#551.The Confessorati

My name is Jon Acuff and I'm a former member of the Confessorati.

You might not know us by name and that's intentional. Much like the Illuminati featured in the new Tom Hanks movie, "Angels & Demons," we've tried to keep our name a secret. (Topical reference! Check out the relevance on Brad! Whoa, a Pulp Fiction reference within a reference? I'm on fire.)

But despite the lack of notoriety we may have, I promise you have felt our wrath at some point if you've been in the church for very long.

We, the Confessorati, are the group of people that judge whether you've properly confessed your sins and shortcomings. We, upon hearing what you share in a small group or in Sunday School, will analyze whether you've been penitent enough. And if you haven't, we will “love on” you by pointing it out.

Our current favorite topic is lust. If you confess to struggling with lust within our hearing we will judge you for not confessing what's really at the heart of the matter, "pornography." If you give in and admit you're talking about a problem with "pornography" we will then judge you for not saying "masturbation." As it says in the Old Testament, “unless thou sayeth the M word, thou haven't really confessed.”

Speaking of the Bible, our favorite verse is James 5:16. Not familiar with that one? You should also go ahead and confess to having whickity whack Bible knowledge. It says:

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”

The Confessorati interpret "to each other" to mean "anyone a Christian makes eye contact with." So if you’re on an elevator and someone asks, "How are you?" The proper way to answer that question, the Biblical way, is to reply, "I fear my uncle might be cheating on my aunt, I use food as a comfort mechanism when I get nervous at work, and three minutes ago, while I was walking in from my car, I sinned four times in my heart and once in my ears."

We don't believe in boundaries. We don't believe in growing relationships over time. If you come in our circle, except to get a firehouse of confession sprayed on you like Sylvester Stallone did in that prison scene in the original Rambo movie. Which, I confess to seeing. Not even the TBS version, I'm talking full on, unedited Rambo.

How did I get involved in the Confessorati? My life blew up. I had a colossal failure, a pit so deep that only Christ could draw me out of it. I was broken in half and walked through a painful confession process with a lot of people in my life. Eventually I started to define that experience as the only way a Christian could be a "real Christian." I started to say things about people like, "Well they just haven't been broken for the Lord. Someday, when they confess the exact same way I did, they'll understand." And then I got a secret Confessorati badge.

I'm out now though. I retired. Judging other people was really exhausting and tended to blind me to my own issues. Plus the group meetings were really horrible and long. You get five members of the Confessorati in the same room and they try to "out confess each other" both in level of depravity and detail. Each meeting lasted roughly 19 hours.

How do you stop them? How do we fight the Confessorati? Two ways-prayer and spray bottles full of grape Kool-Aid. When you see someone in a small group trying to enforce their personal definition of what a "real confession" looks like, give them a little grape Kool-Aid in the face.

Confessorati hate to be sticky.