Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and he might not survive.
DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.
As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.
It’s reading things like this that I really wonder if Augustine was onto something with his concept of the [i]Massa Damnata[/i].
That’s right. I always turn to the Internet for guidance on serious matters. What I find there comforts me and makes clear its benign character. Sheesh.
Seriously (this time), I have known a number of people in and outside of my extended family whose experience in churches with a strongly literal approach to scripture ultimately led them to question the entire apparatus of the Faith. It is not only “liberal” Christians who loose their way when the mechanics of faith overshadow the Gospel’s essential message.
Show me a man who was a “pastor†who became an atheist and I will show you a man who is broken by the law and never here the proclamation of the gospel of Christ death on the cross for our sin and the free gift of forgiveness of sin, grace and even the faith to belief on Christ and trust his word.
I read the article, the seeds of his atheist faith planted early in his life with “getting saved “ at 17 been untrained in scripture fore even his one faith trusted on a pulpit at 17 or 18 and proclaimed a preacher. No where I read, he received any theological training or discipleship. I bet in his Pentecostal and liberal churches he never preach or heard the gospel. Tragically he is following a long line of other like Christopher Hitchens and Marlin Manson.
For every Jerry DeWitt there were others like me (while never a preacher) came from similar backgrounds into faith in Christ For me it was the White Horse Inn exposing me to Gospel of Christ and Reformed theology.
Nor this is a time to be condemning to Mr. Jerry DeWitt it is not too late for Mr. DeWitt unlike Christopher Hitchens. We need to pray for him the he hears the true gospel of Christ not false gospel of works righteousness and come to repentance and faith in Christ alone by faith alone for the glory of God alone.