What is “Strange Fire”?

For the several years I’ve been toiling on my book I had a very rude working title. I knew I needed to change the name, but could not decide until a Twitter friend, a pastor, started speaking of far places and strange fire.

It spoke to the nature of what my journey in our old high demand faith community was like. When we first joined everything was familiar, safe even, with very standard worship practices and theology, like a million churches have done for many years. But as the years rolled by we started to have theology and things happen that became weirder and stranger all the time.

I didn’t see it at the time, I was completely sold out to the ideas and actions going on around me. But my dear husband saw it, experiencing the full horror of things not of God unfolding around him. During those years he suffered cognitive dissonance, unable to reconcile the direction the church was headed. He ended up being shunned at our church, until it all came to a terrible head. I experienced spiritual abuse from my brothers and sisters in Christ because I chose to follow my spiritual head out of the church to the Methodist church. They all claimed a wife was to submit and follow the husband right up until I actually did it. Then I was told to divorce him, and stay with the one true church.

Once it dawned on me finally after exit therapy and enough time recovering in the pews of the Methodist church that something had been horribly wrong at my old church I started doing a small amount of writing for No Longer Quivering. Now that I’ve written and edited for the site more than ten years, and I’m post toxic church 17 years now. All of the praying to see gold dust fall from the sky, believing in miracle healing for everyone, that I would see limbs grow back, gemstones from the sky, and exorcisms I’ve come to realize it’s all “strange fire”, the same strange fire spoken of in Leviticus 10:1.

Leviticus 10:1 talks of “Strange Fire” in the sacrifice that Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu offered before God. One of the many websites that references this scripture explains it like this:

“The Hebrew word translated “strange” means “unauthorized, foreign, or profane.” God not only rejected their sacrifice; He found it so offensive that He consumed the two men with fire.”

That sums up where we ended up. In a form that seemed “Godly” but didn’t have much in common with the words of Jesus. People making things up as they went along, sometimes with tragic outcomes. This is a tale of how one can start so well and end up too far away to ever return to their homes.