Wade Poe

One of my favorite passages from scripture is out of Isaiah 40:28-31.  We sang it as a song when "growing up in church" and the band U2 even did a version of it back in the day... Do you not know?      Have you not heard? The  Lord  is the everlasting God,      the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary,      and his understanding no one can fathom. 29  He gives strength to the weary      and increases the power of the weak. 30  Even youths grow tired and weary,      and young men stumble and fall; 31  but those who hope in the  Lord      will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles;      they will run and not grow weary,      they will walk and not be faint. It's a chapter written long before Jesus came along and it points to...

I'm still amazed when reminded what God is like.  All the grace, the overwhelming love and acceptance.  It does seem too good to be true.  But it's not. Recently was studying through things I'd learned in the past and how I see them with a different slant today - in other words, normal, healthy growth - and was surprised at how simple it was/is. For example, all the teaching in the New Testament, after the New Covenant comes in - all of it is about NOT treating people, especially other believers, in any way that is harmful, abusive, etc. Growing up, sin was about NOT offending God and NOT breaking rules about worship services activities or how a person was baptized - things like that were heavy, important sins. Now I see that they are likely things we were making up.  Mind you, we all had good intentions and want to follow "God's book", but we kind of missed the point at times. God came into the world to show us that we can't and don't keep The Law - a...

No one wants to have the longer conversation. Or so it seems. Or maybe they don’t know the value in having it and so they just don’t. Political discussions, religious discussions, social discussions – they all have at least a couple of sides and a lot of emotion built into them. For the sake of time and fear of losing a moment to “score one” for a particular side, arguments are stacked up for and against a short list of people, ideas, and actions. Few people, at least in my experience, take the time to understand their own side, much less the “other side(s)” in any discussion or rhetoric. Maybe it is because we know that IF we actually look into our own side, we know there will be some inconsistency found or clarity showing that other people have a point. Maybe it’s because we just enjoy being for something and against something else – like it gives us meaning and we don’t necessarily want to know all the details. Often, in my experience, it’s because we don’t want to change something ...

Moving on in deconstruction and rebuilding is a combination of grieving what you left behind and moving toward where you're going. Seems simple enough, but it's challenging because you realize it's not simply leaving a long career in ministry, but a whole worldview that can never be entertained as valid or experienced the same way again. History is rewritten and understood from a different point of view, to some degree. Relationships are given a different flavor or color than they had before.  It's just very different. In the past month or two, I made it a goal to get things out in the clear daylight for myself. What part of the journey so far has been theological, per se? What part was relational? I think I finally boiled it down to a very few personalities that I was regularly running counter with in my heart and mind and I had to own my frustration, anger, and disappointment with them.  __________ In reflection, I think that in a "church context" we put a l...

Looking back on the process over the years, one of the things I realized more deeply was that walking in trust and dependence on God doesn't mean you won't go through some awful things AND that you're not necessarily given extra protection from bad situations. Romans 8 has that great passage from the apostle Paul (seen below) where he talks about NOT being separated from the love of God that we have in Christ and he points out that NOTHING will separate us from his love - absolutely NOTHING... ...and yet, his love doesn't separate us from bad things. Paul even lists off a bunch of bad things that will not separate us from God's love BUT that God's love does not separate us from the possibility of those bad things. In fact, he says it's probably the case you'll have bad things. A LOT of believers live on a razor's edge of trying to know what to think or believe about that. A LOT of unbelievers don't get why they should trust and depend on God if t...

Change is hard. Or at least it can be. Old habits and patterns of thinking step in as if they still have the final say in anything. The new, chosen directions and ways of thinking need regular support and permission to own the way forward. I still regularly dream of people and situations "at church" some of it good, some of it not. I still occasionally have the old feelings of "Oh, I messed up and need to ask for forgiveness for _____."  I still wonder what people would think of how I think and believe. Leaving behind is a choice. Moving forward it a choice.  One thing I've discovered about those choices is that you must move in action on them daily, if not hourly at times. If you don't get up in the AM and choose how you think, remember what is important, and do something about it, it's so easy to step back those comfortable shoes that take you nowhere. __________ Leaning forward into some familiar scriptures more lately - all those that speak to being ...

Today is one year since I left "full time ministry" after 35 years. Deconstruction and rebuilding is still ongoing, though heavier into the rebuilding side in recent days. I realize, the longer I'm in this process, how foreign and frightening it is to a lot of people - especially church people. I still believe in scripture, God, grace, God's people as his family, and all those good things. I still believe in the complete forgiveness of sin, the gift of God's Spirit, the gift of being in his family, and that we live in trust and dependence on him, through and because of Jesus. I have watched others going through deconstruction be labeled as heretics by well meaning people who want to protect "the institutional church" and hope that they can scare the deconstructionists back into line so they don't cause waves, lose their salvation, etc. I think most of those people are well meaning. I do believe they believe that to break ranks on some things is just ...