Young pastor says entrenched conservatism 'made me question the whole system'

Rural Alabama pastor Daniel Rogers refused to give up the church after being ousted by his home denomination, but it wasn’t an easy journey.

Rogers is a member of the Church of Christ, but that segment can run the gamut from hard fundamentalist to progressive. The Daily Yonder reports the church Rogers grew up in “fell more neatly into the former camp,” with Rogers’ father, grandfather, and church elders teaching him “that only he and his fellow churchgoers were going to Heaven.”

“We were taught that everybody else is liberal, everybody else has gone away from Jesus, and we are the only ones who remain as faithful members of the one true church,” said Rogers, adding that the church’s belief system was better defined by “what it did not believe than what it did.”

His home church approached scripture the way a lawyer “might approach the law, trying to discern what is ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’” and occasionally making loopholes to defend certain policies.

“[The dominant scriptural] interpretation is the law. And if you don’t abide by it, you’re not in God’s good graces,” said Rogers.

Rogers became a pastor at 20 and joined his father and grandfather at the church he was raised in, but the relationship soured early as the young Rogers began questioning dome of the church’s enshrined doctrine. Church leaders repressed his questions when he voiced them, sitting him down and telling him, “if you don’t get on board with what we believe, you’re going to have to go.”

This clashed with the church’s own purported claims of considering good arguments behind scripture.

“I was told my whole life, if you ever change your mind on something and you can show us in scripture where we’re wrong, please tell us because we want to change too,” Rogers said. But given the church’s reaction to his inquiries, he realized the real motivation was more akin to: “you need to tell us when you’re changing your mind so we can get you corrected as quickly as possible.”

“When I realized that’s what it was about, that just made me question the whole system,” said Rogers.

Rogers’ father and grandfather tried to oust him from the whole denomination, sending letters to every local congregation calling him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” on a path of destruction, and a “false teacher” who had abandoned the gospel. The technical term for what happened to Rogers “[withdrawing] fellowship,” which is identical to excommunication in the Catholic Church.

But Rogers did not leave the gospel, reports the Yonder. He threw himself into studying scripture more than ever before, engaging a “deconstruction” of the beliefs he was raised with. His questions were not a rejection of his faith, he said, but a deepening of it. And he realized that the circle theology drove people to a “tiny bubble wherein everyone believes the same thing as the person defining it.”

“I was like, wait a minute. It’s got to go the other way,” Rogers said, adding that his

Years after Rogers was pushed from his home church he now has his own Alabama Church of Christ congregation, where he is “cultivating a faith community entirely different from the one he grew up in – one where people not only feel safe, but feel encouraged to ask questions about their faith.”

On “barn night” expect good food on the smoker, kids playing on the trampoline and conversations around the fire about more things than you would normally share on a random Sunday morning.