As I reflected on Calvin University professor Kristin Du Mez’s brilliantly provocative and painful, Jesus and John Wayne, I realized how many different intersections I had with her subject. After all, I serve as a pastor in a Presbyterian denomination that is committed to male-only ordained leadership. I worked at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I’m a two-time graduate of Bob Jones University, that bastion of fundamentalism, after spending a year at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. I’ve been to all three “levels” of Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles (basic, advanced, and pastors). I went to a white-flight Baptist academy for high school in northern Virginia, graduating right after George H. W. Bush became president. As the young people say, “I have the receipts.”
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