{…in which I present a revealing email exchange I had with a so-called “Pastor” in 2003, together with an EXTENDED introduction to it, which I wrote just now. I hope that you find it helpful}

In 2003, I was living in the foothills of the Pyrenees in France, and sending out email messages to an email list of some 1500 people containing a wide variety of contents. At that time the USA had just invaded Iraq based on lies (as usual) and I wrote about that as well as many theological matters and sermonic pieces. Occasionally, I would send out a broader kind of email as relief, which was usually about my experiences in the local area and regarding my wanderings in nature; or I would include a poem or other piece of creative writing; or I would recommend a glorious piece of music. All of this I still do to this day. It is part of who I am.

However, when you have a public ministry there will always be crackpots contacting you maliciously to try and throw you off course (or off your perch, as they see it). Usually, they are someone who simply disagrees with you about something about which they know you are right and thus resent you, but they do not have the guts to say so and instead they hurl abuse at you (or do it behind your back by lying about you). Bullies. The visible church is full of them.

I have a classic example of this in the form of an email which I received from a pastor in 2003 to which I penned a reply and made both his email and my reply available in a mass mailout to my email list at the time. You will find it further below with my reply. But this is a little intro in which, 21 years later in 2024, I am providing some context.

This guy was hot under the collar about my critique of the Iraq war (which, of course, many pastors in the USA supported and publicly cheered on), and he also went ‘on a total bender’ because I wrote a lighthearted piece one day about my experiences in the locality (e.g. joining a table-tennis club in a nearby French village, which was quite amusing) and in the countryside of the Pyrenees, especially after a lovely nighttime walk surrounded by nightingales.

He continued to send me nasty bullying emails for many years, eventually using an obscene pseudonym. It would be no exaggeration to say that he hated me and everything about me — all the more so because he could not control me and because I exposed his madness at every turn and never laid down and showed him my belly (and I still never have to these characters). The visible church is stuffed full of so many bullies like this who have serious personality disorders. You get to be able to smell them a mile off. Churches attract them because these domineering bullies know that they can wield power in them over so many other people who tend to be passive and easily manipulated by such overbearing folks and, unfortunately, they have very little discernment to sus out what are the real dynamics taking place. A great many churches thrive on skewed social dynamics involving false authority and neutered passivity — just like in the rest of society (e.g. families, politics, education, the workplace, etc.).

Do you want to know something which may shock those of you who haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about? Here it is: There have been many times in the past (though not so much these days as I now prefer solitude) when I have preferred the company of easy-going non-judgemental unbelievers rather than the carping fanaticism of the pharisaic “Christianists” who queue up to have a ‘pop’ at you because you do not dot all their “i”s or cross all their “t”s. Putting on the garb of what I call “painting-by-numbers Christianism” (a common infection, so it seems) turns so many into superficial, unimaginative, obnoxious petty-minded monsters, when in fact becoming a new creation should really transform them into wise, perceptive and gracious purveyors of profundity. The idol which they worship is DOCTRINE (yeah, and they often use capital letters in their nasty emails to you! 🙂). Over the years, I have come to have a deep aversion to that word. Islam is based on “doctrine”. Doctrine forms the basis of indoctrination, which is always cultish. The Greek phrase in the Bible, ὑγιαινούσης διδασκαλίας (hygiainousēs didaskalias), in the Second Letter to Timothy, which was translated in the 17th century King James Version as “sound doctrine” is far better and far more faithfully translated as “healthy teaching” or healthy instruction”. That is the real meaning of the Greek there. The word “hygiainousēs” is from where the English word “hygiene” is derived. Healthy teaching; it’s hygienic! Hey, all you ‘doctrinistas’, check it all out in a concordance, so you can see for yourself, if you dare. Healthy teaching is a beautiful thing. It generates health in the soul. It bears fruit in the life of the one who is taught by it. It is expansive rather than repressive. It renders one open to multiple avenues of truth which will run like rivers through your soul. On the other hand, the myopic obsession with mere “doctrine” as the sole focus of the disciple of Christ is the instigator of a warped ugliness in the soul which inevitably makes one into a grizzled inquisitor who has no consciousness of the beautiful fact that it is not so much what one believes which evidences salvation but rather how what one believes makes one behave (Matthew 25:31-46; James 2:14-26). Please meditate on that deeply. The pastor who wrote the email that you will discover below is, to me, the perfect example of this truncated caricature of faith which revels in doctrine rather than didacticism. I love didacticism too. It means wise instruction, training, tutelage, mentoring, education — the very opposite of in-doctrine-ation.

The essence of true faith is not about needing to be right but about being illumined by the Light, which is “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). This is a mind of humility, not the puffed up pride of a knowledge-based doctrinal “Christianism”. So “let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), rather than the over-intellectualised posturing which is so common today. Many will hate me for saying all this. They will seek ways to discredit me. But go ahead. Do your thing. Strut your stuff! I really do not care anymore. This is not paranoia but the result of my actual experience at the hands of the “Christian” mafia. If you disturb their imagined “family” with truth they will ‘take out a contract” of vindictive vengeance on you! That used to disturb me. Now I just smile at the ludicrousness of it all. Ripples of apostasy masquerading as orthodoxy.

There was a time when being bullied by these censorious misery-guts and killjoys would get to me and demoralize me. I wondered what on earth such crackpots were doing as pastors and elders in God’s church. That was back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the years went by, I discovered many people who had been bullied in churches and I sometimes took on their cases and confronted the bullies in a rational and wise manner. But that only got me into deeper water as I then became labelled as a “stirrer” and troublemaker. These are personality-disordered people who want to prevent you from being free because what you are into is not what they are into. For them, being “a Christian” is all about what you cannot do, and they love to forbid you from doing it. Forbiddance is their pastime! If they get one whiff of you knowing the joy of the freedom one has in Christ they want to crush you and even destroy you, while thinking they are doing God a favour. When such twisted people gain control of a church they create a cemetery of censored souls — a mausoleum of misery dedicated to the expulsion of delight. I have seen joy-filled new converts neutralized by these religious fanatics and hideously transformed into morbid maligners whose delight is in hurling grenades at the liberated. (This has even been proven to be true with many alleged converts out of the New Age scene, who spin off in the opposite direction of their former chaos into this repressive, sniping pharisaism). If you resist them to their faces then you will be ‘dead meat’. They specialize in slander and the unjust wrecking of reputations. They are actually the ultimate antinomians whose cover, ironically, is the rule of law. I have made it my business to expose them (few dare to do so, but I have nothing to lose) and have paid many prices for it. I do it because of a moral impetus without any expectation that it will be effective because mud never sticks on them and, like all proficient narcissists, they have carefully cultivated a horde of “flying monkeys” who will rush to their aid and bury you in bitterness.

If you have been hurt by these people, or been a victim of their regimes in a so-called “church”, please do not overreact by going in the opposite direction by abandoning all sense of legitimate order in any alternative gatherings you may form. There is supposed to be order in local gatherings, as the Apostle Paul revealed, but not the straitjacket caricature of order which is generally imposed by these bullies.

Anyway, below is a verbatim copy of the email I sent out to the circa 1500 souls on my email list in June 2003, entitled “Reply to a Frozen Heart”, in which I published that bully’s complaint to me, together with my reply, but with a little preface before that.

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Reply to a Frozen Heart
Diakrisis, June 2003

Dear Friends, I receive many e-mails containing comments or observations on my writings. Even though they come from so many different types of people, they fall into a distinct number of genres. Here is a mail I received this morning which is typical of one of those genres. As this genre represents a large constituency in the Christian scene, I thought I would share it with you, coupled with my response, as no doubt there are many others on the list who are queuing up to send mails like this, 😉 or who have themselves received similar diatribes. I should add that this is quite tame compared to some of the mails I get, which would be unpublishable without causing considerable offence! Here it is:

Mr Morrison,

I cannot tell you how fed up I have become of your whining self-centered ramblings. It has been bad enough to have your socialist anti-American appeasement propaganda rammed down our throats almost daily but the latest piece about your personal nighttime experiences in the wild has finally pushed me to say UNLOAD ME FROM YOUR LIST RIGHT NOW!

I signed on to Diakrisis to receive God’s Word NOT Thoreau or Whitman or any of those other bedwetting nature-loving jerks. I’ve never heard such garbage as your latest rant about music and birds. It is nothing but a display of emotionalism and mysticism. What sort of an apologetics ministry is this? Our sufficiency is in Christ. Yet all you seem to need, judging from your mails in the last couple of years is table tennis, classical music and roaming in the gloaming. You need to seriously question your faith when you want to be involved with such worldly things. I didn’t get the impression that you joined a Christian table tennis club, do you really think that mixing with unbelievers in that way is going to help your obviously already backslidden state? “WHAT CONCORD HATH CHRIST WITH BELIAL?”

You call yourself discerning but most of those composers you listen to were VERY UNGODLY men. How can you run a discernment ministry and expect to be taken seriously when you want us to listen to the music of immoral ADULTERERS, ATHEISTS, CATHOLICS, AND FREEMASONS?????

What the world needs today is not nature boys who want to dance in the meadows and write effeminate poetry. It needs people who are unflinchingly willing to spell out THE TRUTH OF GOD’S WORD and to bring THEOLOGY to a reprobate world. If you ever get back to preaching the gospel (which I doubt) I’ll get back on your list. In the meantime you need to get down on your knees and beseech the Lord to guide you to a church where you can be under the authority of some godly men who can finally straighten you out.

In Christ’s love,

Etc.

Alan M. replies:

Thank you for your interesting mail. I normally ignore mails such as yours because they are being delivered from an insensitive soapbox rather than from a searching heart. But I believe that the time has come to tackle this kind of mail head-on and highlight what is really being said, as it touches on many salient points. Before I respond to the primary theme which lies at the heart of your mail, I would just like to clear up a few of your claims.

First, what you defame as “socialist, anti-American propaganda” are those writings which are part of my stated mission to provide commentary on “topical issues” and also to “hold out a hand of rescue to those who suffer psychological and spiritual manipulation in the religious scene”. I am not at all a socialist and I am not in the least bit anti-American. I have many American friends, even in the military. (In fact, a major in that military wrote to me the other day to say he totally agrees with my take on the Iraqi invasion). However, I am duty bound to expose the criminals, liars and dissemblers who have hijacked what could have been great about America. Many in the Christian scene have been duped by all this into supporting a war built on lies. They are extremely ignorant about what has really been happening and why. They have suffered psychological and spiritual manipulation by the media and by their pastors. Thus my job is to expose it. Some people may not like it at the moment; but one day they will realise that I spoke the truth. I do not propose to go into this in more detail here as I am in the process of writing an article entitled ”What Spirit are You Of? Christianity & Bellicosity” which deals with this issue more fully by answering all the specious arguments which have been hurled in my direction in the past couple of months.

Second, I ram nothing down anyone’s throats. Never have; never will. So I am wondering if you are projecting. My only aim is to encourage people to think, think and think again. You originally signed up voluntarily to this e-mail list; and in any case you are free to delete any of my mails which you do not like.

Third, you said to me, “all you seem to need, judging from your mails in the last couple of years is table tennis, classical music and roaming in the gloaming”. Again, a ridiculously untrue statement. I have send out one email in the last two years which is about my experiences locally in nature and with the community (despite my countless other emails during that time with much teaching and many sermons) and you go completely off the deep end with all your accusations and fanatical capital letters. Honestly, I have to say this but you come across as a deeply troubled soul. I doubt that anyone has dared to confront you with that before because of your aggressive exterior. But you are the kind of professing “Christian” who brings the faith into disrepute with your caricature of a tub-thumping pastor with a very obvious personality disorder. There are a lot of you about.

Fourth, the primary work of Diakrisis is not to preach the gospel. The gospel is preached both implicitly in all our articles and explicitly when the occasion requires it. However, our main aim is to provide apologetics and commentary for those who are already Christians. In any case, there is infinitely more to preaching the gospel than mouthing some formulaic words. For the gospel cannot really be preached unless there is an overflowing of love in the heart of the preacher. People sense that love, and they will not respond to a gospel speaker whose life is a sham because of the aggressiveness of his comportment and persona. If we are unattractive as people (I mean from the inside out), we will never touch hearts.

Fifth, this belief that the Christian cannot have hobbies which make one rub shoulders with unbelievers is ludicrously pharisaic and dangerously cultish. So is the notion that one cannot listen to classical music which has been written by anyone who is a sinner! You sing hymns in your church which use the music of those “ungodly” men. What sins has the man who put your baked beans in a tin committed? Does that make the beans off-diet for the Christian? What will happen to you if you eat them? The daily newspaper you read has been edited by an unbelieving sinner. Is he therefore not to be trusted on that basis? Your house was, in all probability, built by a bunch of beer-swilling, foul-mouthed layabouts. Does that affect its aesthetic or ergonomic aspects? The Windows software that you use on your computer was originally devised by a group of acid-head New Agers. How on earth will you sanctify it? And so on and on. Once we stray down the trail of pharisaism and legalism, there is no end to what we will have to eschew!

I don’t need to say too much on this subject here as I have already written an article entitled “Living for Righteousness: How to Be in the World but Not of It”, which is on the “Articles & Analysis” page on the Diakrisis website. I urge you to read it. The promotional blurb for that article says: “In the evangelical/fundamentalist scene today there are two equal and opposite errors which are concerned both with the way that Christians can behave and also with the extent of our activities in this world. At one end of the spectrum is the view that the Christian should only ever be interested in religious matters and little else. In this view, it is believed that the Christian should not have hobbies or interests other than those connected with his church or Christianity. At the other end of the spectrum we find free indulgence in crass materialism and worldliness. In this view, all people have to do is attend church on a Sunday and live whatever way they like for the rest of the week. In this brief article, we examine how the Christian can sail through life without becoming shipwrecked on the rocks of either legalism or antinomianism”.

Sixth, you said that my last mail “is nothing but a display of emotionalism and mysticism”. Your reference to emotions I will respond to shortly in my seventh point, but I should hardly have to say that I am not a mystic and I do not advocate mysticism, as my writings clearly show. However, I do love mystery. A profound sense of mystery is one of the principal spiritual qualities missing from the church today. That sense of mystery can be discovered not only in the Bible (and especially in the accounts of the creation, and in the incarnation, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ) but also in the vast halls of nature. The whole universe is a kind of cosmic cathedral which — when rightly contemplated — can only throw us in the direction of its Creator. The matter-of-fact religiosity which you seem to advocate, with its theology-in-your-face and the gospel-by-numbers misses that sense of mystery entirely.

Seventh, you speak about emotions as if they were something detestable. But God gave us emotions so that we wouldn’t be zombies and robots. There is a vast difference between emotionalism and the exercise of emotions. Please do not confuse the two. A real man has emotions and exercises them in a healthy manner. A real man is passionate about such noble things as truth and seeks to know it and speak it in every area of his life. A real man is passionate about being authentic. A real man is passionate about living, loving and caring. A real man is an emotional man; but he does not indulge in emotionalism because he knows the difference. Emotion is the free movement of human feelings originally made to be part of man by God. Emotionalism is the forced use of those emotions for manipulative purposes.

Why do you object so profoundly to the expression of emotions or passion? Throughout my so far 18 year sojourn in the Christian scene, it has been my misfortune to have encountered a great many people who I can only describe as frozen folks. Such men (for they are mostly men) are in abundance in the fundamentalist/reformed/evangelical scene. They give off an air of authority and gravitas but in reality they are filled with fear and loathing. They sit on a powder keg of anger and insecurity which they have managed to suppress behind a pietistic exterior and a carefully controlled personal life revolving around a heavily suppressed family. They have also usually found a niche in the church where they can become elders or pastors or hold other office where they can wield authority and never have to be confronted about the destructive fuel which empowers their lives. They pay great lip-service in public to godliness and Christlikeness but if you get close to their wives and children you will discover a very different picture. In my experience, those wives are very often abused. Sometimes they have come to me for counsel, so I know all about their religious-posing husbands who ooze public piety on Sunday and are hell to live with for the rest of the week. The existence of such scheming, hard-hearted people in so many churches and at the head of so many associations and conferences is one of the main reasons that I have chosen to live in blissful obscurity here in the Pyrenees.

These men despise genuine emotions and any kind of heartfelt passion. They despise and feel threatened by (and seem to be more than a little jealous of) anyone who expresses genuine emotions and heartfelt passion for Truth in all its aspects. Their only passion, if one can call it that, is the pursuit of power. In his 1941 essay, “The Lion & the Unicorn”, George Orwell wrote that for the totalitarian “there is no such thing as law, there is only power”. This abandonment of law and the establishment of anything with perpetuates personal power is what I have observed in so many nooks and crannies of the “official” Christian scene. Such people pay lip-service to God’s law and appear on the surface to be very concerned with jots and tittles; but behind this facade there lurks a completely antinomian heart which is ruthless, unscrupulous and cold-bloodedly tyrannical. Your letter gives the distinct impression that you are one of those people.

You say that what the world needs today is “people who are unflinchingly willing to spell out THE TRUTH OF GOD’S WORD” rather than “nature boys who want to dance in the meadows and write effeminate poetry”. While I would agree that the truth of God’s Word needs to be made known in a way that people can understand it, your characterisation of those who love nature and write poetry as “effeminate” reveals more about you than it does about them. It takes manliness for a man to write a poem. Poetry is the bold chiselling of word sculpture to make Truth more powerfully known. To use poetry instead of prose is to make Truth stand to attention to gain the attention it deserves. King David was a poet and he loved music. I am more than happy to be numbered with him. Frankly, there is far too little poetry (in every sense) in the predominantly prosaic Christian scene. Real poetry exposes inauthenticity, so no wonder there is so little of it!

If you are a man whose sole aim is “spelling out the truth of God’s Word” to people, then you will become unbalanced and desperately unattractive. Truth and love go hand-in-hand when it comes to the Christian life (Ephesians 4:15). Any defence or portrayal of Christianity must not be conducted with vitriol or in a mean spirit (i.e. merely “spelling it out”) but, as the apostle sees fit to emphasise, “with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). Those antagonistic to spiritual Truth are far more likely to be won over by an attitude which will enable the love of God to shine out more effectively than by any aggressive “spelling out” of it (cf. Romans 12:18-21; 13:10; Luke 9:54-56).

Now, here is the truth about your missive to me: My experience has been that very often — in fact almost always — when I get a mail like this, there is another, unspoken reason which lies behind it. Usually, it is because I have trodden on some toes in a previous mail. This is an interesting phenomenon which I will deconstruct for you. When I was training as a counsellor, there were two main counselling tips which I received concerning people with problems. The first was that “the presenting problem is rarely the problem itself”. I have found this also with those who write aggressive mails to me. To explode like that over my mail “Joyful Sounds”, which was about the glories and joys of nature, seems more than a little misplaced. I know from other correspondence with you a couple of years ago that you are an ardent supporter of George Bush and that you are a pastor who believes fervently in “binding and loosing” demons, which is a part of deliverance-ministry-related Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare (SLSW). Is it not the case that the real reason you have knee-jerked off the list at this point in time is because I critiqued your doctrine of “binding and loosing” and the whole SLSW delusion in a recent article and you have no reply to it? Was it not that which was the real straw which broke the camel’s back for you, and nothing at all to do with my nature piece? The presenting problem is rarely the problem itself. Truth borne out by experience.

The second counselling tip which I was given concerning people with problems was that one should ”always listen to the music behind the words” as well as to the words themselves. In fact, the ‘music’ behind the words very often tells you more about the speaker than the words themselves. One needs a great deal of perception and empathy to listen to that ‘music’. The music behind the words of your mail is to my ears a discordant cacophony which says “aggressive, insensitive control-freak”. I am sorry, but that is how you come across. It did amuse me though to see all those untrue presumptions, and the wild, almost chaotic way that you express yourself. Do you really have so little self-awareness that you cannot see how you come across as being completely unhinged? You are one among many. The whole Christian scene is full of folks like you with frozen hearts who lash out at anyone by whom they feel threatened and seem to have no understanding whatsoever about why they behave in that unpleasant manner.

I just hope and pray that one day your heart will melt and you will combine your alleged zeal for God’s Word with a passionate love for His creation.

Yours, in the cause of God and truth,

Alan Morrison

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Well, that was what I wrote in 2003 to that pastor. I have been similarly confronted with many others like him over the years. I also know of many who have been broken by men like this. Now, 20+ years later, it is not only men behaving in this manner but wimmin too as many have set themselves up as teachers on the internet (contrary to what is taught in Scripture) with their cleverly disguised autocracy and suppression of anyone who doesn’t tow their party line. When any of these people realise that no matter how hard they try they cannot knock you down to your face, then they will work behind your back with lies, slanders and innuendoes. This is what the Christian scene has come to. And we all know the reason why. (Well, I hope we do!).

Finally, I should say that I received dozens of responses to that email from people who have been similarly attacked by these hollow men of unfaith. If you throw all the wayward bandwagons by which so many churches are deceived into the mix, you can then see why discerning disciples of Christ just do not bother with the whole culture of “church” anymore. It just isn’t good for their πνευματική υγεία, pnevmatikí hugeía, spiritual health. They can hang out and “gather themselves together” with other decent, faithful loving disciples any time they like without any of the widespread nonsense that I have mentioned above. Then they will be protected from both disturbed impostors and dodgy activities. Such are the times in which we are living. 🙃

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2023
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]