ninety-five theses

for the disinherited

I. for Chico Keokee — who said keep fucking breathing

when I was ready to be done with the whole fucking thing

The hardest theology

I ever received

came from a man

who served beside me

without pretending to know g-d more

Keep fucking breathing, he inspired while I dealt with ancestral demons.

Not because it gets easier.

Because you’re still here

and that counts for something,

even when you can’t feel it.

The church never taught me that.

The army did.

II.

The body keeps the score

the sermon never asked for.

Honor that.

III.

Power dressed as doctrine

is still just power.

The collar doesn’t change

what’s underneath it.

IV.

The altar was a table first.

Somewhere between then and now

we stopped passing the bread

and started rationing it.

That was the first fracture.

V.

Any theology that has never been hungry

does not get to define bread.

Full stop.

VI.

You cannot preach liberation

from a building

that took three capital campaigns to finish

while the neighborhood around it

went without heat.

VII.

The porch was the first sanctuary.

We moved inside

and built pews

and called that progress.

Some of us have been trying to get back outside ever since.

VIII.

God did not call you to be comfortable.

God called you to the room

where the difficult thing

was sitting alone

waiting to see if anyone would show.

IX.

The disinherited know what the hymnal cost.

They wrote most of the good ones.

Check who signed the royalties.

X.

Orthodoxy has always been gifted

at building walls

and calling them foundations.

Stand inside one long enough

and you’ll stop being able to tell the difference.

XI.

If your theology requires

another person’s silence to survive —

it is not theology.

It is a system.

Name it correctly.

XII.

The body remembers

what the sermon

tried to bless away.

The body does not forget.

The body is not the problem.

XIII.

Shame is not conviction.

Conviction points toward something better.

Shame just points.

Learn the difference

before you hand it to a child.

XIV.

A faith that cannot hold grief —

not tidy grief, not resolved grief,

but the ugly, years-long kind —

is not strong.

It is fragile dressed up as certainty.

XV.

The ones they eventually canonized

were almost always the ones

who made the institution uncomfortable

while they were still breathing.

Martyrdom is cleaner to manage than prophets.

XVI.

Any revival that never asks

who is missing from this room

is just a concert

with better lighting

and worse honesty.

XVII.

The working poor pray with their whole backs.

They have been doing the physical labor

of survival as an act of faith

since before your building had a name.

You could learn something about posture.

XVIII.

He didn’t fall.

He launched.

Stop calling it a tragedy

when someone finally decides

to stop performing gravity.

XIX.

A man who cannot weep

in the presence of holy things

has confused emotional control

with spiritual strength.

They are not the same muscle.

XX.

Your father’s g-d

is not the only g-d.

This is not heresy.

This is survival.

Sometimes they look the same from inside the inheritance.

XXI.

The communion cup

was never meant to be sterile.

It was meant to be shared.

The sanitizing was ours.

XXII.

If the poor can’t afford your g-d,

g-d has become something else entirely.

Name what g-d has become.

Name it honestly.

Then decide if you want to keep worshipping it.

XXIII.

The women held the walls up.

You built the steeple

and carved your name into the cornerstone.

The record is incomplete

and you know it.

XXIV.

Silence inside a sanctuary

is not always reverence.

Sometimes it is fear

that learned early

it was safer to look like peace.

XXV.

g-d is not afraid of your questions.

The institution is afraid of your questions.

These are not the same thing.

Stop letting one speak for the other.

XXVI.

The boy who left the church

didn’t leave g-d.

He left the room

where g-d kept being used

as the reason he had to stay small.

XXVII.

Grief is sacred work.

Unrushed.

Ugly.

Seasonal.

Stop trying to move people

through grief faster than she desires to go.

XXVIII.

The prophet and the institution

have always been in conflict.

The institution almost always wins

in the short.

History keeps record.

XXIX.

Community built on who gets excluded

is not community.

It is a fence

with a potluck inside it.

XXX.

The burning bush was on fire

and it was not consumed.

Some things can hold heat

without being destroyed by it.

Build your theology to do the same.

XXXI.

Addiction is not a moral failure.

It is grief

that could not find

a container that held.

Stop preaching at it.

Start sitting beside it.

XXXII.

The table in the upper room

was low and crowded

and the bread was torn by hand.

Not sliced.

Chosen. Blessed. Broken. Given.

XXXIII.

Any theology

concerned only with who gets in

is not theology.

It is border patrol

with better music.

XXXIV.

The river does not cleanse.

It carries.

It carries everything.

Sometimes downstream

is the only direction available.

That is still movement.

XXXV.

The men who worked the mills and died young

were not martyrs for the economy.

They were just men

who needed better options

and got none.

Say that clearly.

Say it in the pulpit.

XXXVI.

Holiness has a smell.

Sweat.

Cedar.

Old coffee going cold.

Dirt on the knees.

It doesn’t smell like cologne.

XXXVII.

The boy who memorized every verse

and still went home to an empty chest

every single Sunday —

is not a failure. Ask harder questions.

XXXVIII.

Power does not like being named.

Name it anyway.

Loudly.

In public.

Using its actual name.

XXXIX.

Any church that does not sing

the songs of the people it is standing on

is only singing to itself

and calling the echo worship.

XL.

Every tradition was once a protest.

Every orthodoxy was once a radical act.

Orthodoxy is just radicalism

that won, got comfortable,

and forgot what it was fighting.

XLI.

The still small voice

came after the earthquake.

After the fire.

After the wind.

First you have to survive

the loud things.

XLII.

Justice delayed indefinitely

is not justice on a long timeline.

It is a strategy.

Name the strategy.

Name who benefits from the delay.

XLIII.

The soil under the church

keeps a record

the church has declined to maintain.

The land remembers.

The land is patient.

XLIV.

You do not get to use

the language of sacrifice

if your people

are never the ones

who get sacrificed.

XLV.

The disinherited were not waiting

for your theology to arrive.

They built a faith

in kitchens and porches

and the beds of trucks

while you were still commissioning the stained glass.

XLVI.

The paper airplane

knows the difference

between falling and flying.

So did the boy who made it.

So did the boy who became it.

XLVII.

A sermon that costs the preacher nothing

costs the congregation

everything.

XLVIII.

The darkness before dawn

is not a metaphor.

It is a location.

Some of us have addresses there.

We have been there for years.

Show up anyway.

XLIX.

Mercy without justice is sentiment.

Justice without mercy is machinery.

Both leave bodies on the floor.

You need both.

At the same time.

That is the whole difficulty.

L.

Halfway.

Rest.

The work does not end here.

But you are allowed to breathe.

LI.

Your grandfather’s silence

was not stoicism.

It was the only armor

the century issued him.

Do not confuse his wound

for a virtue

and pass it to your son.

LII.

The body is not a problem

requiring theological management.

It is the address

where God shows up

when looking for you.

LIII.

The songs we sang

when no one was watching —

off-key, half-remembered,

in the car at 2 AM —

those were the real liturgy.

LIV.

The institution remembers

everyone who challenged it.

It has a shorter memory

for what they were challenging,

and why.

LV.

Rage at God

is still a conversation with God.

The prodigal came home angry.

The father ran toward the anger.

Let that mean what it means.

LVI.

The water tower is visible from everywhere.

So is the myth it holds.

Visibility is not the same as honesty.

A town can see something clearly

and still refuse to say it.

LVII.

The son who carries his father’s theology

without ever examining the weight —

is not being faithful.

He is being loyal

to something that may have already

cost him more than he knows.

LVIII.

Every denomination

began as a protest.

Most of them forgot

what they were protesting

within three generations.

Sit with that.

LIX.

The ash is not the end of the story.

The ash is what survives the burning.

Something grows in ash.

Ask any farmer.

Ask anyone who has been on fire

and made it to morning.

LX.

You were not called

to be comfortable on behalf of others.

You were called to stand

in the uncomfortable place

long enough for it to mean something.

LXI.

The Gospel according to the working poor

has footnotes

the seminary curriculum

did not assign.

They are the most important footnotes.

LXII.

Loneliness is not a spiritual deficiency.

It is the accurate report

of a body

in a room

where no one is truly present.

Fix the room.

LXIII.

The drunk father.

The silent mother.

The boy with the headphones

turned all the way up.

All three are in the parable.

All three.

Read it again.

LXIV.

Doctrine that requires a woman

to make herself smaller

to make you more comfortable

is not doctrine.

It is a management strategy

wearing a verse as its badge.

LXV.

The train sound at night

is the sound of departure

that never quite finishes leaving.

Some of us grew up next to those tracks.

We are still listening

for the thing

that finally stays.

LXVI.

You cannot heal what you refuse to name.

The church has always had

a naming problem.

Start with what’s in the room.

Use its actual name.

Then we can talk about healing.

LXVII.

Cracked concrete

is not a symbol of failure.

It is what happens

when time does its honest work

on something built to last forever.

Nothing is built to last forever.

Not empires.

Not doctrine.

Not certainty.

LXVIII.

The sacred and the broken

share the same breath

in every hospital room,

every eulogy,

every 3 AM phone call

from someone who didn’t know who else to call.

Let them share a pew.

LXIX.

Repentance is not a performance.

It is a direction.

You know which kind you’re doing

by asking one question:

who is this for?

LXX.

Jesus wept at the tomb

before he raised him.

He did not skip the weeping.

He did not rush it

toward the miracle.

He sat in it.

Let that be your model.

LXXI.

The kids who grew up in the church

and left —

they were paying attention.

That is not a failure

of their faith.

It is a report

on what they witnessed.

LXXII.

Any institution that cannot survive

critique from within

will eventually only receive it

from the outside,

and by then

it will arrive as collapse.

LXXIII.

The saints kept showing up.

Not because they had it figured out.

Not because it stopped costing them.

They kept showing up.

That is the whole definition.

LXXIV.

The working class prays in present tense

because they cannot afford

the luxury of abstract future hope.

Jesus preached the same way.

The kingdom of God is at hand.

Not later.

At hand.

LXXV.

If the light is only on

for certain people,

it is not a porch light.

It is a spotlight.

Know which one

you are operating.

LXXVI.

The inheritance you received

includes the damage.

You are not required

to pass it on intact.

That is not disloyalty.

That is the actual work.

LXXVII.

The ache of the almost-believer

is as sacred as the certainty of the faithful.

Maybe more.

It costs more to stay

in the doorway

than to choose a side and walk in.

LXXVIII.

Masculinity without tenderness

is just a structure

no one wants to live inside.

You can be strong

and still let someone see you.

These are not opposites.

LXXIX.

The hymnal is full of grief

dressed as praise.

Most of the best ones

were written in the dark,

by people who needed to sing

in order to survive the week.

This is not a criticism.

It is a testimony.

LXXX.

The kingdom you say you’re building

should be recognizable

to the people at the bottom of the hill.

If they don’t recognize it —

check who’s been doing the building

and who’s been hauling stone.

LXXXI.

The rust is not your enemy.

The rust is just time

doing its honest work on iron.

There is no shame in it.

Everything weathers.

The question is what holds.

LXXXII.

You are not required

to perform your recovery

for an audience.

Healing is not a stage.

The work is yours.

The timeline is yours.

LXXXIII.

The hands that built this country

and were not permitted to own it

are still waiting

for a theology

worthy of what they carried.

It has not yet been written.

Write it.

LXXXIV.

Vulnerability is not weakness.

It is the specific courage

of being seen accurately —

every fault visible,

every fracture showing —

and staying in the room anyway.

LXXXV.

The altar call was the beginning.

The institution kept behaving

like it was the destination.

It confused arrival with becoming.

You cannot finish

what has no end.

LXXXVI.

Some people leave the faith.

Some people leave the institution.

These are not the same departure.

Stop lowering them

into the same grave

and calling it pastoral care.

LXXXVII.

The cold floor in the morning

is also a kind of prayer.

The body reporting in.

Still here.

Still breathing.

The day beginning

without ceremony or audience.

LXXXVIII.

Every woman who prayed

in a language the institution wouldn’t recognize —

in the kitchen, in the car,

in the wordless hours before everyone woke —

God heard it.

Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

LXXXIX.

The ones who stayed in the hard place

are not more faithful than the ones who left.

They are just

in a different chapter

of the same long story.

Neither chapter is the whole book.

XC.

The church of the South

holds beauty and blood

in the same cupped hands.

Both things are true.

You do not get to keep the beauty

and discard the blood.

You carry both

or you carry neither honestly.

XCI.

The boy climbed the tower

to fly.

Not to fall.

He carved it into the wood

so someone would know.

Twenty years too late,

someone finally does.

XCII.

Desire is not the enemy of holiness.

Unchecked power is.

The church has often confused these.

Correcting that confusion

would free a lot of people

who are currently

carrying someone else’s shame.

XCIII.

The disinherited were here

before the institution arrived.

They will be here

after it collapses.

In the meantime,

they are building something

in the house next door.

It smells like bread.

The door is open.

XCIV.

You do not restore people.

You sit beside them in the rubble

until their own eyes

adjust to the light

and they can see

what’s worth saving.

That is the whole ministry.

Everything else is furniture.

XCV.

The church burned down years ago.

But some nights

the ashes still breathe.

And that —

that improbable, stubborn warmth

that refuses to go fully cold —

is the only theology

I have left

that I still believe

with my whole chest.

Ink on Bone · jackstallings.com