The Misunderstood God started out as a teaching series I did about ten years ago. I was a Singles Pastor in a mega church in Phoenix, Arizona, and I decided to do a teaching on “The love chapter” in 1 Corinthians 13:4. Since the Bible tells us that “God is love” I thought it would be the quickest way to get straight to the heart of who He is.

I had a group of a few hundred people who met together every Tuesday night in the choir room. We were a neglected bunch, that had been tucked away in a spare room to do whatever it was we did. I’m not sure anyone cared all that much. Having a singles ministry was more about finding something to do with the singles, while the big people did church. It was kind of a, “Keep them busy until they get married” kind of deal. I’m pretty sure no one ever expected anything good to come out of it.

Almost by accident, as I started this teaching, we began to unravel an entire universe of truth that none of us had ever heard of in our lives. What was supposed to be a three week teaching series, ended up taking on a life of its own and sixteen weeks later we had double the crowd and a completely transformed understanding of God’s heart. When we started to compare what scripture says about love with what we had been taught about God from our denomination, we were shocked at the amount of contradictions. For the first time ever, there was a freedom and excitement in the air that none of us had ever experienced. For us, this was like finding the cure to cancer.

We thought the rest of our church would be as excited about our findings as we were. That was not the case. We were rejected, rebuked, ridiculed and forced into hiding. We became an underground group of refugees that people nervously pointed at from across the sanctuary and suspiciously whispered about. In the following few years we would be black-balled by every major group in our church. We were called heretics and cult leaders. Some people even thought we were demon possessed or just plain rebellious. The resistance was unwavering and relentless. In the face of ridicule and unremitting persecution, our little group of unmarried rejects, stood strong and proclaimed this truth to anyone who would listen. We swore to each other that we would someday reach the world with this message.
During this time I began to feverishly write a book about this beautiful truth of love and grace that we had found. I published The God’s Honest Truth in 2003, and resigned from the church six months later.

The God's Honest Truth

At the time we thought we were the only ones in the world who had discovered the grace and love of God. It wasn’t until several years later that we began to come across a new wave of Christian thinking with this message threaded throughout it. Five years later, I got a call from Wayne Jacobsen who had produced, “The Shack.” He was interested in republishing my book. A year after that, we finished the rewrite and changed the title to “The Misunderstood God.” The rest is history.