At first glance, Daniel Rogers ended up more or less where he started: a pastor at a rural Alabama Church of Christ. But along the way, he deconstructed, endured excommunication, and eventually found a new community of believers.
The Church of Christ is distinct from other American Protestant denominations in that it doesn’t identify as a denomination at all. With no overarching organizational structure, Churches of Christ are autonomous congregations ruled locally, church by church, usually by a couple of male elders.
A product of the 19th-century Restoration Movement, they were designed to be this way to resist denominationalism and unite Christians under one church.
Because there is no overarching structure, belief systems and cultures within Churches of Christ vary widely.
“You could walk into a Church of Christ where you live and it might be the most fundamentalist church in the whole state.” Rogers told the Daily Yonder. “Or it could be the most progressive church that you’ve ever been to.”
The church Rogers grew up attending fell more neatly into the former camp. Rogers’ father, grandfather, and church elders taught him that only he and his fellow churchgoers were going to Heaven.
“We were taught that everybody else is liberal, everybody else has gone away from Jesus, and we are the only ones who remain as faithful members of the one true church,” Rogers explained.
The church’s belief system was better defined by what it did not believe than what it did, said Rogers. “It was always reactions – we don’t believe this or we don’t believe that.”
Rogers said the church approached scripture the way a lawyer might approach the law, trying to discern what is “legal” and “illegal,” sometimes even trying to find loopholes to defend one’s stance.
“[The dominant scriptural] interpretation is the law. And if you don’t abide by it, you’re not in God’s good graces,” said Rogers.
Following in his family’s footsteps, Rogers became a pastor at age 20, starting at a small country church before joining his father and grandfather at the church he was raised in.
But a couple months into his ministry there, Rogers started to have questions about how they approached scripture. When he raised these questions, the church leaders repressed them. Leadership sat Rogers down, telling him, in Rogers’ words, “if you don’t get on board with what we believe, you’re going to have to go.”
“I was told my whole life, if you ever change your mind on something and you can show us in scripture where we’re wrong, please tell us because we want to change too,” Rogers said. Given the church’s reaction to his questioning, he realized the real motivation was more like,“you need to tell us when you’re changing your mind so we can get you corrected as quickly as possible.”
“When I realized that’s what it was about, that just made me question the whole system,” said Rogers.
Unwilling to stop asking his questions, Rogers was pushed out of the church for good. The technical term in Churches of Christ is “[withdrawing] fellowship,” a process Rogers compared to shunning or excommunication in the Catholic Church.
Rogers’ father and grandfather sent a letter to every local congregation calling him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” on a path of destruction, and a “false teacher” who had abandoned the gospel.
But Rogers did not leave the gospel. Far from it. After his disfellowship, he threw himself into studying scripture more than ever before, peeling back the doctrines he knew and asking himself what was left underneath. He regarded his studies during this time to a “deconstruction” of the beliefs he was raised with.
His questions were not a rejection of his faith but a deepening of it.
In the beginning, he did much of this alone. “There was no faith community that I could go to,” Rogers said, a feeling that came with a lifelong education that everyone outside his faith community was destined for damnation.
During his deconstruction, he started thinking more deeply about the theology behind the “circle.” At first, he wondered if the circle was bigger than he thought. And then, he started to think, “maybe this whole thing is wrong.”
He realized that the circle theology drove people to a “a church of one,” a tiny bubble wherein everyone believes the same thing as the person defining it.
“I was like, wait a minute. It’s got to go the other way,” Rogers said.
He articulated his newfound beliefs in his 2023 book, How a 25-Year-Old Learned He Wasn’t the Only One Going to Heaven. Rogers’ primary audience was people like him, who were looking for an alternative path apart from the fundamentalist church context. But the book is also for those who completely disagree with him, he said. Always up for a theological disagreement, Rogers said, “I welcome [those people] to read it as well.”
Some who have done similar deconstruction work have called themselves Exvangelicals, or Ex-Church of Christ. While Rogers understands why people use those labels, he does not embrace them himself.
He worries that if he adds the -ex prefix, he may trick himself into thinking that he is fully healed from the doctrines of his youth. And for all the work Rogers has put into undoing his fundamentalist beliefs, he said, it’s an ongoing battle.
He’s still taming his “inner fundamentalist,” he joked. His first assumption about the scripture will always be rooted in what he learned growing up. “If I’m not always admitting that, then I might slip back into it without even knowing it.”
Years after Rogers was pushed out of his home church, he got a call from a friend who was a pastor at North Broad Street Church in Albertville, Alabama at the time. His friend was leaving North Broad Street and wanted Rogers to take his place. Cautious at first, Rogers visited the church, fell in love with it, and took the job.
Now, Rogers said, North Broad Street is “still the Church of Christ, but it’s our church.” Home to many people who have considered leaving the Church of Christ, the church offers people the same familiar traditions, save the fundamentalist ideals.
Rogers says the church is able to be this way, in part, due to ministers that came before him. Since the late 1980s, he said, some ministers have been pushing the needle away from fundamentalism, inviting conversations about topics like divorce and remarriage which were once largely taboo.
For each push of the needle, backlash ensued. Some people wanted to double down on tradition, while others resolved that there was no going back. With pushing and pulling, the net trajectory over the past handful of decades has been away from fundamentalism, said Rogers.
One associate minister in particular had encouraged women to be in leadership roles, prioritized community and fellowship, and encouraged rethinking worship as a specific formula. “He laid a lot of the groundwork for what I’m able to do,” Rogers said.
Now, Rogers is cultivating a faith community entirely different from the one he grew up in – one where people not only feel safe, but feel encouraged to ask questions about their faith.
Churchgoers sing and play music together at a church barn night. (Photo by Corri Johnson)
The Challenges of Serving a Rural Congregation
Forming a community where people feel safe enough to ask questions about their faith is a challenge anywhere, but forming such a community in a rural area poses its own challenges. With folks living 20 miles from each other, Rogers said it can be difficult for people to see each other during the week and not just, as he put it, “punch a time card for an hour on Sunday morning.”
A church barn night in Horton, Alabama. (Photo by Corri Johnson)
This is where church “barn nights” come in. Members Corri Johnson and her husband started barn nights when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, hosting church people at their barn – now mostly a hangout space, but still home to a couple cats and dogs and a free-range pig – in Horton, Alabama. It started as a way to bring people together with enough space to physically distance. But even after Covid-19 restrictions subsided, the barn nights stuck.
On a typical barn night, churchgoers play bluegrass music, cook food on the smoker, and hang out while kids play on the trampoline and toss cornhole. At the end of the night, everyone talks around the fire.
Parishioners and pets gather for barn night. (Photo by Corri Johnson)
“Things get talked about that aren’t things you would normally share with each other on a random Sunday morning,” Johnson said.
Johnson joined North Broad Street with her husband in 2019 after feeling pushed out of their previous congregation, also a Church of Christ. They felt “ready to grow when some other people were not,” Johnson explained.
Barn night conversations around the fire often wander to theological questions. In Johnson’s view, voicing these questions “let[s] people know that maybe you’re not the only one with questions.”
“It gives a place for those questions and that doubt without fear of being made to feel like you’re being rebellious or stupid,” Johnson said.
“[The barn nights are] the purest expression of community I’ve ever seen in a church,” Rogers said. Rogers has been at every single one of them, said Johnson.
North Broad Street remains a “theologically diverse community,” said Rogers. And in Rogers’ journey from fundamentalism, he’s not in the business of changing anyone’s mind. He’s tried that route, he said. It doesn’t work.
Parishioners sit near the fire together. (Photo by Corri Johnson)
“I’m in North Alabama and one of the most conservative counties in the entire country,” he said. Indeed, the church is located in Marshall County, which went 86% for Trump in 2024.
“We might as well meet people where they’re at and help them take baby steps,” Rogers said.
The goal: to “move towards a faith that expresses itself in love.”
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