sexually abusing someone under your care a valley?

Trey: Yeah. That’s cute.  But the jig is up though, right?  At a certain point, we have to ask ourselves why is it so important that everybody who gets caught up like this is eventually restored to ministry.  And I think what we have to confront is that, oh, a lot of us can’t really do nothing.  We’re not actually skilled or talented.  Because in any reasonable society, you would have to go find something else to do.  You got to go get you a job at a bank or something.  You can’t keep on trying to lead people in faith communities if you have been found to abuse the very people in any way, shape, or form but sexually.  No.  What do you mean restore?  Okay.  I believe in restorative justice.  Absolutely.  But that doesn’t always mean that we just go ahead and give you the ability or put you in a position to do the same exact thing, right?  And we see this time and time again when people are—they do the little confession thing.  And I believe wholeheartedly in the ability to restore someone into community. That’s not the same thing as restoring you into leadership and putting you in the same position because what we’re then communicating is that this is a blip in the radar that not only we can expect from people but sometimes that, oh, we should expect this.  And this is how we ought to react to this little speed bump, right?  Which is effectively what it is when we can now rebrand that speed bump as, oh, this is but a valley.  And welcome to Grace Valley Church, right?  We just branded the biggest mistake into—it’s ludicrous.  It really is.  And I think we just got to examine the fact that, oh well, maybe he can’t do anything else.  Maybe there are no other marketable skills.  And why is it that we are the mark for them?  Yeah.

Sheila: Or not even any marketable skills.  There’s no place that’s going to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars because he was a pastor at a mega church.  And he was making bank because they do.  And yeah.  When you’ve got no education, no real education, what else are you going to do that is going to pay you that kind of money?  And the truth is there’s nothing.

Kristin: So that’s some incentive.

Trey: Right.  I had to pause when said that just now because I was like—I knew that I wasn’t getting paid a lot.  But just now I was like oh man.  I didn’t know I could be paid that much.  

Kristin: You’re going to be sitting with that one.

Trey: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Sheila: Well, how much was James MacDonald making?  Remember when Julie Roys did that.  He was pulling in—what?  A million and a half a year with all of the benefits.  

Kristin: Yeah.  With all the perks.  

Trey: Wow.

Kristin: All the perks.  Yeah.  It was a lot.

Sheila: And I’m sure Andy Savage wasn’t in that category.  But most of them are making two, three, four hundred thousand at least.

Trey: Me and Jesus are going to have a long talk when we get off of this call because I promise you—maybe it’s—

Kristin: But Sheila, I find even in—if I don’t actually kind of force myself to look carefully at that story, I find myself kind of—you want redemption.  You want—right?  I find myself like, oh man, do I want Andy Savage to be outed one more time, right?  He had this.  He had this.  And so I actually struggle with this myself.  And can I just say that you have this video on YouTube from a couple years back where you talk about Andy Savage back then and his response with his first restoration. Restoration 1.0.  And you made a really important comment there which is that God gave him a chance with that first call out when Jules wrote him that letter in that Me Too moment.  He could have pointed a different direction.  And I love that saying, “You’re right.”  Not only was there the first massive error of the abuse and then poor judgment going on into ministry and then being called out and then accepting that standing ovation and, once again, minimizing.  I mean there’s a lot of mistakes being made.  But then called out publically in the pages of The New York Times, for goodness’ sake.  What are you going to do with that moment?  What if—what if he had modeled true repentance?  What if he had sought restoration for Jules and for other women like her?  What if he had then stepped back and provided a model of, “You know what, guys?  There’s what is right, and then there is what we want to do.  And I’m going to take the hard path here.”  There are those options.  And I forget about that because we so rarely see that done.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Of course, we want people—we want everyone to be happy.  We want people to get along.  We don’t like tension.  And so this—what he says on his website it sounds really good, right?  This served as a crucible of transformation, and he was challenged.  And he was galvanized.  And he embraced the growth, and this is all challenging.  But to frame the fact that you were outed for abuse as a valley and to never once mention that there’s a victim who needs restoration and who needs an apology, how about a public apology and a public acknowledgment?  Instead, what did he call it?  An organic—it sprung from an organic moment or something on some podcast.  So when there’s never been any work done to repair—and I think I made this point in the video a couple years ago.  If I didn’t, I would make it today too.  Even if he had, even if he had gone to Jules and say, “You know what?  I’m going to give you tons and tons of money for counseling and for all the counseling you’ve been in over the years.  I’m going to publically apologize to you.  I am going to start a chapter for sexual abuse,” even if he had done all of that, it isn’t just about Jules.  It’s also about the people in his congregation who are also victims of sexual abuse.  And they are seeing him say, “See?  I am restored.  I am over it,” when they aren’t over it.  And that’s the problem is you can’t just be restored after you’ve been an abuser because there are people in your congregation who are still dealing with the fallout of sexual abuse decades later.  

Kristin: Absolutely.  So many.  So many.  And that’s something that—just in the—this film hasn’t even been out two weeks.  And we’ve already been overwhelmed with stories from other survivors.  Many of whom have kept their stories close.  Some of whom have been carrying these for 50 years.  Some of whom have never even told their family.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  One of the things you said on social media a couple days ago is that in doing this film you’ve just been overwhelmed by people’s stories.  And if people could just see the stories you see, and that’s what I get too.  Every day.  I get these horrific stories.  And I just think, “Josh Howerton, do you have any clue what you’re doing?  Mark Driscoll, do you have any—do you even care?”  And I’m not sure that they do because they’re so into power.  And it’s really sad.  So Kristin, I wanted—before—I know you’re going to have to go soon.  And Trey and I will be left talking about this.  But I wanted to talk about some stuff that Trey said in his article, which wasn’t exactly about your documentary.  But it was about very similar things, which is why is it that we keep seeing these sexual abuse crises and we keep seeing people wanting to be restored and it’s not working?  So Trey, can you tell us why you wrote this article?  

Trey: Yeah.  What happened was I saw a clip after Steve Lawson, who it was this time.  And I think this time because we’ve seen—and it feels like an increasing amount, but it might not be.  It’s just the steady flow of evangelical leaders falling into sin or whatever terminology, whatever euphemism they want to use this time.  But Steve Lawson was recently removed from a number of his positions for an illicit relationship.  And then an old clip surfaced of him talking about how foolish it would be to get caught in a sexual sin.  And he even mentioned for—I think he said ten seconds of pleasure or something like that.

Sheila: Yeah.  Which is a big admission (cross talk) but whatever.

Trey: Yeah.  Again, have some dignity, right?  Come on now.  And then going into the situation and talking about how foolish it would be to throw away all those years of ministry and now you’re just—you work—and he listed some menial jobs or whatever which is another conversation we’ve got to have about why is there no dignity in those jobs.  And why is it that you only find value in this work of ministry?  Why is this the pinnacle of what it looks like to be productive for you?  And what it really got me thinking about is how very rare it is for me to go into a church and hear a healthy sexual ethic preached and a healthy understanding of sex.  It’s not something that we have to be scared of because this is a danger to us, but something that God has gifted us with as something that two people who desire to enjoy intimacy together can enjoy together as opposed to something that a man does to a woman or to his wife.  And we will always fail to serve each other in a way that honors the God we claim to worship in so much as we do not understand what a healthy sexual ethic defined by enthusiastic consent, mutual pleasure, and a healthy understanding of power dynamics is, right?  And then so that was something that I just really wanted to be crystal clear about naming.  Those aren’t original ideas.  It’s not really that you haven’t said in a number of different ways, but it’s a conversation that—two things that a lot of people like to talk about and would maybe like more of.  Sex and money.  And I think the church is often very deficient in talking about both of those in a healthy and responsible way.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  What did you think when you read it, Kristin?

Kristin: Yeah.  Once again, kind of a breath of fresh air.  And as Trey said, he didn’t invent them.  And yet, it’s still a breath of fresh air because there is so much bad stuff out there.  And I mean you could speak as well as anybody to the market that there is but puzzlingly for the bad stuff, right?  This stuff has been churned out since the 1960s, right?  We go back to Tim LaHaye’s classic.  It’s been pervasive, and it is an industry.  And you have to wonder.  We both study this.  But you have to wonder ultimately what’s at the root here.  What is really going on that this factually incorrect information , that this spiritually, theologically harmful information is just so abundant?  And it’s not that it isn’t being called out now.  But here we are.  We’re still in the thick of it.  And yeah.  I think what we’re seeing in the Lawson situation—and he’s just one of many in the Dallas Fort Worth area recently.

Sheila: I know.  Something is going on in Dallas.  Something is seriously going on in Dallas.

Kristin: I mean as a historian I’ll say—yeah.  There has been stuff going on in Dallas.  And take a close look there and see what’s going on.  And then look at the networks that he’s a part of and see what’s been going on there.  Absolutely, right?  So I just I think we need to—I think this is about sex, and it’s about power.  And it’s about money.  And we have to keep digging deeper to see just how deep it goes.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s really what I appreciate about your documentary, as I said, because I am so horrified by the abuse crisis in the evangelical church and in the SBC.  But it isn’t just the SBC.  But I am so horrified by it.  But we aren’t going to solve it simply by having more plan to protect programs.  They’re important.  Okay?  We all need plan to protect programs.  We all need background checks.  We all need good rules for when you can be alone with a kid and how you can’t be, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  We all need those things.  That is not going to stop abuse because abuse is—it’s what feeds it.  And what feeds it is like Trey said.  It’s this way of looking at sex.  Here’s just a quote from Trey’s article.  “If sin is expressed as a lack of piety and not a lack of justice, then you will find a community that prioritizes piety over justices.”  And I’m reminded of Fred Stoeker, who is one of the authors on Every Man’s Battle, saying, “The real problem is not when we push past the boundaries of our girlfriends.  The real problem is when we get into masturbation to pornography and how we’re aroused by that.”  So having a true, living, breathing victim in front of you, that isn’t the real problem.  The real problem is I’ve hurt my own purity because they have a view of sin which is all about your own personal piety and not a view of justice.  And they think women don’t matter.  

Kristin: Exactly.  

Trey: Which is always interesting because we can find proof texts to put behind it and (inaudible) this thing that we carry and we talk about Jesus’—Jesus actually does warn us against lust.  But then we pretend as though lust is this abstract thing when no.  Jesus is telling you that we only get to this point when we haven’t mastered this one thing, right?  And what I’m trying to get at there is—when I write what I write is that okay.  If all we’re worried about is the ways that sex can bring us down without actually addressing the fact that what Jesus is getting at is this is undergirding an ethos where we now hurt each other, right?  Sin is at its root a fracture of the unity and the community and the wholeness that God has called us to.  And what Jesus says is like by the time we get to this point, by the time you’re actually abusing people, it’s too late.  We’re going to deal with this ethic at the root.  And then we somehow get into this shorthanded way of trying to theologize our way around the actual harmful impacts we’re having because we don’t really view each other as fully worthy of the same dignity.  The whole idea even that men are somehow more qualified to lead because of a couple of isolated verses here despite the fact that even throughout the Bible and in the communities that we live in right now we have shown to be very unreliable leaders, very untrustworthy leaders, very poor stewards of the power we share, or whatever.  Tell us that we’re really not that interested in seeking the way that Jesus is calling us to so much as looking for ways to legitimize that which was were going to do anyway.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  So Kristin, that’s a great way—I know you’ve got to leave in a sec.  But do you want to just leave us with your dreams for the movie and what you’re trying to get across here?

Kristin: Yeah.  My most immediate goal is just for people to watch it.  I want as many people to watch this film as possible because I have such faith in the power of these women’s voices.  If you watch, if you hear their voices, if you listen and sit with it, I am convinced that it will change you.  First and foremost, just watch this film and sit with it.

Sheila: And, again, the link is in the podcast notes.  So go click on it right now and—yeah.

Kristin: Yeah.  It’s free.  It’s on YouTube.  You can watch it with friends.  I highly recommend watching it in community.  Forourdaughtersfilm.com.  Absolutely.  And then beyond that, do something.  We cannot change the systems that we have inherited if we don’t identify the problem and if we do not have the courage to act, and we need both.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Well thank you.  I appreciate you being with us.

Kristin: Thank you so much.  I’ve got to go, but I love both of you.  Thank you so much.  This was very fun.  We should do it again sometime.

Trey: Most definitely.  Thank you.  

Sheila: Absolutely.  Okay.  So now just you and me, Trey.  All right.  I want to continue with some other things that you said.  I just want to read—this is always awkward when someone is reading your words and a lot of your words.  But I’m just going to make you sit there and I’m going to read this part of your article, which I thought is so good.  “Too many people in our communities of faith still think of and speak of sex as something that men want from women as opposed to something that two people agree to enjoy together.  Framing sex as a prize that uncontrollably lustful men want from women who have the power to control men by choosing to withhold or offer this prize whenever they choose is the foundation of all sorts of sin, objectification, and dehumanization.  It is the framing that drives a culture misogyny, making the world less safe for everyone, but especially women.  Framing sex as something that two people agree to enjoy together is the foundation of intimacy.”  And I so agree with that.  My question is why is that so hard to do?  Why is it that when so many Christian leaders talk about sex they do talk about things like men’s sexual needs and how women were made to provide for men’s sexual needs and do not deprive one another?  And it very much is that he needs it or else he’s going to combust, explode.  I don’t know what he’s going to do but something bad.  And women have to provide.  Why don’t we talk about it as something that’s mutual?

Trey: I think it’s because we have an atrophied imagination for what intimacy can look like and, I would argue, should look like, right?  We are fundamentally afraid of intimacy because intimacy is a vulnerable place to be.  Intimacy opens us up to all sorts of places.  You have to let people see parts of you that you’re not even all that secure in yet.  And I’m not just talking about sexual intimacy.  I mean that in a very real way.  And so one of the things that I think we have to do is understand sex as a part of intimacy, which I think is ultimately the goal that God is calling us to.  When Jesus talks about that God made them male and female and for this reason a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife and the two shall become one, I don’t even think Jesus is that concerned with reinforcing a heteronormative society so much as describing why it is that these two seemingly separate entities are joined into one because the goal was always the oneness.  God creates humanity in the beginning.   When we talk about male and female, it’s talking about the diversity of His creation.  But they’re designed to exist together.  And one of the things that we see if you subscribe to the notion of original sin or whatever—the fracturing of community, of wholeness, of oneness, of unity that occurs in the garden when they eat the fruit is that there’s this distrust because it’s the serpent, who deceives the woman, who then brings Adam into this.  And then what we’re really witnessing is, aw, shucks.  Now we’re in trouble, and this is all your fault.  Nobody wants to take any accountability for it.  And there’s no longer a trust.  And when there is no trust, there is no unity.  But God’s design has always been for us to be in unity, and that requires trust.  And trust is a scary prospect because when you trust somebody you are always giving them the ability to harm you in some way whether that’s through disappointment, whether that’s through hurt.  And intimacy exposes you to those negative things. And so when you ask why I think it’s hard for us to conceive of sex as something that two people agree to enjoy because the other way is a whole lot easier.  And this is something that I do to you.  This is something—I’m going to get mine, and I don’t have to worry about anything of this sort.  That I’m no longer exposed to the idea of, oh, is this something that you’re enjoyed.  Now I have to take lessons.  I have to ask you what is it that would help us arrive at the same destination if you catch my—if you smell what I’m cooking right here, right?  And that’s a very vulnerable place to be.  

Sheila: Right.  And I think you’re really touching on something important.  Michael John Cusick, who wrote one of the books that I always recommend for quitting pornography—it’s really good.  Called Surfing for God.  He was the one who said to me, “For a lot of men, sex provides a feeling of connection without having to do the work of connection.”  So it’s like it’s a shortcut, right?  So we have sex.  I feel connected.  But I never had to open up to you.  I never had to be vulnerable.  I never had to show you who I really am.  I never had to actually talk to you.  And that seems to be what we’ve created is this whole transactional view of sex where if he’s nice to her, if he does the dishes, if he has some nonsexual touch, then she’ll give him what he really needs which is sex.  And you hear this all the time in Christian resources, right?  It’s such a shallow view.  First of all, it assumes she doesn’t want sex, right?  It assumes sex isn’t for women which is probably true in some of these relationships where they don’t care about women at all because she’s probably not feeling good anyway.  So that’s probably a problem.   But yeah.  It’s this view that sex is something that I trade or a I give or you take or whatever.  And not something that we share.  It’s not an experience that we share together.  It’s something that someone takes or someone gives.  And that’s just really ugly.

Trey: It’s not only ugly.  It’s another one of those situations where, again, if this is what we are presenting in Christian circles we have to ask ourselves what it is that we have to offer the world because you don’t need Christianity or the church to arrive at that conclusion (cross talk) have sex.  You really don’t.  Right?  And some of these you can find pretty much anywhere where patriarchy is present.  And if that is the case, what I would ask from a philosophical standpoint is what is the purpose of this framework?  Why do we need to attach the adjective Christian to it if there’s nothing uniquely Christian about it at all?  It’s not something that Jesus speaks of in that way.  It’s not something that is somehow distinct about what we believe about this relationship.  And I think that if we were to allow Jesus to speak to our sexual ethic, which again is going to take work because sex, sexuality, none of that stuff has ever been central to the Gospel of Jesus.  If it was then He might have given us a little clearer instruction.  He might have modeled out what that looks like.  But the ethic that He gives is always one of care, of mutuality, and of intimacy in every single way.  And even I would argue that Jesus is very big on pleasure, and it’s something that people call Jesus out on all the time.  Why is it that you all aren’t fasting at the same time as us?  No.  Right now is time to celebrate, right?  Right now it’s time to enjoy.  There will be other times for other things.  But I think that we have to ask ourselves if this is the message that we’re giving like sex is a transaction and everything do we really have any good news to offer.  But I can get that news anywhere. 

Sheila: That is so good.  I really appreciate you framing it that way.  I don’t think I’ve ever framed it quite that way before, but that is good.  Yeah.  If this is what we’re saying, what are we offering to the world?  How is that any different?  How is that any different from how pornography sees sex, right?  Pornography sees sex as women existing to please men.  And men are in power, and men get to use women.  How is that any different?

Trey: Exactly.  Exactly.  And I think we get to a point where if we can just attach whatever proof text to whatever the status quo is we’re wasting time.  Ourselves and other people’s as well.  And I think that that speaks of a very low view of the Gospel and a low view of what I view as a really, really expansive God.  I’m regularly amazed by how large the love of God is, and I don’t know if we’re communicating that effectively when we present sex as something so scary.

Sheila: And present women like—relationships between men and women as something so scary.  One of the things that’s grown out of this whole Steve Lawson incident—so—and we’ve mentioned him—just for clarification, I think this broke about a month ago maybe.  He was a long time, very big pastor in his 70s.  And it came out that he has been having—I want to call it clergy sex abuse.  I don’t think it’s been clear whether the woman was from his church or the school where he was affiliated.  But a woman in her 20s.  And it had lasted for five years.  This relationship.  And Al Mohler, who is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, gave a talk where he said that the best way to not have an affair with a woman is to never be alone with a woman.  It erupted into the whole Billy Graham rule conversation on Twitter again about how important it is for men never to be alone with women.  And that’s just not really a transformational way of seeing relationships between the sexes.

Trey: Yeah.  It also doesn’t make a ton of sense, right?  The best way of not having an affair with a woman is to not have an affair with a woman.  Oh, the best way to not become an active shooter is to not be in a room alone with a gun.  No.  The best way would be to not pick up a gun.  It’s not complicated.  There’s no real mystery as to how this occurs, right?  And just the idea, the concession, that we won’t be able to control ourselves or we’re going to fall into temptation and everything.  I think it speaks very loudly about what we believe, not only we’re capable of, but the actual power of this Gospel to transform.  Because what you’re saying to me is if somebody at this level of ministry is still as susceptible to tripping up and falling into an affair any time they’re alone with a woman, have you really been transformed by the Holy Spirit of God to the degree that you would have us believe?  Are you the best advertisement for this Gospel that you are proclaiming and the power of the Holy Spirit?  And that’s something that we really have to wrestle with because this is what we’re supposed to be offering.  And you keep saying, “Oh, but I can’t do that,” that doesn’t seem that hard.  Lots of other people without the power of the Holy Spirit, without Jesus in their lives, have figured out how to be in rooms with women without—

Sheila: Taking their pants off.

Trey: Yeah.  Yeah.  Without crashing out.  This is a thing we can do.  I believe it.  I believe it.  I believe that we’re capable of that.  And the fact that you don’t is actually a little disturbing.  And we have to be able to call that what it is.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And I think it’s also—it also sees women as dangerous to me.  So the way that he was talking was that we need to protect pastors from this temptation.  And it wasn’t about we need to protect women from—

Trey: From these pastors.  

Sheila: And I agree that—it’s a really good idea for ministries, for workplaces to have common sense regulations that can protect the vulnerable.  I’m not against that.  I don’t think they should be gender specific because even in the case of Paul Pressler, who was super high up in the SBC and who was one of the founders of the conservative resurgence—I mean he abused young men, right?  So I mean even assuming that it’s always going to be women is problematic.  But this idea that women are automatically dangerous to men is just so strange.  And I got into a bunch of Twitter conversations.  And one of them—the guy was saying, “Well, you would never want your husband to drive alone with another woman.”  And I’m thinking, “Well, he does it for work.  It’s not a big deal.”  I use the example of my husband is a pediatrician.  And he used to supervise medical residents.  And so if he had a pediatric resident in his office and then they were called to go into the emerg, he would have to get into his car and drive to the emerg.  And the resident didn’t have a car.  And so if she was going to accompany him to the emerg, she would have to also get into his car.  And this is something which the Billy Graham rule would have said was terrible to do.  But how else were they supposed to get to the emerg?  What if you’re a paramedic?  And you are a male paramedic and you are paired with a female paramedic.  You have to somehow figure out how to work with that.  What if you’re a police officer?  And you’re paired with a female police officer.  In the real world, men and women have to get along.  It’s just in the evangelical world that we do this crazy stuff.

Trey: Right.  And to your point, I think there’s something that a lot of us kind of gloss over because we assume heteronormativity, which I mean, by the numbers, makes sense, right?  Most people are, in fact, at least heterosexual presenting and live that way.  But there are cases where because we assume that everybody is wired that way we overlook.  We’re prone to missing homosexual abuse or something of the sort.  And I think what—no.  Why is it that we do not believe that these protections or—okay.  Let me back up real quick.  Why is that we believe that women are the problem as opposed to people not being able to control themselves?  Because at the end of the day, if you lack self control, it—we can never pin it on that person.  There are young men, who are abused.  There are children, who are abused.  There are elders, who are abused.  There are all sorts of people, who are abused by people who do not know how to control themselves or, worse yet, have decided that there is some thrill in overstepping boundaries.  Some people find the thrill in the transgressive act in and of itself.  And so the idea—pinning it all on women or acting as though this is somehow a valid ethic like, oh, I’m not going to be around women is missing the cart.  We’re not actually paying attention to what it is that needs to be refined which is always ourselves.  We hate looking at the people in the mirror and doing the hard work of acknowledging where transformation is yet necessary.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And like you said, I mean if this person doesn’t have self control, why are they in the pastorate anyway?  

Trey: Precisely.  Precisely.  

Sheila: Why can’t we expect more from our leaders?  

Trey: Exactly.

Sheila: Like I said, I understand wanting to have some regulations around workplaces and just common sense things to protect the vulnerable.  Not to protect pastors, but to protect the vulnerable.  And those will look different depending on the scenario or whatever.  But this emphasis on how pastors need to be so careful really shows that we have the wrong view of women and we have the wrong view of sex.  

Trey: Indeed.  Indeed.

Sheila: Because if we see sex as something where I am in power and I get to use the women around me because that is what women are for, then yeah.  Abuse is going to be more rampant.  And that’s what we see over and over again in these churches.

Trey: Over and over again.  And I think the degree to which we are able to—when I talk about destigmatizing sex, so people take it as me going into this libertine utopia.  And that’s not really what I’m about.  I’m not here to judge nobody.  But what I’m saying is it always feels taboo anytime we talk about it, right?  What it will then become is something that we don’t know how to handle responsibly.  We don’t know how to handle with the joy that it can bring and I believe should bring.  And as long as that’s the case, it’s a reinforcing system to the point where all of the messages that we preach around purity are less about actually practicing purity and more about how to protect people who haven’t learned to control their own instincts or (cross talk).  We’re not talking about purity at all at that point.  We’re just reinforcing the notion that we can’t expect dudes to act right.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Which really is not a Christian ethic.  That’s not a Christian ethic.  We should be able to expect dudes to act right.  So tell me.  All right.  So you are a pastor at an online church and an in person church.  At both?

Trey: That is correct.  I’m the executive pastor at a local congregation here.  We just started an online church plant with another organization.  What I like to call a denominationally promiscuous, ordained in a local church, and I also hold credentials with Mennonite Church USA that my online church is held.  And so yeah.  I get busy.  I be out here in these streets trying to talk about God in public.

Sheila: And how do you navigate?  Do you find that people are really open to hearing a different message than the typical one they’ve grown up with?

Trey: No.  Yeah.  Yeah.  I like to think that I am sort of built for these conversations because I’ve grown up in a lot of the same circles.  Particularly my local church context with the people I grew up with, I understand.  And so I’ve grown pretty adept at warming people up to the idea and then slowly easing them along the road where—I don’t think growth happens in perfect comfort.  I think the discomfort is a necessary ingredient in where God is leading us.  And so part of pasturing in my mind is being able to help people walk through uncomfortable places to a destination that is actually more fulfilling for them like where God is calling them to, right?  People being open to that isn’t so much my concern.  And I don’t mean that in a, oh, we’re going to go here regardless.   My whole thing is everything that is good for you don’t necessarily feel good to you in the moment.  And even saying that out sounds like okay.  Where are we going?  But my whole thing is whether or not you are receptive to the envision here if we can agree that love is a worthwhile value and a worthwhile commitment and something that we all have to grow into and if you can trust me enough to allow me to journey with you in this place, in due time, we’re going to leave where we started from with hopes of arriving some place different.  And that may lead to some things feeling a little tight as they maybe even unravel a little bit.  And I actually cherish that journey for the most part. 

Sheila: That’s beautiful.  So can I put a link to your online church in my podcast notes?  Or are you already full?  Do you mind if more people join?

Trey: Oh most definitely.  Theintentionchurch.com.  We out here.  Most definitely.  

Sheila: Okay.  Okay.  I will put a link to that.  Theintentionchurch.com.  I have so many listeners who feel like they are lost for church right now.  So if you want to go check out what an online church is like, you can see that.  Theintentionchurch.com with Pastor Trey.

Trey: That is exactly why we exist for any number of reasons.  There are some people whether it is pandemic, health related, whether it is faith journey related, whether somebody went through a journey of what some people refer to as deconstruction and are still madly in love with Jesus but skeptical about the church community.  I believe that church is not about where you go but about who we are.  And so if you are in need of or desiring to be in community with other people pursuing the narrow way of Jesus, then come check us out.

Sheila: All right.  And I love—you are a theologian.  And you have written—how many books?

Trey: No.  This is my first one.  This year.  Theologizin’ Bigger.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

Sheila: Oh, it’s your first one.  Okay.  I thought it was your second.  Okay.  And Theologizin’ Bigger?  Is that what it’s called?

Trey: Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Theologizin’ Bigger: Homilies on Living Freely and Loving Wholly.

Sheila: Okay.  Well, I’m going to put a link to that.  It’s been on my to-do list—or to read list on Amazon.  So I should really go buy it now.  But Theologizin’ Bigger by Trey Ferguson.  And your church is theintentionchurch.com.  And I’m also going to put a link to this wonderful article.  What did you call it?  Reframing Sex?  I don’t think I wrote down what you called it.

Trey: Yes.  Yes.  Reframing Sex.

Sheila: Okay.  I will put a link to that from your Substack as well in the podcast notes, so you can all go check out Trey.  So thank you so much for being here.  I really appreciate it.

Trey: I appreciate you.  Thank you so much.

Sheila: It’s been awesome.  So grateful for this conversation with Trey and Kristin and so glad that people are speaking up.  And I really encourage you to see the documentary, For Our Daughters.  Please check out that link and spread it around.  Let other people know about it.  Let’s not let this evil go unchecked.  Let’s shine the light on it.  Let’s bring it to light so that we can end this scourge on the evangelical church.  Please also check out our sponsor.  The book, Recovering from Purity Culture, which is just going to help you move on because you don’t need to stay stuck.  If this stuff has hurt you, you don’t need to stay stuck.  So please check out that book and help find real healing and real understanding of what you went through.  Real empathy too of some of the stuff that you were taught.  And then next week we have something really exciting to announce.  We have a puberty course, a sex and puberty course called The Whole Story, which parents can share with their kids to talk about puberty and sex, to spill the beans on everything that’s happening to them, and to help get those conversations going.  We like to say that it isn’t a replacement for parents, but it’s a resource for you to use.  We actually launched it seven years ago.  But over the years, we’ve done some more research like with the book, She Deserves Better, on how some of the teachings as teens affect kids long term.  And so there is so much that we wanted to add to it.  So I haven’t been talking about it much on the podcast or the blog for the last few years because we wanted to update it.  Well, that update is just about done.  And on Monday, the new course launches.  If you bought the old one, you’re going to get an email so that you can get access to the new one.  Because when you buy something, we give you lifetime access.  So even if we update it, you’re still going to have access to the new version.  You don’t have to buy it again.  But if you’ve never seen it, it is going to launch on Monday at a special launch price all through next week.  And we’ll be talking about some tips for how to talk about sex and puberty to your kids so that they aren’t going to grow up with all the purity culture harms that you may have and also so that they can spot predators so that they won’t grow up with the kind of messages that so many women heart that Kristin highlights in For Our Daughters.   So that is coming next week.  And you can prepare for it again by watching the For Our Daughters documentary and checking out Recovering from Purity Culture.  Thanks so much, and we’ll see you next week.  Bye-bye.