Lessons Learned: The Tragedy of The Ramp Movement Part 4

There is something I did not expect to find at the end of this series: a gift.

This morning I was invited to attend church with my boss. The invitation carried more weight than usual, because we both knew the worship leader there. He had been a kid at one of the churches where I served as youth pastor. His older sister had been in my youth group, and he would sometimes tag along during events, wide-eyed and eager to be included.

Even then, he could sing.

I remembered a boy with an extraordinary voice. What I encountered this morning was a man who had become an extraordinarily gifted worship leader. He was not performing. He was genuinely crying out for the presence of God, offering adoration to the One who deserves all praise.

What connects him to this story is that he attended the Ramp School of Ministry. As he led worship, I could tell. Something in the way he carried the room reminded me of the early days at the Ramp, when we gathered as young people with sincere hearts and a real longing for God’s presence. Sitting there this morning, I felt something I had not expected to feel while writing this series: hope.

Whatever failures we have walked through in these four posts, the Ramp has done genuine good in awakening a hunger for God’s presence in young people who are now leading churches. I got to see the fruit of that this morning, in a man who once tagged along to youth events as a little boy.

I believe, with humility and grace, that purpose could continue. Or perhaps it will not. His ways are higher than ours, and who can say what God has in store. What I do know is this: even in the midst of everything that went wrong, God was still working something for good. I was grateful to witness it.

For some of us, the Ramp is not a place we need to be completely healed from. That might be a difficult sentence to read depending on where you are in your own processing, and I do not write it to minimize what was real and what was wrong. I write it because it is also true.

There were beautiful things. Things I might never have experienced had the Ramp not existed.

I think of my mentor, someone who has stayed by my side through life’s highest moments and its lowest ones, who I would not have known without that community. I think of what I learned there about worship and prayer, not as performance or religious obligation, but as genuine encounter. I think of a young boy who tagged along to youth events and grew into a man leading a congregation deeper into the presence of God. That legacy did not die with the scandal. It walked into a local church this morning and lifted its hands.

We are allowed to grieve what was broken and still give thanks for what was beautiful. We do not have to choose.

You are free to see the good things. You are free to call out the bad. You are free to acknowledge that nothing about this story is entirely right or entirely wrong. You do not have to feel as though you are excusing real harm simply because you can also recognize real fruit. I would argue that genuine growth and maturity only come when we are able to hold both.

If you were part of it, you know this tension. But somewhere between those who choose only harsh anger and those who choose only willful blindness, there is a place to land. We are all just broken people, each of us carrying our own fractures into everything we build.

I once heard a singer say it this way: God uses crooked sticks to make straight paths.

That is the only hope the Ramp has. And if we are being honest, it is the only hope any of us have in our own personal walk.