About Joe Degidio
For most of my adult life I tried to balance work, family, and faith inside churches that often felt political, corporate, or disconnected from the Jesus of the gospels. I went to the meetings. I served on the teams. I gave to the building fund. I kept showing up.
Underneath all of it, something was not adding up.
I could answer theological questions on a quiz. I could not answer the questions that mattered. Why does God allow suffering? What does faith actually mean? How do you get more of it when you need it most? Why does the place that promised community keep producing the most disconnected people I know?
The questions did not go away because I stopped asking them. They went underground and waited.
His wife and children were there. The room was quiet in that thick, helpless way rooms get when people do not know what to say. The leader stepped forward to offer comfort. The best answer he had was three words.
"God took him."
That was it. That was the answer offered to a widow and her children at a megachurch that spent millions on production every year. God took him. Move on.
I sat in that Bible study and felt my faith almost leave me on the spot. Not because I had stopped believing in God. Because I could not square the God I was being shown with any God worth following. A God who looked down at a faithful man serving him on a mission trip and decided to snatch him away? That God is not a God. That God is a tyrant with better marketing.
I almost walked out that day. I would not have been wrong to. Something refused to let me leave quietly. That refusal is what started the next thirty years.
Not theological questions. Not seminary questions. The kind of questions a man asks when the lab results come back wrong and there is no good news on the second page.
Why does God allow suffering? What is faith actually for? How do I get more of it? When I die, is this the end of me? Why is the church so often the opposite of Jesus? Did the first century followers believe any of what we believe now?
I went to people I trusted with these questions. Most of them flinched. A few gave answers that sounded right but did not survive an honest follow-up question. A few admitted they did not know either. Those were the ones I kept around.
I went looking for what the people in 34 AD actually believed before any building was built. I wanted to know what they heard. What they were willing to die for. What got carried forward unchanged and what got bolted on by editors, councils, and emperors looking to make the message politically useful.
What I found surprised me.
The original message was simpler, harder, better, and more honest than anything I had been handed in three decades of regular church attendance. It made room for suffering without blaming the sufferer. It made room for doubt without punishing the doubter. It did not require a building, a pastor, a tithing schedule, or a political tribe.
It required a decision. Then a life.
The message had been buried, not because it was wrong, but because it was too dangerous to the people who took it over.
Along the way a small group of men formed around the same questions. Doctors, business owners, fathers, sons of pastors who walked away, current believers who could not say so out loud at the church they still attended.
We met. We argued. We studied. We did not agree on everything. We agreed on the thing that mattered: the version of Jesus we had been handed was not the one we were finding in the first century. We called ourselves the Wrecking Crew because what we were doing felt like demolition before construction. You cannot build a house on someone else's collapsing foundation.
This book is the work of that crew, written down.
Your questions are not a sign of weak faith. They are the beginning of real faith. The kind that survives a hospital waiting room, a graveside, a divorce, a diagnosis. The kind that does not need a building to hold it up.
If that is where you are, you are already in the right place.
I write for the next person sitting in a Bible study about to walk out. I write for the one who left ten years ago and never went back, but never stopped wondering. I write for the one who is still attending out of habit while the part of them that mattered checked out a long time ago.
The book is what I wish someone had handed me thirty years ago.
Signed up. Showed up. Served. Believed what I was told to believe.
An alpha class. A man with MS. A question asked three times and never answered.
A pastor's death. "God took him." Almost the end.
Started asking out loud. Most people flinched.
Stopped reading commentaries. Started reading history.
A handful of men around a kitchen table. No agenda. No program. The first real church I ever attended.
Suffering. Faith. The first century message. The shape of the book started to appear.
Tested the framework against real grief. It held. That was the first time I knew it was worth writing down.
Three years of writing. Most of it bad. Some of it usable.
One hundred sixty-two copies in the first run. Every one of them mattered.
Readers find it. Counselors use it. Skeptics read it. The Wrecking Crew keeps meeting.
Still writing. Still asking. Still not interested in the version that almost ended my faith.
Thirty years compressed into ten chapters.