Posted on 06/05/2019 11:27:40 AM PDT by Gamecock
Dave Gass, a former pastor who most recently led Grace Family Fellowship in Pleasant Hill, Missouri, has renounced his Christian faith as a system rife with abuse that caused him “mental and emotional breaks.”
A representative from his former church, however, has accused him of being an unrepentant adulterer.
Gass reportedly first made his announcement in a series of now protected tweets but not before they were copied and shared across multiple social media platforms.
“After 40 years of being a devout follower, 20 of those being an evangelical pastor, I am walking away from faith. Even though this has been a massive bomb drop in my life, it has been decades in the making,” he began in the thread before moving on to compare Scripture to Greek mythology.
“When I was in 8th grade and I was reading Greek mythology, it dawned on me how much of the supernatural interactions between the deity of the bible and mankind sounded like ancient mythology. That seed of doubt never went away,” he said.
He explained how he was raised in a “hyper-fundamentalist” Christian home where Christianity “didn’t work. The promises were empty. The answers were lies.”
Even so, he grew up to be a devout Christian who rarely missed church or failed to study Scripture.
“I was fully devoted to studying the scriptures. I think I missed maybe 12 Sundays in 40 years. I had completely memorized 18 books of the bible and was reading through the bible for the 24th time when I walked away,” he wrote.
None of it, however, helped his marriage.
“As an adult my marriage was a sham and a constant source of pain for me. I did everything I was supposed to - marriage workshops, counseling, bible reading together, date nights every week, marriage books - but my marriage never became what I was promised it would be,” he said.
He went on to discuss how miserable his life eventually became as his expectations, including experiencing the supernatural failed to match up with the reality he was experiencing.
“An inescapable reality that I came to was that the people who benefited the most from organized religion were the fringe attenders who didn’t take it too seriously. The people who were devout were the most miserable, but just kept trying harder,” he said.
“… The entire system is rife with abuse. And not just from the top down, sure there are abusive church leaders, but church leaders are abused by their congregants as well. Church people are just sh*tty to each other,” he continued. “I spent my entire life serving, loving, and trying to help people in my congregations. And the lies, betrayal, and slander I have received at the hands of church people left wounds that may never heal.”
He said he struggled so much with his church experience it began to affect his mental and ultimately physical health.
“This massive cognitive dissonance - my beliefs not matching with reality - created a separation between my head and my heart. I was gas lighting myself to stay in the faith. Eventually I could not maintain the facade anymore, I started to have mental and emotional breaks. My internal stress started to show in physical symptoms. Being a pastor - a professional Christian - was killing me,” Gass revealed.
To save himself, he said, he chose to walk away from the church.
“Eventually I pulled the lever and dropped the bomb. Career, marriage, family, social standing, network, reputation, all gone in an instant. And honestly I didn’t intend to fully walk away, but the way the church turned on me forced me to leave permanently,” he said.
He apologized to his former followers and said he still loves those who choose to dismiss him as an “apostate.”
“For those of you who want to yell at me, that’s fine. I know that many will call me an apostate, say I was never really saved, that I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and that a hotter hell awaits me. And to you I say I love you. My heart is tender toward you,” he said.
“To those who have been in my congregations or under my teaching/preaching I sincerely apologize. I thought I was right. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I could fake it until I made it. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I love you,” he added.
Justin Thuttle, a deacon at Grace Family Fellowship Church, claimed on Twitter that Gass was not entirely forthcoming about his faith journey and branded him an unrepentant sinner.
“Yes, he was my pastor when he ‘walked away’. He actually just slept with a married women (sic) in the church and got caught. He never repented and they still live together,” he wrote in a tweet last Thursday.
“Last year all the information came to light. The affair happened for almost a year before it was uncovered. So the whole, ‘I did everything right in my marriage’ part was kinda funny until I saw how many people liked his story,” he said.
The Christian Post reached out to the church for further comment Tuesday and a representative who asked to speak anonymously said Thuttle's response is accurate.
"Justin’s input is accurate. I would only add that, to our knowledge, none of the churches where Gass was on staff were megachurches. And after he resigned, he cut off all communications with anyone from Grace Family Fellowship," the representative said.
2Th 2:3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;
Happens all the time. The pastors works was revealed by fire.
Grace Family Fellowship in Pleasant Hill, Missouri
ha ha ha ha ha ha !!!!!
“It’s not me that’s messed up - it’s the system!”
That is why it took us three churches before we found the one that fit us here in Kentucky. The other two were way too dogmatic. I’m more “liberal” in my beliefs as I age. That is, I have learned that much of what we are taught are an interpretation of a translation of an interpretation that is not really what was stated or meant in the original Koine Greek or Hebrew.
And when a church goes into full dogma mode, just because of me asking questions, it’s time to move on.
The longer I live, the more I realize that NOTHING takes the place of a One-to-One relationship with Christ. Nothing. Take all the church trappings and structure away and if you don’t daily make real in your heart the fundamentals of humility, openness, honesty before the Lord, you’ll live in deception and facades. Everything this guy tweeted showed Works. I read, I attended, I did this and that.
I’ve seen this mentality burn out so many over the years. They forget the daily acts of repentance and submission. None of us are perfect and ALL need Mercy and forgiveness until our last breath.
We should come to faith in Christ in humility and with a broken, repentant, and thankful heart, and for the joy and assurance of knowing we will be with Him in eternity.
Entering into faith for the sole purpose of personal gain is only going to produce disappointment and frustration.
This is a very selfish man.
The Christian Faith is a personal relationship with Christ the Savior, not a group or organization.
Ooh lookit me - I read the Bible 57000 times and was on 57001 when I realized it’s all a sham - I am so smart.
No, you’re a stupid dork who obviously never understood what you were reading.
I figured out in my TEENS (after I had read the Bible from cover to cover twice) that the church was corrupt and had my first schism when I tried to “save” a person in pain and ended up hurting them more.
Picking up ones cross and carrying the burden is a hell of a lot harder than whining and trying to destroy others faith because he can’t live up to the responsibilities of his own decisions and throws his family away for the sake of some sexual pleasure. Even then he couldn’t do the right thing and divorce his wife first THEN go for the affair.
At the very least you’d think he’d have understood that God isn’t Santa Claus.
Nope... simple dork idiot.
I recall a major ministry leader saying 1 out of every 100 women in the typical congregation is looking to sleep with the pastor.
“What about loving your wife “
Wives it sounds like
So he fostered what he thought was a lie since the 8th grade. If he had any honest in his heart he never would have become a pastor till he resolved his doubts. Instead he became a fraud and made being a fraud his livelihood. He should be required to return every penny he stole from the ministry
Christianity only works when you have true faith! It is not about religion, it is about relationship with God. If you don’t have that relationship, God does not reveal himself to you, but once he does show himself, you will never lose that faith again.
He’s just rambling. He knows he can’t live in sin and be a pastor so he is blaming everyone but himself.
That’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard of him.
Actually I can understand his 8th grade doubt. I’ve seen it affect people before. He had doubts. It’s not an unusual human trait. But to know you are fraudulently ministering to a flock and you yourself know you are lying to your parishioners you have stolen from them.
Of course his genitalia were responsible for his coming clean. If he were happy with his lot he would have continued to steal from his flock.
There are three takes on hell
1. ECT (eternal conscious torment of the lost)
2. CI (conditional immortality also known as annihilationism. That is, mankind is not eternal - unless one is born again. The rest die in the second death)
3. Universalism - all are, at the end of the day, saved
I used to be an adherent of ECT but am now CI. Frankly, my second choice would be Universalism. I simply can’t put my creator and savior in the ECT. It doesn’t fit their personality.
The challenge is that there is a lot of biblical support for some form if universalism, but plenty that goes directly against it. Meanwhile, the ECT message seems to be made up of, basically, bad translations of the bible and a lack of understanding of the meaning of the plain language as it would have been interpreted by those alive when the Jesus talked of Gehenna.
Best I can tell is that ECT was developed by people wanting to increase the number of people going to, and donating to church, and they didn’t care if people were going out of fear of torture rather than desire for a relationship with their creator.
70 times 7
Only Christians shoot their wounded. And gossip and slander, which the Bible lumps together with murder, are rampant in some congregations, of EVERY denomination and creed. Sounds like this man needed an open ended sabbatical, until he can heal. Pastoring is an unbelievably stressful job, because no matter how rotten your congregants are, or how bad your marriage is, or how troubled your homelife is, you’re expected to be perfect, or as close to it, as possible.
Your point is well taken in all but this one respect - we have the Holy Spirit down here. Life isn’t hard because God made it that way. Life is hard because people and Satan make it hard and God is who we turn to.
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