Hello, and welcome to my blog. My name is Brandon, my main handle is Pr0pheticus on all the gaming sites, but if neither of those suit you then you can call me BB. I thought I would use my first post to talk a little about who I am and why I decided to start this blog. I want to call out false teachings that are rampant in today’s church. I want to reach out to others who are autistic, and possibly some that aren’t, that maybe just need the encouragement to remove their mask and speak out about concerns they have. And not just in the church, but in all of life. I want to promote what the Bible actually teaches, rather than what faulty man has to teach. If any of these are things that interest you, then I invite you to join me on this journey.

I think it’s important to outline what’s taken place in my life, especially as it relates to my being burned by the church I was last attending. The newer events happened fairly recently, a few weeks ago, and the wounds are still fresh. But I am going to do my best to remain sober-minded through this process and tell my side of the story and not bash too hard on the others involved. I will not be naming names.

I am a 32-year-old husband and father of 2 beautiful boys, one 8 months and one 2 years. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Bible and Theology and am not currently using it. I hear that’s pretty common nowadays. My wife and I have been married since 2018 and navigating the difficulties of life ever since. I am a somewhat avid gamer (about as avid as you can be with small children and a job and other responsibilities) and cling to Pokémon as my special interest, although I do enjoy Nintendo as a whole. I own a Switch and have been diving into the Virtual Console games as of late. I also own a PC and will dust that off from time to time to play with my friends who I never see IRL anymore.

Over the past 5 years, I have really been trying to learn who I am and to heal from past wounds to be a better husband and father to my family. By going to therapy I have discovered that I suffered from depression and anxiety, and more recently have learned of my neurodivergence (ADHD and ASD Level 1 to be specific.)

I guess the best way to describe myself is as an autistic theologian. I have lived over 31 years before I finally discovered my autism and was diagnosed in early 2024. Now that I can look back on my entire existence and understand that there was indeed something that separated me from my peers, along with most everyone in my life, I decided it was time to take off the mask. This starts with what I believe to be true about the Bible and Christianity.

I had grown up going to a Lutheran church until I was about 16. My dad, who was majorly involved in the church, had a falling out with the pastor, who said some terribly mean things to him. We as a family ended up leaving the church and never found a new church to attend.

After this incident I had fallen into just a pattern of living and getting by. I graduated high school, went to community college, hopped jobs a bit, partied (not too hard), and just lived for me, always struggling with what to believe. I mostly was wondering why a God of love would let such horrible things happen to people, not to mention disease, cancer, murder, etc.

It wasn’t until I met my wife that I actually started looking into God’s word to answer the questions about Christianity I had and the problems I was having with other Christians. She brought me to her church, helped lead me to answers that I needed and also helped lead me back to Christ. I repented of my sin, something I had never done in the Lutheran church I had attended as a child, and confessed that Jesus Christ is savior and Lord of all.

After this, I got married, felt the call to become a pastor, and ended up going back to school or a couple of years to get a Bachelor’s of Bible and Theology under my belt, as well as some debt; $20k in the hole for 3 semesters of schooling…. Which I am not using right now. I may never use it, except for blogging purposes at this point.

Here’s where stuff starts to get hairy. As I was going through school and learning from my pastor (sort of) what it was like to be a pastor, I was into preaching and had preached a couple messages myself. I wanted to learn how other people preached and so I decided to travel to the wonderful land of YouTube and do some research on other people’s preaching styles. In this, I found a lot of messages that I didn’t really like… messages about how God can lead you to your best life; that God would bless you and make you healthy and wealthy in this life, as long as you were tithing or serving in the church in some volunteer type way. None if these sat right with me. I knew I had read in the. Bible to watch out for false teachers, but i never imagined it would be on such a huge scale. I decided to type in “false teacher” in the YouTube search bar. Before my eyes were hours and hours of content of people bringing to light false teachings and heresies that exist in a great deal of churches today; teaching about prosperity, that God’s will is ALWAYS to heal people, that everyone can prophesy, that God is going to move soon and there will be a bunch of good things and blessings coming soon here on earth! I saw guys like Chris Rosebrough, Steve Kozar and Justin Peters critique sermons, Bible in hand, comparing everything that was said back to Scripture, and just absolutely schooling people on how to interpret the Word of God. I found guys like Mike Winger, who challenge others to think critically and biblically about everything, and if you have a question, to crack open your dusty old Bible and read it, rather than taking someone’s word for it as they stand in a stage on a Sunday morning. Aside from Pokémon I had found my new special interest.

I spent hours and hours absorbing content and relating it back to my schooling and my own Bible reading. I was building more and more confidence in my ability to discern between sound biblical exegesis and eisegesis. I can now look at a passage and figure out for myself how to understand what it is saying, rather than needing to be spoon fed. However, the one thing I had never done was take all of this training and learning and applied it to my beliefs and the church that I was attending. Maybe this is because of the blinders being on, or because I was possibly too self-righteous and too “in-my-own-way”. Maybe it’s because in my autistic reasoning, it’s much easier to just go with the flow and not question anything than it is to stick your neck out and risk looking like a social outcast, which is ironic because I already felt like such an outcast. Excuse me as I tangent once again.

I attended this church, but never felt included in anything that was going on. It just always felt like there was some get-together or party or dinner thing happening that neither me or my wife were ever thought of or invited to, except maybe last minute as a passing comment. I always got to hear about it after the fact. And it’s not like I was just an outlier in the church. Since I was in school to become a pastor, I devoted myself to serving in church as much as possible. Not only was I on the worship team, I also ended up becoming the Sunday morning administrator. I would talk with the pastor about the message, choose the songs accordingly, send requests to members of the band through Planning Center, and arrange the order of service. This happened each week. Then on Sunday mornings I would print out the chord charts for the band members and make sure everyone had what they needed.

I even ended up taking my secular remote office job and arranging so I could work at the church so I could be around the pastor as much as possible and learn from him and maybe have him take me on some of his pastoral duties like visiting members of the church or the community. That quickly devolved into me and him just sitting around talking most of the time. Which in some aspects was helpful, but not really scratching the itch for being prepared to go into full time ministry. I will say, the church made it clear that there was no place for me to be put on staff payroll. I knew that I was going to be leaving this church at some point.

On top of all this, I also was appointed to Eldership by the church. You’d think that at this point they would have accepted me into their friend clique. Still, I never was included on anything besides whatever went on in the Elder meetings.

Allow me to continue my rant about not feeling seen. Aside from all of that, here I am trying to become a pastor, and never got ordained. It’s been 3 years since I graduated and got my Bible degree. As much as I asked and requested, the Elders never bothered to even bring it up in one of our meetings. I know that I could just go online and get it done myself, but I wanted it to be legit through the church. They never gave me that. I also accrued a bit of debt, like I mentioned earlier, and the Elders had agreed to help me out by matching each month what I paid into the loan. Months went by after this was voted for. I sent my credentials to login to the loan service to our secretary, reached out several times to both her and the other Elders, and brought up the situation at every Elder meeting. Nothing was done. Lots of people saying “yes, we’ll get on that”, but nothing ever being done about it. As you can see, concerns and frustrations are starting to build.

Back to my desire to look at everything biblically. I mentioned that I was on the Elder board for this church. One of the main things this Elder board does is once a year head into the mountains for a retreat at some cabins. During the retreat the board practices listening to God to gain direction for the church. We would go on a walk with pen and paper, and hear what God is saying to us. Personal, direct revelation. I admit that I bought into this heavily. This was a normal practice at this church and at first, I just went with it because I didn’t want to seem like the outcast I already was. This isn’t just something the Elders did. The pastor teaches this same doctrine to members of the church. I’m not going to get much into the rebuttal of this doctrine. I will at least mention that this is not a good teaching, it’s not biblical, and it comes from the plague manifested by heretical books like The Purpose Driven Life and Jesus Calling. It breeds feelings anxiety, inadequacy, hopelessness, and sometimes resentment into the hearts of believers that are subject to such teachings. I will dive into this topic in another post later on, if you’re interested in what the heck I’m talking about. Nevertheless, I bought into this concept and participated in it with this church.

So as I’m researching and absorbing more content on false teaching, wouldn’t you know, I find videos about this exact teaching. And it’s not just people blabbing their opinions. These guys are opening up the text and refuting this idea that God speaks outside of the Bible with biblical text. Again, I’ll go into this in greater detail in another post. But when I started reading the Bible for myself, and finding out that the videos I was watching weren’t lying to me, my heart sank. Could I really have been partaking in heresy? I couldn’t believe it at first, but there I was with the truth staring me straight in the face. I grieved. How could I be so deceived? How, with all my interest in calling out false teachings and heretical doctrines, could I not see this much sooner? I was devastated. This teaching is what led me to believe that I was to become a pastor; what led me to going back to school and accruing a ton of debt for a little paper that says technically, because it’s not an Mdiv. that I am only “partially” qualified to be in ministry. I felt like a fool.

I knew I had to bring this up to my pastor. Even though I knew what the answer was going to be, I wanted to give him the chance to explain to me biblically his argument for hearing God’s voice outside of Scripture. I prayed for wisdom and discernment, and also for a civil conversation. I finally worked up the courage to approach him on this issue and we scheduled a time to meet.

I started out by asking some questions, just about where this teaching came from. He confirmed for me this was something new as of the last decade, and that they had partnered with another church in the area, one that is highly charismatic, to learn and teach this doctrine. He then asked me if I was wondering if this is biblical or not. And I said yes, I want you to show me in the Bible where this happens. He told me he couldn’t and wouldn’t do that and instead showed me a document that said there were some biblical rules to follow as far as hearing God’s voice goes. None of the passages were talking about hearing God’s voice. His only argument for it was that because he had experiences it in his own life, he knew it to be true.

Then, he said some very not nice things to me. He accused people who claim that God only speaks to us through scripture (yes I am now one of those people and yes it is a biblical view) that they have such static and boring lives. Now, I would call that rude, but it’s at least nicer than what most others who subscribe to this teaching about hearing God’s voice have to say. Others with this same viewpoint claim that Bible only people have a low view of the Holy Spirit and in doing so are heretics. Again, in another post I will argue that it is not the Sola Scriptura crowd that has the low view of the Holy Spirit.

There were other things that were said that were attacking me as a person, passive aggressively scolding me about a sermon I had given weeks prior to this discussion, claiming I was sending out the congregants to go judge people wrongly and that it was my fault if they did so. If this was such an important thing, why was this not brought up during the sermon, or at least right after it was over? I also was met with gaslighting, twisting scripture, and just all around not seeing me as a peer and fellow Elder. In my Autistic fear of just wanting to get the conversation over with, being in the moment, I didn’t recognize what was actually being said to me. I ended up just letting him say what he was saying, not agreeing with any of it, thanked him for talking it out with me, and walked away. After replaying the entire conversation over and over again in my head, that’s when I started noticing all of the hurtful and horrible things that were said.

After mulling it over for a while, I made the decision to leave the church. With all of the neglect and gaslighting I was receiving beforehand, all the ways I felt unimportant and unwanted, heap this last interaction onto it and I decided I needed to be done. I handed in my resignation 2 weeks ago. Now I am searching for churches in the area that will hopefully be biblically sound, but also will see me. I may never end up in leadership again after what happened though. If I do, this wound is going to have to heal significantly beforehand.

Thank God my faith is strong. I have heard people who discover stuff like this going on in their church isn’t right and they decide to leave the faith entirely, God have mercy on them. Although I was so broken, I felt my faith was stronger than ever because I was more grounded in Scripture than I had ever been. I can finally articulate what the true gospel is. I can tell when someone isn’t handling the text correctly. I can see dangerous doctrine that can lead people astray. I want to make this blog a place where people can read and then apply to their own church life or life in general. I want to share and spread biblical truth. My intent is not to bash the people teaching or practicing the false teachings, but to bring to light the teaching itself and inform people of traps and pitfalls. That being said, I will most definitely call out individuals who are intentionally leading people away from God’s Word. Avoiding false teachers and reading the Bible is how you get away from false teachings. So please join me and let’s read our Bibles, build each other up, call out the stuff that’s dangerous, and show love to one another.