“Goodbye Jesus”–A Book Review/Analysis of Tim Sledge’s Book (Part 2: Child of an Alcoholic; Obsession with Church Attendance)

Last week I began a short blog series in which I discuss Tim Sledge’s book, Goodbye Jesus, in which he tells his life story as an Evangelical pastor, and his eventual walking away from the Christian faith, to where he now identifies as a humanist. In last week’s post, I provided a 2,500-word overview of Sledge’s 420-page book. In this post, I want to discuss my impressions of his life story.

In all honesty, compared to the other books I’ve read by former Christian ministers turned atheist, I actually found myself feeling genuinely sorry for Tim Sledge. First of all, it sounds like his childhood was pretty bad. I can’t imagine how damaging it would be for a child to witness such a dysfunctional marriage and to live with a father who was a stumbling down drunk alcoholic. Even after his father became a Christian and seemed to overcome his alcoholism, living with that kind of dysfunction for the first ten years of one’s life is bound to have a lasting and damaging effect on a person.

On top of that, I’m sure that those feelings of helplessness and fear as a child pushed Sledge to cling to Christianity in an attempt to make sense of the world and to feel safe. The fact that his father seemingly became a changed man after he became a Christian probably further convinced a young Sledge that Christianity was the key to make everything better. In short, it seems obvious to me that from the very beginning, Sledge viewed Christianity as the “certainty” that could keep out the chaos and make him feel safe and worth something.

Exceptions to the Rule of Faith
One of the recurring themes throughout Sledge’s book was he found himself constantly coming into contact with people throughout his Christian life who ended up being exceptions to the rule of faith. As he progressed in his Christian life and pastoral ministry, every time he encountered a supposed Christian who ended up doing something really bad according to Sledge’s Baptist worldview—various sexual sins, being gay, embezzling money, committing suicide, etc.—Sledge concluded that that person was just an “exception to the rule of faith.” Over time, though, Sledge says he just couldn’t ignore the fact that his “exceptions to the rule of faith list” just continued to grow. Thus, he eventually concluded that there was nothing truly special or supernatural about Christianity or the church. It was just filled with people who were no different than anyone else.

I found this to be particularly sad, for it was clearly obvious to me that Sledge had a concept of Christianity’s Rule of Faith that was completely wrong. At the risk of being oversimplistic, Sledge’s “rule of faith” seemed to be rooted in the assumption that Christians are supposed to be morally superior to everyone else and to have all the answers in life figured out. You have problems before you become a Christian, but once you become a Christian, God was supposed to give you supernatural power to overcome all your problems and hang-ups, so you can be a good and impressive Christian who can then go out and save more souls for Jesus!

That “rule of faith” though, looks nothing like the traditional rule of faith of Orthodox Christianity. Technically speaking, the “Rule of Faith” that is emphasized in the early Church Fathers, has to do with the teaching that Jesus handed down to his disciples, who then went out to teach it in the churches they established. That teaching is preserved for us in the New Testament, as well as in the life of the Orthodox Church. But if you just take what is found in the New Testament, you will be hard pressed to find any kind of “teaching” or “rule of faith” that resembles the sort of things Sledge assumed the “rule of faith” was.

In fact, if we are just to stay in the Gospels, Sledge’s understanding of the “rule of faith” has more in common with the pharisaic “oral tradition,” that essentially acted as the “ruler” or “measuring stick” to determine which Jews were truly righteous and which one were “sinners” and sellouts. We need to see that, despite the negative connotations we have for the term “Pharisee,” in Jesus’ day, Pharisees were seen as the Jews who were seriously devoted to the Torah. Why? Because they looked the part. They not only kept the rules, but they even came up with more rules for them to keep, just to show just how righteous they were—and people were impressed. Pharisees were like the elder son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, who looked down on anyone they deemed to be an “exception to the rule” of their faith.

Being a devotee to a religion of “looking good” will almost always lead to something bad. Some become even more legalistic, harsh, arrogant, and judgmental of others (most of us probably know people like that). Some, like Sledge, eventually realize the error of their ways, but decide to chuck it all completely. To use the Prodigal Son parable analogy, instead of repenting of their pride and going in to join the party that celebrates the Kingdom of God coming to the lowly sinners, people like Sledge conclude there is no celebration to be had in the first place, and they just go on their way.

Sales Curves and Converts
Back when I was in junior high, I was heavily influenced by the Christian singer/songwriter Bob Bennett. His album, Matters of the Heart, had a tremendous impact on my life. Although I didn’t realize it back then, that album helped me see that, when it came to the Christian faith, the “heart of the matter” wasn’t to be found in big, impressive church programs or high church attendance figures. Instead, the power and truth of following Christ was to be found in the small, everyday struggles we all have as human beings. In fact, in the last song of the album, a song entitled “Heart of the Matter,” Bennett sings these lines: You can show me your sales curves, plot my life on a flow chart/You can count up your converts and miss where it all starts.

That always stuck with me. I grew up in a rather large church of about 5,000 people, but the sheer size of the church never made me think, “Oh, my church really has it together! Look how successful it is!” Christianity isn’t about numbers—it’s about changed (or rather changing) human hearts within a pretty screwed up world, individual Christians included, regardless of whether or not any particular church is big or small.

After reading Sledge’s book, though, it was painfully obvious to me that he completely missed it on this point. As I pointed on in my initial post, throughout his book—literally on a year to year basis—Sledge felt it was necessary to let his readers know just how successful and booming church attendance was at the churches where he served as the pastor. It was jarring to me. In the middle of telling about countless tragedies and “exceptions to the rule of faith” he witnessed as a pastor, he couldn’t help but effectively say, “But during Easter of this year, our attendance increased exactly by this much!” I mean, he even gave percentages! I’m sorry, but I found myself saying, “Who gives a crap about your attendance? Two boys in your youth ministry committed suicide that year!”

I got the distinct impression that the reason why Sledge was constantly touting his church’s yearly attendance numbers was because those were the numbers by which he was grading himself as a Christian. This was even more shocking, given what he related about what he discovered in 1985, at a four-day career assessment with Dr. Jerry Brown, a counselor who specialized in working with ministers. It was at that seminar when Sledge finally came to grips with how much being a child of an alcoholic had affected him as an adult. He writes, “I had also read that a coping method of many adult children of alcoholics is becoming prematurely mature and consequently accomplishing things one would normally only expect from an older person” (97).

That’s exactly right. That drive to be better and to achieve more as an adult stems from all that fear of helplessness and insecurity one had as a child of an alcoholic. Sledge writes that this is something he learned about himself at Brown’s seminar. And yet, shockingly, this is what he relates about what he realized after that seminar: “I wanted to continue being a pastor, but I needed to move to a church with more potential for growth. I returned to Arizona with plans to work toward finding a new place of ministry” (97-98). Translation? –“I realized that children of alcoholics are extreme over-achievers, because they are trying to over-compensate for their feelings of insecurity and helplessness. AND SO, THAT’S WHEN I REALIZED I NEEDED TO FIND A BETTER CHURCH WITH MORE POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH!”

When I read his reaction to that seminar, I was dumbfounded. How could he not see the problem? Yet he didn’t, seemingly ever, throughout his entire life as a pastor. In fact, Sledge writes that a few years later, in 1988, after suffering severe panic attacks, despite all the success and church growth numbers, he visited another treatment center, The Meadows, under the auspices of doing research about recovering programs. And what did he further learn? He writes, “I learned that an adult child is an individual who acts like an adult while still a child, and then, as an adult, continues to deal with unresolved childhood issues. And I learned that growing up with an addicted or abusive parent was most often the causative factor” (118).

There it was, again. So, what did Sledge do with it? He turned it into a sermon series and a church “recovery program” that resulted in…a more successful church and higher attendance.

In My Next Post…
There are two more aspects of Sledge’s life that he discusses in his book that I want to touch upon in my next post: (A) The clear rivalries surrounding his ministry, and (B) His admitted marital failures.

I want to emphasize once again, though, that when it comes to the details he shares about his life, I do not want to come across as judgmental or harsh. Still, the fact that he has taken the time to write his book tells me that he wants people to understand why he has ended up leaving the faith. And so, these posts are my attempt to engage and wrestles with what he says in his book. Although I didn’t grow up in an alcoholic home, I too have gone through divorce, and I too have had some pretty painful and toxic encounters with Christian leaders who certainly did not act that Christianly at all. I understand that kind of pain that Sledge discusses in his book. And that is what I’ll look at in my next post.