Len Miyahara's Spiritual Journey (posted at the request of Len Miyahara)

• I was born into a hard working Japanese-American family. Due to hardships my family suffered during WWII, high discipline, hard work & pursuing education was stressed in my upbringing. My upbringing was also Buddhist in nature, with my father being a vocal opponent to Christianity, my mother being more indifferent.

• Being always somewhat sharp with my wit and my words, with that family background, I spent my high school years being like “Saul of Tarsus”, persecuting my Christian high school classmates in debates regarding what I thought was an utterly weak religion. I prided myself in being to go “3-deep” in rebuttals on any point a Christian wanted to make to substantiate their religion.

• Later, a confluence of life events had me contemplating religious topics again. I met Christians who were not interested in defending Christianity, but instead joyfully shared their interactions with Jesus, as if they had talked to Him earlier that day. On my own volition I picked up a book called “101 Answers to Tough Questions Asked by Skeptics about Christianity” by Josh McDowell. In all honesty, I was whipping Josh’s butt in that debate until he got to, “Who do say Jesus is or was in history?” McDowell’s point on that question was what I later learned to be what is called the “trilemma” and at the time I knew I could not honestly go “1-deep” on the person of Jesus. I had to “man-up” and accept I lost the debate, so I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior that evening. For this wasn’t about Christianity or religion; it was all about the person of Jesus Christ.

• I joined a local Baptist church and was baptized on my 29^th birthday; I got married to a “good church going Christian.” I was a voracious student of the Bible; my personal change was like going from Saul to Paul. The weird thing was that I had been a Christian for only 9 months when I asked to serve on the Board of Deacons. And then one year later I was asked to serve as Chairman of the Board of Deacons, which includes membership in the church’s Executive Board of Directors. That was only 21 months after I admitted I lost the debate with Josh McDowell.

• Bottom line: Despite my sincere desire to serve the Lord that I had persecuted in my earlier life, from that moment and for the next 10 years I witnessed the ugliest in human behavior from denominations, from pastors and from lay leaders. I was not immune either, I had no idea how Christians behaved but the people I was involved with were Christians much longer than I, and I found myself morphing into a person I did not like. I found it annoying that churches, pastors and Christians (for the most part) seemed to be overly concerned about appearance, how things seem on the surface. New pastors would seem great at first, and they would get called, but time and time again my desire to serve the Lord got perverted into serving man. I felt dirty and used, serving instead people’s ulterior motives and hidden agendas. Finally I left the established church, and with a handful of other Christians, started a house church at my house with the Associate Pastor from our last church (who was also used for the church’s ulterior motives).

• But over a year and a half, our house church did not grow (we added just one couple). One day he called me to meet for lunch very excited, “My wife and I during our prayer time today received a revelation of why we have stopped growing and I want to share it with you. Now we can remove the obstacles to the Holy Spirit’s desire to move in our church and our region.” I found myself excited as well and met him. It was then he told me the reason: only he and his wife were “regenerate,” everyone else in our house church were “converted but not regenerate.” Ummm… what?!? I asked him to clarify his Calvinistic terms. At that point I was not as well versed in theological lexicon at this highly construed level of Calvinism. But I’m smart enough to get to the bottom line, so I asked him, “From what you are saying, if a bomb goes off in our next church service and everybody dies, the only ones who will go to be with the Lord would be you and your wife?” “Well, yes. Only those who are regenerate have received the saving grace of the Holy Spirit.” Ya, he and his wife were the only ones in our church who spoke in tongues.

• My best friend and I were the main financial backers of this house church, we met with him and his wife once to try to reconcile this severe error in judgment, but he also would have none of it. We him gave an extra month’s pay and dissolved the house church the next day.

• My then wife and her family were good “church people,” toting the party line with Republican (now Tea party) politics and conservative family values, so of course we started looking for another church home. We ended up going to a successful church close to our house, but this time I went much more cautiously. This church seemed like an answer to prayer, leadership seemed functional, healthy and authentic. But I still I remained a cautious pew sitter at this church for a couple of years. I had met with a few of the pastors (as a large church, they had five on staff) and told them the story that you’ve read to this point. They did well to let me heal, giving me a book called “The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse.” I remember telling them early on that I really had had it with church; I was done… if this church didn’t work out due to similar kinds of nonsense, and I would be done with church.

• As I started to get more comfortable, I volunteered to serve on various projects since I had the time (I really have always just wanted to serve God). At a very graceful pace, relationships built between me and several pastors, but mostly the associate pastor. Eventually I started to attend seminary and the church hired me as the Director of Small Group Ministries (my unique experience with the house church made it natural for me to suggest grace as the rule for my small group leaders).

• It was during this time that I found out about the tendency in many churches to use relationships on economic terms. While doing what the church wanted compliments, affection and relational investment were lavished upon me. I had hoped this was the unconditional love the New Testament says we receive from God and that we should then lavish on others without partiality. I was soon to be disappointed.

• Again, we did some good work. There was some initial enthusiasm but soon things flattened out and numbers were not increasing. When that concern was brought to my attention I decided I would share openly and honestly was had been taught to me in the various small group seminars I attended: “It doesn’t matter what your church bulletin says, it doesn’t matter what your senior pastor says, it doesn’t matter what your church board says, even if they paid to send you here. If your church is now platform-centric, and if they have no intention of adjusting their budget and org-chart to re-prioritize to a community-centric model… nothing will actually change in your church. Small groups will just become another option in a Christian consumer market of products.”

• I had no agenda, I had no need to manipulate anyone. The seminar people had experience with this and they told it straight out, as straight out as I told the pastors. I was unpaid, what were they going to do, fire me? No, not right away. What they did do was withdraw the compliments, affection and relational investment they had previously given. I could articulate this only later: in the church we speak of unconditional love, but except for rare exceptions, it is totally conditional on economic terms: do what I want, be who I want you to be and you get relational account deposits; don’t do what I want or be different than what I want you to be or even say what I don’t want to hear and get relational account withdrawals. We say we love unconditionally and most often withdrawals are nothing outwardly mean, just nice blank smiles of disengagement. I didn’t really get fired but after a talk we mutually agreed that I not be on staff anymore. There were no major wrongs done so we continued to attend that church… for a while.

• One of the last things I did in official “ministry” came about when I was asked to put on a seminar covering post-modern Christianity or the emergent church… the church as it may look like in the 21^st century when all those that have hung onto the modern paradigm have either changed or passed away so that a new way of being a Christian can come about.

• Here’s what I told a group of about 60 seminar attenders as I closed the seminar: “A post-modern mindset doesn’t want to argue, for it doesn’t have to be ‘right.’ A person with that mindset would rather have a beer with you, listen your views, shrug their shoulders at things they may not agree with (but at least she/he will think about them). Since that person does not take him/herself overly seriously he/she may joke about their own views and move on to things we all have in common. A modern mindset is more about being ‘right’ which is best shown by arguing or debating, a person with a modern mindset would rather have your respect for being right or smart than have your company. Since that mindset and all the opinions therein are sound and the ‘right’ ones, there is no reason to listen to other views. Now let me give you a practical application of what I am talking about: if what I have said during this weekend really bothers you and you come up to me and say, ‘Hey, let’s go get a beer and talk about some of this, I want to be sure I’m hearing you correctly’ then sister, you have more of a post-modern mindset. But if what I have said during this weekend really bothers you, you’ve been grinding your teeth and you really don’t want to come talk to me, but instead you’ll talk about how wrong I am to others behind my back, then brother, you have more of a modern mindset.”

• By that point, I was already really close to reaching my limit with church. I found out later that the #2 guy at the church, who did attend the seminar and who was temporarily filling in for the associate pastor who had left, circulated a flyer the very next day to all church staff listing bullet point by bullet point how my presentation was theologically incorrect at best and Satan’s message at worst. He never did try to talk to me. The irony really made me laugh especially after how I closed the seminar, with this #2 guy only illustrating my point. But as a post-modern, for me that was only good for laughs, not for proving anything. My church attendance dwindled down to nothing within about a month, showing my early words to the pastors of this last church to be prophesy.

• I remained in a kind of numb limbo regarding church. Interestingly, not going to church for month after month had unintended benefits: I felt free, I felt at peace, my blood pressure dropped, and because I was teaching full time at a community college, I had a surprising amount of interactions that I consider ministry outside of the church. I have done much more “ministry” (counseling, sharing my testimony, sharing theology although it may not sound like it, sharing the love of God, etc.) outside of the church than I ever really did within those four walls. It is during this time that I realized that “if God were contained within the four walls of the church then Christians should be pitied above all people.”  I feel God is NOT angry at people who walk away from church after stories like mine, stories that I have heard time and time again. I truly have felt God looking down on me saying, “I don’t blame you, I don’t blame you one bit.”

• Then in April 2006, my best friend of 18 years who had walked with me from the 1^st church with Pastor #1 & 2, to the house church with Pastor #3, to finally that last successful church, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer though he had never smoked. I felt as though the prior nine months of healing outside the church really helped me be in a better place to help my friend, his widow and his 3 young children, it made me feel further isolated from any Christian community and that mostly included my then wife. It was during this time that I realized my wife of 20 years didn’t know me in the least, she knew about me, but she had no clue who I was. And that my friends, is the loneliest feeling in the world, much more so than actually being alone for 20 years. I don’t want to discuss the details of that painful divorce except to say that although I was devastated, I was not (nor am) sorry for leaving behind her modern paradigm of false fronts, of “good church folks,” of tea party politics, of conservative and uncompromising family values, of manipulative power plays, of relational economics. I didn’t experience any of that before 1986 when I first became a Christian and I have not experienced any since I left the church for good and got a divorce in 2007. Not hard to connect the dots.

• My current girlfriend of nearly two years is very much a postmodern Christian who loves the Lord very much (even though she didn’t know what post-modern meant – I told her that’s what makes her post-modern… haha). I have been able to occasionally attend church with her without getting either nauseous or angry, which I take as a good sign. I am currently involved in the Abolitionist movement fighting modern day slavery and human trafficking through a group in another church, I love connecting with people in my sphere of influence with the love and grace I have received, be it at work with both colleagues and students, or at the local watering hole, or even starting last week, with you fine people in this group. Praise God He will not be contained within the four walls of the church! If you made it to the end, I congratulate you… haha.