This Is What Recover Christianity Is About (CLICK HERE FIRST)
Reconstructing Faith Around the Life and Love of Jesus
What Will I Write About and Why?
If you’re a Christian parent whose child has walked away from faith, or if you’re the one who walked away, this is for you. If your mind is full of questions but your soul still longs for Jesus, you do not have to choose between faith and honesty. There is another way forward.
I grew up an Evangelical Southern Baptist in the heart of the Bible Belt. I went to church three times a week and devoted myself to “inerrant” Scripture and trying to stay morally pure.
I stayed committed for decades. I led men’s retreats, wrote an evangelical book (No Matter the Cost, Bethany House Publishers), and launched a men’s ministry called Band of Brothers (bandofbrothers.org). But everything changed when my oldest son Collin, out of college and beginning his career, told me he no longer believed in Christianity and had come to identify as an atheist.
As a father, I felt fear, grief, confusion, and love all at once.
He could not reconcile a God who commanded genocide, excluded women and LGBTQ people from church leadership, or condoned slavery in any way.
Most troubling of all was his central question, the one that ultimately sent me on this journey: How could a God of infinite love and mercy torture people forever after they die, without any redemptive hope?
That conversation launched a rigorous and honest reexamination of everything I thought I knew about God.
What I began to discover was not a loss of faith, but something I hadn't expected.
C.S. Lewis, early Christian history, and most importantly the words of Jesus himself led me to a God whose love does not expire and whose grace is infinite.
Along the way, I brought my whole self to this journey. I have spent my career in boardrooms, courtrooms, and mediation tables, and none of it prepared me for sitting across from my own son and realizing I did not have good answers. And nothing in my professional life shaped me as deeply as rethinking the God I was taught to fear and rediscovering the Christ of grace and love.
Now I write and share what I have learned for people like me, those who want to hold on to Jesus while letting go of fear. And if you have a child who is questioning, rejecting, or walking away from the faith you once passed down, this is a place for you too. You are not alone.
I know firsthand what it is like to walk alongside a child who no longer believes. The good news is that reconstruction is possible. It can happen without sacrificing the relationship and sometimes while deepening it in ways neither person expected.
My hope and mission are simple. I want to help people stay in relationship with one another while honestly wrestling with the big questions of faith. Reconstructing Christian faith around the life and love of Jesus is possible. But how we go about it really matters.
As a mediator, I have learned that finding common ground is always the goal, because relationships, especially between a parent and child, matter more than winning all the arguments. In mediation, the path toward understanding usually begins with giving people more information, more context, and a fuller picture of the story.
That is part of what I hope to do through Recover Christianity.
I want to be honest with you about something. Some of what I share here may unsettle you at first. A few things might even make you angry. That is okay. I remember feeling the same way when I first encountered ideas that challenged what I had believed for my entire life. But here is what I eventually realized: much of what unsettled me was the same information my son had already found on his own. He had not stumbled onto fringe ideas dreamed up by skeptics trying to dismantle the faith. He had found real questions, rooted in history, Scripture, and honest theology, that serious Christians have wrestled with for centuries. If our children are already sitting with these questions, perhaps the most loving thing we can do as parents is not to dismiss them, but to sit down and look at them together. That is what I try to do here. Not to shake anyone's faith, but to meet people where the conversation is already happening.
Many Christians simply have never been exposed to the breadth of historic Christian thought. They may not realize that faithful followers of Jesus throughout history have held different views on questions involving hell, salvation, atonement, the Bible, suffering, and spiritual transformation. Some of what we explore here may feel unfamiliar, particularly for those of us shaped by modern evangelical Christianity, but much of it is not new at all. In many cases, these are older streams within the Christian tradition that became less visible over time.
My goal is not to pull anyone away from Jesus or from Christianity. Quite the opposite. My hope is to create space for honest, respectful conversation so that parents and children, doubters and believers, conservatives and progressives, can remain at the table together. Because sometimes the bridge back to faith begins not with certainty, but with the realization that there is more than one faithful way to understand the journey.
No one has a backstage pass to the afterlife, including me. We hold our perspectives with humility, not certainty. And we believe that people can land in very different places theologically and still call themselves Christians, and still love each other well.
I do not claim to have final answers, but I do believe these questions deserve honest exploration, which is what I try to do on this Substack.
I will explore what I have learned on this Recover Christianity journey, and why I am very much aligned with C.S. Lewis. Questions we will engage include:
Is God a God of Wrath?
Are we inherently good or bad?
Is Jesus really the only way?
How should we read the Bible?
What about suffering?
Along the way, I also offer a perspective on why Christianity is still worth holding onto. I have been fortunate to have the resources to offer this work freely, and I am grateful to share the journey with you.
I highly recommend starting with the 4-part video conversation I had with my son. You can hear about our 10-year journey together as we studied and explored Christianity and other faith traditions. Both of us now are more in love with Jesus and his teachings than we have ever been. We are grateful that we recovered Christianity together, and we certainly know that the questions and the journey are not over.
Whether you are deconstructing, reconstructing, doubting, grieving, questioning, or quietly hoping there might still be a version of Christianity centered on love instead of fear, welcome. I am glad you are here.
Quick Start on how I recommend you begin:
The video Series with my son:
What to do when your child questions their faith:
What to Say and What NOT to Say
When Faith Costs You Your Child - No Contact Culture
Engaging with the first big question - Is God a God of Wrath?
Part 1: What is the Character of God?
Part 2 - Does Death Represent the LAST CHANCE?
By: Vance F. Brown
Subscribe for free below. New posts arrive most weeks, and this is always a safe place to ask hard questions. WELCOME! LET’S RECOVER CHRISTIANITY TOGETHER!
Substack Page Recover Christianity Website YouTube Channel Vance’s LinkedIn
Glad you are doing this, friend. I am in.
These words you wrote are so inviting, and necessary: “If you’ve ever felt torn between your heart and your beliefs—if your mind is full of questions but your soul still longs for Jesus—you don’t have to choose between faith and honesty. There is another way forward.”