I’ve been clean for five years now…it’s hard to believe, but it’s been five years since I left my post in full-time ministry. I quit cold turkey – no patches, no rehab (though I could have used some serious counseling). Reminiscing about my past life as a minister is usually a gut-wrenching experience – filled with the kind of stories you’d share to win the last brownie (Link). I’m not unhappy about everything that happened while serving said Baptist church in North Georgia (what is the statute of limitations on preaching and telling?), but the pros are not easy to quantify.
I enjoyed working with the students and parents there, particularly when we had opportunities to go out and do good things in the community like spending time with shut-ins or those at the nursing home. One of my students thought enough of me to ask that I perform her wedding ceremony a couple years ago. So, hopefully there were a few positives for them during my brief time there – they certainly deserved more than I delivered.
I was drunk when I decided to enter ministry full time – drunk on a concoction of emotionalism and fundamentalism. I was drunk on a belief that there was some great, cosmic plan for my life – if only I could figure it out [if you are scratching your head at that last line...well, you may be drunk, too]. I looked in many places for the fulfillment of my calling prior to ministry – I changed majors multiple times, even pondering medical school (missionary work, right?) and law school (defend the faith, right?). Eventually, surrendering to my illusory vision of a sacrificial vocation, I enrolled in seminary. Two years later I was Rev. Damon C. Nix; I had found my place, I had found my calling, I had found my niche in the supernatural deity’s great, and very specific, blueprint for humanity. Ministry turned out to be a sobering experience.
Looking back, I failed in ministry (and I failed, mostly due to my own shortcomings, but also with the help of a handful of toxic adults) because I had become what others wanted or expected me to be – or, at least, what I imagined was the right me. Problem was, I didn’t know myself. I espoused the right theology, had the right resume, I said and did the right things, etc. I was intoxicated by the evangelical paradigm and culture that created me. It had answers to all the questions – even ones I hadn’t thought to ask. But, I had never answered those questions for myself. As I discovered during my very brief stint in full-time ministry, the exploration of those questions would lead me out of, and maybe even make me unfit for, traditional/orthodox Christian ministry.
If I owned any personal belief prior to entering ministry it was the primacy of social missions – that whole loving your neighbor and your enemy bit. It’s the kind of thinking that endears you to a hiring committee when spoken about, but gets you nasty anonymous notes in your mailbox when put into practice. Regardless, it was something I tried to act on, if ineffectively, during my time as a preacher man. And it was those moments, those events in life, that began to form me – the real me; affecting my understanding of Jesus, of love, of what salvation really looks like, and even what kind of God I believed in.
Who was Jesus to me? That was a pointed question Jesus presented his disciples with in Mark’s gospel:
Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”
Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. (Mark 8:27-30, TNIV)
It doesn’t matter who Jesus is to your parents, your preacher, your spouse, or your church by-laws. It matters little what your commentary says or what your denominational doctrine is. In fact, it may matter very little whether you get the right answer. Jesus neither affirms or denies Peter’s response…he simply tells him to keep it to himself.
The question of Jesus’ identity has been paramount for me – I spent the last decade of my life on an exhaustive search for Jesus. I wonder, in Peter’s place, how I would respond to that question – who is Jesus to me? And I don’t know what Jesus would say in return…he’d probably tell me to shut up, too.
Maybe, one way of viewing Jesus’ questions is to see them as instruction on the importance of self-awareness? Jesus was unusually comfortable in his unorthodox skin – and from that confidence of self he was able to serve others – just as they were. True self-awareness is not self-aggrandizement in the vision of one’s public – it is a humility of self that allows for the acceptance of others. Allowing us to welcome the diversity of beings in this world and to see the great value in each one – whether they be a rich young ruler or an ostracized leper. That is the strange Jesus I am so fond of. That is who I say Jesus is – and I’m comfortable with what that kind of interpretation says about who I am, no matter how far off the Romans Road that puts me or how far that divides me from the possibility of ever being called Reverend again.
I, and my family, left ministry broke, socially isolated and spiritually shaken. Disillusioned. But, after sobering up a bit, I finally began to discover myself, my values and a satisfying way of ‘living…moving…and…being.’ I’m a happy ‘love is God,’ ‘historical-Jesus freak,’ Baptist. For me, I found life after ministry. – D. Christian Nix, 2/1/2012
