San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘Another Gospel’ author tells howfaith challenged, grew
In “Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity,” author Alisa Girard Childers shares how her faith was deconstructed, challenged and even shaken — in church of all places. The book is listed as a #1 News Release in Christian Social Issues on Amazon.
Childers chronicles how a very persuasive and dynamic pastor at a church she and her family attended handpicked her and others to be part of a class he described as a ministry training course on par with a seminary education. Intrigued by the opportunity, she accepted.
“I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. I had been in church my whole life but the idea of deconstruction wasn’t anything I’d ever been exposed to,” Childers said during a recent interview with the Express-News. “It wasn’t like I had blind faith but my faith had always been informed by watching the gospel in action. But intellectually it was untested and, as a result, weaker than I knew.”
She was especially taken aback the very first time the class met and the pastor described himself as a “hopeful agnostic.” It seemed odd not just for a person of faith but a supposed leader of the faithful to describe himself in such a way, Childers said. “I’d heard some of the claims challenging the authority of Scripture, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and other core Christian doctrines, and I expected nonChristians to disbelieve but in our class, I seemed to be the only one who was troubled by what was being taught.”
After four months of the group training, Childers and her husband left the church. But the damage had been done, she said.
“The seeds of doubt that were planted during those four months grew into a full blown crisis of faith,” she said. “I talked about it with very few people
because I didn’t want to wreck their faith as well.”
She spoke about her theological struggles with only two people: her husband, Mike, who was patient and supportive throughout her ordeal, and her father, Chuck Girard, one of the pioneers in contemporary Christian music and a founding member of Love Song, one of the earliest and most influential bands in the genre.
“My dad was never rattled by any of the questions I brought up, which was very comforting because I was definitely rattled,” said Childers, a former member of the Dove Award-winning female Christian pop group ZOEgirl. She set out to get informed, scholarly responses to her progressive pastor’s skillfully articulated skepticism.
She dove headlong into subjects, such as textual criticism, church history, systematic theology and more. She audited seminary classes to dig even deeper. The results are impressive.
In “Another Gospel,” Childers takes the reader through what is essentially a seminary level tour de force of those disciplines. Yet she presents topics with an easily understandable clarity.
What is especially helpful for anyone who feels their faith may be under siege is the way in which Childers demonstrates that contemporary challenges to Historic Christianity are, in fact, nothing new.
As Childers ably demonstrates, Progressive Christianity and many of its challenges to the authority and reliability of Scripture, the Resurrection of Jesus, the nature of the atonement and other fundamental Christian beliefs have been answered before— and those answers are available to anyone who, like Childers, takes the time to find them.