Ever since it was announced that Bishop Carlton Pearson was ill, people have been commenting on the implications of his legacy in the Christian Church. There have been debates and panel discussions, Youtube personalities have been throwing out vitriolic commentaries and random people were wishing ill of him as if it was earning them some heaven points. And since he died on November 19th, it hasn’t let up. I have tried not to get too sucked in. But, I have seen people continue to malign him or those who have shown him even a modicum of support. And in many ways, they have made it their mission to ensure that folks don’t “fall for inclusion” by demonizing him as much as possible.
As one of his friends who got to know him most when he was in the valley, I can hear him saying that I should not let it get to me. In fact, I have a video of him talking about letting go of the right to be right and not necessarily the reason. And for a long time, he tried to protect me from being associated with him when I was a pastor because he didn’t really want other people to pay the price he did. But, since I had already had my fair share of church hurt, I wasn’t afraid of that. That’s why I invited him to install me in my last church. What I didn’t want to do—but he was willing to do—was to go back into the lion’s den trusting that if the lions heard his message clearly they might not attack again. His big thing was the idea that we don’t have to go along to get along. Even though in many cases, that ran contrary to his experience. He really underestimated some of his fellow Christians’ sense of contempt for folks who break ranks.
Now, since returning from the services in Tulsa, I have been thinking a lot about why he kept on trying with folks who wouldn’t even try to meet him halfway and about all of the folks who are honoring him now that didn’t say anything good prior to him falling ill and eventually dying. On one side, it all frustrates me. But, on the other side, I see that it couldn’t be any other way, because people have always been this way. I remember when I used to take care of my ex’s grandmother. Almost no one visited with her. She couldn’t call them if she needed anything. But, as soon as she was about to die, they were crying. And when she finally died, one of her grandkids even tried to jump in the grave with her like a fool screaming, “Take me with you.” I told her to calm down. Then I asked her, “Where was all of this love when I was calling you to come see her and you didn’t?” And then family members were asking me after the funeral if she had told me about any money she might have hidden. I know that might sound like a tangent. But, it isn’t. It’s just a demonstration of how folks tend to be when love inconveniences them.
Enter expletives here. *$%#$($&(&@$^
But what gets me more than anything is folks waxing theological about what they think he believed and refuting it, when they have very little knowledge about what he went through. I went through a similar experience as him on a smaller scale, spent 10 years in the Christian wilderness, spent five years getting a theological education, pastored for 10 years, and had dozens of conversations with Carlton on top of reading his books, went to his Inclusion conference and even formally studied the history of Christian Universalism in seminary, and I still don’t claim to know what Carlton held in his heart beyond what he told me. But, I did know how he lived from personal experience and hearing from others. And there is only one word I could use to describe him. Christian.
Take up your cross and bear it.
In the Bible, when Jesus foretells the suffering that he was going to have to go through, it says,
‘The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.’ Then he said to them all, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?
Luke 9:22-25
I have known a lot of people, mostly Christians, who when they feel like the chips are down, the last thing they want to do is bear their cross. And they don’t want to do it for Jesus’s sake or anyone elses’. That was not Carlton. They say you know a tree by its fruits. Well, he literally lost everything fame had to offer because he believed in a peace that surpassed all understanding. Even though, he was called a heretic, which comes from from the Greek word hairetikos, which means “able to choose”, what he chose was his personal cross. The same thing that has been asked of anyone who says they follow Christ. And just because his wasn’t the same as our personal crosses, it didn’t mean that he should have been treated as he was and has been.
They Will Know You By Your Love
In John 13:34-35 just before we get into the “Farewell Discourses” of Jesus, it is written that Jesus said;
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Carlton died from a broken heart, because he loved the church. On several occasions, I saw him tearing up when he talked about his love for the church and the people in it. But what hurt him the most was that he didn’t feel the love in return. He couldn’t reconcile how easy it was for people to turn on him even as he kept pressing forward with his cross. It wasn’t so much that he wanted or needed folks to agree with him in as much as he still desired that we love one another even in the midst of disagreeing. One thing I can say for certain is that he was known by his love. I can’t say the same for some of his detractors.
Study to Show Thyself Approved
When I was in seminary, I did a course on the early church fathers and mothers and learned many things that were never taught in the Pentecostal, Baptist, and Holiness Churches that I was a part of. One was that many of the early church folks and desert fathers believed in Universal Salvation, what Carlton Pearson taught. They took the words, “It is finished.” very seriously and literally and thus believed that all of Creation was redeemed in the finished work of the Cross but folks just hadn’t learned it yet. That was the Good News they were called to spread. I also was not taught that many of them were African. I was not taught that originally, there were way more than the 66 books in the canonized Bible. But Martin Luther separated the Apocrypha in the 1500s. And that says nothing of the scores of other books that were being shared among different Christian communities before Constantine got his hands on the religion in the 4th Century. I wasn’t taught that the KJV, that many people say is the authoritative translation, included the Apocrypha until the 1880s. I didn’t know that Biblical inerrancy wasn’t taught until the late 19th Century and was started in America and wasn’t really formalized until almost the 1980s!!! What I did know from my own reading of the Bible, but got in trouble for asking about was, that there are distinctly two different Creation stories in the Bible or that the Noah story says 2 of each animal in one section and 7 pairs (14) of each clean animal in another section (Now how big was that boat again?). I noticed that there are two sets of the “10 Commandments” because after Moses broke the tablets, he rewrote them differently. I noticed that most people know about the Levitical priesthood. But no pastor I ever met has preached about the Zadokite priesthood and its relationship to Melchizedek–even though the Bible, that they say they read and take literally, says that Jesus was a priest forever in the “Order of Melchizedek”. Seems like something important to investigate.
I also noticed that the Gospel of Luke opens with him saying to “Theophilus” (God lover) that he is not an eyewitness to the events of Christ’s earthly ministry, even though I was always taught that the Apostle Luke wrote that book. Just as I was taught that the other Books in the Gospel were written by those whose names are on it. But any seminary trained minister knows this isn’t accurate. I also noticed before seminary that Romans 10 says that the righteousness of faith does not say who is going to heaven or hell. Even though many Christian pastors and commentators make a business out of saying who is going where. But, it does say “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” And I can tell you from hours of conversation that Carlton Pearson called on the name of the Lord constantly and desperately wanting to be of the same mind as Christ Jesus and that he searched and searched and searched and read everything he could get his hands on to try to understand the world of Jesus’s time and the early church so that he could put his modern faith in the proper context out of which Jesus and the Apostles emerged. He was the epitome of trying to study to show himself approved. People might not agree with where he landed. But, I don’t know any other pastors who put in the hours he did genuinely trying to serve the Lord. I’m talking giving the shirt off his back style. When he came to my apartment and saw how small it was, he literally tried to sell stocks to give me some money. And this is when he was at a low point himself. Very few know how much he grieved over what he was learning. It was literally torturing him because he wasn’t trying to preach a “different gospel”. But like Paul who said in Romans 16:25, “Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to MY gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began.”, Carlton felt he had learned a secret that the finished work was more complete than we had been taught and he very innocently thought that people would be happy to know that God truly was as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent as we say we think God is. He truly believed with the faith of a child that Romans 8:38-39 was true when it says, ” For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” He just believed that “nothing” included religion, doctrine, or contextual interpretation.
Counting it All as Loss
Just like Paul preached sincerely out of his revelation after first believing differently, that’s what Carlton did. He tested everything, studied, held back from every earthly thing, fasted, and still this revelation persisted. So, he stayed faithful and kept studying and sharing even though it cost him everything earthly. Some people say with their lips that they agree with Paul in what is shared in Philippians 3:7-11 about counting everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, his Lord. But, Carlton straight up lived it out. Then he went through all of the sufferings that came with transformation. I can tell you firsthand that most pastors I know do everything they can to avoid suffering of any kind.
What Carlton was guilty of was not believing in God incorrectly. He believed in God absolutely. He was guilty of believing in people too much. I don’t expect most people to read this far because I don’t believe in as many people as much as Carlton did. Most of us don’t read. We just take the word of someone who screams loudly and has the world’s goods and think that is a mark of authority. But, for those of you who made it this far, I offer you an experiment that I did. For 30 days, all I did was read Universalist theology and write about it and journal on it. At the end, of that time, I was pretty convinced that it was accurate. Then for 30 days, I read only theology that supported the idea of hell and how a loving God could send people there for eternity and journaled on that. And guess what, at the end, I was also pretty convinced that it was accurate. So, what conclusion did I come to? It is that Proverbs 23 was right when it says that as a person thinks, so are they. And this is humbling.
Almost everyone who argues for one side or the other on any issue only hunkers down and surrounds themselves with folks who think like them. They don’t know the other. They don’t know their “enemies”. They don’t study. They don’t inquire. They have no sense of wonder. Their faith cannot withstand questions or examination. They literally don’t read the Bible they say they take literally. And if they do, they either skip the boring or challenging parts or zone out when something doesn’t match the biases that they come to the Bible with. It is amazing. Here is another challenge if you’re still reading. I did this when I left one church after other Black people got bothered with me for saying Jesus wasn’t White and that many of our perceptions of Christianity are attached to what we were taught in slavery. In my grief, I looked at every belief that I held and I asked myself, “Where did I learn this?” “Have I ever tested this myself?” “Where is this teaching in the Bible?” (There is a lot that we think that’s in there that isn’t, such as “God helps those who help themselves.”) “How would I be if I didn’t hold this belief?” “Does this belief help me to love God and others as Jesus commanded or does it make me judge them as Jesus warned against?”
If you will dare do this exercise, I imagine a good many of you will be shocked at how little you actually know about what you believe and how you came to that belief. Like most of us, you probably just went along with the crowd. And yet, you can justify judging folks from different backgrounds who basically just went along with their crowd. I learned that from my cousin who challenged me when I called myself trying to save him. He simply asked, “Why do you think I should stop believing what my parents teach me and believe what your mom teaches you? We’re both just believing what we were taught.” He got me on that. What arrogance I had. And then the nail on the coffin was that his Muslim family was more faithful to their beliefs than any Christian I knew. They prayed, fasted, had a faithful marriage unlike my Christian parents. And more than that, they knew their Book and the Bible way more than most Christians. What sad commentary.
Meanwhile we are constantly forgetting what our Book teaches, which includes that we are one body, many members and that no part of the body should say that they don’t need the other part even if we have different gifts and callings. But, that is absolutely what we did to Bishop Pearson. And there is no denying that. And as the teachings we say we take literally say, “As we sow, shall we also reap.” Given that, I think many of us have a lot more to be concerned about than Carlton does. He sowed the belief that God loves us all and that nothing can separate us from God’s love. What should be reaped from sowing those seeds? And out of curiosity, taking the idea of reaping what we sow literally, what would you say we should reap if we sow seeds that say, in fact, that there are those God loves that God is powerless to save, that the slightest confusion in doctrine no matter how innocently attained is worthy of eternal damnation, that God does not know the heart of a person but is attached to being misinterpreted and is not secure enough to “forgive them for they know not what they do”, that we have a hell or heaven to put people in, that our interpretation of scriptures that we usually know very little about authorize us to terrorize the world with our colonizing and conquering mentality?
Here is where I land with all of this. I will never know as much as I don’t know about God and people. And I can never know enough to get it perfectly. It is a fruitless exercise apart from the joy of trying to love God and people the best we can with the gifts God gave us–to include scriptural guidance. That’s why I believe we need to cultivate the intellectual and cultural humility to understand that there are things we don’t understand. First and foremost we don’t understand someone’s heart. But beyond that, unless we can acknowledge our biases that limit us in terms of us grasping the nuances of the many diversities that encounter our understanding of scripture, it is very likely that we are reading to confirm our biases rather than to understand what is written in the context it was written from. Further, if we think that those who transmitted those writings as well as those who edited and redacted portions were free from biases themselves, you are missing a big chunk of the conversation. Sometimes you can learn just as much about a person’s motivation and understanding from what is not said as from what is said or missing. Not knowing everything is the biggest part of being human. And as far as scripture having all of the information, consider that Paul refers to other letters that he wrote that aren’t in the Bible. That too is missing part of the conversation. Or what about what it says in John 21:25, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” We try to act like we’re not all ignorant about most things, especially about whatever God is up to. But, if we can accept that there is an untold story there, we can learn more about how to navigate Mystery or make room for the Unknown. That is the essence of walking by faith and not by sight. So let me ask you, in what are you placing your confidence? If you cannot face these missing elements of scripture, then chances are you are attached to being right, to a community that you fear being dispelled from if you make a mistake, to the fear of going to hell for being wrong, or many other factors. But, you are not attached to an honest inquiry into the tradition that you profess. And you can’t shout enough to make that true. Fortunately, God knows our heart and God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. So, that even our ignorance and arrogance cannot separate us from God’s Love. And that is what Carlton came to understand and live and love from. He was able to reconcile that he was taught by people not to far from slavery, many of whom couldn’t read, and despite their anointing, could not win their battles over sin and despair. And that in many ways, the fear of not getting it perfectly contributed to the anxiety that made them backslide or give up. And so, he kept learning to the point that he figured out, metaphorically speaking, how the sausage was made. And so he could no longer swallow it. Nor could he feed it to other people. Rather, he chose to invite them to the banquet he entered into where everyone was welcome. And that was too much for the sausage salespeople who feared what they had to lose if people agreed with Carlton’s revelation. And when all you’ve ever had was sausage, trying other things may seem scary.
I gave up on my own understanding a long time ago. And I know that I can’t control God with my own righteousness or indebt God to me by getting an A on a Bible quiz like we get taught. All I can do is keep loving and learning. What I learned from Carlton is that even if the whole world turns on you, it is imperative that we do what is most loving. I will always respect him for that.
Bonus Content
For those of you are feeling brave. I invite you to check out this message and wrestle with the implications of realizing how much more of the big picture there is to explore.
The Roofless Church 
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