My name is Tom Bryan

But my life didn't start that way.

At 16, I ran away from an abusive home. I ended up in juvenile detention, was abandoned, and entered court-ordered foster care. I became a ward of the state.

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On my 18th birthday—Christmas Eve—I was abandoned for the second time.

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That day I became a legal adult and was aged out of the system. My final support check arrived, and every form of assistance ended.

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I was completely on my own.

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That same Christmas season I started my first business—a tiny T-shirt shop—and I’ve been pedaling as fast as I can ever since. There was no time to finish high school or experience college. Even so, I’ve lived a life I never should have had—and I don’t take that lightly.

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Those early years formed me. I learned quickly that if I wanted answers, no one was going to hand them to me. I had to earn them. My hardscrabble youth built a survival instinct in me: I worked a problem until I could break it open. Once I understood it, I could take it apart, examine it from every angle, and put it to work.

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That mindset shaped my life—and later how I read the Bible.

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I’ve been married to the same wonderful woman for 48 years. Together we’ve raised three children and now delight in our five grandchildren.

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For most of my life, I was a pretend Christian. Tammy and I attended church regularly and knew about Jesus our entire lives.

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But knowing about Jesus and actually following Him are not the same thing.

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At 55 and 53, we came to a hard realization: we had never actually known Jesus, and we had no idea what it actually meant to follow Him.

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That realization changed everything.

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I was baptized soon after, and seconds later—still dripping wet—I turned and had the joy of baptizing Tammy as we stepped into a completely new life together.

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For the next 12 years, I taught and co-led Sunday School, Wednesday nights, Vacation Bible School, and summer youth camps—nearly every Sunday, every Wednesday, and every summer. I opened the Bible and brought it to life so kids could taste it, feel it, and live it. Kids didn’t have to be there—they wanted to be.

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At the same time I was investing in the church, I was pressing even harder into Scripture. I put all my hardscrabble instincts to use to break open the Bible—to learn where it came from, how it was formed, and who wrote it. I immersed myself in the Bible and quickly discovered I couldn’t get enough of it. I thought about it every day. Every hour. It was all I could think about. Before long I became a full-blown Bible geek.

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About three or so years into that geekdom, I began to see contradictions between what I was teaching in Sunday School and what I was learning from my deep dive into Scripture.

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At first, this felt like a slow-motion crash. But it quickly became a head-on collision.

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Alarmingly, I began to notice more and more of these biblical inaccuracies being preached in churches—especially megachurches—sung in popular worship music, and repeated in small groups.

I came to call these inaccuracies—Churchianity Bamboozles.

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One of the first and biggest bamboozles I uncovered—one that nearly knocked the wind out of me—was realizing that biblical authorship is often not what tradition claims.

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As an example, take what many consider to be the “Bible’s own defining statement”:

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2 Timothy 3:16 — “All Scripture is God-breathed…”

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You know the verse. I know the verse. It’s one of the most quoted lines in modern Christianity.

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Those words choke me up as I write them today—because that passage was the one that led me down a biblical rabbit hole that changed everything.

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Most modern biblical scholars believe that 1 and 2 Timothy (along with Titus) were written decades after Paul’s death by someone pretending to be Paul. After studying the evidence, I found those arguments convincing.

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That discovery was only the tip of the iceberg. There were many more Churchianity bamboozles waiting for me.

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Not only was the Bible contradicting much of what I had been taught in Sunday School and heard preached in churches, it appears to contradict itself. There are two different Creation accounts in Genesis. Two different genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. Two different descriptions of Judas’s death in Matthew and Acts. Again, that was only the beginning.

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The proverbial straw that broke my Christian back was learning this: there is no provenance proving that the Bible came directly from God.

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The sacred words of the Bible were formed, shaped, and written by humans, and Scripture gives us no clear explanation of how divine authorship operated in that process.

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I had always subconsciously imagined the Bible as something like golden tablets falling from Heaven—written directly by God.

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Not so.

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The Bible was produced by humans in a long and messy process.

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Even our earliest complete biblical manuscripts reflect that deeply human history.

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The more I learned, the deeper I dug until I found myself buried in confusion and wrestling with what many call the Bible’s “dirty little secrets.”

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To use a metaphor from Tim Mackie, the Bible is a lot like the Mona Lisa hanging in a crowded museum, surrounded by experts arguing over whether the painting was started in 1503 or 1506, did Da Vinci paint every stroke himself, what pigments were used, or whether parts were later restored by human hands.

When I saw the Mona Lisa in person, I remember the pockets of arguments almost as much as the painting. Small groups stood debating details all around the room while, behind them, a masterpiece hung silently, its beauty largely overlooked.

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Turns out, once you enter the quagmire of the Bible’s “dirty little secrets” at the scholarship level, you quickly find yourself in an arena filled with doctrinal divisions, infighting, name-calling, and scholars arguing over who even qualifies as a “biblical scholar.”

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Some fall in love.
Others fall into anger.

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I was slipping toward anger—closer than I ever expected.

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These unfolding realizations hit me hard. I was shocked. I was angry. I was embarrassed. I had made such a big deal about Paul’s words with the kids: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” I wanted them to feel those words. To live them.

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I felt as if God had pulled the rug right out from beneath me.

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The immense confusion ultimately threw me into a faith crisis. I stepped away from what I believed was my calling—to plant a church for kids—because I no longer knew what I could teach with confidence. I was lost. I felt abandoned by the very faith I thought I understood. I was giving up on God because I no longer knew what to believe.

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But God didn’t give up on me.

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I could not shake Jesus. I could not stop thinking about Him. So I went back to where I left off—not to grow more angry, but to figure out what those who were falling in love had discovered—and what I had missed.

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That’s when I came across a video by Tim Mackie of The Bible Project called Genesis: Beginning the Right Story.

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Tim Mackie is a biblical scholar and co-founder of The Bible Project. His training in the Hebrew Bible and the historical context of Scripture gave him a way of explaining the Bible I had never encountered before. For the first time, everything I had been wrestling with began to make sense.

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To summarize Tim’s video message in two sentences:

One. The Bible has no Dirty Little Secrets, only misunderstandings often presented as “scholarly consensus” as if it is a settled fact, when in reality biblical scholarship is full of debate, competing models, and unresolved tensions.

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Two. If we believe Jesus rose from the dead on our behalf, then we carry that same faith into trusting that the Bible—though undeniably human—speaks God’s divine words to His people.

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That video was a breath of fresh air. It filled my sails again. For the first time, I realized I wasn’t alone. Someone else understood exactly what I had been wrestling with and explained clearly that the Bible has no “dirty little secrets” when it’s read carefully.

I was floored. I was thrilled. For the first time in a long time, the pieces were starting to come together again.

Here’s the deal. The Bible is not a rulebook. Nor is it a history book. It is an ancient, unified, epic narrative of God working through humans in history to reveal His covenant story to humanity. 

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The Bible was written for us, not to us.

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Verses are not standalone truth bombs.

Jesus is the climax of the whole story.

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Genesis is not trying to answer modern questions. Nobody lived 900 years. The serpent is not a talking snake—it represents the deceptive, rebellious power of evil speaking lies into God’s world.

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Reading Genesis as if it were a modern scientific or historical document leads to conclusions the text is not trying to make.

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And perhaps most importantly, the Bible’s story is not ultimately about escaping Earth and going to Heaven when we die. It is about God bringing Heaven and Earth back together through Jesus right here, right now.

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Churchianity breezes by all that—and much more—opening the door wide to misunderstanding and misreading the Bible from the very first page. That, I believe, is the root of Churchianity bamboozlement and the growing collapse of biblical literacy and trust in churches. 

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When I understood that the Bible must be read carefully in its historical context, everything began to click. From its beginnings in myth and folklore to its many interpretations, it forms a unified story that leads to Jesus.

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Indeed, the Bible is confusing (Gen. 6:4), human, and developed over time—but that is not a problem to be solved. It is the very way God chose to work through people in history.

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I am not tearing the Bible apart. I am sharing what I have learned from widely available scholarship and resources that most people either overlook or never encounter.

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I’ve come full circle and now understand this is how God works through humans. It is my learned conviction that the Bible is filled, cover to cover, with the knowledge God wants us to know about following Jesus into the Kingdom of Heaven.

That’s when the light went on. I realized the story of Paul’s faithfulness still mattered—that he fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.

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My faith has been reframed—from asking, “Does the Bible fit modern categories of science or history?” to asking, “Will I trust the God revealed in Jesus and enter His covenant story?” 

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That was a massive shift.

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I went from seeing the Bible as purely divine, to thinking it was purely human, to finally understanding that it is both divine and human—just as God intended. And it all comes together in Jesus—where the divine and the human meet, right here, right now. 

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It takes the same faith to believe that Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead on our behalf as it does to believe that the Bible is both divine and human.

Trust in the Bible is downstream of trust in Jesus. Not the other way around. It’s a reversal most people miss.

I have a feeling there are others searching for the same answers I was and am searching for. 

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This realization is what led me to start First Savvy Church of Christ. 

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Not because I think the world needs another church.

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It does not.

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But I do believe kids need a church that gives them a break.

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They need a safe place where they are not managed, entertained, ignored, or handed shallow answers that collapse the first time life gets hard. They need strong, safe adults who love Jesus, tell the truth, welcome hard questions, and make sure no child feels like the odd-kid-out. 

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Kids are not the future of the church.

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They are people Jesus already loves now.

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Churches should be centered on our youth, the very people Jesus tells us not to push away. If it works for kids, it works for everyone.

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Done correctly, everything else will just fall into place.

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This is why the First Savvy Church of Christ exists.

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A Jesus-centered, youth-focused, biblically accurate church.

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A bamboozlement-free church for kids—adults too.

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And for the parents, grandparents, teachers, leaders, and honest seekers who know deep down that children deserve better than what Churchianity has been handing them and us before them.

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I have planted the seed.

Now I’m looking for people who will help water it.