Who we are

Welcome to our Circus.  We are a family of improving Christians. What that means is that we love God a lot, but we also have a lot of issues with Him and His church, and we are ok with all of that.

We met right before we were both separately planning on moving to San Diego, CA to help plant a church in the heart of downtown. We were young-ish, naïve, passionate and immature. We had no plans but to go all in and reach San Diego with the gospel through this church that was supposed to be fresh and different and a killer light in the middle of darkness.

We worked hard, for years.  We did “whatever it took” and learned whatever we needed to learn to make this church “successful”.  And then we started to feel fake; we started to feel like what we believed deep down inside and what we were doing, were simply not consistent one with the other. But we pushed through, obviously we needed to be careful with our thoughts and check our heart. The problem was, the feeling that we were betraying ourselves kept growing and becoming increasingly difficult to tame.

We started to question if we believed all the things we taught and did, and then we’d feel guilty we were even questioning them. Questioning the how-to of church in general felt like rebellion, like our heart was clearly contaminated with evil or something – but how does one shake feelings they simply cannot shake?

So we gave into the feelings of “rebellion”, if “submission” and maintaining the status quo made us feel like clowns playing a game of pretend, then we were going to be rebels. We needed to leave and walk towards God knows where, to figure out God knows what. We needed to become wanderers with more uncertainty than certainty, backpackers of faith who had no idea where they would lay their head for the season to come. We left in search of God and freedom and identity and destiny and a new life. We left knowing very little and with more questions than answers.

We learned that having questions and making peace with uncertainty can be viewed by many as not hearing from God, because there is a belief that He always gives you direction and always tells you exactly where to go and always does the same thing for all. But that actually isn’t always the case. Abraham decided to go to Egypt during a famine and God said nothing, Isaac was specifically told not to go to Egypt during a famine, and Jacob was told to actually go to Egypt during a famine. That’s the life with God; he speaks to each of us, individually. He plans unique paths for each of us, the uncertainty lies in the fact that I have absolutely no clue what He has laid for you, and I have to spend time with Him to know what He has planned for me. Honor only happens when I trust that every step you are taking is a step you are taking because you believe it is what God invited you to do. Me not understanding your path doesn’t make it any less the path God has you on, and we are learning to respect that and honor that for us and for others.

After we left the church we helped plant and had to stand alone with no community and no actual direction, we discovered that we had permission to question everything, and I mean everything. We were allowed now to be uncertain about all the things we had held as final truths because we realized nothing really was. We even questioned God and His existence but He was so real to us, He became the only certainty we had, He was, period. [But we didn’t know all that He was, and we questioned His character, we didn’t know if He was really all that good, and we asked Him about it. We didn’t know if He was really all that faithful, and we asked Him about it. We didn’t know if His idea of having a Church was all that genius, and we asked Him about it; and He was so cool about every question. We realized He wasn’t offended by our questions but instead he was ready to answer them. He was ready to take us on adventures to discover all we had struggled with, He wanted us to struggle with Him because in the struggle we were actually really getting to know Him.

We learned that actually He is in the questions, in the uncertainty and the beauty of mystery. We learned that sometimes He pushes us to stand alone because the noise of all that is around us has become so deafening we stopped hearing Him all together. And He is in the silence, and in the solitude, He is in the other side of belonging because really we don’t belong anywhere if we don’t belong fully to Him, and we can’t belong fully to Him until we know Him, and we can’t know Him until we are free enough to ask Him everything.

So here we are, with lots of questions and lots of uncertainty, still young-ish, still naïve, still passionate and still immature but having changed a lot in the last decade. Here we are, hoping to know God more and more everyday and ready to invite others to ask questions with us, ready to learn from others and teach others what we’ve learned, because we all know God uniquely, and we all have something to learn from everyone and something to teach everyone.

So welcome to our Circus. You won’t get a lot of absolutes here but you’ll have permission to be you. All of you is welcome to the circus, you won’t get our polished versions here, you’ll just find a group of freaks letting God use our insecurities, our less than perfect stories and our ugly sides. A group of freaks getting increasingly more comfortable being freaks.