Why This Book Had to Be Written Some books are written because an author has an idea. This book was written because I had a wound. Not the kind of wound that disappears because time passes. Not the kind of wound that becomes smaller because people tell you to move on. Not the kind of wound that can be prayed away by the same kind of voices that helped create it. This wound came from watching people speak about God with certainty while carrying very little understanding. It came from hearing people talk about salvation as if it gave them permission to look down on the souls of others. It came from seeing Jesus used as a weapon by people who seemed less interested in becoming like him than in making others bow to the version of him they inherited. It came from family. It came from pressure. It came from watching people I love be treated as spiritually incomplete by people who had never deeply examined the faith they were using to judge them. That is where this book begins. Not in hatred. Not in rebellion for the sake of rebellion. Not in some shallow desire to attack Christianity. This book begins with a question: Do you actually understand what you are asking another soul to become?
Because I have heard the command. Convert. Accept Jesus. Give your life to Christ. Come to the truth. Be saved. I have heard those words spoken like they were simple. I have heard them spoken like they were loving. I have heard them spoken like they were urgent, holy, unquestionable, and final. But beneath those words, I kept hearing something else. I kept hearing assumption. I kept hearing superiority. I kept hearing inherited certainty pretending to be divine authority. And the more I listened, the more one question rose in me with a force I could not ignore: Convert into what? Into Jesus? Into Christianity? Into your denomination? Into your interpretation? Into your church culture? Into your fear? Into your family tradition? Into the version of God someone handed you before you were old enough to question it? That question would not leave me. Because when people say, “You need Jesus,” they often speak as if the meaning is obvious. But Jesus has been preached, interpreted, translated, institutionalized, politicized,
From The God They Inherited, manuscript pp. 5–6. Original wording; line breaks normalized.
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