A Preview of Dear Revolutionaries:

A Field Guide to the World Beyond the Church* My follow up to Dear Church.

For a long time folks have asked if I would ever update or speak to the issues in Dear Church that I raised. I have actually openly resisted this idea: with my editor, on stage, in meetings. My agent probably thinks I’m a mad person. Why would I refuse to talk about and work on the subjects I have had the most successful sales you ask?

Two pieces of context: the most sales of Dear Church happened in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder and that fact almost broke me. My success paid for in his blood and white existential terror.

Also I thought I was wrong. About a lot in Dear Church.

I know some of you did too, you loved to drive miles out of your way to come tell me at book events. But I wanted to take up the challenge presented by my detractors: great words, now go try and live it out. So I have. Now I’m back.

Dear Revolutionaries: A Field Guide for the World Beyond the Church is my notes, scribbles, experiments, and mostly the spiritual practices that kept me going in the middle of the civil war I discussed in Dear Church. Here is a bit of the preface, to chew on. Pre-sales are a few months out, but I know some of y’all like to *checks notes* start programming planning early. This is way early to share, but some of the endorsers already are sharing bits on twitter also so I figured what the hell. So without further prelude:

Dear Revolutionary: it’s time to prepare for a world beyond the church.

I write this to you after almost two years of caring for Black leaders, organizers, activists, fellow faith leaders, and community leaders in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin.

If there is anything I want you to take away from this book, from this field guide written in Black blood, it’s the very first sentence. It bears repeating. It’s the entire message of this book:

Dear Revolutionary: it’s time to prepare for a world beyond the church.

This book is meant to take the already faithful and prepare them for a vastly different landscape than the one I wrote about in Dear Church. By already “faithful,” I mean those of us who are resisting the shadow spreading across our world. Those who realized in some bit of horror that following God in this world, in this time, in this country, may actually mean the risk of life, limb, reputation, and psyche.

In fact, since the publication of Dear Church, we have slid past many of my worst-case scenarios. The republic died stillborn on the steps of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

I’m not supposed to tell you that. I’m supposed to remix my first book into a rousing speech about why you need to come back to the church and save her from her poor leadership and subsequent fate. That is what a dying predator always says when fresh meat comes wandering by.

I wrote Dear Church in language that church councils, pastors, and it is my still-fervent prayer, bishops, could hear. It’s hard to explain to people who have invested generations into an endeavor that it has failed. I’m going to say something now that will cause many to tell you not to read this book. For that, I am sorry. I am sorry for my own complicity in this system because truth is commoditized, sold, repackaged, then sanitized. I worked hard as a writer to have the freedom to say these words:

Every major American mainline denomination failed us at a critical time in salvation history. Every leader. Every bishop. Every pastor.

Including me.

It is my fervent belief that this utter failure is a sign that the church is no longer God’s or the Divine’s chosen vessel on Earth. The age of Christ and the church is over. Whether the church truly is no longer God’s chosen vessel, or whether the age in which Christ is revealed most clearly through the church is over, the effect is the same on the ground.

I write these words to prepare a generation that sees, clear-eyed, the series of catastrophes we have inherited, the road that lies ahead, the improbability of victory, and is still ready to build the tomorrow we so desperately want to be born in this world. For too long, we have been told that our tomorrow has come too soon. That the people aren’t ready to see a new day dawn. Even the entire social paradigm in which we educate, train, and send leaders out into the world is based on the premise that giving you power is the worst thing that could happen. In seminary, although not on the syllabus, certainly in the air was this notion that the people were the problem. If only they would listen, or show up, or give more. I was taught that I couldn’t trust you with your own keys to your own salvation. That if I presented you with the same tools, learnings, and guidance I had received not only to navigate scripture but also build community, you would misuse them. I was told that you were defeated, dejected, or recalcitrant. I was told that I may be one of the last of the final generation of paid professional ministers. I don’t think the church has told you all of this. Why would they? But when mainline denominations aren’t putting Black, Queer, Brown, and Indigenous leaders in clearly dangerous settings for them; they seem to almost intuitively block all progress of any innovative, shifting, or emerging faith community.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the uprisings, and the attack on the peaceful transition of power in the United States all happened—and what was the direction we were given by our leadership as they hid in their homes?

While you watched the world burn, the church told you to abstain from the holy meal. Despite knowing that Christians, for thousands of years, had simple table gatherings like this. Not because it isn’t good for you. Not that communion at home while reading Scripture with friends and loved ones during tough times is holy. That is what the first disciples of Christ did. Yet they discouraged online communion.

That decision only serves one subset of people in the church, and it’s more about their gainful employment over the course of the next fifteen years: clergy, pastors, bishops, deacons—paid professional clergy. Me. My ilk. At the greatest time of human need that I have ever witnessed in this republic’s history, all the clergy were worried about was the survival of the institution of the church. Keeping their church’s programming going. The efficacy of online communion.

This isn’t a testament about what we all did. It’s about what are we going to do—because white supremacy is not going to take a vacation. Fascism is a cancer, and a Christo-fascism based on American principles isn’t disappearing with one American president.

*END PREVIEW*

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