They didn’t believe it in the early church. There was no penal
substitutionary atonement. The atonement, or what Jesus did on the cross, was Christus Victor, mostly. Christ victorious over what? Our lost identity, our death, over everything. A very different view of what Jesus did.
But Protestantism very quickly picked up on penal substitutionary atonement and it became the cornerstone of Calvinism and lots of other streams of thought. When that got removed, and when that evangelical pillar crumbled, all the other pillars started to wobble.
So sola scriptura was the second pillar. Well, without evangelicalism holding it up, that went over, which is why it changed my whole view about the Bible, the way I see the Bible, and the Bible being ‘the word of God’ and all that stuff: “It’s got to be in the Bible!” and all the challenge that came
with that, because God totally took me to task over it.
Penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) was the first to go. When I began to express my doubts about it to others, one woman involved in mystic and mentoring groups emailed me, saying I was trying to take away ‘the cornerstone of her faith’. She was serious and angry at me because she wanted to hold onto PSA as the cornerstone of her belief.
I told her that if that’s where she wanted to remain, that was her choice, but I was moving on. Naturally, that upset some people, but many others resonated with the idea that it didn’t make sense for God as Father to kill or punish His Son. And when you investigate further, you find that PSA is actually a doctrine that only emerged in the tenth century…
I believe six of them were religious pillars, and three were cultural or scientific. It was then that I realised these pillars were framing how I viewed the world and understood reality around me.
The first and strongest pillar was evangelicalism. He removed that one first, shaking me to the core by taking it away. Every evangelical thought I had was challenged, especially the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, which was the first belief to be questioned. God didn’t just take the pillar out; he shook it, challenging my beliefs and creating instability in my belief system around those topics. And penal substitutionary atonement was the first to go.
I’m not going to go far wrong if I interpret everything through love. I might get some minor things a bit mixed up or twisted, but the bottom line is that love won’t lead me too far astray if I lean that way. On the other hand, if I lean towards judgment, condemnation or other negative interpretations, I’m stepping beyond the scope of love.
I don’t go there any more.
It took a long time for my mind to be deprogrammed from my religious upbringing and the programming of evangelicalism, along with the other pillars of my thinking. He asked me if I wanted him to remove these pillars from my mind. About six of them were religious, as I was brought up very religiously, and three were cultural or scientific, influenced by an education that included cultural relativism and similar ideas.
All those people who say they have been in hell for ten minutes, or whatever, are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell rather than the truth. They see what they expect to see. That is the problem. We can be confirmation-biased and create our own scenario around what God is really trying to show us.
This is why we need to let God renew our minds and trust him in that process, rather than resisting him. At the same time, we should not be naive enough to think that everything we are thinking is already correct, because we are all still in the process. Even so, I would rather err on the side of love in everything I think than lean towards anything else. If I interpret everything through love, I will not go far wrong.
So between 2005 and 2010, I had a number of experiences which I described at the time as hell-like, simply because I had no other reference point in my life. I thought I had encountered hell, and so my framework for understanding was the usual concept of hell. That’s what I believed the experience meant, because I couldn’t see it any other way; I had no other frame of reference.
Once I actually encountered God and encountered love, I was able to revisit those experiences and see what he had really been showing me through them. I came to realise that I had completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what had happened, just as many others do when they claim to have been in hell for a few minutes. They are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell.
We should weigh both what we feel and what we believe God has said. Does this align with love? If it does, we can wholeheartedly accept it. If it does not, then something has gone wrong in how we’ve understood it. In that case, we can take it back to the Father and ask why we misinterpreted it, recognising that often it is our own mindset that causes misunderstanding.
I had to do that many times when my experiences did not line up with what I thought to be true. When that happened, cognitive dissonance arose, and I was left with a choice: which should I trust—my experience, or my belief system? Over time I came to see that when my experience was aligned with love, that was what I needed to trust. And when it was not aligned with love, it was usually my interpretation of the experience that was the real issue.
We’re all in a process of having our minds renewed so that we won’t be moulded and shaped by the upbringing, conditioning and programming we’ve received. Our minds are renewed so we’re not pressed into that mould, but instead transformed into who He said we were from the beginning.
That process is relational. By experiencing Him, our minds are changed. We can’t make it happen by trying to use the Bible as a tool, since misunderstanding it was what created the problem in the first place. Our minds are changed when we let Him do it, as we submit ourselves to the relationship He gives us—always weighing everything with love as our measuring stick.
We should weigh the things that we feel and what we think God has said. We should weigh them. We shouldn’t just accept them carte blanche. We should weigh it.
What do we weigh it with? How do we measure it? I measure it with love. Is this loving? Is this going to help people experience God and experience His love? So I’m measuring it against that.
So I know that if I thought God told me to do something which was contradictory to love, I know it couldn’t be Him. And people say, but you’re now saying that God can’t do something! Yes, I am. He can’t contradict Himself as being love, and he wouldn’t ask us to contradict himself and contradict what love is either.
So whenever something we think God said is not aligned to true love – true unconditional love – then we’ve got to question it.
God spoke to me and said, “I am really bored with this church stuff.” And I thought, you cannot say that. That cannot be you. How can you be bored with people worshipping you? But he was not saying he was bored of people, or of their desire to worship. He was saying he was bored of the format, the same things, week after week.
So I pressed him. “What do you mean, bored?” He said, “Why do you not ask me what I would like you to do?” I said, “We do. We ask you every week.” And he replied, “Yes, but you are only giving me a menu of five things to choose from. What you are really asking is: what order do you want to do those five things?”
I had to admit he was right. We claimed to be led by the Spirit, but only within the boundaries of those five things. That realisation shocked me. I kept quiet at first, because I knew it would cause an uproar. Instead, I began teaching the Engaging God programme in my office on Sunday mornings. The main meetings had to stay at a basic level for the newer people and those from the rehabilitation unit, so others handled that.
I would spend the first part of the service downstairs teaching, then went upstairs to join the main gathering. And when I did, I felt the same as God had said. This is really boring, is it not? I enjoyed myself more in the office than in the service. It was not the people—I loved the people. But while we were on the cutting edge of engaging God, with angels and portals into heaven, we were still doing everything in the same tired format. Someone would say something, we would sing, there would be ministry, and perhaps something else—but always within the same framework.
What is church?
I began to understand what God was saying, and I felt it too: this is not it, is it? He took me out of that scenario and began to press the deeper question: what is church? Why do we run a meeting? Because church is not a meeting. Church is people in relationship—with each other and with God. But what we had built, with worship, a preach and the rest, was the very thing God was challenging. “Why are you doing this? Who said I wanted you to?” And that challenge shook us.
It challenged people. What was this going to look like? So then we did not do any of that. We turned up on a Sunday and asked, “Oh, what does God want to do then? What do you want to do, God?”
God said, “If you had asked me before you got here, I would have told you I did not want you to come and do this today.” Ah. So it is not about meeting this way and turning up in a building then? No. Not every Sunday. No. If you had asked me, I would have told you I wanted you to go and do something yesterday, to go for a walk and enjoy the beautiful fresh air.
That was a very different challenge to our thinking. This was not just, “Oh well, we will turn up in the building and then ask you what to do.” This was actually, “Do you even want us to meet this way this week?” People struggled with that because they were so conditioned to being told they had to turn up on the day to do whatever was going to happen. That was ‘church’, and they were expected to be there if they were part of church.
What is the way forward?
So it was very challenging, and we got to the point where those who were meeting together began saying, “Well, let’s just seek God and ask Him to show us the way forward. What is the way forward?” This was November–December 2019. Then God used COVID to show us the way forward, because suddenly we could not meet anymore anyway. We had all the technology to meet online, but we asked God, “Do you want us to meet online?” No, because all you would be doing is recreating something online that you cannot do in person.
Eventually, people were weaned off church — the meetings, the format, the structure that we called church. They were still relating to one another, still building relationships, still pursuing the mission God had given to care for people. Some people could not cope with not having a church service, so they went off and found one that made them feel comfortable. Great. If that is what they want to do, no problem. They were free to do that. But some people were so free that they realised they did not have to go to a meeting on a Sunday — or two meetings, or whatever it might have been. They would never want to go back to that. They discovered that being church is very different to going to a meeting that we call church.
That deconstruction took place in people’s understanding of church over quite a long period. I did not turn around and say, “You can’t do this anymore.” I did not say, “You can’t meet this way anymore,” because that would have been forcing them. I said, “Okay, I am not making these decisions. I am not going to be a leader anymore who tells you what God might be saying or not saying. You are responsible to hear God for yourself. So you decide what you are going to do.”
An everyday relationship
When COVID came, with all the restrictions, we could not meet the way we had been meeting, and for a time, we could not even meet together individually. People realised their relationship with God was just as strong, if not stronger, after they stopped doing Sunday church meetings than it had been before. They found their relationship with God was an everyday relationship, not based on the structure we had put in place to ‘help’ them.
Some people struggled. Some wanted the fellowship of meeting together in a bigger setting, and they found that elsewhere. But others found their relationship with God growing anyway. They discovered that their relationship with others, if genuine, is not dependent on meeting on a Sunday. They still had relationships and friends.
It is very interesting to see the process God takes us through to challenge our preconceived ideas about the Christian life, about what church is, about what we ‘should’ or ‘should not’ do. And when we are free from it, we find freedom. Now, I am free to go, free not to go, free to do whatever I feel in God. And I know God enjoys me watching the football just as much as He enjoys it if I went to a home group!
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Sons of Issachar 