The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

If I hear one more Evangelical claim that God chose Donald Trump, I swear I'm gonna rapture myself. MAGA Christians really need to stop spiritualizing the man and his movement. It's sinful. It's blasphemous. It’s heretical. It's lousy evangelism. It’s laughable. It’s offensive. It's also just plain asinine. The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending the 8 years straining to find infinite...

When you lose someone you love, good people do what good people do: they try and help. They see you in the deepest despair and they want desperately to pull you out, to rescue you, to numb the pain, to stop the bleeding. There's a helplessness that comes from watching someone they care for suffer and in their urgency to alleviate that suffering, they will do something that is rarely helpful in suc...

Today, I attended a PRIDE event at a small town here in North Carolina known to be decidedly conservative and extremely slow to embrace LGBTQ equality. (Such an area is not an anomaly here in the South, sadly.) Given this reality, it was a surprising and glorious site as hundreds and hundreds of people streamed into a huge swath of a local public park that had been transformed into a kaleidoscopic...

Friend, this really isn't difficult. I see you making everything harder than it has to be. All your striving and searching and pontificating is overcomplicating things and it’s distracting you. You're not going to find what you need where you've been looking. You already have it. There is no magic elixir to ingest, no secret incantation to exhale, no perfectly worded prayer you need to recite, no...

I’m willing to bet that most of my readers and followers see themselves as LGBTQ allies, that philosophically and intellectually we all agree that someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation or marriage has no bearing on their inherent worth. We agree that queer people should have every human and civil right provided here, that sexuality should never be a barrier or penalty or cause for exclus...

The verdict is in. Donald Trump (the unstable, unhinged, decade-long cult leader of the current Republican Party and its likely presidential candidate in a few months) is a convicted felon, found guilty on all 34 counts in a trial that is but one of four that he faces and would already have been tried on had his infiltration of our justice system not slowed the process this long. For anyone who tr...

I still remember the precise moment I stopped believing in hell. Over two decades ago I was at a Christmas dinner party in the home of a gay couple. From the outside it looked like any holiday gathering: a warm, beautifully decorated room filled with people laughing and telling stories in the glow of the tree, while the silky voice of Johnny Mathis wafted through the air along with the heavenly co...

Do you know where you’re going when you die? Growing up a Christian, I’ve been asked that question in one form or another a few thousand times. That has been the go-to, can’t miss, literally “scare the hell out of them” question that much of conservative Christian evangelism is built on: what happens when you die and are you sure you know where you’ll spend eternity. It has always been and still i...

I've always despised bullies. Ever since I was a young boy I could see them clearly: on the playground and in the hallways and on the street corners—the way they terrorized people while being themselves internally terrified. Even as they brutalized the other kids with words and fists, I heard the shaking of their voices and noticed their quivering hands, and I knew how petrified they were. I almos...

Recently, Kansas City Chiefs field goal kicker Harrison Butker gave a commencement address at Catholic Benedictine College. It has become a battleground for a nation already addled by political tribalism and exhausted at Conservative religion’s continual efforts to reach into the bathrooms, bedrooms, and boardrooms of America. It’s also a stark reminder of why there is a mass exodus from the Churc...

Every time I attend a funeral or memorial service, I think about how powerless the guest of honor is. Conversations take place, tributes and memories are offered, events of their lives are recalled, intimate stories are relayed—and they can’t do a thing about any of it. Once someone dies they are defined and summarized without their consent. If there’s one certainty of this life, it’s that we all...

We all have a story we tell ourselves, a narrative about who we are and what matters to us. It is the carefully curated working mythology of our daily lives that helps direct our decisions and fortifies us in seasons of adversity. That story can act like a True North in disorienting days like the ones we find ourselves tumbling through in this moment. It can also be terribly flawed, distorted by e...

Dear Church, The Exodus has begun and it's not going to stop. People are leaving you and they're probably not coming back. I've been where you are and I know what's happening within you right now. I know you're panicking, scrambling to understand it all, trying to somehow stop the bleeding; to reverse the swift and steady tide out the doors. I know that you’re hiring consultants and holding emerge...

What will you do on the day democracy dies? On November 6th, when you realize that the terrible things you always dismissed as virtual impossibilities have actually come to pass, how will you feel? When it becomes sickeningly clear that January 6th, 2021 was not a final and resounding defeat of this malignant ugliness but merely a postponement of its eventual victory, what will run through your mi...

We all have a story we tell ourselves: a sometimes aspirational mythology about what kind of human beings we are, about what truly matters to us, and about how we’re using the one life we’ve been given. And then, there is the unadorned nonfiction of our daily existence, the unalterable declaration we make by our presence that speaks with great eloquence who we really are. It’s Teacher Appreciation...

The United Methodist Church recently decided to reverse its ban on LGBTQ clergy. As someone who served in the UMC for 17 years, nearly a decade of those in one of the 100 largest churches in the country—it's about damn time! Traveling this country and engaging thousands of Christians every month, I encounter local faith communities both inside and outside the United Methodist Church, who claim to...

This isn’t a “hush-money” trial. Donald Trump is on trial for trying to override the voices and votes of the American people in order to steal an election. These offenses against him (among the nearly one hundred charges across four indictments) are more traitorous and sobering than anything we've witnessed in our young nation's turbulent lifetime. Sadly, that isn't the story here. There were days...

They say every dog has its day… There’s been a rare bipartisan outpouring of outrage in response to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s revelations in a forthcoming book, of her shooting and killing a 14-month old hunting dog: an act that she not only deemed innocuous enough to include, but one she actually manages to use as an example of her willing to do “unpleasant jobs.” In the terrifying worl...

What Would Jesus Do? When I began my ministry career over a quarter of a century ago, this was the rallying cry of American Christian youth culture; embossed onto colorful rubber bracelets, adorning t-shirts, and emblazoned across student group meeting rooms. It was ubiquitous in the Church and eventually crossed-over into the mainstream zeitgeist. The stated premise was admirable: to try and filt...

Ignorance is not a compelling argument. We’ve all heard the theories for the past eight years: people still supporting Donald Trump are somehow victims of the partisan media and Evangelical alternate reality that they've been raised in and are still captives of. They're continually surrounded by fake news and false stories, and so they aren't bad people they just aren't seeing what we are seeing a...

We are all hopelessly temporary. We had a fixed date when we arrived and we will have another when we depart. We all have a birthday—and we all have zero assurance as to how many more of those we will get. None of us are getting out of here alive, and we can probably agree on that. What we are less unanimously united on, is from where we came and to where we’re headed. Did we spring from the earth...

Conservative Christian, I want to talk to you about Life. No, not the word you've weaponized as ammunition in your incessant, hollow holy culture war; not the one you use to justify your political alignment with an amoral monster; not the word you wield like a legislative hammer against women's autonomy over their own bodies. I'm talking about Life, in its most expansive, most elemental definition...

We are the people of the Exodus. For so long we lived in captivity, chained in the Egypt of our Religion. Fear was our Pharaoh and he was cruel and brutal. For years we toiled in the bondage of our captor, our backs bent over and our shoulders rubbed raw by everything piled high upon them. Spend enough time like that and you begin to grow used to the fear, even dependent on it. Terrified by what i...

For years I've preached tolerance. I’ve lauded its virtues. I’ve affirmed its value. I believe in it, in its place and time. I also know that tolerance can be dangerous in a place and a time like this. We all know how we got here. We've all lived through the past eight years. We saw the "both sides" rhetoric in Charlottesville. We saw the George Floyd murder. We saw the violence against the BLM pr...

Dear Hateful White People, I’m sorry. I was wrong about you. For a long time I thought I hated you. I may have even made you feel that way, too. You would pop up on my social media feed, drive past me in traffic, say something at Thanksgiving, or I'd overhear you at a restaurant—and what seemed like rage would rise up quickly within me. I thought it was abject hatred.  Today I realized that I don'...