Timothy Hundley's Substack Podcast

Timothy Hundley

The Table brings Timothy Hundley’s spoken essays on faith, queer life, spiritual harm, justice, and the question beneath them all: Does this look like Jesus? It is grace for every soul still reaching for God through the rubble—and an invitation to pull out another chair. timothyhundley.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    The God Who Keeps Coming

    The Gospel Is God’s Relentless Desire for Communion “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” — Romans chapter one verse sixteen There may not be a more familiar verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Most Christians can quote at least part of it from memory: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel.” Yet I wonder how often we stop long enough to ask the question Paul assumes we understand. What is the Gospel? For many Christians, the answer begins with heaven. For others, it begins with forgiveness. For still others, it begins with the cross. None of those answers is wrong, but none of them, by itself, is complete. The Gospel is the good news that the God who spoke humanity into existence has never abandoned his desire to dwell with his creation. The Gospel is God’s relentless desire for communion with humanity. That story did not begin in Bethlehem. It began in a garden. Genesis does not begin with humanity searching for God. It begins with God walking among his creation. The Garden of Eden is a place of beauty, abundance, nourishment, and peace, but the garden is not paradise merely because of its rivers, its trees, or the absence of death. The treasure of Eden is that God is there. Humanity lives in uninterrupted communion with its Creator. Then comes rebellion, and the first consequence of sin is not merely guilt. It is separation. Adam and Eve hide, and God comes looking. “Where are you?” That question echoes through the rest of Scripture. Humanity hides, and God comes. Cain murders, and God comes. Abraham wanders, and God comes. Moses flees, and God comes. Israel rebels, and God comes through the prophets. Humanity crucifies Christ, and God comes out of the grave. The disciples hide behind locked doors, and God comes. The Spirit descends, and God comes. The Bible ends where it began: with God dwelling among humanity. Not merely with golden streets, walls of jasper, and gates of pearl, but with the great proclamation that “the dwelling of God is with humanity.” The story of Scripture is not primarily about humanity finding its way to heaven. It is about God refusing to stop making his way toward humanity. That is why Romans matters. Paul is not inventing the Gospel. He is explaining why restored communion with God required nothing less than the self-giving love of Christ. Before Paul announces what grace accomplishes, he dismantles every illusion that humanity can restore communion on its own. That dismantling does not stop at the end of Romans 1. It continues through Romans 2 and into Romans 3. In fact, Romans chapter one verse eighteen throughRomans chapter three verse twenty is one sustained argument. It is the diagnosis before the cure, the courtroom before the declaration of grace, the universal need before the universal invitation. Our chapter and verse divisions often hide this from us. We read a verse as though it contains a complete thought. We read a chapter as though it contains a complete story. Paul wrote neither. He wrote a letter, and he did not stop writing where we so often stop reading. Romans 2 begins with a single word. Therefore. That word changes everything because Paul has not changed subjects. He is continuing his argument. After describing humanity’s rebellion, idolatry, corruption, and disorder, Paul turns toward the person who has been listening and agreeing. “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge another.” Imagine hearing Romans read aloud for the first time. As chapter 1 unfolds, heads begin to nod. Yes, Paul. That is exactly what is wrong with the world. Those people have abandoned God. Then Paul says, “Therefore.” The room becomes quiet. The spotlight turns. The listeners discover that they have not merely been watching someone else’s trial. They have been sitting in the defendant’s chair all along. Romans 1 is the indictment. Romans 2 is the mirror. Romans 3 is the verdict: “There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Only then does grace become good news. This also reveals the difference between judgment and discernment. Judgment assumes a seat that belongs to Christ. Judgment says, “I have decided that you are not worthy.” Discernment asks a different question: Does this look like Jesus? That has become the foundational question of The Table. Not, “Does this person deserve Jesus?” but, “Does this teaching resemble Jesus? Does this movement resemble Jesus? Does this policy resemble Jesus? Does this fruit resemble Jesus?” Jesus taught that we would know people by their fruit. Fruit can be examined. Actions can be named. Teachings can be tested. Movements can be discerned. But another person’s final standing before God belongs to Christ. Discernment evaluates fruit. Judgment declares worth. The Church is called to the first. The second belongs to God. That is why Acts 10 remains one of the most revolutionary passages in the New Testament. Peter is not rebelling against God. He believes he is defending holiness. He believes he understands what is clean and what is unclean. He believes he knows where the boundaries have been drawn. Then God interrupts his certainty. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Peter enters the home of Cornelius. The Spirit falls upon the Gentiles. Peter then asks one of the most beautiful questions in Scripture: “Who was I to hinder God?” Peter did not become less faithful. He became less certain that his understanding of God’s boundaries was complete. That is repentance. Sometimes the hardest thing we surrender is not our appetite, our ambition, or even our fear. Sometimes the hardest thing to surrender is our certainty: the certainty that we know exactly where God is allowed to move, whom God may receive, and where grace must stop. The Church’s greatest moments have rarely come when it led God somewhere new. They came when it finally realized that God was already there. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he said, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” What does that Kingdom look like? We could begin with Revelation. We could speak of gates of pearl, streets of gold, walls of jasper, and the throne of God. But perhaps we should begin where Scripture begins. In the garden. The garden is beauty. The garden is abundance. The garden is sustenance. The garden is creation at peace. Most of all, the garden is communion. It is humanity walking with God. Then we move to Matthew 25. The hungry are fed. The thirsty receive something to drink. The stranger is welcomed. The naked are clothed. The sick are cared for. The prisoner is visited. This is not merely charity. It is the character of the Kingdom becoming visible on earth. Then we arrive at Revelation, and once again the greatest promise is not wealth. It is presence. “The dwelling of God is with humanity.” The Kingdom is not first defined by geography. It is defined by communion. The streets of gold are not the treasure. God is. Perhaps gold covers the streets because, in the Kingdom, the thing humanity has killed for, hoarded, worshiped, and gone to war over has finally been reduced to pavement. The treasure is not what lies beneath our feet. The treasure is the God who walks among us. So what is the Gospel? The Gospel is not simply that sinners may escape judgment. It is not merely that heaven awaits us after death. It is not merely a prescription for becoming morally respectable. The Gospel is the good news that the God who created us has never surrendered his desire for communion with us. Humanity chose separation. God chose incarnation. Humanity chose violence. God chose self-giving love. Humanity raised a cross. God turned it into a doorway. Through Jesus Christ, God entered our suffering, bore the weight of sin and death, and made restored communion possible. Romans 1 through 3 does not exist so that we may identify which sinners deserve condemnation. It exists to dismantle every illusion that any of us stand outside the universal need for grace, or above another person in determining who may receive it. The tragedy of modern Christianity is not that we read too much Paul. It is that we so often refuse to let Paul finish. We stop at the indictment. Paul keeps writing. There is a therefore. There is a but now. There is a Gospel far greater than our favorite proof texts and far more beautiful than our systems of exclusion. There is a God who has never stopped coming. From Eden to Abraham, from Moses to the prophets, from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the empty tomb to Pentecost, and from Pentecost to the New Creation, the story remains the same. God keeps coming. Because the Gospel is God’s relentless desire for communion with humanity. And everything else flows downstream from that. Get full access to The Table with Timothy Hundley at timothyhundley.substack.com/subscribe

    The God Who Keeps Coming

  2. 2d ago

    Empty Shelves, Full Convictions

    Every now and then a story appears that is so drenched in irony it almost reads like one of Jesus’ parables. This week brought one of those stories. According to the reporting, a Christian food pantry found itself with empty shelves after its pastor rejected supplies connected to organizations that affirm LGBTQ people. Whether one agrees with every detail of that decision is almost beside the point. The image itself should stop Christians in their tracks: hungry people waiting for food while the Church debates whether the hands offering the bread are sufficiently righteous. If there is a passage of Scripture that deserves to interrupt this conversation, it is Matthew 25. Jesus’ vision of the final judgment is astonishing in its simplicity. The King does not divide humanity according to denominations, political parties, theological camps, or cultural identities. He gathers the nations before Him and asks questions so ordinary that they almost seem beneath the grandeur of the moment. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was a stranger. I was naked. I was sick. I was in prison. Then comes the line that has echoed through two thousand years of Christian history: I was hungry, and you gave me food. Notice what Jesus never says. He never says, “I was hungry, and you first investigated the theology of the people who donated the bread.” He never says, “I was hungry, and you verified the ideological purity of the supply chain.” He never says, “I was hungry, and you made certain no sinner had been involved in feeding me.” He simply says, “You gave me food.” The Church, however, has become remarkably gifted at asking questions Jesus never asked while quietly neglecting the ones He never stopped asking. Who is hungry? Who needs a meal? Who needs mercy? Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that preserving distance from the wrong people is a greater act of faithfulness than feeding the right ones. How did we get here? When did suspicion become holier than compassion? When did refusing bread become a testimony of conviction? Scripture certainly does not prepare us for such a conclusion. The God of Israel has always displayed a frustrating habit of working through people the religious establishment would rather avoid. Cyrus, a pagan emperor, is called God’s anointed. A Samaritan becomes the hero of Jesus’ most famous parable. Peter is forced to abandon categories he once believed were divinely established, only to discover that God had already gone ahead of him. Again and again, the Bible tells the story of a God who refuses to limit His grace to the boundaries His people so carefully construct. Perhaps that is because grace has never been primarily concerned with protecting our sense of purity. It has always been concerned with restoring human beings. That is what makes Matthew 25 so unsettling. Jesus does not merely tell us to care for the hungry. He identifies Himself with them. The hungry are not a ministry opportunity. They are Christ. The thirsty are Christ. The stranger is Christ. The prisoner is Christ. The lonely widow standing in line at the food pantry is Christ. The exhausted single father wondering how he will feed his children is Christ. The child whose stomach hurts because dinner never came is Christ. That changes everything. It means our theological debates are no longer abstract. Every decision we make eventually arrives at the feet of a real human being bearing the image of God. We are free to wrestle with conscience, conviction, and doctrine—as Christians always have—but we should tremble whenever those debates leave the vulnerable carrying the consequences. The tragedy of our age is not simply that we disagree. Christians have always disagreed. The tragedy is that we have become so consumed with determining whom we cannot stand beside that we sometimes forget to kneel beside those who are suffering. Jesus never seemed particularly anxious about guilt by association. His critics certainly were. They complained constantly about the company He kept, the tables He attended, and the sinners He welcomed. Yet Christ never apologized for proximity to broken people. He seemed far more concerned that mercy reached them than that His reputation remained intact. Perhaps that is the question the Church should recover. Not, “Who donated the bread?” But, “Was the hungry person fed?” Because if Matthew 25 is to be believed—and Christians confess that it is—the One receiving that loaf is not merely our neighbor. It is Christ Himself. And if we can watch His shelves stand empty while congratulating ourselves on the purity of our convictions, then perhaps the question before us is not whether we have defended the faith. Perhaps the question is whether we have recognized the King. Get full access to The Table with Timothy Hundley at timothyhundley.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Jul 27

    The Gate Is Still a Gate: Matthew Vines, Brandan Robertson, and the “Gay, Not Queer” Debate

    I did not expect to find myself writing this response to Matthew Vines, though I cannot honestly say I am entirely surprised. I have taken some of Vines’s classes and read his book. I know the significance of his work, particularly for gay Christians formed in conservative churches who needed someone to demonstrate that affirming theology could be biblically serious rather than dismissive of Scripture. His work has opened doors. It has given language to people who were told that faithfulness required them to deny something true about themselves. I do not need to erase that contribution to name where I believe his latest argument fails. I also knew long before his recent New York Times essay that Vines and I did not fully align. Theologically and politically, his advocacy has remained far more conservative than my own. His project has often been structured around proving that gay people can live faithfully within institutions whose other norms remain largely intact. My questions have increasingly turned toward the institutions themselves: whom they were designed to exclude, why conformity is so often mistaken for holiness, and whether preserving the structure matters more than recognizing the beloved still standing outside it. That is why “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters” feels both surprising and like the troubling arrival of a boundary that was always present. Vines’s concern deserves to be understood accurately. He argues that the expanding meaning and visibility of *queer* have muddied a once-clear public message about gay people. The gay rights movement persuaded much of America that sexual orientation was not chosen and that gay people were not rebelling against ordinary life. They were simply living one form of it. As the queer umbrella expands to include identities, experiences, relationships, and political postures that are more fluid or openly resistant to social norms, Vines fears that gayness itself begins to look less like a fixed orientation and more like an ideology, an aesthetic, or an act of social defiance. I understand the premise. I disagree with it. Vines is right about something important when he writes that being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life. Gay people fall in love, make homes, care for aging parents, raise children, argue over money, sit beside hospital beds, take out the trash, and build lives from the same ordinary materials as everyone else. The gay rights movement changed the world by making that humanity visible. But “gay people can live ordinary lives” is an affirmation. “Gay people must be distinguished from those whose lives appear less ordinary” is a gate. The movement’s achievement was not proving that gay people could imitate straight life convincingly enough to deserve rights. It was exposing heterosexuality as an illegitimate condition for dignity, citizenship, family, and belonging. We can defend the ordinary beauty of gay life without turning *ordinary* into a behavioral requirement. We can affirm that many people experience their orientation as durable and unchosen without declaring that only the fixed and easily narrated parts of human identity deserve protection. The governing fear in Vines’s essay is not merely linguistic imprecision. It is political contamination. Gayness, in his framing, is fixed, comprehensible, respectable, and therefore defensible. Queerness is malleable, ideological, destabilizing, and therefore capable of making gay people less acceptable through association. The concern is not only that *queer* means something different from *gay*. It is that queer proximity may alter how the public interprets gayness. The widening coalition and the people who do not fit familiar binaries begin to look like liabilities attached to a political case that once seemed cleaner. This is the anti-trans logic that has taken root inside parts of the broader LGBTQIA+ community. It rarely announces itself as abandonment. It presents itself as strategy. It says that the public was beginning to understand gay men and lesbians until the movement became too complicated, too fluid, too demanding, or too difficult to explain. Responsibility for the backlash is quietly transferred from those manufacturing it to those most exposed to it. Vines may understand himself to be describing how the gatekeepers think rather than endorsing their judgment. That distinction matters. He is warning that many Americans see the widening meaning of queer identity and infer that LGBTQIA+ identity is increasingly chosen, ideological, or anti-normative. He may believe he is translating a public perception the movement ignores at its peril. But translation becomes participation when the proposed remedy is to make the beloved smaller, quieter, and easier for the gatekeepers to admit. His essay does not remain a detached account of someone else’s suspicion. Vines describes queer identity as available for “radical chic.” He reduces some people’s relationship to gender expectations to being “vaguely uncomfortable.” He contrasts the “fixed reality” of gayness with a malleable queer banner, complains that the movement lacks “clear limiting principles,” and treats the expanding acronym almost as evidence of excess. These are not neutral descriptions of the gatekeepers’ categories. They begin sorting the community according to them. The additional letters are not branding clutter. They represent people who were present before our language became sufficient to name them. Bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, nonbinary, and other queer people did not materialize because an acronym became fashionable. The language lengthened because the earlier shorthand left too many lives unspoken. There is a legitimate question beneath Vines’s concern: can a word become so capacious that it loses analytical usefulness? Of course it can. Communities should be able to debate the meanings and purposes of their language without treating every question as betrayal. Not every use of *queer* will be equally thoughtful. But the possibility of frivolous adoption does not invalidate the people for whom the word names a costly and deeply lived truth. People call themselves Christian without resembling Christ. They call themselves patriots while attacking democracy. We do not ordinarily conclude that a word is meaningless merely because its borders can be exploited. We practice discernment without making suspicion the price of entry. Vines’s request for “limiting principles” is revealing because the movement already has them. Consent matters. Capacity to consent matters. Bodily autonomy, noncoercion, non-exploitation, mutuality, and equal protection matter. These are ethical boundaries. What the movement should not adopt is a principle declaring that dignity extends only to identities that are immutable, monogamously expressed, gender-conforming, politically reassuring, or easily understood by conservative observers. The disagreement is not between a movement with limits and one without them. It is between ethical limits and respectability limits. The old “born this way” argument deserves care. It was politically powerful because it interrupted the accusation that gay people had chosen depravity. For people told to repent, change, marry someone of another gender, or remain alone forever, naming orientation as unchosen was life-giving. I will not pretend that message did no good simply because it was incomplete. But it was always a useful simplification, not an adequate foundation for human dignity. A right that depends upon proving we had no choice is not yet freedom. It is an exemption from punishment. It asks the majority to forgive our difference because we cannot help it rather than recognize that our lives possess dignity whether every element of identity is fixed, fluid, discovered, chosen, expressed, revised, or still becoming. Theologically, grace offered only after someone proves they could not have been otherwise is not grace. It is an acquittal on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Brandan Robertson’s response to Vines names the assimilationist bargain clearly: a useful simplification secured acceptance for some people while asking those whose lives complicated it to remain at the margins. His further reflection on why he identifies as queer gives the word a positive theological content Vines’s essay largely denies it. Robertson describes queerness as a posture that questions who established the norms, whom those norms protect, and whom they require to disappear. He sees in Jesus not a guardian of compulsory conformity but one who repeatedly destabilized religious certainty to restore people to community. That does not require everyone to identify as queer. Vines has every right to call himself gay and reject a label that does not fit him. Some LGBTQIA+ people hear *queer* and remember a wound, not a shelter. Some experience their identities as stable and specific, not fluid. No one should be forced to trade one compulsory narrative for another. But refusing a label for oneself is different from presenting those who need it as a threat to everyone else. Robertson’s theological vision resonates with me because it rejects the message many of us inherited: conformity is the path to salvation. Dress correctly. Believe correctly. Love correctly. Vote correctly. Remain inside the prescribed categories, and perhaps the community will allow you to remain near God. Deviation becomes danger because the gatekeepers have confused their boundaries with God’s. Jesus does not move through the Gospels protecting those boundaries. He crosses them. He repeatedly brings the excluded into proximity with people taught to fear, despise, or avoid them. He does not ask the Samaritan to become more legible before making him the moral center of the story. At Pentecost, the Spirit does not replace many languages with one approved tongue. Understanding becomes

  4. Jul 25

    Which Vine Have We Been Cultivating?

    Kudzu arrived in the United States in 1876 as an attraction at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. People admired it. Gardeners planted it as an ornamental vine to shade porches and decorate arbors. Farmers experimented with it as livestock feed. By the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government was actively encouraging its use as a defense against soil erosion. Millions of seedlings were distributed, and landowners were paid to plant them. It seemed like a solution. Kudzu grew quickly, covered damaged ground, and made scarred landscapes appear green again. But it did not repair the erosion. It hid it. Not Everything Belongs to the Vine: The church has been consumed, but not everything within it belongs to the vine. Christian nationalism may wear the Church’s outline, borrow its language, and climb its steeple—but it cannot become Christ. The light still burns beneath what has overtaken it. Underneath that impressive blanket of green, kudzu deprived existing plants of sunlight. It climbed trees, covered fields, crossed power lines, and swallowed buildings. What had been welcomed as ornamental, promoted as useful, and subsidized as restorative became an invasive force capable of suffocating nearly everything beneath it. The vine did not invade the American landscape entirely by accident. We planted it. That history offers an unsettling way to understand Christian nationalism. It, too, was not initially presented as a threat. It was planted as protection: protection against moral decline, cultural change, racial integration, feminism, queer liberation, secular government, and the loss of unquestioned Christian authority. It was advertised as a way to stabilize eroding ground. Its cultivators called it biblical values, religious liberty, patriotism, spiritual authority, and national restoration. All the while, the vine kept growing. Borrowing Chosenness The American evangelical obsession with Israel is usually explained through end-times prophecy. For many evangelicals, the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 and its territorial expansion in 1967 are interpreted as signs that biblical prophecy is being fulfilled. Israel becomes a clock by which believers attempt to measure the distance between the present and the return of Christ. But prophecy alone does not explain the emotional and political intensity of the attachment. Israel also provides a model of something American evangelicalism has long coveted: a nation understood as specially chosen by God, possessing sacred territory, defeating its enemies, and exercising authority under divine protection. The fascination is not only that Israel is chosen. It is the possibility that America might be chosen too. The United States has repeatedly narrated itself through the biblical story. Europe became Egypt. The Atlantic became the Red Sea. America became a promised land. Settlers became a chosen people. Indigenous nations were cast in the role of the Canaanites. Territorial expansion became providence. This is more than Christian Zionism. It belongs to a broader political theology of sacred nationhood—and, where land and displacement are involved, to what can be called settler theology. A population declares itself chosen. Territory becomes promised. Possession becomes evidence of divine favor. The people already living on the land are erased, subordinated, or represented as obstacles to God’s purposes. What begins as conquest is retold as obedience. Christian Zionism, American exceptionalism, covenantal nationalism, and dominion theology are not identical. They have different histories and sometimes conflicting theological systems. But in American evangelical politics, they have grown together like intertwined vines. Christian Zionism identifies the modern State of Israel with biblical promise. American exceptionalism transfers the language of chosenness onto the United States. Dominionism converts that borrowed chosenness into a mandate to rule. The sequence becomes remarkably simple: God chose Israel. God commissioned America to protect Israel. God appointed conservative Christians to preserve America. Therefore, conservative Christian control of government is not ambition. It is obedience. A mandate is what power calls itself when it wants ambition to sound like obedience. The Alibi of Providence Providence is the hinge that makes the entire movement possible. It converts what happened into what God intended. We possess the land; therefore God gave it to us. We won the war; therefore God favored us. We accumulated wealth; therefore God blessed us. We control the institutions; therefore God appointed us. Power produces an outcome and then cites that outcome as proof that God wanted the powerful to prevail. Human conquest is assigned a divine intention after the fact. This is not the same as trusting that God remains present within history. Christian hope can confess that God is present amid what human beings have done without claiming that everything the powerful have done is what God wanted done. The first sustains people suffering beneath history. The second sanctifies the people controlling it. Providence becomes the alibi. Theology constructs the explanation. Dominion makes the arrangement permanent. The pattern repeats across the history of empire: Colonize.Providentialize.Theologize.Consecrate.Dominionize.Repeat. First, power acquires the land, subordinates its people, or captures its institutions. Then theology declares the acquisition providential, the hierarchy biblical, and the victors chosen. Religious authority blesses the accomplished fact. Dominion transforms possession into a continuing right to govern, expand, and suppress resistance. The sword can seize power, but it cannot make power legitimate. For that, it needs the altar. This is why stories set in medieval courts, Puritan settlements, and collapsing kingdoms so often include the religious hierarchy blessing treason against the beloved. Without that blessing, the new ruler is merely the person who betrayed the old order and won. Once an authorized religious figure declares the victory righteous, treason becomes deliverance, usurpation becomes succession, submission becomes obedience, and the victor becomes anointed. The sword performs the treason; the altar teaches the people to call it providence. This is also why modern authoritarian movements need religious leaders even when their political champions bear little resemblance to the faith they claim to defend. They do not need the clergy’s holiness. They need their symbolic authority. They need someone capable of telling believers that betraying everything they claim to love is necessary to preserve what they love. Religious authority consecrates the betrayal and then makes resistance to it appear ungodly. The Vine Covering the Field The final movement in this history is present-day Christian nationalism. It is the political claim that the United States is properly a Christian nation, that its institutions should privilege a particular expression of Christianity, and that conservative Christians possess a special mandate to determine the nation’s laws, culture, history, education, families, bodies, and future. Yet many of the people cultivating the field continue to deny the vine’s presence. They imagine Christian nationalism only in its most explicit forms: a preacher openly demanding theocracy, a politician formally calling for the end of religious pluralism, or an extremist carrying a cross beside a nationalist flag. They do not recognize it in the assumptions that prepared the soil. They do not see it when Christianity is treated as the nation’s rightful owner, when equality feels like persecution, when the loss of cultural dominance is described as oppression, or when political control is pursued as a form of spiritual obedience. They call the vine patriotism. They call it restoration. They call it taking America back for God. Kudzu looked like restoration too. It covered the damaged ground in green. From a distance, it appeared abundant, healthy, and alive. But coverage is not fruitfulness. Expansion is not health. Something can grow rapidly, command the landscape, and still be killing everything beneath it. They deny the weeds because they have mistaken the vine consuming the field for the fruit of their own faithfulness. The True Vine Christianity does not need another vine. It already has one. In John 15, Jesus says, “I am the true vine.” The word true matters. Jesus identifies himself not merely as one possible source of Christian life, but as the standard by which every competing claim to sacred authority must be judged. Christian nationalism asks how much of the field Christianity controls. Jesus asks what kind of fruit the branches produce. The test is not national power, territorial possession, military victory, cultural dominance, proximity to government, or the ability to compel others to obey. Jesus already told us what faithfulness looks like. In what has sometimes been called Christianity’s eleventh commandment, Jesus says, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” In Matthew 25, he identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the exposed, the sick, and the imprisoned. He does not ask nations how effectively they protected Christian dominance. He asks what they did to the least of these. Paul names the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not conquest. Not domination. Not fear. Not exclusion. Not the ability to force an entire nation to conform. Jesus says, “I am the vine.” Paul says, “Look at the fruit.” Matthew says, “Look at how the vulnerable are treated.” And the question that has governed all of my theological work remains: Does this look like Jesus? Does the conquest look like Jesus? Does the dispossession? Does the hunger for control? Does the trea

  5. 11/13/2025

    When Growth Becomes Resistance

    There are seasons in life when everything feels like it’s shaking—politically, socially, spiritually, and even internally. Times when the old scaffolding of your life trembles under your feet, and you’re not sure if it’s falling apart or falling away. Times when you wake up with the sense that something inside you is asking to grow, but there’s no clear sense of where that growth will take you or what it might cost. I’m in one of those seasons now.If you’re honest, you might be too. What I’m learning—slowly, stubbornly—is that personal growth is not a private hobby. It is not a luxury. It is not self-help for people who have the privilege of spare time. In moments like these, growth becomes a form of resistance. It becomes a political act, a theological act, an act of defiance against every system that told you to shrink, every voice that trained you to survive and never flourish, every fear that taught you to stay small. When the world tightens, growth becomes rebellion.When the world trembles, growth becomes revelation.When the old self stops fitting, growth becomes salvation. And if you’re willing, let’s sit with that for a little while. I. The Old Containers That Cannot Hold Us Anymore There is a hunger that rises inside us when we’ve outgrown a previous version of ourselves. It’s a spiritual claustrophobia, an inner tightness that whispers, This is too small now. You can’t stay here anymore. I felt that growing up, long before I had words for it. As a gay kid in church spaces that didn’t have room for me, I learned early that survival meant shrinking. Blending. Editing. Hiding. Constricting myself until I could fit into the expectations handed to me. It was like wearing a suit three sizes too small because someone told you it was “holy.” But here’s the truth you don’t understand until later:Your soul keeps growing even when your life doesn’t. You can suppress the voice, silence the desire, numb the ache, but the soul—God’s breath in you—does not stop expanding. And eventually, the container cracks. The costumes tear. The borrowed expectations burst at the seams. For some people, this happens quietly.For others, it’s an internal earthquake. But it will come. And when it does, you have to choose:Will you shrink back into the old self, or will you grow into the new one? Growth hurts.But shrinking kills. II. Survival Mode Makes No Room for Becoming For a long time, survival was my normal. I know what it is to count food, to stretch meals, to watch the pantry with dread. I know the tension of working full-time and still feeling like the math never adds up. If you’ve lived through scarcity—financial, emotional, spiritual—your body remembers. It shapes the way you breathe, the way you hold your shoulders, the way you hope just enough to get by but not so much that disappointment crushes you. Survival mode teaches you to be grateful for crumbs because you’ve experienced famine.Survival mode teaches you to never ask for more because “more” was never an option.Survival mode teaches you that suffering is normal and wanting joy is suspicious. But here’s the revelation no one talks about:Survival mode and personal growth do not coexist. Survival mode doesn’t give you the space to become. It gives you the space to endure. And yet, enduring is not the same as living. We often confuse the two because endurance feels holy, sacrificial, admirable. But you weren’t created simply to endure. You weren’t put on this earth to spend your entire life bracing. The God who breathed life into your lungs didn’t design you to spend that breath tightening your chest in fear. There comes a point when survival strategies start suffocating the soul.What once protected you now limits you.What once kept you alive now keeps you small. Growth begins the moment we stop worshiping survival. III. Healing as a Political Act We are living in a moment when hateful ideologies are disguising themselves as piety—when Christian nationalism, authoritarian rhetoric, and fear-driven religion parade through the streets draped in flags and crosses. When entire systems tell you that your flourishing is selfish, your healing is rebellion, your authenticity is dangerous, and your joy must be policed. In this climate, becoming whole is not passive. Healing is subversive.Healing is prophetic.Healing is political.Healing is a declaration: “I will not let this world convince me that I don’t deserve to be whole.” When you grow beyond the story they gave you, you resist the systems that benefit from your stagnation. When you confront the traumas you were told to ignore, you break generational cycles. When you unlearn shame handed to you by religion or family or culture, you undermine the structures that rely on shame to control you. When you take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, your boundaries, and your truth, you are actively disrupting the powers that depend on your exhaustion. This world is loud with fear.Healing is choosing not to worship fear anymore. And in seasons of political and social uncertainty—times like right now—your healing becomes a form of public theology. A statement of what you believe about yourself, about God, about humanity, about the future. Choosing to grow in chaos says,“I believe in a world that is possible but not yet visible.I choose to become that world before it arrives.” IV. When the Earth Shakes, Roots Deepen There’s something strange about the human soul: it grows deeper when everything on the surface shakes. Political instability. Social fracture. Economic anxiety. Moral confusion. Religious betrayal. You know the list. I know the list. We’re living it. And yet, paradoxically, these seasons call something sacred out of us—something ancient, something resilient, something God-shaped. In Scripture, earthquakes often precede revelation.Storms precede miracles.Trembling precedes transformation. When the ground moves, you find out what can be shaken and what cannot. Growth in a season like this is not a forced optimism. It is not pretending the world is fine. It is the decision to anchor yourself in something deeper than the chaos. To say:“I will not let the noise determine my identity.”“I will not let the storm define my becoming.”“I will not let uncertainty shrink my soul.” This is the kind of growth that changes people.This is the kind of growth that changes nations.This is the kind of growth that changes faith. V. The Gratitude That Changes Everything Let me tell you something surprising:The most radical form of growth I’ve found lately is gratitude. Not the shallow kind—“be grateful it’s not worse.” That’s not gratitude; that’s gaslighting. I’m talking about the kind of gratitude that sees clearly.The kind that doesn’t deny pain but recognizes presence.The kind that doesn’t erase struggle but honors resilience.The kind that says: “I am still here. I am still growing.And I am not who I was—even if I’m not yet who I will be.” Gratitude doesn’t shrink you.It grounds you. It becomes a quiet rebellion against despair. Because when you’re grateful, you are telling your nervous system,We survived that.We are safe here.We can grow now. Gratitude is how we teach the body that becoming is possible. And in a political moment where fear is the preferred language of power, choosing gratitude becomes a spiritual counterattack. Not a denial of reality—but a refusal to surrender hope. VI. What I’m Learning About Myself (and Maybe You Are Too) Lately I’ve been realizing that most of my growing edges are found in the places I least want to look: * the parts of me still shaped by scarcity * the fears I inherited from childhood * the instincts that brace instead of breathe * the places where I still shrink to make others comfortable * the wounds from systems that demanded survival instead of flourishing * the remnants of an old self that once served me but no longer fits And somewhere in the midst of all this, God keeps inviting me deeper. Not into certainty—but into honesty.Not into perfection—but into presence.Not into performance—but into becoming. What if growth isn’t about leaving anything behind, but about welcoming more of yourself home?What if healing is not a destination but a widening?What if the soul is already pulling you toward the next version of yourself, and all that’s left is the courage to say yes? And here’s the grace:You don’t have to be ready.You just have to be willing. VII. Growth as a Form of Worship The older I get, the more I understand that spiritual growth is not separate from personal growth. They’re the same river. The same breath. The same unfolding. To grow is to honor the God who planted something sacred inside you.To heal is to respect the image of God within you.To become is to reflect the One who is always making all things new. Your growth is not selfish.It is sacred.It is holy.It is worship. When you stop shrinking, you honor God.When you stop hiding, you honor truth.When you step out of survival mode, you honor your worth.When you heal, you honor your story.When you grow, you honor your future. And in a world spiraling with fear, division, and control, this kind of becoming is nothing less than prophetic. VIII. The Invitation So here’s the invitation—not from me, but from the deep place inside you where God still whispers: Grow.Even now.Especially now.Grow. Grow beyond the narrow expectations you inherited.Grow beyond survival mode.Grow beyond fear.Grow beyond the version of yourself that was built to endure.Grow beyond the systems that benefit from your silence.Grow beyond the old containers that cannot hold you anymore. Grow because the world needs healed people.Grow because the world needs awakened people.Grow because the world needs you—whole, honest, unapologetic, courageous, rooted. And if all you can manage today is one quiet b

  6. 11/12/2025

    What Have You Done to Be Proud?

    There is a sickness in the soul of the Church.It wraps itself in the flag and calls it faith.It quotes the Beatitudes and votes against the poor.It preaches “life” while legislating cruelty. We are watching in real time as the body of Christ becomes a political weapon — a nationalist idol carved in the image of empire, not Jesus. And the result is visible: poverty deepening, healthcare collapsing, social foundations crumbling like the East Wing of a house once meant to stand for liberty and justice. This is not just politics. This is theology gone rotten.This is what happens when worship is replaced by ideology,and discipleship by dominion. The Mirror Test So I ask again: What have you done to be proud? Not in the ego sense — not pride as arrogance — but pride as participation in redemption.What act today stands as a defiance against despair?What word did you speak that defended the dignity of another?What small miracle of compassion did you perform that said,“I still believe in the Jesus who washed feet, not waved flags”? Because neutrality, in times like these, is allegiance.Silence is consent.And observation without participation is complicity. The Flood Is Rising Fascism always dresses itself in patriotism and prayer.It carries a cross in one hand and a torch in the other.It baptizes cruelty in the name of order.And right now, its floodwaters are rising. The question is not whether you see it —the question is: what are you doing about it? Did you feed someone who’s hungry because the system failed them?Did you write your representative?Did you amplify a voice silenced by fear?Did you refuse to normalize the language of hate in your home, your pulpit, your feed? Because every act of love is a sandbag against the flood.Every prayer embodied in action is a dam against the collapse.Every word of truth, spoken with courage,is one more stone shoring up the democracy that love built. The Gospel of Resistance Jesus didn’t build a movement to protect power — He dismantled it.He didn’t command us to defend the temple — He overturned its tables.He didn’t promise political victory — He promised the Kingdom of God breaking through wherever the poor are lifted, the oppressed are freed, and the hungry are fed. That is the gospel we are called to live.Not a gospel of nationalism,but a gospel of neighborliness. So before the day ends,ask yourself: What have I done today that love would recognize as its own?And if the answer is nothing yet —then there is still time. Go.Do something that makes Heaven proud. Get full access to The Table with Timothy Hundley at timothyhundley.substack.com/subscribe

  7. 11/11/2025

    The Church I Need and the Church I’m Becoming

    I miss and I grieve the worship I once knew. Not just the songs — I can stream songs. Not just the lyrics — I write words everyday for my various outlets. What I miss is the room. Timothy Hundley's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I miss the feeling of walking into a space that was already humming with expectancy. I miss when the Spirit felt so near that it started as a quivering somewhere down in my gut and rose up like water, pushing tears to the surface, loosening my throat so that I couldn’t help but sing. I miss a worship that was intimate and outward — where the people around me were not spectators but participants, where you could feel somebody on the other side of the room get their breakthrough and somehow it became yours too. I miss the way a Spirit-filled room could read the wind of God together. No one said, “Key change here, vamp here, linger here.” We just…knew. The worship leader could feel it, the musicians could feel it, the congregation could feel it. We were in the same river. That kind of worship, the kind that doesn’t have to be hyped because it’s already holy, is hard to find. And for those of us who came out — came into authenticity, came into being whole, came into telling the truth about who we are and who we love — it’s even harder. Because, if I can tell the truth, that kind of worship often lives in gatekept spaces. Spaces that love the sound of your voice but not the fullness of your life. Spaces that say, “You are welcome here,” but the welcome is conditional, managed, monitored. I’ve been in churches that say, “You can sit at the table, but you can’t serve the bread.” As if our mere touch will cause mold to grow under our fingertips. As if somehow the God who made us in God’s image would be offended if we dared to minister in that same image. That kind of half-welcome is its own kind of grief. So these days, most of the time, I worship in my personal sanctuary — my house. Just me, God, and my dog listening in. And let me say this: that worship is still real. That worship still reaches the ears of God. There’s no lesser glory on it because it’s in a living room instead of a sanctuary. God has visited people in caves, prisons, and wildernesses; a two-bedroom house is not going to block heaven. But I would be lying if I pretended I didn’t long to walk into a gathered church again — a church that is both affirming and alive, both welcoming and Spirit-sensitive, both inclusive and anointed. I long to walk in as my full self, my whole self, my homosexual self, and worship in spirit and in truth, just like Jesus said: “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23–24) I’ve done worship before. Before I came out, before I said the quiet parts out loud, before I chose wholeness over hiding — leading worship was one of the most beautiful things I’ve done in my life. To stand before people, to feel the Spirit nudge, go back to that chorus, stay right here, pray for the brokenhearted — there is nothing like that partnership with God. Nothing like watching a room break open and knowing you were obedient to the flow. But so many of the rooms that once claimed they wanted the Spirit have barred the gates to the very people the Spirit is moving through. They built doctrinal fences around the river and then wondered why the water stopped moving. I have come to believe — and this will offend the rule-keepers — that many of the things some churches call sin are actually the coloring God put into creation. Queerness is not a stain on the fabric; it is a thread in the tapestry. Our diversity — in gender, race, background, speech, abilities, bodies, orientations — is what makes the cloth beautiful when we are woven together. And I grieve for the space where that could all live together in worship. So I did what grace-touched people do when there’s no pulpit: I turned to writing. I started authoring books. I shared sermons in closed communities. I opened up this Substack and began saying the things I wish someone would’ve said to me. Because grace will not be contained. If one door doesn’t open, it will find a window. If the institutional church will not lay hands on us, God will lay words in us. If we aren’t “allowed” to preach from the stage, we will preach from the page. And yet — even with all that — I keep sensing something deeper, something more urgent: What if the church we are longing for is the church we are meant to build? Hold that. We’re coming back to it. When the Gathering Won’t Fit the Glory For a long time, I thought I was just church-hunting. I thought this was about finding the right affirming church — one that wasn’t dry, one that actually loved Jesus, one that still flowed in the gifts, one that preached grace and justice and the Kingdom, one that didn’t make me feel like a theological project. I really did pray, “Lord, show me where I belong.” But somewhere between the silence of that prayer and the scrolling of church websites and trying a service here and there, I heard something else in my spirit. Not a rebuke — God doesn’t talk to me like that — but a re-direction: “What if it’s not where do you belong… but where do you build?” That landed in me. Because when I look at Jesus, I don’t see someone obsessed with buildings. I see someone obsessed with belonging. Jesus never founded a nonprofit, never knocked out a capital campaign. Jesus found people — fishermen, tax collectors, women pushed to the margins, the sick, the poor, the spiritually hungry — and He made a people out of them. He stood up in His hometown synagogue and read His ordination out loud: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,because he has anointed meto bring good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captivesand recovery of sight to the blind,to let the oppressed go free,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18–19) That’s ministry. That’s the model. And it did not start in a cathedral. It started in a small, ordinary worship space in a marginalized town, and it spilled out everywhere. So I started to wonder: If Jesus’ ministry refused to be contained, why are we so eager to be contained? I’ve realized that the walls that once kept us out can no longer keep the Spirit in. God has been slipping past stained glass for a long time now. God is moving in coffee shops, in DMs, on Zoom calls, in recovery circles, in book clubs, in Substack comments. I have gotten more “I felt God in this” messages from people reading an online article than some folks get in a year of altar calls. That’s not because I’m special — it’s because God is not waiting on a building to move. The book of Acts even says it plain: “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” (Acts 17:24–25) If God does not live in temples made by hands, then God can absolutely meet somebody scrolling on their phone at 2:00 a.m. looking for hope. God can absolutely anoint a Substack post. God can absolutely inhabit a living room with two queer believers holding hands and praying. God can absolutely make an online community into a church. And here’s where the “we” comes in. Because it’s not just my ache. A lot of us — LGBTQ+ believers, divorced believers, believers from denominations that didn’t recognize their gifts, disabled believers, believers of color who are tired of ethnocentric church — a lot of us are walking around with this same longing: “Where is the church that is both inclusive and powerful? Where is the church that is both affirming and anointed? Where is the church that will let me bring my whole story and still lay hands on the sick?” So I want to say this clearly, and I want you to hear it like calling, not condemnation: What if the church we are longing for is the church we are meant to build? What if we are not supposed to wait for someone else to grow a backbone and widen a table? What if the Spirit has been placing this ache in us because we are the ones who will make sure the table is long enough for everyone. What if the church we build is a church that: * Embodies grace instead of merely talking about it; * Welcomes every soul, from every creed and color, and actually means it; * Guides everyone into worship no matter what they did yesterday, what they look like, how they talk, or if they smoked, drank, or cussed on the way to service; * Lets God do the work of redemption while we do the work of setting the table; * Opens the door wide because that’s literally what Jesus did. Why else would Jesus go so far as to wrap Himself in flesh and become human? Why else would He eat with sinners, talk with women alone, touch lepers, cross ethnic lines, and then die the way He died? If salvation is God’s work, then welcome is ours. Jesus never once said, “Clean up first, then come.” He said, “Come.” Over and over. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” He trusted that encounter with Him would do the transforming. So what if that’s the church we become? A church that trusts God enough to welcome people before they’ve been edited. Because here’s the truth: we are children of promise. Paul writes, “Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac.” (Galatians 4:28) Children of promise don’t live in scarcity. Children of promise don’t protec

  8. 11/10/2025

    Love Is Love Is Love – A Moment Worth Celebrating

    Today, we pause and lift our voices in gratitude, because the Supreme Court of the United States has declined to take up the petition to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges — the landmark 2015 decision that affirmed the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry nationwide. In a moment when so many of our civil liberties feel under pressure, this is — for now — a win. Timothy Hundley's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A Win, Not the Finish Line Let’s be clear: this is not an endpoint.The fight for justice is far from over. The petition was brought by Kim Davis, a former Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, explicitly seeking to challenge Obergefell and rewind marriage equality. The Court’s decision to pass on the case signals that — at least for now — there is not enough support among the justices to reopen marriage equality. But we know the ideological forces aligned against LGBTQ+ rights, often white-washed under a veneer of “religious freedom” or “traditional values,” are still very much knocking at the gates. Why This Matters Now In the midst of a political and cultural climate where we see: * mounting legislative attacks on queer identity, trans rights, and family recognition * co-optation of Christian symbols and rhetoric by groups using flag and pulpit to exert control rather than offer love * rising fear that rights once settled might again be treated as negotiable This moment stands as affirmation: You matter. Your love matters. Your marriage matters. It also says to those who would barter human dignity for political gain: not yet. A Church, a People Called to Something Better There are those who claim Christianity yet choose control over compassion — who would rather regulate affection than reflect the God of love.In so doing, they wound the very image of God made visible in our communities. So yes — we celebrate.We celebrate because love is love is love is love is love is love.Because every time one more couple says “yes,” one more heart breathes a little easier. What We Still Must Do * Stay vigilant — legal precedent is fragile. * Build communities of radical welcome inside and outside the church. * Support leaders who see marriage equality as a matter of human flourishing. * Resist apathy and cynicism; love requires courage. In This Moment, We Rejoice So for now: we rejoice. We breathe. We hold each other.Because love won this round.Because in the face of fear, light still broke through. Because love is love is love is love is love is love. Timothy Hundley's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Table with Timothy Hundley at timothyhundley.substack.com/subscribe

See All (14)

About

The Table brings Timothy Hundley’s spoken essays on faith, queer life, spiritual harm, justice, and the question beneath them all: Does this look like Jesus? It is grace for every soul still reaching for God through the rubble—and an invitation to pull out another chair. timothyhundley.substack.com

Information