Not long after Jeremy and I moved to California in 2019, we met Joey and Kinsey Mejia. The Mejias are about as Los Angeles as it gets. Joey grew up in Venice, LA’s famous beach town known for its street art, skate parks, basketball courts, outdoor gyms, and colorfully dressed residents. Before his current job at the Master’s Seminary, Joey was an accomplished hairstylist in Beverly Hills (he once cut Paul McCartney’s hair). He worked as a DJ on a rock and roll station. His DJ name was LAJoey. And he sold clothes for Armani. Kinsey grew up in the mountains just outside LA. She was in a bluegrass band with her siblings, and her father worked for the Walt Disney Company.
If you met Jeremy and me and then Joey and Kinsey, you wouldn’t think we had much in common. We not only come from different backgrounds we also have different perspectives on music, clothes, sports, and a wide range of other issues. Kinsey has tattoos and a nose ring. When I was a teenager, I would have thought it bizarre, even immoral, for a Christian to have either. Joey wears T-shirts with band names on them. Yet these differences have not kept us from becoming friends with and serving alongside the Mejias at our church. We may not see eye to eye about everything, but we do agree on the most important issues.
Since we moved to Los Angeles three years ago, I’ve met dozens of people like the Mejias. Most don’t dress like us, talk like us, or share our interests or hobbies. At our church, there are nearly as many perspectives as there are people. On Sunday mornings, some men wear suits and ties while others show up in shorts and T-shirts. There are as many women wearing pants as skirts. There is a full orchestra in the main service, and we primarily sing hymns. In the college ministry where Jeremy and I serve, a full band with drums and electric guitars plays a range of worship songs. The pastors don’t talk about an umbrella of authority. They don’t encourage courting and discourage dating. They’d say that God, in His kind providence, uses a variety of means to bring a man and woman together for marriage.
Some congregants work in the entertainment industry, while others never watch movies. There are big families. Small families. Stay-at-home moms and women with careers. It’s a large church with all the variety that comes from living in one of the biggest cities in the world. But we are incredibly united in our perspective on what matters most.
Members at our church share my love for the Bible. On a typical Sunday, I’ll hear two sermons (if neither of my girls are under the weather, which is a big if for a four- and two-year-old). Each message is between fifty and sixty minutes in length. When our pastor preaches, he simply explains what the Bible means. He doesn’t tell funny jokes or stories. He doesn’t share his opinion. He describes what the Bible says, what it means, and how it can change anyone’s life. And the people of our church submit to everything the Bible teaches, even if that puts them out of step with the broader culture.
I also know my church family wants to glorify God with everything they do. At Calvary, Jesus Christ bought them “with a price” as 1 Corinthians 6:20 says, so they want to do what the rest of the verse says: “glorify God in your body.” Those who glorify God make His name well-known. They give God a good reputation and point to His fame, power, and character. Their changed lives show the world that God exists, that He is powerful, and that He is involved in the lives of His people.
The members of Grace Church share a desire to do that by telling a lost and dying world about Christ, working with excellence and integrity at their jobs, caring for others with their words and actions, and loving God with all their soul, strength, and mind (Luke 10:27). That love for God is probably the thing that most unites us as a church. We share a common love for God “because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
My current pastor has been preaching through the Bible, verse by verse, for more than fifty years. He’s spent nearly half that time preaching from the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—looking at the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. He’s even preached through the Gospel of John twice. This hasn’t bored the church members though. Far from it. Because everyone loves Jesus, they want to spend as much time with Him as they can. There’s unity around that love. Since we share a common love for Christ, the other issues are not as big a deal. There truly is far more that unites us than divides us.
Being at my current church has changed how I think about Christians who are different from me. The churches I grew up in did not have the same diversity, so I learned to see all Christians the same way. Now I understand what all Christians have in common and what they can have different perspectives on.
Though there are about the same number of people at Grace Church every Sunday as there were at each of the IBLP conferences I attended, the crowds could not look more different. While people dress in a variety of ways at Grace Church, they were dressed mostly the same at the IBLP conferences. Women wore skirts from the time they arrived on the Big Sandy campus until the conference ended.
Walk across our church campus each Sunday and you’ll hear a variety of greetings—a lot of them in different languages. At Big Sandy, greetings were all positive and encouraging. Ask someone how they were doing, and they would smile and say, “Doing well.” There was even a season of life when Bill Gothard encouraged everyone to “give the perfect greeting,” which involved responding to the question “how are you doing” with as big a smile as possible and the words “I’m rejoicing.” I remember constantly hearing that greeting when I walked down the halls or interacted with someone at the IBLP headquarters one summer.
What I didn’t understand then is that unity does not mean uniformity. The Bible allows for differences. It doesn’t always tell you what to do. It doesn’t say whether you should order beef, chicken, or pork. It doesn’t tell you which house to buy or what shoes to wear. It doesn’t even tell you which job to take or spouse to marry or whether you should marry at all. In those areas and so many others, Christians have the freedom to make their own decisions (as long as they aren’t disobeying a direct command from the Bible). Sometimes those decisions may be different from another Christian’s decisions—and the Bible says that’s okay.
A good example of that is Romans 14. I read this chapter more than once as a kid, but I didn’t understand what it was saying and how helpful it was until recently. This chapter has become so important to me. It’s really shaped how I live. I want to share a little about this section of the Bible so that you can see why it matters so much for me and so many Christians who want to honor God. In this chapter, the apostle Paul talks to Christians who disagree about whether or not they should eat meat. The disagreement is messy. Some people are so sure they shouldn’t eat meat because it used to be offered to false gods. Other Christians don’t think it’s a big deal. That argument sounds so much like arguments I used to hear about clothes, music, and, yes, even food. So who was right? Paul said both were. Here are the first four verses of that chapter:
As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
I’m amazed at the Bible’s wisdom. In this chapter, it gives Christians the freedom to eat or not eat the meat because “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (v. 17). In other words, food isn’t that big of a deal. It’s not a priority in God’s kingdom. It’s not nearly as important as righteousness, peace, and joy. If someone has those three things, then it doesn’t matter what kind of food they are eating or where that food came from. They are, as verse 18 says, “acceptable to God and approved by men.”
Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 are two of the main places where the Bible talks about Christian liberty. That’s the idea that Christians have freedom to decide how to live, what to do, and even what to believe as long as those beliefs don’t disagree with the Bible’s essential truths about God, salvation, and Scripture. I didn’t learn much about Christian liberty when I was younger.
I didn’t realize that when I was judging other women for wearing pants, I was committing the same mistake as the Christians who didn’t eat meat. I didn’t know that when I assumed someone had a spirit of rebellion because they listened to music with drums, I was judging that believer for something God’s Word did not condemn. I had no idea that I was being stricter than the Bible.
I recently came across a famous quote that is often falsely attributed to Saint Augustine but can most likely be traced back to a seventeenth-century Catholic source. Regardless of who originally penned these words, I think the quote gives a helpful perspective on how to have unity and differences among Christians. “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”1 We unite around the gospel, we give freedom for differences of opinions on lots of other issues, and we seek—at all times—to love people.
That is a perspective I’ve had to learn. I’ve had to take a hard look at all the convictions I used to think were absolute necessities for all Christians and disentangle my essential convictions from the nonessential ones.
Something that made this process of disentangling a little easier was figuring out the differences between the Old and New Testaments. Growing up, I thought I had to obey everything the Bible commanded—whether it came from the Old or New Testament. Bill Gothard often referenced verses from Deuteronomy or Leviticus and said that Christians had to obey the command in those verses. This included commands about eating pork or certain kinds of seafood. It also included a lot of commands about clothes. There were specific orders for how far someone could walk, or what was considered work, on the Sabbath.
Jesus freed us from those commands. But we are still required to love God and others, just like the book of Deuteronomy says. Chapter 6, verses 4–5 say, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” And Leviticus 19:18 says, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Now that I know the truth, that Jesus sets me free from those ceremonial laws, obedience has become less of a burden, and it’s helped me be gracious toward others who have different convictions. It’s also made me love Jesus so much. I can’t keep all those Old Testament laws on my own. But Jesus ensured I wouldn’t have to.
Why do pastors like Gothard have so many rules? Why do they teach that all Christians should dress the same, consume the same music and media, vote the same, and talk the same? Why did he even create rules about what food Christians are supposed to eat when the Bible clearly says, “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking” (Romans 14:17), and Christians are not supposed to judge others for what they eat?
I think he did that because uncertainty can be unsettling. Rules are easier than liberty. They give a sense of certainty. They remove doubts and questions. Knowing exactly what to say and what to do in any situation to perfectly please God is an incredibly attractive idea. It certainly was for me, since I struggled with doubt and fear. Gothard’s rules gave me certainty.
All those rules may have told me what to believe, but they didn’t teach me how to think. Critical thinking was not important as I was growing up because what was there to think critically about? There was a right and a wrong way to do everything. Gothard apparently had figured all that out. All I had to do was follow his seven principles.
By far the most common extrabiblical source for Gothard’s rules was personal experience. It’s called truth by analogy. Here’s an example from one of Gothard’s seminars. After arguing that sins are passed from one generation to the next, he used the following story to prove that is true. He described a young couple from California who adopted a girl. Not long after they became her parents, they started to notice problems. The baby didn’t look at them with love. Instead, the baby had a cold, even hateful look in her eyes when she was looking at them. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a newborn with hate in its eyes, so I don’t know what that would look like, but evidently it happened to this couple.) To fix the issue, the couple had to remember what Gothard had taught them about the sins of the fathers being passed on to the next generation. The couple figured that there must be some serious sins of hate and bitterness in this adopted girl’s biological family. She would have certainly grown up to despise her adopted parents if they didn’t recognize what was happening and ask God to take away the generational sin. The couple then told Gothard that their child was happy now because they had followed his steps for dealing with cross-generational sins.2
When I was a teenager, I definitely believed that sins could be passed from one generation to the next. A story like the one Gothard told would have been terrifying to me. It would have made me believe that there were all these hidden sins lurking in me that would come out not necessarily because of something I did but because of something my grandparents or great-grandparents did. That made me think I wasn’t free to do certain things or go certain places because if I did, I might encounter a temptation that my family was particularly susceptible to. Then I would mess up and sin in the same way my previous family members had. Stories like this, and the principles at the heart of them, slowly chipped away at my Christian freedom. They gave me, and I’m sure many others, rules that went beyond the Bible.
The slippery slope argument is another tactic Gothard used to bind the conscience of his audience. This is the idea that certain behaviors may not be bad in themselves, but they can lead to other behaviors that are immoral, sinful, or harmful. These behaviors are like gateway drugs—they lead to something far worse. One of the most common slippery slope arguments involves music. Gothard never used the Bible to preach against certain kinds of music, like rock and roll or rap. Instead, he used personal experience and the slippery slope argument. Here’s an example.
Gothard and Jim Sammons, who taught the Financial Freedom Seminar at IBLP, would tell stories of men and women with credit card debt, mortgages, or car payments. When these people lost their businesses, when their marriage crumbled, or when their health took a turn for the worse, Gothard and Sammons would blame the debt. They would tell the audience that if they didn’t stay out of debt, the same catastrophes would befall them.
Those kinds of arguments stifle debate. It’s hard to argue with personal experience. They also make it easy for someone, like me, to judge others. When a personal experience becomes a black-and-white rule, it’s natural to judge someone who is engaged in the behavior that you’ve been told can lead to a destructive outcome. I used to do that all the time.
What the Bible says about Christian liberty has freed me from that judgmentalism. The apostle Paul didn’t say in Romans 14 that someone who ate meat offered to idols would one day start worshiping idols. He didn’t see a slippery slope there. He saw only freedom. I’ve learned that if I have a conviction against something because it is spiritually unhelpful for me, that doesn’t mean the same activity is spiritually unhelpful for someone else. That’s the beauty of Christian liberty.
In these last few chapters, I’ve traced the massive changes in my beliefs during the past three years: changes that have freed me from the legalism, fear, and man-made rules of my youth. In chapter 7, I described how the Lord freed me from a fear of Him by showing me that He is my heavenly Father. In chapter 8, I looked at how a true biblical understanding of love—one based on self-giving, not performance—freed me from my fear of people. And in this chapter, I’ve looked at Christian liberty. Christians can’t have different convictions about the Bible, God, or salvation, but they can believe different things about all kinds of less-important issues. That has not only freed me from obedience to rules that are not in the Bible but also made me a less-judgmental person.
As I’ve come to understand the true freedom that’s found in Christ, I’ve also realized that a teacher can preach the truth in public but value control and man-made rules in private. And that can be just as dangerous as a false teacher who tells people lies. I used to think the only dangerous teachers were those who convinced others that the Bible was a book of fairy tales and that God did not exist. Now I believe the far more dangerous false teachers are those who say they believe in God and the Bible but misrepresent Him and His Word. The Bible describes these false teachers as “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:5). They look like Christians. They talk like Christians. But they don’t teach the truth. Instead, they teach a religion of their own creation. I’ve become convinced that Bill Gothard is one of those dangerous teachers.
If someone had told fifteen- or twenty-year-old Jinger that she would one day say something like that, she would have been horrified. She would have probably thought that meant she was going to one day abandon Christianity entirely. Back then, I thought Bill Gothard was a modern-day prophet. Before Jesus came to earth, God revealed Himself to His people through men like Noah, Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jonah. A lot of books in the Old Testament are named after prophets because those books include many of the words God gave His people through those prophets. They were ordinary men with a supernatural message.
Bill Gothard was that kind of teacher to me. I thought his words were so powerful—and his message so unique and helpful—they were like a special revelation from God. Gothard never called himself a prophet, but when he said God had shown him a rhema or that he understood “the key” to the Christian life, he was setting himself up as the messenger of a special revelation from God.
Now I see that Gothard has nothing in common with the Old Testament prophets, who served only as mouthpieces of God. Instead, he seems to be more like the false teachers described throughout the New Testament in verses such as these:
When Jesus said in Matthew 7 that you will know false teachers by their fruit, He was talking about the false teachers’ actions. And when the apostle Paul said false teachers are slaves of their own appetites, he was talking about their desires. He was calling them selfish. They were the kind of people who would use their platform and influence over others for selfish gain and their own pleasure.
A few years ago, it became abundantly clear to me that this man I had always looked up to as a model Christian was, in fact, no better than the false teachers Jesus and Paul described. Gothard was not only teaching his own principles instead of Christ’s but reportedly harming those closest to him.