# Confessions of an Ex-Pastor (with Timmy Gibson)

An episode of [TheThinkingAtheist](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/412308695), 10 Sep 2024, 1 h 10 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/e/711/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/61201319/podcast_759_timmygibsonb.mp3

Timmy Gibson was a Christian minister for three decades. He is a Christian no more. Check out his fascinating story. VIDEO of our second converstion: https://youtu.be/X95_yGi7LlM Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/thethinkingatheist--3270347/support.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Under semi to.
[0:05] Speaker 2: The Thinking atheist, It's not a person, it's a symbol,
[0:09] Speaker 2: an idea.
[0:10] Speaker 1: The population of atheists in this country is going.
[0:13] Speaker 2: Through the rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred.
[0:18] Speaker 1: If I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
[0:22] Speaker 1: not because I put my hand on a book and
[0:24] Speaker 1: made a wish.
[0:25] Speaker 2: And working together for a more rational world.
[0:29] Speaker 1: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
[0:32] Speaker 1: Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
[0:35] Speaker 2: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
[0:43] Speaker 2: Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
[0:56] Speaker 1: There is a video, a companion piece for this conversation
[1:00] Speaker 1: that is releasing on YouTube. The link is in the
[1:02] Speaker 1: description box. But I wanted to I don't know if
[1:06] Speaker 1: we're going to go deeper, going to a different direction
[1:09] Speaker 1: or several different directions, but we had the time. So
[1:12] Speaker 1: I have an ex pastor on the show, Timmy Gibson, Hey.
[1:16] Speaker 3: Brother, Hey brother.
[1:18] Speaker 1: We call each other brother outside of the face, right,
[1:22] Speaker 1: it just feels right. But and we didn't say this
[1:25] Speaker 1: on the video, but you and I have a history.
[1:27] Speaker 1: We've known each other. It's been thirty thirty plus years,
[1:30] Speaker 1: you know, and It's a weird thing because you knew
[1:33] Speaker 1: me when I was a Christian radio host, and I
[1:37] Speaker 1: knew you when you were mister clean minister. Were you
[1:42] Speaker 1: a pastor here.
[1:43] Speaker 3: Fresh out of Bible college and was traveling as a
[1:46] Speaker 3: healing evangelist? Come on, I used to lay hands on
[1:51] Speaker 3: people and see him get healed.
[1:52] Speaker 1: Lord, we call down your divine restoration. So what are
[1:58] Speaker 1: we talking about? The deaf to hear, the eyes to see.
[2:03] Speaker 3: Yeah, basically, headaches, slight back aches were notoriously being healed.
[2:09] Speaker 1: So you didn't see an amputated limb grow back.
[2:14] Speaker 3: Never have I seen that, or have I ever heard
[2:17] Speaker 3: of that with any evidence to follow. In fact, I
[2:20] Speaker 3: have a great story, seth. I don't know if I've
[2:21] Speaker 3: ever told you this. I was invited to a church
[2:23] Speaker 3: up in Chicago, and I was invited in to do
[2:27] Speaker 3: the Sunday night healing service, big church, five six hundred people. Afterwards,
[2:33] Speaker 3: you know, people are lining up for me to lay
[2:36] Speaker 3: hands on them and pray for him and get them healed.
[2:39] Speaker 3: And they brought up this lady in a wheelchair to
[2:43] Speaker 3: be healed. I forget what was going on with her,
[2:46] Speaker 3: and I kid you not. That night the pastor calls
[2:51] Speaker 3: me at the host home where I was staying and said, hey,
[2:54] Speaker 3: I got some said I shouldn't laugh. I got some
[2:57] Speaker 3: sad news that lady who prayed for died same day,
[3:00] Speaker 3: same day. And I was like, and actually, he was funny.
[3:04] Speaker 3: He's like, to be honest to me, she was dying.
[3:09] Speaker 3: He goes, she just came down front because she liked
[3:11] Speaker 3: to be in church, and you know, she wanted to
[3:13] Speaker 3: be in church on her dying day or whatever. And
[3:16] Speaker 3: he actually kind of joked about it and laughed about it.
[3:18] Speaker 3: And I said, well, I said, there you go. That's
[3:19] Speaker 3: how good my healing ministry is.
[3:21] Speaker 1: Is that how pastors talk with each other behind the scenes.
[3:23] Speaker 3: Yeah, yep, yeah, we unfortunately, and I'm sure maybe not
[3:28] Speaker 3: everybody does this, but I did, you know, I would
[3:32] Speaker 3: oftentimes after the service, we'd go out to eat and
[3:35] Speaker 3: talk about some of the crazy people and some of
[3:37] Speaker 3: the weird things and just yeah, kind of almost not
[3:40] Speaker 3: taking ourselves that seriously honestly.
[3:42] Speaker 1: So you came into an experiential would you call it
[3:46] Speaker 1: assembly of God?
[3:48] Speaker 3: Yeah? So I was ordained assembly of God early on,
[3:51] Speaker 3: and then I left the assemblies of God and God
[3:55] Speaker 3: amongst the charismatics, the Holy Roller, the divine healing, you know,
[4:01] Speaker 3: health wealth gospel got amongst that circle.
[4:05] Speaker 1: I'd want you to be rich and have the mansion,
[4:09] Speaker 1: and yeah, claim it.
[4:11] Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'd write on my check. Money cometh to me. Now, really, yep,
[4:16] Speaker 3: I'd write it on my check after I'd yeah, I
[4:19] Speaker 3: believed it. Okay, I believed I was so in seed.
[4:23] Speaker 1: But is the prosperity gospel mostly pitched by the people
[4:27] Speaker 1: who are at the end of the offering plate?
[4:30] Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, you know the really, if I'm honest, truly,
[4:34] Speaker 3: the people that benefit from the health and wealth teaching
[4:38] Speaker 3: are those at the top. It's the pastors, It's the preachers.
[4:42] Speaker 3: It's the teachers, it's the one preaching. Hey, give to God,
[4:46] Speaker 3: give to me, give to the man of God, give
[4:48] Speaker 3: to the church, and God will bless you. There was
[4:53] Speaker 3: a belief that if you give to God, you honor
[4:56] Speaker 3: God with the first fruits of your income, that would
[5:00] Speaker 3: bless you on the back end. And except the reality
[5:03] Speaker 3: is I had a church of three hundred people that
[5:05] Speaker 3: were attending my church that I started from scratching my
[5:07] Speaker 3: living room with ten people grew to three hundred. There
[5:12] Speaker 3: were some of the most faithful giving people in our
[5:14] Speaker 3: church that were almost like on welfare. I mean, they
[5:18] Speaker 3: could barely pay rent, they were foregoing so many things.
[5:23] Speaker 3: But they had this belief based upon the teachings that
[5:26] Speaker 3: I was subscribing to, that if they gave to God
[5:29] Speaker 3: and they honored God with a part of their income,
[5:33] Speaker 3: that God would bless them. And how we would frame
[5:35] Speaker 3: it if they weren't financially blessed, we'd say, hey, listen,
[5:39] Speaker 3: God's blessing you by protecting you from evil, protecting you
[5:42] Speaker 3: from sickness, and protecting you from disease. So it was.
[5:47] Speaker 3: You know, it's sadly now I view it as such
[5:49] Speaker 3: a racket. You know, it's because it's just not true.
[5:51] Speaker 3: It's not true. I can't tell any people I know
[5:54] Speaker 3: who tied, who came to church, who prayed and their
[5:57] Speaker 3: kids died.
[5:58] Speaker 1: What was that line? They used to say, pressed down,
[6:01] Speaker 1: shaken together and running over was how the portion would
[6:04] Speaker 1: be returned unto you.
[6:06] Speaker 3: Yeah, which is misused. That scripture actually is about forgiveness,
[6:09] Speaker 3: but we preachers, we would misuse that and say, yeah,
[6:11] Speaker 3: give to God and he'll bless you, bless damn, press together,
[6:14] Speaker 3: running over and that's just not true. I mean, it's
[6:17] Speaker 3: just not true.
[6:18] Speaker 1: But you believed it was true.
[6:19] Speaker 3: I did at the time.
[6:21] Speaker 1: I believed it was true, which takes me to the
[6:24] Speaker 1: sincerity of many ministers. Because we in the atheist movement,
[6:30] Speaker 1: I've heard people say that they're all Charlatans and shills,
[6:33] Speaker 1: and man, they learned how to milk it right, tax free,
[6:36] Speaker 1: good for you, enjoy that parsonage exemption all the way
[6:40] Speaker 1: to the bank. And I think there are some who
[6:43] Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, and there are a great many more,
[6:47] Speaker 1: I think who don't.
[6:49] Speaker 3: Right it ficking name names. I think like a Robert Tilton,
[6:51] Speaker 3: he's a complete con artist, you know, the Benny Hens
[6:55] Speaker 3: of the world. I think they're con artists. But yes,
[6:58] Speaker 3: truly I know that for myself. Well, I was very
[7:01] Speaker 3: sincere in many of my friends that I am unfortunately
[7:05] Speaker 3: not really friends with now, or maybe fortunately they were
[7:07] Speaker 3: sincere they genuinely believed it themselves. I even talked about
[7:10] Speaker 3: this before that not only was I a perpetrator of misinformation,
[7:14] Speaker 3: really selling this thing that's just not true, the myth,
[7:18] Speaker 3: but I was also a victim because I was raised
[7:20] Speaker 3: in it. It's all I knew. You know, you were
[7:23] Speaker 3: there I genuinely, sincerely believed it, and that if we
[7:29] Speaker 3: just stick with what is good, I'm building my house
[7:32] Speaker 3: on the rock, you know, and that if I would
[7:35] Speaker 3: not do this, I was building my house on the sand.
[7:38] Speaker 3: So it's weird how we teach this. If you're not
[7:41] Speaker 3: blessed now financially, Hey, you're blessed by being protected, or
[7:47] Speaker 3: you're blessed in the afterlife. You're sending money on ahead
[7:51] Speaker 3: to heaven to build you a big mansion. So even
[7:54] Speaker 3: if you were poverty stricken now you had this idea
[7:59] Speaker 3: of hope that well, in the afterlife, I'm going.
[8:04] Speaker 1: To be rich. Yeah, you know it's hard to watch, Yeah,
[8:10] Speaker 1: because people are desperate for hope. And I think when
[8:13] Speaker 1: we're in a culture that needs hope or craves hope,
[8:17] Speaker 1: and then you see the hope sellers, sincere or not.
[8:21] Speaker 1: I mean, this puts a lot of people in very
[8:23] Speaker 1: precarious positions.
[8:24] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[8:24] Speaker 1: Sometimes, did you immediately start behind a pulpit or on
[8:30] Speaker 1: a stage or whatever the model for your church was,
[8:32] Speaker 1: or did you go up through the ranks, Oh look,
[8:34] Speaker 1: I'm a volunteer, deacon, youth pastor worship pastor how did
[8:39] Speaker 1: you get there?
[8:39] Speaker 3: Yeah? So as soon as I was in Bible College,
[8:42] Speaker 3: I seemed to have a knack for teaching, and so instantly,
[8:46] Speaker 3: like my first day of Bible College, I tried out
[8:49] Speaker 3: to be a Sunday school teacher or a healing school
[8:52] Speaker 3: teacher or school the Bible. We had different names for it,
[8:56] Speaker 3: and I started with you know, I was nineteen twenty
[8:59] Speaker 3: twenty one teaching the high school class or the junior
[9:02] Speaker 3: high class. And then as I got older, then I
[9:05] Speaker 3: started teaching the young adults class. And then I was
[9:09] Speaker 3: teaching after I had gotten married, and I was teaching
[9:11] Speaker 3: the young married couple's class. And then it was youth
[9:15] Speaker 3: pastor position at a little trailer church literally was a
[9:18] Speaker 3: trailer home. I was called Grace Church. I don't think
[9:20] Speaker 3: it's even around anymore in Springfield, Missouri. And then from
[9:24] Speaker 3: there just yeah, I kept graduating to go to a
[9:26] Speaker 3: bigger youth group, and then I got to a church.
[9:29] Speaker 3: Actually this pastor worked alongside Joel Ostein, so I was
[9:32] Speaker 3: working under a pastor who was friends with Joel Ostein
[9:36] Speaker 3: back in the John Ostein days. John Ostein was the
[9:38] Speaker 3: pastor of Lakewood who's the father of Joel Ostein. Joel
[9:42] Speaker 3: Ostein took over Lakewood Church and now it's you know whatever,
[9:45] Speaker 3: fifty thousand people show up on Sunday mornings.
[9:47] Speaker 1: Yeah, I wanted to give that context for some of
[9:49] Speaker 1: my overseas listeners or those who aren't familiar. Joel Ostein
[9:53] Speaker 1: is a monumentally wealthy Oh yeah, mega pastor in Texas.
[10:00] Speaker 1: I think they have twenty thousand in a service.
[10:03] Speaker 3: I think it's fifty fifty. Are in the largest, if
[10:07] Speaker 3: not the largest, one of the very largest. Yeah, Sunday gatherings.
[10:11] Speaker 1: He's got a ten million dollar mansion. I think his
[10:13] Speaker 1: net worth is close to forty million something like that.
[10:16] Speaker 1: Talk about prosperity, gospel.
[10:18] Speaker 3: Yeah, God's blessing him.
[10:23] Speaker 1: So again you you sort of rose through the ranks.
[10:26] Speaker 3: Yeah, rose through the ranks. My first legitimate When I
[10:30] Speaker 3: say legitimate, I was paid for my first you know,
[10:33] Speaker 3: twenty five dollars a week type of a thing when
[10:36] Speaker 3: I first started. But then I got my first like
[10:38] Speaker 3: real salary with a four to oh one K and
[10:40] Speaker 3: benefits and everything. When I moved down to Houston, Texas
[10:44] Speaker 3: and I worked down at a church down in Houston, Texas.
[10:47] Speaker 3: Just about forty five minutes from the said minister Joe
[10:50] Speaker 3: Lostein's church down there in Lakewood, and it was a
[10:53] Speaker 3: fast growing church. I think the year that I started,
[10:56] Speaker 3: the church was running about eight hundred people. In all
[11:00] Speaker 3: credit to the pastor himself, gifted communicator, great as you say, storyteller.
[11:06] Speaker 3: I mean, his sermons were crafted to a t. I
[11:10] Speaker 3: was very impressed. I took a lot of notes and
[11:13] Speaker 3: learned a lot from him how to just communicate. And
[11:17] Speaker 3: that was my first real youth pastor position. And at
[11:20] Speaker 3: the time when I took that job, there were eighty
[11:22] Speaker 3: kids in the youth group high school, just high school,
[11:27] Speaker 3: and before when I left there after about four years,
[11:30] Speaker 3: there were five hundred kids coming to our Wednesday night service.
[11:36] Speaker 3: It was crazy.
[11:38] Speaker 1: Did you do like the super hip youth thing. Oh yeah,
[11:41] Speaker 1: music and.
[11:42] Speaker 3: The tables and the fourier, yeah, PlayStations and graffiti yes good, yeah,
[11:48] Speaker 3: all of it. Yeah, foosball tables surrounding the sanctuary and
[11:53] Speaker 3: it was decked out super cool. You went, hubcaps on
[11:55] Speaker 3: the backstage and lights and metal on the I mean
[12:00] Speaker 3: it was my pulpit which I made because I know oddly,
[12:04] Speaker 3: I know a weld, so I was a welder in
[12:06] Speaker 3: high school, and so I welded together a pulpit out
[12:10] Speaker 3: of car parts. Wow, you should have seen. It was bad.
[12:13] Speaker 1: A man, and you're a hip pass you're a hip pastor.
[12:17] Speaker 1: I did a youth thing. We did a radio thing
[12:20] Speaker 1: for an alternative Christian event in Owasso, Oklahoma, and they
[12:25] Speaker 1: brought out and they did a car bash. I don't
[12:27] Speaker 1: know if anyone's old enough to remember to car bash,
[12:30] Speaker 1: but there was a time four I don't know, in
[12:33] Speaker 1: the eighties when they would bring out an old car
[12:38] Speaker 1: and you would spray paint the hell out of it,
[12:40] Speaker 1: so I guess there's Jesus messages or whatever on it.
[12:43] Speaker 1: And then they would you would pay money to a
[12:46] Speaker 1: Christian charity or some cause to get a sledgehammer and
[12:51] Speaker 1: you would just beat the shit out. So all right,
[12:55] Speaker 1: three swipes of the hammer will be five bucks for
[12:58] Speaker 1: you know this or this Christmas charity or is that thing?
[13:03] Speaker 3: I remember we did that.
[13:04] Speaker 1: We thought we were awesome, man, we thought we were awesome.
[13:07] Speaker 3: So I've got a story for you. When I was
[13:10] Speaker 3: a youth pastor, we did a bunch of the things
[13:14] Speaker 3: like you mentioned, different things to attract people to come
[13:17] Speaker 3: to the church. And so at one point we had
[13:19] Speaker 3: other youth groups bringing their buses, that said, first Baptist
[13:24] Speaker 3: Church of whatever, bringing their whole youth group, including their
[13:28] Speaker 3: leadership and their pastor, to come to our youth group
[13:32] Speaker 3: to see what we were doing, because we really were
[13:35] Speaker 3: like notorious is the word? Maybe like that church still
[13:39] Speaker 3: remembers me, remembers what we did, all the crazy stuff.
[13:43] Speaker 3: I used to eat goldfish for Jesus, live goldfish. I
[13:47] Speaker 3: would swallow them. But in one time we took these big,
[13:50] Speaker 3: huge metal oil containers. Bring all your Satan music, bring
[13:57] Speaker 3: all your tapes and your CDs. Well, I don't know
[13:59] Speaker 3: if thats.
[14:00] Speaker 1: Then this must have been in the what nineties, This
[14:03] Speaker 1: was yes, early nineties. So this is satanic panic.
[14:06] Speaker 3: This is the satanic backward masking. And we brought that
[14:10] Speaker 3: stuff food and I put lighter fluid in there and
[14:13] Speaker 3: threw a match, and the were burning that for the
[14:15] Speaker 3: Lord and praise and worship while we're running around the barrel.
[14:17] Speaker 1: You burned albums because we usually talked about it in
[14:21] Speaker 1: the abstract. Now I think we just tossed ours in
[14:25] Speaker 1: my culture, but we heard about those who did the bonfire.
[14:29] Speaker 3: That was you did the bonfire do the bonfires?
[14:32] Speaker 1: There were stories. Did you hear those? Where when I
[14:35] Speaker 1: threw the Ossy Album in or I threw Iron Maiden in,
[14:38] Speaker 1: you could hear the screams of the demons.
[14:40] Speaker 3: Absolutely as it was. I wish I had some of
[14:46] Speaker 3: those because that takes back, you know.
[14:47] Speaker 1: But you've got a youth pastor vibe about you. I
[14:50] Speaker 1: can see you being that guy. Did you have the
[14:53] Speaker 1: you know, the hair, you didn't have the tats. Back then,
[14:55] Speaker 1: I had.
[14:56] Speaker 3: Tats, but they were all elbow up. You know. Now
[15:00] Speaker 3: no one can see me, but I you know, fully
[15:01] Speaker 3: covered my hands, my all of it, fingers are fully covered.
[15:06] Speaker 3: But at the time I wanted to be appropriate for
[15:08] Speaker 3: the Lord, and so if I put a T shirt on,
[15:10] Speaker 3: you couldn't see any of them. In fact, the pastor
[15:12] Speaker 3: told me, I don't want you to get any tattoos
[15:14] Speaker 3: below your elbow. I don't want the kids feeling like
[15:16] Speaker 3: it's okay to get tattoos. So that was a stipulation.
[15:20] Speaker 3: When I got the job, He's like, hey, I don't
[15:22] Speaker 3: I don't really want the tattoos showing. And at the
[15:26] Speaker 3: time I had short hair because I had to Bible college.
[15:28] Speaker 3: Wouldn't let me have it long.
[15:29] Speaker 1: Well, that's weird because now the whole game's reversed. Tattoos.
[15:33] Speaker 1: That's credibility. Man.
[15:34] Speaker 3: Absolutely, you've seen some shit.
[15:36] Speaker 1: You've been out in the world, right.
[15:38] Speaker 3: I've had pastors tell me if you ever come back
[15:40] Speaker 3: to Jesus, I want you to be.
[15:44] Speaker 1: So before you know it, you're starting your own church.
[15:48] Speaker 3: Yes. Back in two thousand is when I was working
[15:51] Speaker 3: at this church in Houston, you know, very successful youth group.
[15:54] Speaker 3: Like I said, you know, nice paying job, four oh
[15:56] Speaker 3: one k insurance, the whole nine yards, cushy job, really,
[15:59] Speaker 3: you know. I mean it was a great environment, as
[16:02] Speaker 3: great as that can be in that world. Of course,
[16:05] Speaker 3: I mean there was definitely some cultish vibes and some
[16:08] Speaker 3: squirrely stuff going on. But anyway, about two thousands when
[16:12] Speaker 3: I had the dream of starting my own church because
[16:15] Speaker 3: I felt hamstringed a lot too, because I work better
[16:20] Speaker 3: by myself. You know, I don't know if I'm just
[16:22] Speaker 3: not easy to get along with or I'm just too
[16:24] Speaker 3: much of a freethinker, and so there were so many
[16:27] Speaker 3: things that they wouldn't let me do that I wanted
[16:30] Speaker 3: to do because it was just it was too out
[16:33] Speaker 3: there and so I thought, I'm going to start my
[16:36] Speaker 3: own church one day, and I'm going to do what
[16:38] Speaker 3: I want to do. I'm going to do it like
[16:40] Speaker 3: Jesus wants me to do it, you know, which is
[16:43] Speaker 3: just me telling myself that. And so in two thousand
[16:46] Speaker 3: had that dream launched out in two thousand and two,
[16:50] Speaker 3: and actually had our first planning meeting in two thousand
[16:54] Speaker 3: and two with about ten people that I gathered. And
[16:58] Speaker 3: this is up in Kansas City.
[16:59] Speaker 1: Were you harbor from other churches or these just your buddies?
[17:02] Speaker 3: Yeah, it was people that were They were all at
[17:04] Speaker 3: other churches, but they liked my vibe, my charisma, and
[17:08] Speaker 3: they thought, yeah, he's going to start a new kind
[17:10] Speaker 3: of church and do it the way we want to
[17:12] Speaker 3: do it, you know. And so yeah, we you know,
[17:14] Speaker 3: I pulled together. When we kicked off our service in
[17:17] Speaker 3: January of twenty two thousand and three, we had unbelievable
[17:23] Speaker 3: rock and music. I mean, like by all stand like,
[17:27] Speaker 3: I had friends that were living in Nashville as musicians
[17:30] Speaker 3: that came up to our service and they're like, dude,
[17:31] Speaker 3: you got some great music.
[17:33] Speaker 1: Now we were It was just like music. It was
[17:35] Speaker 1: just like crashed in music.
[17:36] Speaker 3: Well, we weren't doing no gaither stuff, you know. I mean,
[17:40] Speaker 3: we were doing Hillsong, you know, elevation church, like really progressive.
[17:44] Speaker 3: And so we grew up into the right really quick.
[17:47] Speaker 3: I think the end of our first year we were
[17:48] Speaker 3: toe hundred people. End of our second year we were
[17:51] Speaker 3: like two hundred. By the third and fourth year we
[17:53] Speaker 3: were at three hundred people. So we were up into
[17:56] Speaker 3: the right. I'm getting invitations from other churches to come
[17:59] Speaker 3: and speak about church growth and what we're doing. And
[18:02] Speaker 3: I even went was invited to go to a conference.
[18:04] Speaker 3: My first conference, I was on a panel of successful pastors.
[18:08] Speaker 3: And actually some of the pastors that were on that panel,
[18:11] Speaker 3: they people would know their names if I said them,
[18:12] Speaker 3: And these are megachurch pastors. And I was like this
[18:16] Speaker 3: up and coming, like the golden child, you know, the young, cool,
[18:20] Speaker 3: wild guys doing this church thing. And then that's when
[18:24] Speaker 3: the doubts started coming in.
[18:26] Speaker 1: So it was around that time you're starting to skyrocket yep,
[18:31] Speaker 1: deep back in the recesses of your skull danger.
[18:36] Speaker 3: And the first thing for me, I think, like, what
[18:39] Speaker 3: a story you've told before. I had a lot of
[18:41] Speaker 3: gay friends and gay friends that were Christian and not
[18:45] Speaker 3: necessarily pastors, but just people that were, you know, good
[18:48] Speaker 3: friends of mine, and they were good people, and many
[18:52] Speaker 3: they were Christians. They were good Christian people. And I
[18:55] Speaker 3: just the more I just pondered on it and thought
[18:59] Speaker 3: of it, and even read the Bible, I thought, I
[19:02] Speaker 3: just don't see how if if God made you this way,
[19:05] Speaker 3: Like I didn't ask to be heterosexual. I'm just I
[19:07] Speaker 3: always liked women, you know, and my friend, you know,
[19:12] Speaker 3: we'll call him Rick, Rick just liked men, you know,
[19:15] Speaker 3: and he just did and he just found women not
[19:18] Speaker 3: appealing at all. And I thought, so if God made
[19:23] Speaker 3: him this because he wasn't abused by his uncle, you know,
[19:25] Speaker 3: he didn't have any kind of crazy story. In fact,
[19:27] Speaker 3: his parents were still together, they were Christian, he had
[19:29] Speaker 3: a good home life, and here he's just genuinely gay
[19:32] Speaker 3: with a good heart. And I thought, I don't think
[19:35] Speaker 3: this is wrong to be gay. I just don't think
[19:37] Speaker 3: this is wrong. So that was the first big, big
[19:40] Speaker 3: piece that really hurt my church actually, because we were
[19:43] Speaker 3: blowing and going. It was three hundred people, and I
[19:46] Speaker 3: said I support gay marriage, and people were wah wah
[19:51] Speaker 3: wah about.
[19:51] Speaker 1: How did you say, did you make it formal from
[19:54] Speaker 1: the stage I did.
[19:55] Speaker 3: I said next week, I said here at the end
[19:57] Speaker 3: of the month, whatever it was. I did series, a
[19:59] Speaker 3: lot of the series, but I said, on this particular Sunday,
[20:02] Speaker 3: I'm going to preach a message is probably the most
[20:04] Speaker 3: important message of my career, and it's called God Loves Gays.
[20:10] Speaker 3: And I said, I want everybody to be here. Bring
[20:11] Speaker 3: your friends, if you have any gay friends, bring them all.
[20:13] Speaker 3: Bring everybody to the church. We had a good turnout
[20:16] Speaker 3: except fifty. So I had three hundred people. Fifty of
[20:20] Speaker 3: those people on that Sunday my announcement of the sermon,
[20:25] Speaker 3: they quit, Like some core people that were big money
[20:27] Speaker 3: givers said, we think that's an abomination, that's not God's will,
[20:33] Speaker 3: that it's you know.
[20:34] Speaker 1: They hadn't heard a syllable. You'd say, no.
[20:37] Speaker 3: They had not heard a single They had no idea
[20:40] Speaker 3: what I was going to say, and so fifty of
[20:43] Speaker 3: them left, So we're down to two fifty. When that
[20:46] Speaker 3: Sunday actually arrived, we had a you know, it was
[20:49] Speaker 3: a blowout a lot of people and I preached the
[20:53] Speaker 3: sermon God Loves Gays, and basically at that time, I
[20:56] Speaker 3: think Seth I was really saying, Okay, it's okay to
[20:59] Speaker 3: be gay, it's even okay to live a gay lifestyle,
[21:02] Speaker 3: just do it in a in the moral way. So
[21:05] Speaker 3: I just kind of filtered it through heterosexual one man
[21:08] Speaker 3: with one woman, so one man with one man and
[21:11] Speaker 3: one woman with a woman. I kind of apprecied it
[21:13] Speaker 3: from Hey, God loves us all. We all no one's perfect,
[21:16] Speaker 3: we're all sinners, we're all you know, all the stuff.
[21:19] Speaker 3: So I just kind of say, hey, listen, it's okay
[21:21] Speaker 3: to be gay, just live it morally, do it in
[21:25] Speaker 3: a moral way. Again, I don't believe any of this now, obviously,
[21:29] Speaker 3: but it just didn't. You know. It went over great
[21:32] Speaker 3: with a lot of the new people that came to
[21:34] Speaker 3: hear the sermon, but man, I lost another fifty core
[21:38] Speaker 3: members of the church because they're like, well, like, you've
[21:42] Speaker 3: gone heretical. We can't support a church that doesn't stick
[21:45] Speaker 3: with the scriptures. It's in the Bible that it's wrong,
[21:49] Speaker 3: and they left.
[21:51] Speaker 1: We're going to get the rest of ex pastor Timmy
[21:54] Speaker 1: Gibson's story on announcing to his church that God loves
[21:58] Speaker 1: gays and doesn't judge gay and what happened after short
[22:03] Speaker 1: break I'll be right back. We continue with a conversation
[22:12] Speaker 1: with ex pastor Timmy Gibson, who was becoming more egalitarian
[22:19] Speaker 1: humanitarian by the day, just announcing to his church that
[22:23] Speaker 1: God doesn't judge gay people, and the blowback was significant.
[22:30] Speaker 1: Did they tell you to your face write letters?
[22:33] Speaker 3: Oh yeah, emails letters. One guy did a big blog
[22:36] Speaker 3: I found out later, and someone goes, you say that
[22:38] Speaker 3: blog written about you, and I'm like, no, so well
[22:42] Speaker 3: I went and read the blog and it was very
[22:43] Speaker 3: hurtful because this guy was on the worship team, he
[22:45] Speaker 3: was a core leader in our church, and he wrote
[22:49] Speaker 3: this big hit piece on me about that. You know,
[22:51] Speaker 3: I've crossed over and supporting gays now, and you know,
[22:56] Speaker 3: I was. I was so convinced. And you know, I'm
[22:58] Speaker 3: a thought I'm a very I think and I read
[23:01] Speaker 3: and I contemplate.
[23:02] Speaker 1: You.
[23:02] Speaker 3: I don't do things just out of my butt, you know,
[23:04] Speaker 3: I'm very thoughtful about it. So it wasn't I wasn't
[23:07] Speaker 3: wishy washed. I was like, no, this is this is
[23:09] Speaker 3: a I'm willing to die on this hill. You know,
[23:11] Speaker 3: I support gay marriage one and it didn't go over
[23:16] Speaker 3: well with the fundamental right winger types. But then my
[23:19] Speaker 3: church became a little bit more, even more progressive, more
[23:22] Speaker 3: liberal if you will. In theology, Okay, maybe the Bible
[23:27] Speaker 3: isn't an errant, you know, maybe there are some errors.
[23:29] Speaker 3: You know, maybe there are some contradictions.
[23:31] Speaker 1: So that's how you get over the Book of Leviticus. Yeah,
[23:35] Speaker 1: you were able to just say, eh, not necessarily right.
[23:38] Speaker 1: You were taking the exact ow knife to your own fundamentals.
[23:42] Speaker 3: I was picking and choosing Wow, if I didn't like it,
[23:44] Speaker 3: I either ignored it or I revamped it, you know,
[23:49] Speaker 3: and would find somebody else that wrote a book about
[23:53] Speaker 3: what those scriptures really meant in the original context.
[23:56] Speaker 1: Did that cause any conflict in you? I mean, you're
[23:58] Speaker 1: you're essentially saying, hey, I think God got this wrong,
[24:01] Speaker 1: or whoever was interpreting God got it wrong. That's that's
[24:05] Speaker 1: a weird spot.
[24:05] Speaker 3: Yeah. Once the once the cards start to fall, then
[24:08] Speaker 3: they start falling fast because at that point then you
[24:11] Speaker 3: start realizing, well, wait, if that was misinterpreted, what else
[24:15] Speaker 3: is potentially misinterpreted here? And then it's just like it
[24:20] Speaker 3: starts crumbling. At that point, everything starts to be I'm
[24:23] Speaker 3: questioning everything, and the big the one that really kind
[24:27] Speaker 3: of nailed, nailed our church in a bad way? Is
[24:32] Speaker 3: that I said? I just don't think Jesus is the
[24:34] Speaker 3: only way.
[24:36] Speaker 1: At a Christian church.
[24:39] Speaker 3: That one over about as well as a lead balloon.
[24:41] Speaker 1: But why not throw a Momotov cocktail through the front door? Man?
[24:46] Speaker 3: And at the behest of many of my pastor friends.
[24:48] Speaker 3: I mean, they all like Timmy, this is this is
[24:50] Speaker 3: because I talked to them about it. Us. I feel
[24:52] Speaker 3: very strongly about this, like this isn't a joke for me.
[24:56] Speaker 3: I have to preach what I believe is to be true.
[24:58] Speaker 3: I can't stand up and knowingly lie. You know, I
[25:02] Speaker 3: was lying unknowingly many, you know, obviously for my whole career.
[25:06] Speaker 3: But I didn't know I was. You know, I didn't
[25:08] Speaker 3: know that. But as I started, because truth became clear
[25:13] Speaker 3: to me and I started understanding things, I had to
[25:16] Speaker 3: go with what truth was, I had to go with
[25:19] Speaker 3: what was real. And yeah, it just caused a lot
[25:24] Speaker 3: of conflict with a lot of my pastor friends that
[25:26] Speaker 3: they kept just telling me, Timmy, be quiet, just just
[25:30] Speaker 3: don't keep that to yourself. I can't tell you how
[25:32] Speaker 3: many times I heard that, keep that to yourself. It's fine.
[25:35] Speaker 3: I don't think it's wrong to be gay either, but
[25:37] Speaker 3: I don't preach on it like so many of my
[25:40] Speaker 3: pastor friends said that, and I just couldn't do it, seth.
[25:44] Speaker 3: I just couldn't sleep with my sleep with myself at night.
[25:46] Speaker 3: I just couldn't knowingly continue to propagate a lie. I
[25:51] Speaker 3: had to speak out. And how old I was. Let's see,
[25:57] Speaker 3: at that time, I was in my late thirdies up
[26:01] Speaker 3: into my mid forties. Rather, I was in my mid forties,
[26:04] Speaker 3: so I was definitely midlife crisis, no doubt about it.
[26:07] Speaker 3: Because I noticed there was this shift in me that
[26:10] Speaker 3: I just didn't give a rat's ass what people thought
[26:13] Speaker 3: about me. Then I started tattooing my arms and start
[26:16] Speaker 3: tattooing my finger. I was just getting more and more like,
[26:19] Speaker 3: you know what, I'm gonna do what I want to do.
[26:21] Speaker 3: I can't imagine God would be upset with me expressing
[26:25] Speaker 3: myself in an artistic way. This is how I'm wired.
[26:29] Speaker 3: I'm just made this way. I'm still living moral like
[26:32] Speaker 3: I'm still not drinking, I'm still not cussing. I cuss now,
[26:35] Speaker 3: but you know I'm not doing all these things, so surely,
[26:40] Speaker 3: like that's what matters. It's the right. God looks at
[26:42] Speaker 3: the heart, not the outward appearance, so God doesn't see
[26:46] Speaker 3: my tattoos. It's all good. And it just kept going
[26:49] Speaker 3: and going until finally the conversation that I had with
[26:52] Speaker 3: the some of the team when I said, I just
[26:55] Speaker 3: I think that Hindu's go to heaven, Buddhists go to heaven.
[26:58] Speaker 3: I think, I think, if you're good, you go to heaven.
[27:00] Speaker 3: I just can't imagine God's going to send people to
[27:02] Speaker 3: hell because they just don't believe in Jesus, that you know.
[27:07] Speaker 3: And then I had that there was a book or
[27:09] Speaker 3: a saying or a blog or something I read that
[27:11] Speaker 3: said Ann Frank is in hell. Ted Bundy's in heaven,
[27:17] Speaker 3: and I think I was thinking, wait a minute, Ted
[27:20] Speaker 3: Bundy was evil and he's in heaven because why he
[27:25] Speaker 3: accepted Christ before he was electrocuted. And I'm like, wait,
[27:29] Speaker 3: and Frank, because she was Jewish and precious and sweet
[27:33] Speaker 3: and was Jewish, is going to burn in hell forever.
[27:37] Speaker 3: And Ted Bundy's in heaven because that sorry ass gave
[27:39] Speaker 3: his heart to Jesus before he died. It just I
[27:44] Speaker 3: was like, no, there's no way, that's the way it's
[27:46] Speaker 3: set up. And if that is the way it's set up.
[27:48] Speaker 3: I don't want anything to do with this God anymore.
[27:51] Speaker 1: Can you imagine the scenario where Ted Bundy is reunited
[27:54] Speaker 1: in heaven with so many of his victims that he slaughter.
[27:57] Speaker 1: They killed what thirty three women, and you know a
[28:00] Speaker 1: bunch of them had to have been Christians. So all
[28:01] Speaker 1: of a sudden they're sharing what the same neighborhood street
[28:05] Speaker 1: mansions next to each other. Hey, Ted, Praise Jesus, how
[28:08] Speaker 1: you been right? It's just crazy, It's crazy.
[28:12] Speaker 3: I couldn't. I felt so conflicted. I really, what was
[28:17] Speaker 3: happening in me is I couldn't reconcile so many things.
[28:21] Speaker 3: It just things that I couldn't understand. But I was
[28:26] Speaker 3: doing those mental gymnastics as we do. As you know,
[28:28] Speaker 3: when you were a Christian, you make sense of things
[28:31] Speaker 3: that just don't make it. They don't make any sense,
[28:33] Speaker 3: but you make sense of it. And I no longer
[28:36] Speaker 3: was going to let myself do that. I wasn't going
[28:38] Speaker 3: to take something that just clearly didn't make sense at
[28:41] Speaker 3: face value and try to make it. Well, you know,
[28:45] Speaker 3: the mysteries belonged to the Lord. You know, his ways
[28:48] Speaker 3: are above our ways, you know, he had a purpose
[28:51] Speaker 3: and a plan. We just don't know it, like all
[28:53] Speaker 3: that silly stuff that I would say.
[28:55] Speaker 1: Yeah, But Timmy, were you just in the moment where
[28:57] Speaker 1: you didn't think about not being able to pay your
[29:00] Speaker 1: bills the next month? You know? I mean, if you
[29:03] Speaker 1: self immolate at we'll call it forty, then what were
[29:07] Speaker 1: you even there in your mental space? I?
[29:10] Speaker 3: Yes, I knew that this was a big deal, and
[29:14] Speaker 3: I knew that I potentially was upending my life.
[29:21] Speaker 1: I might be sleeping in my car tomorrow.
[29:24] Speaker 3: There was that reality. But at the but if I
[29:27] Speaker 3: knew I was being true to myself, I was like,
[29:29] Speaker 3: you know what, so be it. I'm okay with it.
[29:31] Speaker 3: You know, I'm going to do what I think is
[29:34] Speaker 3: right and true and loving and kind.
[29:38] Speaker 1: Were you familiar with Carlton Pearson's stuff?
[29:40] Speaker 3: Oh? Friends, I was good friends of them.
[29:42] Speaker 1: Were you? For those who don't know who Carlton Pearson is?
[29:44] Speaker 1: You want to flesh it out?
[29:45] Speaker 3: Yeah, Carlton Pearson is pastoring Higher Dimensions, which was a
[29:49] Speaker 3: megachurch in the buckle of the Bible Belt in Tulsa,
[29:52] Speaker 3: very popular connected to or Roberts University. I mean, this
[29:55] Speaker 3: guy's everywhere he's doing Azusa street revivals. I mean, this
[29:58] Speaker 3: guy's ginormous. He was a rock star, oh rock star,
[30:01] Speaker 3: and could sing and preachy like nobody's business at Bishop
[30:06] Speaker 3: Carlton Pearson just an amazing gift. And yeah, he threw
[30:10] Speaker 3: and he's very intellectually, he's a reader, and he said
[30:13] Speaker 3: through further studies, he came to the realization that hell
[30:16] Speaker 3: isn't real, that everybody goes to heaven. And he took
[30:20] Speaker 3: that literally that you know, God so loved the world
[30:22] Speaker 3: that Jesus died on the cross for the sins and
[30:24] Speaker 3: everybody's saved. Everybody's just saved. And man, that didn't go
[30:28] Speaker 3: over well. His church of eight thousand people on Sunday
[30:31] Speaker 3: morning began to dwindle to the point of where they
[30:35] Speaker 3: had maybe one hundred people in a mega building and
[30:38] Speaker 3: it was like crickets and he's continuing to preach down
[30:43] Speaker 3: this road and everybody turned their backs on him. I
[30:46] Speaker 3: remember it was very public, dude.
[30:48] Speaker 1: I went to a church four miles down the street
[30:51] Speaker 1: I won't name the church, Grace Fellowship, where the pastor
[30:57] Speaker 1: preached a whole sermon against Carlton Pearson saying that he's
[31:01] Speaker 1: been deceived by the devil, and Hell is a real place.
[31:04] Speaker 1: He wrapped a whole sermon around. Carlton Pearson called him out.
[31:09] Speaker 3: YEP called him out, and interesting enough, so I was
[31:12] Speaker 3: still a Christian at that time, but I was definitely
[31:15] Speaker 3: you know, I always had a compassionate heart. So after
[31:18] Speaker 3: that all came out and everybody's you know, doing preaching
[31:21] Speaker 3: sermons against him. I knew him, and so I had
[31:24] Speaker 3: a way to get a hold of him. So I
[31:26] Speaker 3: got a hold of him and I just told him.
[31:27] Speaker 3: I said, hey, listen, I had to say this. I said,
[31:30] Speaker 3: though I don't agree with your position, I said, I
[31:33] Speaker 3: think you're a prince of preachers. I think you're a
[31:35] Speaker 3: great man, and I just want you to know I
[31:38] Speaker 3: support you and I'm not turning my back on you,
[31:40] Speaker 3: and I think you're great. Well, he reached out to me,
[31:43] Speaker 3: and I actually came back to tulsl and had lunch
[31:45] Speaker 3: with him at Whole Foods, and we shot the shit
[31:49] Speaker 3: about all different kinds of preacher drama and things that
[31:53] Speaker 3: he knew about famous preachers and things that were going
[31:57] Speaker 3: on behind the closed doors, and which was interesting to
[32:00] Speaker 3: me because I wasn't quite deep into the circles clearly
[32:04] Speaker 3: like he was. But hearing those things from him was
[32:09] Speaker 3: just validation that humans are involved in all of this.
[32:16] Speaker 3: And so even when you think of a pastor who's
[32:18] Speaker 3: up there preaching all this holiness stuff behind closed doors,
[32:24] Speaker 3: they're not necessarily living in the way that they're teaching.
[32:28] Speaker 1: You're sort of edited for broadcast, aren't they.
[32:31] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I remember one pastor in particular, again a
[32:34] Speaker 3: megachurch in Tulsa, Mega ministry actually, and this guy would
[32:39] Speaker 3: when they would do camp meetings out in Las Vegas,
[32:42] Speaker 3: he was gambling and drinking and yeah, wow, yeah, But
[32:47] Speaker 3: and he told me, he goes, well, I don't tell
[32:48] Speaker 3: anybody about this. They wouldn't understand it. I'm like, I
[32:52] Speaker 3: think we would like No, I think you'd relate real well,
[32:56] Speaker 3: Toody probably.
[32:57] Speaker 1: I remember that guy who was it, William Bennett. It
[33:00] Speaker 1: was a major evangelical politician from the nineties, I think.
[33:04] Speaker 1: And he wrote this book about how we need to
[33:06] Speaker 1: return to our moral center, and then it comes to
[33:09] Speaker 1: public that he's got eight million dollars in gambling debt
[33:12] Speaker 1: from Las Vegas. Do you feel like the people, the
[33:15] Speaker 1: preachers who were going after a specific sin, you think secretly,
[33:20] Speaker 1: that's their thing.
[33:21] Speaker 3: Yeah, they do. There were the death too much. Really,
[33:24] Speaker 3: I think a lot of times when a preacher is
[33:26] Speaker 3: heart really harping on something, just like remember Jimmy Swagger. Yeah,
[33:29] Speaker 3: back in the eighties he was just lamb blasting, you know, uh,
[33:34] Speaker 3: harlots and.
[33:36] Speaker 1: The adulterers and oh you're not lust for the flesh.
[33:39] Speaker 3: Sure, he's you know, seeing a prostitute every week.
[33:44] Speaker 1: You know what though, I mean he I think he
[33:46] Speaker 1: stayed in the ministry for another few decades. All he
[33:49] Speaker 1: had to do was come forward with the maya culpa
[33:51] Speaker 1: and cry, I've sinned against thee and then what is
[33:54] Speaker 1: the pattern? They disappeared for six months for personal reflection,
[33:58] Speaker 1: and then they just sort of we insert themselves into
[34:01] Speaker 1: the machine.
[34:02] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. The way the bylaws are usually set up,
[34:04] Speaker 3: and especially the charismatic churches, is the pastors the ultimate authority.
[34:09] Speaker 3: You know, you might have an elder board or trustees
[34:12] Speaker 3: or overseers and all that stuff, but that's all smoking merrors.
[34:16] Speaker 3: At the end of the day. It's like you own
[34:19] Speaker 3: the church. You're the owner of a business, and you'll
[34:24] Speaker 3: do whatever you can to protect that business. But then
[34:26] Speaker 3: clearly you know your sins will find you out.
[34:30] Speaker 1: How many major churches have had to blow up. Hillsong,
[34:34] Speaker 1: I know, made the headlines. And you remember Ted Haggard.
[34:37] Speaker 1: He was always going after homosexuals and then it turns
[34:40] Speaker 1: out he's texting pictures to some dude in his congregation.
[34:43] Speaker 3: I had lunch with him before I started my church,
[34:45] Speaker 3: Ted Haggard, Ted Haggard before and after the fall. So
[34:49] Speaker 3: I met with him before the fall, before the big
[34:51] Speaker 3: thing came out. And again, you know, gifted, charismatic, you know,
[34:56] Speaker 3: very personable, fun funny, super intelligent. Uh. Yeah, we had
[35:01] Speaker 3: a lunch with him at Village Inn. It was like
[35:03] Speaker 3: a brunch. It was me and him and his youth pastor,
[35:06] Speaker 3: and I was getting ideas from him on how to
[35:09] Speaker 3: start my church. I was just getting ready to start
[35:11] Speaker 3: my church, and I knew someone that knew him personally,
[35:14] Speaker 3: so I reached out to them and said, he can
[35:15] Speaker 3: you set this lunch up with Ted. I'm gonna be
[35:17] Speaker 3: in Colorado Springs. He said, yeah, I'll do it, So
[35:20] Speaker 3: he set me up with it. And uh. And then
[35:22] Speaker 3: after the big thing came out and all that, and
[35:25] Speaker 3: he had gone off for the six months for the
[35:27] Speaker 3: healing stuff. And he was in Kansas City and I
[35:31] Speaker 3: still had a cell number, so I reached out to him.
[35:33] Speaker 3: I said, hey, when you come to Canta, se let's
[35:35] Speaker 3: let's meet up for lunch. And I met him. You know,
[35:39] Speaker 3: after all that stuff came out and he was back
[35:41] Speaker 3: to ministry, And.
[35:43] Speaker 1: How did you feel about it?
[35:45] Speaker 3: You know, I thought it was extremely of course hypocritical,
[35:49] Speaker 3: you know, but I definitely was a very grace filled person.
[35:55] Speaker 3: I knew my own thoughts and desires and things that
[35:58] Speaker 3: I was struggling with. So when I saw ministers getting
[36:03] Speaker 3: just crucified because they're human and doing things, even though
[36:09] Speaker 3: you know, some of it was very, very bad, but
[36:12] Speaker 3: it just it humanized him. You know, I realized, hey,
[36:14] Speaker 3: he's not perfect, He's like everybody else, you know. And
[36:18] Speaker 3: because he denied it and act in a certain way,
[36:21] Speaker 3: you know.
[36:22] Speaker 1: It wasn't just because he was part of the club.
[36:25] Speaker 1: You were cavernous tracks for him. I mean, hey, fellow preacher, yeah,
[36:29] Speaker 1: you know, what could happen to any of us.
[36:31] Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely had that feeling. Yeah, definitely had that feeling
[36:34] Speaker 3: of hey, listen, you know, this is a we Pastors
[36:38] Speaker 3: are held up on a pedestal like we're perfect people
[36:43] Speaker 3: and and we're just not. You know. But part of
[36:46] Speaker 3: the challenge, I think because and I've said this before,
[36:49] Speaker 3: because it's it's so true. My friends tell me this.
[36:52] Speaker 3: I'm a better human now than I was then. And
[36:55] Speaker 3: I think it mainly was I was trying to live
[36:59] Speaker 3: a standard that just it's it's just not you can't
[37:03] Speaker 3: live that way. You can't live it. You become so
[37:06] Speaker 3: inauthentic because you anything that you think or struggle with
[37:12] Speaker 3: certain sins. You can tell people I'm really struggling with prayer,
[37:14] Speaker 3: I'm really struggling with reading my Bible. But you can't
[37:17] Speaker 3: go and say, yeah, I looked at porn for an hour.
[37:21] Speaker 3: You know, you got to keep that stuff under wraps
[37:24] Speaker 3: and you can't be open and honest about that, and
[37:27] Speaker 3: and that just sets you up for problems. Because I
[37:30] Speaker 3: can honestly say now I don't have a problem with porn.
[37:32] Speaker 3: I don't really care about porn, which is weird. I
[37:34] Speaker 3: cared about it a lot when I was, you know, preacher,
[37:37] Speaker 3: and now I just it doesn't have that same feeling.
[37:41] Speaker 3: And I don't know, it's that's a I'm still kind
[37:43] Speaker 3: of working through what that is, Like what was the
[37:46] Speaker 3: draw then, and why do I not care? Now? Does
[37:50] Speaker 3: that make sense?
[37:50] Speaker 1: It does?
[37:51] Speaker 3: It was like it's going back to the Genesis story. Hey,
[37:54] Speaker 3: you can have eat any of the fruit off any
[37:57] Speaker 3: tree in this whole garden here, but not that tree,
[38:03] Speaker 3: not the knowledge of good and nevile. Don't go near
[38:05] Speaker 3: that tree. And what do they do? You know? According
[38:08] Speaker 3: to the story, that's where they go.
[38:10] Speaker 1: When I was a video producer for churches, we had
[38:14] Speaker 1: a lot of humble churches. You would go in and
[38:15] Speaker 1: everybody knew everybody, and there was no pretense. It was
[38:18] Speaker 1: a family and there's a lot of that. I try
[38:21] Speaker 1: to tell people who aren't familiar with that culture that we're.
[38:25] Speaker 3: Talking about good people, absolutely.
[38:27] Speaker 1: And I also did some work for some churches. I
[38:29] Speaker 1: remember one it was in Washington, d C. I walked in.
[38:33] Speaker 1: There was an oil painting of the pastor in the
[38:35] Speaker 1: lobby and he had surrounding him a bunch of bishops
[38:39] Speaker 1: and deacons and a whole entourage. And I remember finishing
[38:45] Speaker 1: that job with two words on my mind, pastor worship.
[38:50] Speaker 1: The whole culture was it was literally they had deified
[38:54] Speaker 1: their shepherds, and you've seen that.
[38:57] Speaker 3: I received some of that myself. There's a particular church
[39:01] Speaker 3: I worked out down in Mobile, Alabama, and they had
[39:04] Speaker 3: pastor worship to the nth degree. Smaller church, I would say,
[39:08] Speaker 3: maybe two hundred and fifty people. The pastor drove like
[39:12] Speaker 3: a one hundred and fifty thousand dollars beamer. Yeah, it
[39:15] Speaker 3: was unbelievable. Lived in a mansion, okay, And when he
[39:19] Speaker 3: would show up, there was a special parking spot for
[39:22] Speaker 3: him right by a private door to enter the building.
[39:26] Speaker 3: When he would get there, ushers would come out, opened
[39:30] Speaker 3: his car door, grab his bible and his jacket, and
[39:34] Speaker 3: usher in behind him into a green room. Now I
[39:37] Speaker 3: was on staff at this church, so I'm in the
[39:39] Speaker 3: green room too, in the green room where there're ore
[39:41] Speaker 3: dirvs and sparkling water, and so backstage this is just
[39:46] Speaker 3: two hundred fifty people. This is I mean, this is
[39:48] Speaker 3: not that big of a church. And we were in
[39:50] Speaker 3: as the staff. We were all in this green room
[39:52] Speaker 3: just having fun and hanging out, eating or dirves, drinking
[39:56] Speaker 3: sparkling water. And then the music was coming to the end.
[40:01] Speaker 3: Ushers would come and get us and say it's time
[40:03] Speaker 3: to enter. They would open the side door right by
[40:07] Speaker 3: the stage and the staff would come in, everybody would
[40:10] Speaker 3: stand and start clapping.
[40:13] Speaker 1: They applauded you, They applauded us as entering. Yep, did
[40:17] Speaker 1: the pastor you don't have to betray any confidence. I
[40:20] Speaker 1: don't know where your zone is. But sure was he
[40:22] Speaker 1: kind of getting off on it?
[40:23] Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he was an ask Yeah no, he totally
[40:28] Speaker 3: totally he ended up same thing he ended up.
[40:30] Speaker 1: Oh Lord ran off with.
[40:33] Speaker 3: His hairdresser and.
[40:36] Speaker 1: True story.
[40:36] Speaker 3: I like he literally yeah, yeah, just just just total sham.
[40:41] Speaker 1: When you finally got to that point where you're like,
[40:44] Speaker 1: Christianity is not true. You're still preaching.
[40:48] Speaker 3: Uh now, I'm preaching, but not the gospel message.
[40:51] Speaker 1: I mean at that moment when you finally I don't
[40:53] Speaker 1: know what the last domino was, Christianity cannot be true?
[40:58] Speaker 1: Are you still preaching Christianity?
[41:00] Speaker 3: No? No, I couldn't. You weren't No I yep. I
[41:04] Speaker 3: segued out, and for a time I moved into more
[41:06] Speaker 3: spiritual teachings. I started teaching Buddhist principles, good life principles,
[41:12] Speaker 3: meditation principles. I was even holding meditation services. So I
[41:17] Speaker 3: had quit the church and I shut it down. I
[41:19] Speaker 3: said I can't do this. I don't believe in this message.
[41:21] Speaker 3: But then I went through this phase where I was
[41:23] Speaker 3: just super spiritual, you know. I said, hey, there's still
[41:26] Speaker 3: value in some of the teachings of Jesus and we
[41:28] Speaker 3: can still glean, you know, lessons from the words of
[41:31] Speaker 3: Jesus and Buddha and whatever. And I kind of went
[41:36] Speaker 3: down that path for about a year. And so still
[41:41] Speaker 3: on Sunday mornings, again, different area of Kansas City, a
[41:45] Speaker 3: whole different scenario, and we wouldn't do worship music. We
[41:48] Speaker 3: just did cool music with acoustic So we'd start the
[41:52] Speaker 3: service out with some cool music and then I'd get
[41:54] Speaker 3: up and we'd all meditate for you know, five minutes
[41:57] Speaker 3: or so, or do some breath work, and then I
[41:59] Speaker 3: would teach.
[42:01] Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Yeah, give
[42:04] Speaker 1: me a few lines. What's that sermon sound like? Pastor
[42:07] Speaker 1: Tammy Gibson, who's no longer a Christian, who's now mister
[42:10] Speaker 1: motivational speaker. Come on, what are you saying?
[42:13] Speaker 3: The meditation of the mind. I would talk about, you know,
[42:15] Speaker 3: using our words, carefully, making sure our thoughts are pure,
[42:20] Speaker 3: do good to others, do no harm. It was all
[42:23] Speaker 3: just positive, you know. I still taught in a way
[42:27] Speaker 3: of God's got good things in store for you, treating
[42:30] Speaker 3: the earth well as honoring God. You know, I just
[42:33] Speaker 3: kind of moved into a very if you were a
[42:36] Speaker 3: Christian or even atheist, or even didn't know what you were.
[42:41] Speaker 3: I was trying to at My initial thought was I'm
[42:45] Speaker 3: going to have a different kind of church, which is
[42:47] Speaker 3: going to be a non religious, non denominational, not connected
[42:51] Speaker 3: to any belief system, but we're going to incorporate all
[42:55] Speaker 3: the good teachings from every religion. And that lasted about
[43:00] Speaker 3: less than a year and I was like, this is
[43:01] Speaker 3: all bullshit. I can't do this.
[43:03] Speaker 1: The other day, the other churches on the block looking
[43:07] Speaker 1: at you, where you like the relative we don't speak of,
[43:09] Speaker 1: Like that's not a legit church.
[43:11] Speaker 3: Yeah. At that point, no one, Maybe a two or
[43:14] Speaker 3: three people from my original three hundred member church, maybe
[43:18] Speaker 3: a couple people from that era ended up coming because
[43:22] Speaker 3: they never were really Christians anyway. They just liked me,
[43:26] Speaker 3: and so they came along for that. But it attracted
[43:29] Speaker 3: a whole different kind of crowd of people, you know,
[43:32] Speaker 3: I got into it. Yeah, just a bunch of different people.
[43:35] Speaker 1: Man, we're getting some good stuff behind the scenes, you know,
[43:38] Speaker 1: hearing how pastors talk, what they think, and what an
[43:41] Speaker 1: ex pastor thinks. More with my guest Timmy Gibson. Next,
[43:50] Speaker 1: continuing now with a guy who was a pastor and
[43:53] Speaker 1: a minister for decades now an ex pastor, Timmy Gibson. So,
[44:01] Speaker 1: did you say the words atheist, agnostic? Did you say
[44:06] Speaker 1: a word you put a label on it?
[44:07] Speaker 3: Not? At the time, I think the one word I
[44:10] Speaker 3: started to feel comfortable using, as I said I was
[44:13] Speaker 3: I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. I started using that, and
[44:16] Speaker 3: then from there I shifted to I'm a spiritual agnostic
[44:22] Speaker 3: and that felt palatable. And it's not until really recently
[44:28] Speaker 3: I would say, in the last six months that I
[44:30] Speaker 3: clearly say I am agnostic, but I am atheist when
[44:34] Speaker 3: it comes to the Bible God. There is no Bible God.
[44:37] Speaker 3: I'm certain of that. But is there something out in
[44:40] Speaker 3: the cosmos?
[44:41] Speaker 1: And I don't know, how do you unpack that word spiritual.
[44:45] Speaker 1: It's kind of the jello that we can't really nail
[44:47] Speaker 1: to the wall. Everybody who says I'm spiritual seems to
[44:50] Speaker 1: have a different definition. If I come to you and
[44:52] Speaker 1: I say, well, I'm a spiritual person, how do you
[44:54] Speaker 1: approach that.
[44:55] Speaker 3: I'm probably more of, if this is even correct. When
[44:58] Speaker 3: I think of spirituality, I think of like I'm spiritual.
[45:02] Speaker 3: I don't even say that about myself anymore, But like
[45:04] Speaker 3: a Sam Harris. When I think of Sam Harris who
[45:06] Speaker 3: has a meditation app and he's into breathing and calming
[45:10] Speaker 3: the mind, that's what I think of when I think
[45:13] Speaker 3: of spiritual now. But there's a level of spirituality where
[45:17] Speaker 3: they still believe in a divine being. And like they
[45:21] Speaker 3: believe believe there's a divine beings.
[45:22] Speaker 1: There's a supernatural membrane that you can tap into. Yeah,
[45:27] Speaker 1: I've given a lot of grace on the word spiritual.
[45:31] Speaker 1: I take it in the teeth a little bit for
[45:33] Speaker 1: this because people are like, well, the word spirit is
[45:35] Speaker 1: the root for spiritual, and you don't believe in spirits. Yeah,
[45:39] Speaker 1: but I think language is clumsy. Some people, I think
[45:41] Speaker 1: are grasping to try to describe the transcendent moments of
[45:45] Speaker 1: our lives, the birth of a beautiful child or the
[45:47] Speaker 1: day you met your love, or you know the sunset
[45:51] Speaker 1: or you know some amazing thing, and and it taps
[45:54] Speaker 1: into this where you feel a thousand percent of your
[45:57] Speaker 1: own humanity, right thing, and so we're growing to try
[46:00] Speaker 1: to describe it in language balls short and they're like, well,
[46:03] Speaker 1: it was a spiritual experience. I don't begrudge anybody that
[46:07] Speaker 1: if they use the word, but it seems to be
[46:11] Speaker 1: a different word for everybody. Yeah, it's hard to nail it.
[46:14] Speaker 3: The thing that I have trouble with, or not trouble with,
[46:16] Speaker 3: the thing that I despise is fundamentalism. I'm right, my
[46:21] Speaker 3: way is right, my belief is right. You must believe
[46:24] Speaker 3: what I believe or you're going to spend eternity burning.
[46:28] Speaker 1: Like, yeah, no, but you came out of a Pentecostal tradition.
[46:32] Speaker 1: I came out of what we mom is Pentecostal, but
[46:35] Speaker 1: my main faith tradition was Baptist, so we had what's
[46:38] Speaker 1: called eternal security. So once I say the Salvation prayer,
[46:41] Speaker 1: I'm locked in. I'm in the club. Even if I
[46:43] Speaker 1: go totally off the rails, I'm still going to heaven.
[46:47] Speaker 1: I may not get as big a mansion, yeah, or
[46:50] Speaker 1: as many jewels in my crown. That's how we said it, right, Yeah,
[46:53] Speaker 1: he's still going to heaven. He's not going to get
[46:55] Speaker 1: a good package as he was going to get before you.
[47:00] Speaker 1: As a Pentecostal, the thinking is you could lose it,
[47:04] Speaker 1: oh absolutely, and go burn in hell.
[47:06] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, the one saved always saved. I was familiar
[47:08] Speaker 3: with that teaching, and yeah, did not subscribe to that teaching.
[47:12] Speaker 3: I believe that you could lose your salvation, which is
[47:15] Speaker 3: what led me to pretty much every Sunday repenting of
[47:18] Speaker 3: my sins and asking Jesus back into my heart because
[47:21] Speaker 3: he probably left.
[47:22] Speaker 1: You know, do you feel like you failed or somehow
[47:26] Speaker 1: not qualified so you had to reapply?
[47:28] Speaker 3: Yeah? I felt like I'd fallen short of God's best,
[47:32] Speaker 3: of what God wanted me to be and how he
[47:34] Speaker 3: wanted me to be. And that's the thing I really
[47:37] Speaker 3: just really struggled with my entire Christian life is you
[47:41] Speaker 3: never felt good enough, you never felt like you qualified.
[47:44] Speaker 3: But that was the whole teaching. You're bad and unless
[47:50] Speaker 3: you accept Jesus, you're bad. You're lost, you know, And
[47:54] Speaker 3: so it really led to a lot of guilt and shame.
[47:58] Speaker 3: I dealt with a lot of guilt and shame my life,
[48:00] Speaker 3: never feeling good about myself, always feeling like I was
[48:05] Speaker 3: just a failure on the inside. There was something I
[48:08] Speaker 3: always felt I always admired people that seemed to be
[48:10] Speaker 3: so good to their core, like they always thought good thoughts.
[48:13] Speaker 3: I didn't know what they thought, but you just kind
[48:15] Speaker 3: of looked at them and thought, man, they just they're
[48:16] Speaker 3: just peer to their bone. And here I am just going, man,
[48:20] Speaker 3: it's like getting cats together. Here I can't. I was like,
[48:23] Speaker 3: you know, try to keep myself in line. You know.
[48:25] Speaker 3: It's like that that I used to preach this all
[48:27] Speaker 3: the time. I'd say I crucify my flesh because it
[48:30] Speaker 3: was like I was at war all the time with
[48:34] Speaker 3: with this other part of me that was in a
[48:36] Speaker 3: cage and wanted to be free. And now I view
[48:40] Speaker 3: it like, well, now I'm out of the cage. And
[48:42] Speaker 3: I realized it's all good. It's all fine. You're not
[48:45] Speaker 3: going to go wild. It's like you're in the cage,
[48:47] Speaker 3: you want to go wild. You let them out and
[48:48] Speaker 3: they're like, it's all good.
[48:49] Speaker 1: I did a speech recently. We were talking about baptism
[48:52] Speaker 1: by immersion. That was your culture, right, yep. So they
[48:55] Speaker 1: take you and they put you in the pool and
[48:56] Speaker 1: they dunk you, and the symbolism is you have to
[48:59] Speaker 1: die to you and you're raised again in Christ and
[49:03] Speaker 1: This is what cults do, right. They kill the individual
[49:06] Speaker 1: identity for the identity of the cult leader and or
[49:09] Speaker 1: the group. And then if you come to a point, Timmy,
[49:13] Speaker 1: where you're like, no, I've got value, I'm good on
[49:16] Speaker 1: my own merit, I'm worth something, they look at you
[49:20] Speaker 1: and say you want to be God? Or how egotistical
[49:24] Speaker 1: and arrogant of you? It's all about you. Do you
[49:27] Speaker 1: hear the yes?
[49:28] Speaker 3: Absolutely. I used to preach that that that's creating a
[49:32] Speaker 3: false image, that you're putting yourself before God, and that
[49:38] Speaker 3: was not smiled upon.
[49:39] Speaker 1: That How sad is that I am valuable? Like I
[49:44] Speaker 1: have value, I have worth on my own terms. I
[49:48] Speaker 1: don't have to be killed to become somebody else. Why
[49:51] Speaker 1: would that be egotistical?
[49:53] Speaker 3: Yeah?
[49:53] Speaker 2: You know?
[49:53] Speaker 3: Yeah? Now I mean yeah. I viewed that then as egotistical,
[49:56] Speaker 3: and now I view it as the it should be
[50:00] Speaker 3: in the sense of, yeah, I am valuable. I feel
[50:04] Speaker 3: like every person on planet Earth has some value, regardless
[50:08] Speaker 3: of what the religious belief is, and they have something
[50:12] Speaker 3: to contribute and something to add. And you don't need
[50:17] Speaker 3: this divine being to be good or to have value.
[50:22] Speaker 3: That's one of the biggest questions I get now from
[50:24] Speaker 3: Christians or like where's your sense of hope and meaning
[50:28] Speaker 3: and purpose? And I'm like just doing life. I mean,
[50:33] Speaker 3: i'd like it's kind of a weird question now because
[50:37] Speaker 3: I didn't really ever struggle with that. But I meet
[50:40] Speaker 3: a lot of people that are deconstructing and they struggle
[50:43] Speaker 3: with having meaning and purpose and they find themselves in
[50:46] Speaker 3: a depressive state. For me, now, I went through some
[50:48] Speaker 3: dark days in my deconstruction because it was my life.
[50:53] Speaker 3: You know, it was a huge shift, but I always
[50:57] Speaker 3: felt valuable.
[50:58] Speaker 1: I hear a lot of if you don't live forever,
[51:01] Speaker 1: and if one day you're just going to become worm food,
[51:04] Speaker 1: why bother getting up in the morning, Why bother being moral?
[51:09] Speaker 1: Why bother at all?
[51:11] Speaker 3: And you're because I care about people.
[51:13] Speaker 1: You look on the other side and you're like, well, actually,
[51:15] Speaker 1: if the days are finite, the moments are more precious.
[51:18] Speaker 1: I need to be on my best behavior and maximize
[51:21] Speaker 1: the days.
[51:21] Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's a great point, because I have no
[51:24] Speaker 3: fear of an afterlife. I just don't fear death. I
[51:28] Speaker 3: don't fear death, and I don't fear judgment. I don't
[51:30] Speaker 3: fear any of that. And weirdly, knowing that there or
[51:34] Speaker 3: believing that there is no God to send me to hell,
[51:37] Speaker 3: it doesn't make me want to do bad things. I
[51:40] Speaker 3: just why would I want to do bad things? I
[51:43] Speaker 3: love people, you know what I mean. I want to
[51:45] Speaker 3: be good to my wife, I want to be good
[51:47] Speaker 3: to my kids. I want to be kind to my neighbor.
[51:50] Speaker 3: And not because I'm scared of eternal damnation. I just
[51:55] Speaker 3: want to be a good dude. So I didn't. That
[51:59] Speaker 3: was another thing that I hear a lot. They're like, well,
[52:01] Speaker 3: you just wanted to live a life of sin. I'm like, really,
[52:04] Speaker 3: because I'm not in it, like in the way that
[52:07] Speaker 3: you would be thinking, Like, I'm not living in a
[52:09] Speaker 3: van doing meth. You know, of course living in a
[52:12] Speaker 3: van is kind of a cool thing now.
[52:14] Speaker 1: But do people look at you now and say, now,
[52:19] Speaker 1: you're just an atheist pastor, I don't even know if
[52:21] Speaker 1: you call yourself. Do you go with agnostic overall? But
[52:23] Speaker 1: you're atheist about the fundy.
[52:25] Speaker 3: Faith, yes, atheist about the funding faith.
[52:28] Speaker 1: So one of the responses is you just traded one
[52:31] Speaker 1: faith in for the other.
[52:32] Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, you know, I don't look at atheism as
[52:36] Speaker 3: a faith. I know it gets labeled by Christians. It's
[52:39] Speaker 3: just a religion. Atheism is a religion. I'm like, really,
[52:41] Speaker 3: do they have a set of core beliefs. I don't
[52:44] Speaker 3: even think they do, you know, I think they just
[52:46] Speaker 3: don't believe that there's a God. And I think it
[52:50] Speaker 3: was Ricky Gervais that really kind of helped me understand
[52:53] Speaker 3: what atheism is and what being an agnostic is. And
[52:56] Speaker 3: he's like, everybody's agnostic, you know, no one knows. But
[53:00] Speaker 3: if I was to ask you do you believe in God?
[53:03] Speaker 3: You can't say I don't know. I mean do you
[53:06] Speaker 3: or don't you? And if you don't believe, then you're atheist.
[53:10] Speaker 3: And I thought, oh, well, okay, Well then if you
[53:12] Speaker 3: ask me, do I believe in the Bible God?
[53:13] Speaker 1: Well no, so you're an atheist about Yahweh and Jesus? Right?
[53:17] Speaker 3: Yes?
[53:18] Speaker 1: So who were the major figures that propelled you forward?
[53:23] Speaker 1: Like for me, I saw the Christopher Hitchins debate video
[53:26] Speaker 1: and I read The God Delusion and then it was all,
[53:29] Speaker 1: you know, the House of Cards fell down for me
[53:31] Speaker 1: after that. Who were those in your life where it
[53:34] Speaker 1: was like a seismic moment for you?
[53:37] Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's a few things in that. There are
[53:41] Speaker 3: a few people that really influenced me during that time.
[53:44] Speaker 3: Of course, Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, the God Delusion,
[53:49] Speaker 3: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris. I watched a lot of his debates,
[53:54] Speaker 3: and honestly, I don't know if I've ever told this publicly,
[53:57] Speaker 3: but so I was watching these atheist things on YouTube
[54:02] Speaker 3: and there was this one podcast that came up and
[54:05] Speaker 3: I thought, man, that guy's voice sounds familiar.
[54:07] Speaker 1: You are shitting me.
[54:08] Speaker 3: No, And I was sitting there, you know, it wasn't
[54:11] Speaker 3: your face. I would have known it. And I'm watching
[54:15] Speaker 3: the stale picture, but I'm hearing the voice and I'm like,
[54:20] Speaker 3: that sounds like Seth. That sounds like Seth. And the
[54:25] Speaker 3: more I'm listening, I'm like, that is for sure Seth.
[54:29] Speaker 3: So I google searched and I'm like, oh my gosh,
[54:33] Speaker 3: he is the thinking atheist podcast guy. He's the one
[54:37] Speaker 3: that's doing this podcast that I've listened to. And then
[54:40] Speaker 3: I text you and I said.
[54:42] Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't remember your text.
[54:44] Speaker 3: Yeah, I text you. I said, hey, it's been a
[54:46] Speaker 3: long time.
[54:49] Speaker 1: Wow, so how are you. Yeah.
[54:53] Speaker 3: So it was a lot of things, you know, it
[54:55] Speaker 3: was a lot of it was a lot of research online.
[54:59] Speaker 3: Thank goodness for Google. You know. I just started googling
[55:02] Speaker 3: debates between Christians and atheists or you know, deconstruction, just
[55:07] Speaker 3: hearing people's stories and I just really connected with it
[55:11] Speaker 3: and it just made more sense. I would watch the
[55:14] Speaker 3: whole debate, and as I'm watching it and listening, I'm like, man,
[55:20] Speaker 3: that atheist just sounds more right, and this sounds logical
[55:26] Speaker 3: and reasonable, and he's actually nice, like he seems like
[55:30] Speaker 3: a nice person, you know, and then the Christian And
[55:33] Speaker 3: I don't mean that, not all Christians are like this,
[55:34] Speaker 3: but it just sounded I was like, that doesn't even
[55:38] Speaker 3: make sense, Like you're a smart person. How is it
[55:41] Speaker 3: that you're believing this?
[55:43] Speaker 1: No, but you believed it? Yeah, you believe it?
[55:45] Speaker 3: Yeah?
[55:45] Speaker 1: So did you go through that whole Why was I
[55:48] Speaker 1: so stupid? Face? How can I be that dumb?
[55:50] Speaker 3: I was embarrassed?
[55:51] Speaker 1: What's wrong with me?
[55:53] Speaker 3: I felt duped. I went through a period where I
[55:56] Speaker 3: felt I was embarrassed and ashamed, like I can't believe
[56:01] Speaker 3: I believed this, and it's weird to see it from
[56:05] Speaker 3: the I never thought that's the thing that's so surreal
[56:09] Speaker 3: for me. I would have never thought I would have
[56:13] Speaker 3: bet the lives of my children on the fact that
[56:15] Speaker 3: I would have been a Christian till the day I died.
[56:18] Speaker 3: It was so deeply ingrained in me. It wasn't just
[56:23] Speaker 3: my belief I was a Christian, like it was who
[56:28] Speaker 3: I was, It was my identity. But it's so shocking
[56:31] Speaker 3: to me now to think back that I actually believed
[56:34] Speaker 3: all that stuff. But it gives me an understanding now
[56:37] Speaker 3: of people that might say things and believe certain things,
[56:41] Speaker 3: or even criticize me.
[56:42] Speaker 1: And now I figured it out at nine. Why did
[56:45] Speaker 1: it take you to your mid thirties? Well, how do
[56:47] Speaker 1: you respond to that? You know, as someone says, how
[56:49] Speaker 1: stupid could you be?
[56:50] Speaker 3: Yeah, I say, yeah, I agree. I don't know. I
[56:55] Speaker 3: just think to myself, you know, it was all I
[56:57] Speaker 3: ever knew. It was what I heard growing you know,
[57:01] Speaker 3: waking up, It's what I heard all through the day.
[57:02] Speaker 3: It's what I heard going to bed. It's you know
[57:04] Speaker 3: what I mean. It was just I was the Sunday morning,
[57:07] Speaker 3: Sunday night, Wednesday night, Bible study, prayer meetings, camp meetings,
[57:10] Speaker 3: alien service. I mean, you know, like I was so
[57:13] Speaker 3: ingrained in that world, and and I took that scripture
[57:17] Speaker 3: literally right, be in the world, but not of it. Right,
[57:21] Speaker 3: So I never really allowed any other influence outside of
[57:26] Speaker 3: a Christian influence. I would. I was the kind of
[57:28] Speaker 3: person if I was going to go to therapy, it
[57:30] Speaker 3: was definitely only going to be a Christian therapist. If
[57:32] Speaker 3: I was going to do anything, I would seek out
[57:35] Speaker 3: or even do business with Christians. So I was extremely insulated.
[57:40] Speaker 3: And it wasn't until I've, like I said before in
[57:44] Speaker 3: the other show, I started going, you know what, I'm
[57:48] Speaker 3: going to allow myself to read things outside my circle
[57:52] Speaker 3: because it'll give me a greater understanding of the enemy.
[57:56] Speaker 1: Well that was programmed into you, though, I mean, you
[57:58] Speaker 1: got to give yourself some grace, right, We both have
[58:00] Speaker 1: had to learn to do that. They taught us to
[58:04] Speaker 1: distrust the outside world, yes, all right, the big, bad,
[58:07] Speaker 1: scary world, which is why we had Christian versions of
[58:10] Speaker 1: everything we wanted to do. Right, there's Christian music, and
[58:13] Speaker 1: we have Christian apparel, and there's a Christian activity, and
[58:16] Speaker 1: there's Christian TV and film and you know, unfortunately I
[58:20] Speaker 1: don't know if you've seen Christian movies, but oh.
[58:22] Speaker 3: I try not to. Did you ever go see Striper
[58:27] Speaker 3: and Concert?
[58:27] Speaker 1: I was there, dude. I was on the second row.
[58:32] Speaker 1: I was so the second row for Striper and the
[58:36] Speaker 1: to Hell with the Devil tour at the Old Lady
[58:39] Speaker 1: On Brady Theater downtown Tulsa. And of course you know
[58:42] Speaker 1: they're out there like rocking for the rock Man, and
[58:46] Speaker 1: they're throwing those Striper New Testaments out into the crowd
[58:49] Speaker 1: with their black and yellow spandex on and I thought
[58:53] Speaker 1: we were the coolest. I thought, man, how edgy are we?
[58:57] Speaker 1: And then you get out and you look at it
[59:00] Speaker 1: from the outside and go, that was a clown show man.
[59:03] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I met those guys and they were tiny.
[59:07] Speaker 3: They were tiny. Seriously, I remember when I met them.
[59:13] Speaker 3: They came to Kansas City and did a big concert there,
[59:15] Speaker 3: I think at Kimperina, and I went to a album
[59:19] Speaker 3: signing at the Christian Bookstore and you could meet So
[59:23] Speaker 3: I stood in the line with all these other young
[59:26] Speaker 3: people and got to the front of the line and
[59:29] Speaker 3: they stood up so I could have a picture taken,
[59:31] Speaker 3: and the guy stood up and he came up to
[59:33] Speaker 3: about my chest. Really, yeah, he was tiny.
[59:35] Speaker 1: I only ever saw him from the stage.
[59:37] Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and also they wore those platform form shoes
[59:39] Speaker 3: kind of like Kiss did, yeah, but they didn't have
[59:43] Speaker 3: those on. They were tiny, and they had hair that
[59:46] Speaker 3: was just everywhere.
[59:49] Speaker 1: We did a live broadcast at the Promenade Mall when
[59:52] Speaker 1: Michael Sweet, lead singer of Striper, had come out with
[59:54] Speaker 1: I think with a solo record or something. So he
[59:57] Speaker 1: was in there and he was signing autographs and somebody
[1:00:00] Speaker 1: by and threw a stink bomb in the Christian bookstore.
[1:00:03] Speaker 1: They ran down the mall and threw this stink bong boom,
[1:00:07] Speaker 1: and the for the whole time he was signing records,
[1:00:09] Speaker 1: everybody was having to cover their faces because the whole
[1:00:11] Speaker 1: place smelled like shit. I don't know why that anecdote
[1:00:17] Speaker 1: just pumped into my mind that rids.
[1:00:19] Speaker 3: Me of a Carmen. I went and saw Carmen and
[1:00:23] Speaker 3: Addicted to Jesus was one of his songs. But I
[1:00:26] Speaker 3: remember going to Carmen and waiting in line, and then
[1:00:29] Speaker 3: the next year I was like, I ain't waiting in line.
[1:00:30] Speaker 3: I'm going to sign up to be like a helper.
[1:00:32] Speaker 3: I'm going to be a prayer room worker so I
[1:00:35] Speaker 3: could get there early, get in there and be a
[1:00:38] Speaker 3: part of the Carmen Show.
[1:00:40] Speaker 1: Carmen used to do these eight minute story songs. So
[1:00:43] Speaker 1: he did one call the Champion, where it's an actual
[1:00:46] Speaker 1: boxing match with Jesus and the Devil and they're like
[1:00:50] Speaker 1: gonna out, you know, and they had the rocky music.
[1:00:53] Speaker 3: He was cutting edge.
[1:00:55] Speaker 1: Jesus kicks the crap out of the Devil.
[1:00:57] Speaker 3: Of course.
[1:00:58] Speaker 1: I had another one called which is Invitation, which was
[1:01:01] Speaker 1: I guess a halloweeny kind of a tune. And he
[1:01:04] Speaker 1: had a whole bunch of those there, and there was
[1:01:06] Speaker 1: a whole culture wrapped around that kind of stuff in
[1:01:09] Speaker 1: real dramatization.
[1:01:11] Speaker 3: Yeah songs.
[1:01:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, So these days, when you look back, the good
[1:01:16] Speaker 1: news is is you've got insider knowledge, don't you.
[1:01:19] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:01:20] Speaker 1: So, and someone comes to you and they're talking about
[1:01:22] Speaker 1: Christianity from the inside or the out, you're able to
[1:01:25] Speaker 1: speak with some authority to both.
[1:01:28] Speaker 3: Yes, And it's very helpful having conversations because it's I
[1:01:32] Speaker 3: know exactly what they're thinking, and I know the verse
[1:01:34] Speaker 3: they're probably thinking in their mind and their reference. And
[1:01:38] Speaker 3: it does both. It gives me some empathy. They're innocently
[1:01:42] Speaker 3: believing this to be true, so it gives me some grace,
[1:01:46] Speaker 3: you know. I don't get too hyped up or too
[1:01:48] Speaker 3: offended at comments that come through on my YouTube channel
[1:01:52] Speaker 3: when people tell me I'm going to hell and different things,
[1:01:55] Speaker 3: because I know that's what I used to think. But
[1:01:57] Speaker 3: it's just a lack of understanding, you know. They just
[1:02:00] Speaker 3: they're unwilling to look deeper. And the thing that helped
[1:02:04] Speaker 3: me so greatly, and I think it was one of
[1:02:06] Speaker 3: the debates that I watched if you could just act
[1:02:09] Speaker 3: like nothing's true and just start from scratch, just read
[1:02:12] Speaker 3: the Bible. It's crazy. I mean, it's just it's a
[1:02:17] Speaker 3: nutty book, you know. I mean, okay, fine, it's good literature,
[1:02:21] Speaker 3: there's some great wisdom in there, whatever, but it's quite crazy.
[1:02:26] Speaker 1: You don't even know if it's I mean, we could
[1:02:30] Speaker 1: have that. I'm trying to be kind, and I guess
[1:02:31] Speaker 1: it's all subjective. I mean, there are some who say
[1:02:34] Speaker 1: that it's remarkably written, and maybe, but I find most
[1:02:39] Speaker 1: of the characters are pretty one dimensional. Then you get
[1:02:41] Speaker 1: to the lineages and then what there how many chapters
[1:02:44] Speaker 1: on whether or not you have to use this knob
[1:02:47] Speaker 1: or that button or whatever fabric for the tabernacle When
[1:02:51] Speaker 1: I'm just like, who wrote that?
[1:02:52] Speaker 3: Well? Men? You know, I mean it's very misogynistic, it's
[1:02:56] Speaker 3: very patriarchal. It's you know, I always joke and say
[1:02:59] Speaker 3: to my wife, I'll say, babe, I mean the Bible
[1:03:01] Speaker 3: says women should keep sun.
[1:03:05] Speaker 1: I know we do that as a joke. Here. I'll
[1:03:07] Speaker 1: be like, I'm the man, i am the authority, you know,
[1:03:10] Speaker 1: submit unto me. And Natalie just gives me that look
[1:03:13] Speaker 1: like there is no way in hell that you're going
[1:03:16] Speaker 1: to sell that shit here, you know, and we both
[1:03:18] Speaker 1: have a good laugh about it.
[1:03:19] Speaker 3: So yeah, and the slavery, I mean, it's just on
[1:03:22] Speaker 3: and on. You know. People say, well, it doesn't actually
[1:03:24] Speaker 3: condone it. It's like, well, but it doesn't condemn it.
[1:03:27] Speaker 3: It's telling you how to be nice to your slaves.
[1:03:30] Speaker 3: That's kind of weird.
[1:03:34] Speaker 1: Okay, So now what does an ex pastor do when
[1:03:36] Speaker 1: he doesn't preach but he has something to say. We're
[1:03:40] Speaker 1: going to talk more with Timmy Gibson next. Thanks for
[1:03:48] Speaker 1: your support on my Patreon channel. If you want to
[1:03:51] Speaker 1: become a patron, it makes a huge difference. You can
[1:03:54] Speaker 1: get the show early in commercial free Patreon dot com
[1:03:58] Speaker 1: slash Seth Andrew continuing with ex pastor Timmy Gibson. So
[1:04:07] Speaker 1: you mentioned the YouTube channel, Let's go there. Yeah, is
[1:04:10] Speaker 1: there a title for it? How do people find it?
[1:04:12] Speaker 3: It's just my name, Timmy Gibson.
[1:04:14] Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll link it. Yeah, in the description box of
[1:04:17] Speaker 1: our conversation. What do they find on the channel? What's there?
[1:04:20] Speaker 3: A lot of my deconstruction story. One of the ones
[1:04:24] Speaker 3: that is a popular video. It's twenty things I believed
[1:04:27] Speaker 3: as a former evangelical, fundamental Christian, and I just literally
[1:04:30] Speaker 3: went down the list of twenty crazy things that I
[1:04:33] Speaker 3: used to believe. So I tell kind of my story
[1:04:35] Speaker 3: of deconstruction reconstruction as well as I read the Bible
[1:04:40] Speaker 3: sometimes and say, here's a verse that you probably didn't
[1:04:42] Speaker 3: know was in there, and then I read it, and
[1:04:45] Speaker 3: then I just kind of look into the screen, like,
[1:04:47] Speaker 3: that's the Bible.
[1:04:48] Speaker 1: You and I should buy a Partridge Family van and
[1:04:51] Speaker 1: hit the road. I've been doing atheist Bible trivia, where
[1:04:55] Speaker 1: we tell the stories that most people don't that pastors
[1:04:58] Speaker 1: certainly aren't tossing out right Sunday morning, right, and you're like,
[1:05:01] Speaker 1: that shit's in there, you just didn't know it, right.
[1:05:03] Speaker 3: And that's what I'm doing, teaching the stuff that I
[1:05:05] Speaker 3: could never teach before. This is so crazy.
[1:05:08] Speaker 1: So you're covering stuff that we haven't covered here, like
[1:05:10] Speaker 1: if they want to take a much deeper dive.
[1:05:12] Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely.
[1:05:13] Speaker 1: You also did something about Christ's supposed rapture. Is that
[1:05:17] Speaker 1: a video?
[1:05:18] Speaker 3: It's entitled Jesus is Not coming Back?
[1:05:21] Speaker 1: How's that going over?
[1:05:24] Speaker 3: It has more comments than any video I have. Yeah.
[1:05:29] Speaker 3: I think I title it don't worry Jesus is not
[1:05:32] Speaker 3: coming back?
[1:05:34] Speaker 1: So the armchair apologist have found you.
[1:05:36] Speaker 3: Yeah?
[1:05:37] Speaker 1: Do you engage or you mostly just kind of let it,
[1:05:39] Speaker 1: let it go? You know?
[1:05:40] Speaker 3: I try to engage, like the when I first posted,
[1:05:43] Speaker 3: all engage, but then when they start getting slanderous and
[1:05:46] Speaker 3: just it's like, what's the.
[1:05:48] Speaker 1: Point once they dig into the ad hominems and start
[1:05:50] Speaker 1: attacking your looks and your voice and your IQ or
[1:05:55] Speaker 1: whatever it is that they want to pull under their house? Yeah? Right,
[1:05:58] Speaker 1: So I ask you this on camera and I will
[1:06:00] Speaker 1: link to the video conversation. Which is weird because you
[1:06:03] Speaker 1: and I just talked for over an hour. I don't
[1:06:07] Speaker 1: think we've covered hardly any of what we covered on camera,
[1:06:11] Speaker 1: which we recorded earlier today. I mean we covered a
[1:06:13] Speaker 1: little bit of overlap, but I'm like, wow, there's just
[1:06:16] Speaker 1: a lot. Right, But let me ask this that I
[1:06:20] Speaker 1: ask on camera, if you could talk to your younger
[1:06:23] Speaker 1: self and advise him, right, the devout I'm going to
[1:06:28] Speaker 1: go into ministry. The world is about the size of
[1:06:31] Speaker 1: my fist kind of thing. You know, what would you say?
[1:06:34] Speaker 3: I would encourage myself to read outside of your belief system, like,
[1:06:38] Speaker 3: read outside of what you're told is true, and allow
[1:06:43] Speaker 3: those things to teach you something, and don't reject something
[1:06:47] Speaker 3: because it's not Christian, Like that's not a Christian author,
[1:06:52] Speaker 3: so don't read that book. I would just say, Hey,
[1:06:55] Speaker 3: all I'm going to tell you is read those books.
[1:06:58] Speaker 3: Read those books.
[1:07:00] Speaker 1: Like to say that when someone tells me that this
[1:07:02] Speaker 1: is sacred and off limits, I reply, congratulations, You've now
[1:07:07] Speaker 1: made that the first thing on my list.
[1:07:09] Speaker 3: That's exactly what I'm going to do.
[1:07:11] Speaker 1: Right right, that's the first thing we're going to cover.
[1:07:13] Speaker 1: If you could say something to somebody who is now
[1:07:16] Speaker 1: where you were, then the seeds of doubt, the alarms
[1:07:19] Speaker 1: are going off. Maybe they haven't even really admitted it
[1:07:22] Speaker 1: to themselves, how problematic their faith is becoming in their
[1:07:26] Speaker 1: own mind. What would you say?
[1:07:27] Speaker 3: I would say, it's okay, like it's okay to you know,
[1:07:31] Speaker 3: I don't believe in God. But if the God that
[1:07:33] Speaker 3: you profess to believe in, he understands that you have
[1:07:37] Speaker 3: questions and that it's okay to have doubts. It's okay
[1:07:41] Speaker 3: to investigate, and it's okay to look for evidence, you know,
[1:07:45] Speaker 3: believing things on blind faith. We don't do that in
[1:07:48] Speaker 3: any way in life, the way you live life for
[1:07:53] Speaker 3: everything else. Just translate that over into your religious life too,
[1:07:58] Speaker 3: and investigate and look and it's okay, Like don't it's okay.
[1:08:02] Speaker 3: You're not going to go to hell for asking questions.
[1:08:05] Speaker 3: It's it's okay.
[1:08:05] Speaker 1: John Loftis has a book called The Outsider Test for Faith,
[1:08:09] Speaker 1: and he encourages people to approach your religion with the
[1:08:13] Speaker 1: same critical lie that you would approach a competing religion.
[1:08:16] Speaker 1: That if you go, you know, your Christian looks at
[1:08:18] Speaker 1: Islam and they're busy looking for the holes, and the
[1:08:21] Speaker 1: Islam is looking at Christianity going oh, there's a problem.
[1:08:25] Speaker 1: Do that with your own faith without fear, right, because
[1:08:28] Speaker 1: a worthy God wouldn't punish you for being genuinely curious
[1:08:31] Speaker 1: and wanting to live in on his life, right.
[1:08:33] Speaker 3: I mean, that's how we're born. We're very curious by
[1:08:36] Speaker 3: not at least I am very curious by nature. And
[1:08:39] Speaker 3: that was the thing that I don't know who's where
[1:08:41] Speaker 3: I read it or where I saw it, but I
[1:08:43] Speaker 3: had opinions about every other religion. They were false, they
[1:08:47] Speaker 3: were crazy, they were weird. And then when I started
[1:08:50] Speaker 3: backing a way, I'm like, wait, Christianity's kind of weird,
[1:08:53] Speaker 3: kind of weird.
[1:08:53] Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad you escaped, and I'm so glad our
[1:08:57] Speaker 1: paths have crossed. After all of these years, I guess
[1:09:00] Speaker 1: several decades now, it's almost like no time is passed
[1:09:03] Speaker 1: during it. We can probably go all night. We could
[1:09:06] Speaker 1: probably just keep talking. But I know you've encouraged a
[1:09:08] Speaker 1: lot of people, and I think people take inspiration from
[1:09:12] Speaker 1: personal stories and to see a pastor manage to escape,
[1:09:16] Speaker 1: it's huge.
[1:09:17] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's huge.
[1:09:18] Speaker 1: Thanks for sharing your story.
[1:09:20] Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, My pleasure.
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