This book came out of ten years chronically the good, the bad and the ugly in the Non-Denomination Quiverfull movement for my daily Patheo’s column “No Longer Quivering”

My own story was one that didn’t necessarily line up with the usual offenders and cultural enforcers that were my beat for No Longer Quivering. Every now and then I’d tell a tale from my years slogging in the sometimes comedic, sometimes toxic realm of what I used to call Charismatic Funda-Gelicalism. People would react, telling me that one day I needed to write a book about how far our church wandered. And wandered it did.

What started out as a sweet little Bible-believing church in the Virginia countryside started to drift like an unmoored barge on the Mississippi River, Slowly at first, until we’d ended up in a faraway place doing things that had been unimaginable during my early years at the church. Which is why the book title references “Strange Fire”

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.