Hi, I’m Brandon Gross… Thank you for stopping by brandongross.tv. I hope you find this small corner of the web to be filled with hope and purpose you can relate to along your journey of being the church.
I am here to help, listen, advise and learn with you on this journey. For many of you, my journey with the church has been much like yours; filled with many great times and honestly many really bad ones.
It’s easy to remember the hurt but necessary to remember the good in order to see past our hurt.
It’s easy to get so distracted by what hurts us that we can no longer appreciate and really savor the good times mixed in with the bad.
I have been married to my beautiful wife, Lindsay, since 2007. She makes me want to throw out high-fives like they were candy. As for work, Lindsay and I are wedding photographers in the rolling hills of Tennessee. If you just love looking at wedding photography you can take a look at our work over at www.lindsayandbrandon.com.
I’ve grown up most of my life as a pastor’s kid or better known as a “PK” for those of you who are in the club. My childhood consisted of a healthy dose of organ music and fellowship dinners all sandwiched in spit slinging sermons that made the front row of Gallagher and the “smash-o-matic” show seem dry. They really should have handed out ponchos before service.
I was always deeply involved in “church” and later on even worked with a very well known church management software company for 7 years. During my time there I spoke with thousands and thousands of ministry leaders, pastors, and volunteers. I also volunteered heavily at our local church congregation during this time.
That was until I lost hope in the church…
Within 1 month I left everything I knew about church behind. There wasn’t any particular instance or event that caused me to lose hope. Instead, I think it was more of a consortium of small things built up from what I saw happening and not happening in the church. I got to the point where what I could see just felt fake and hopeless.
So, I did what so many others have done who have lost hope in the church… I left.
“So many of us have left what we have deemed the institution of church only to find we left the church along the way. Our intentions were good and we desired a greater sense of community, and for many that is just what they found in small consistent gatherings, but for the rest of us we lost hope and gave up. We simply replaced our weekly interaction with the whole of the body with intermittent lunch dates with friends.
Our loss of hope in the church caused us to reject anything that looked like church as we knew it and in all our hopelessness we became bitter without knowledge of it. Life went on, Sundays became another free day from the previous week’s work and we slowly, day by day, drifted further and further from consistent interaction with other groups of Christians. In this place, it’s possible to not even feel hopeless any longer but instead feel something much worse… nothing.”
– Excerpt From “I Forgive Church”
It took years for me to come around to entertaining the idea of journeying back to the church. To be honest, I wasn’t too thrilled at the initial thought of it. I argued with God and laid out my list of objections but like the loving Father He is, He simply took my list and asked me to look to Him instead.
That made all the difference. I now see more hope in the church than ever and it brings much peace to my soul. I know I’m not alone on this journey and my hope is that perhaps a few of the things I’ve learned from rediscovering the hope I lost might also help you do the same.
There are a few ways I think this is possible:
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- Sign Up For My Free Ebook – This list will also notify you when my book “I Forgive Church” is available. You can easily sign up below:
- Contact Me – I would love to hear from you. Send me your questions, stories, and comments. I will do my best to respond to everyone but this could take some time, so be patient. If you want to shoot me an email, you can do so by going here.
Oh! And, I’m also an author currently working on my first book called, “I Forgive Church”… Just in case I needed to put that out there.
