Lessons Learned: The Tragedy of The Ramp Movement Part 3

Healing from anything requires an honest reckoning with what actually happened. You cannot grieve what you will not name. You cannot recover from a wound you insist on calling something else. And for those of us who were shaped by The Ramp, that honesty is not easy, because what happened to us is layered in ways that make it difficult to sort out. The good was real. The harm was also real. And both of those things are true at the same time.

So let me try to name some of it.

In my last post I wrote about how the founder became the singular authority in our lives, displacing parents, pastors, and every other voice that might have offered a different perspective. But the story does not end there. Because for many students, the community that had become their entire world was eventually taken from them too.

It happened in different ways. Some students found themselves on the outside because they could not agree with every point of doctrine being taught. Something did not sit right with them theologically, and rather than that being welcomed as an invitation to discuss and grow, it was treated as a loyalty problem. Others were removed because of relationships. If you had dated someone prominent in the movement and the relationship ended, your place in the community could end with it. The situation I described in my last post, the young man sent away in the middle of the night, was not an isolated incident. It was a pattern.

For the students this happened to, the loss was devastating in ways that are hard to overstate. Their entire identity had been built inside that community. Their friendships, their sense of calling, their understanding of who God made them to be, all of it lived inside those walls. To be removed, for whatever reason, was not just to lose a church. It was to lose everything at once.

From the very beginning, there were people outside the movement who looked at what was happening and used a word that made those of us on the inside defensive. They called it a cult.

I want to be careful here, because that word carries a lot of weight and gets applied too broadly in Christian circles, sometimes to things that do not deserve it. But I also think it is worth sitting with the concern rather than dismissing it, because the response to that accusation revealed something important. When those concerns were raised, the leadership did not pause and ask whether there was anything worth examining. The outside world was shut out further. Loyalty was demanded more intensely. To raise a question from inside the community was to risk looking like a defector. Concern was treated as betrayal.

That pattern, the closing of ranks, the demand for unquestioning loyalty, the treatment of outside voices as threats rather than as potential sources of wisdom, is worth naming honestly. Not to condemn everyone who was part of it, but because naming it is part of what healing requires.

There is something else I need to say, and I want to say it with as much sympathy as I can, because I lived it too.

We were kids from a small town. Hamilton, Alabama had around six thousand people. Most of us did not come from money. The world felt small and our futures felt uncertain in the way that futures always feel uncertain when you are young and poor and from a place that most people have never heard of.

And then something happened that felt like a door opening onto something enormous.

We were told we were part of a movement that was going to awaken revival across the whole world. And there was fruit that seemed to confirm it. We were traveling. We were performing for large churches and crowds of people in places we had never imagined going. For kids who had grown up with very little, the sense that God had chosen us for something significant was overwhelming in the best possible way.

The founder had also achieved a level of success in the gospel music industry that was visible and tangible. She knew famous people. She had a large home, fine clothing, luxury cars. There was a private jet. My twin brother, while he was dating her daughter, was taken on trips that would have been unimaginable to us growing up. And the message, spoken and unspoken, was that this was what faithfulness looked like. That if you stayed in, if you gave yourself fully to this work, God would reward you with a life that looked like this.

For a materialistic teenager from a small poor rural town, that was not a small thing. It was dazzling. I do not say that to excuse it. I say it because I think it is important to understand how it worked on us. We were not foolish. We were young and hungry and we had been shown a vision of a life we had never had access to, and we were told that God wanted to give it to us.

But it was not true. And it was not right.

Ministries should not have greenrooms. Servants of God should not present themselves as celebrities. And anyone entering ministry with wealth as an expectation has started down a road that leads somewhere Scripture warns us about clearly and repeatedly.

I know this now. I learned it the hard way, the good way.

While I was still part of the movement, my Baptist youth pastor prayed something over me that I did not understand at the time. I had asked him to pray for me, and what he prayed caught me completely off guard. He said, God, use Kevin in the way you want to use him. If that means cleaning bedpans in a nursing home, show him what true ministry is.

I was frustrated by that prayer. It felt small. It felt like he was not believing for enough. But years later I would find myself doing ministry in a homeless shelter, sitting across from people that the world had completely forgotten, and I finally understood what he had been asking God to give me. He was praying that I would be freed from the lie that significance looks like a stage and a crowd and a private jet. He was praying that I would find God in the ordinary, humble, unglamorous places where God has always done His deepest work.

That prayer was one of the most important things anyone ever did for me.

So here is what I want to say to you, if you were part of The Ramp and you are carrying something you have never fully set down.

You are not alone in this. And you are allowed to heal.

The first step, as painful as it is, is to admit what happened. Not to perform bitterness, not to build an identity around your wounds, but to look honestly at what was done and call it what it was. You were isolated from the people who loved you. You were handed an identity that belonged to a movement rather than to God. You were shown a version of ministry that was more about platform and personality than about the quiet, faithful, costly work of actually loving people. And if you were pushed out, you were made to feel that losing your place in that community meant losing your place in God's story.

That last part is the lie that most needs to be undone.

You need structure now. Not control, not another singular authority to hand your life to, but the real and ancient structure of the Church, with its accountability and its sacraments and its eldership and its long memory. Connect to a body of believers where no single voice drowns out all the others. Let yourself be known by people who will tell you the truth.

You also need to reexamine what you believe ministry actually is. Because the vision of ministry you were given was too small, even though it looked enormous. The great thing God has for you may be being a faithful parent. A steady employee. A quiet volunteer who shows up every week without recognition or reward. A friend who stays. These are not consolation prizes for people who did not make it onto the stage. These are the things the kingdom is actually built from. These are the things that are way more fruitful and way more biblical than anything you were told to want.

God has you where you are. That is not a mistake. That is not a lesser plan. That is the thing itself.

And the bedpan prayer is still the truest prayer I know. May God use you in the way He wants to use you. Whatever that looks like. Wherever that is.

That is more than enough.