Lessons Learned: The Tragedy of The Ramp Movement Part 2

In Part 1, I wrote about the absence of wisdom and adult oversight at the beginning of what would become The Ramp. But I want to be fair to the adults who were there, because the problem was not that parents and church leaders were indifferent. Many of them had real concerns. Many of them tried. The problem was that by the time they tried to say something, their voices no longer carried weight with us. Someone else's did.

There was one voice. And for those of us who were there at the beginning, that voice was everything.

The founder of The Ramp was not simply a teacher to us. She was the authority. Not one authority among many, the way it should be for any young person, balanced against parents, pastors, elders, and the slow accumulation of lived experience. She was the authority. The one we measured everything else against. And I do not think that happened by accident, even if it did not happen by malicious design.

Two things in particular made it possible.

The first was the nature of what she was teaching. It was not presented as one faithful interpretation among several. It was presented as the truth, full stop, and everything outside of it was spiritually deficient. If your church did not operate in the sign gifts, it was a dead church. If your parents were not pursuing what we were pursuing, they were not truly on fire for God. For teenagers who wanted to give everything to Christ, that framing was intoxicating. She was not just offering us a theology. She was offering us an identity, and the identity came with a clear line between those who were in and those who were not.

The second thing was the way she carried herself when she spoke. She did not preach like a teacher working through a text. She spoke like a prophet. And we hung on every word.

I know how that sounds. But I can prove it, at least to myself, because of something that happened years later.

A close friend and mentor of mine, someone who had also been part of those early gatherings, and I decided to visit The Ramp together. We were adults by then. Both of us had been in pastoral ministry. I had a degree in religious studies and years of theological formation behind me. I no longer agreed with most of what The Ramp was doing. We went partly out of curiosity, partly to gain some clarity on our own experiences.

What happened unsettled us both.

The moment the founder began to preach, something in me shifted. I was not sitting there as a pastor with years of ministry behind him. I was fifteen again, waiting. Hoping she would say something to me. Hoping for a word, a moment of recognition, some acknowledgment that I was seen. It was not rational. I knew it was not rational even as it was happening. But the pull was real.

She came through the crowd the way someone does when everyone around them treats their proximity as a gift. She made eye contact with me and my friend and came to pray for us. When she reached me, I heard myself say, without planning to, "I'm a pastor now."

I was not introducing myself. I was asking for approval. From a woman whose theology I had largely moved away from, in a room I had come to observe, as an adult with my own pastoral formation and convictions. And still, in that moment, I wanted her to be proud of me.

My friend and I drove home mostly quiet. Then, somewhere on that drive, we both came out of it. We looked at each other and acknowledged how strange it had been. How we had both felt it. How neither of us had been able to fully resist it in the moment.

That is not a small thing. That is the fingerprint of a formative authority that was never properly bounded.

Because the authority she held over us was not just spiritual. It was total.

I mean that carefully, and I mean it literally. The founder shaped decisions that had nothing to do with theology. Who you spent time with. Who you dated. What you did with your future. These were not areas where young people were encouraged to seek wisdom from multiple sources, to pray, to talk to their parents, to think carefully. They were areas where her word was the word.

I knew a young man in that community who was told to end the relationship with his girlfriend. The reason given was that the founder had received a dream about him, a revelation that he was not meant to marry her. That was the entire basis. Not a conversation. Not a pastoral process. A dream, delivered as verdict. And the relationship ended.

But it did not stop there.

This same young man, who was twenty-four years old, said something in a discussion at the Grace Place, the storefront we had rented as a gathering space, that the leadership took exception to. What he said was not inflammatory. It was not an attack. He said, simply, that he did not believe anything spoken from a pulpit unless it agreed with Scripture in context.

That is a statement any serious student of the Bible should be able to make without consequence. It is, in fact, close to what the Bereans were commended for in Acts 17. But in this environment, where the founder's words carried the weight of prophetic authority, it was heard as insubordination. And the response was not a conversation. It was not a rebuke offered in love or a meeting where concerns were raised openly.

One of the pastors went to his house late at night and told him he could no longer come back. They accused him of insubordination. They told him to leave town.

He was twenty-four years old. And he listened. Because that was what you did. Because the authority structure we had all absorbed said that to resist was to resist God. The next day, he was gone.

This was before cell phones. There was no way to call him, no way to find out what had happened. It would be many years before I reconnected with him as an adult and learned the full story of what had been done to him that night.

That was not church discipline. That was not loving correction. That was not what it looks like when a community of believers holds one another accountable in truth and grace. That was something else entirely. And it happened to a twenty-four year old who had done nothing more than ask that the Word of God be handled carefully.

No one should hold that kind of power over another person. Especially not over young people who are still forming, still learning who they are, still building the interior scaffolding that will carry them through the rest of their lives.

Scripture is clear on this. Leaders are not called to replace the authorities in a young person's life. They are called to support them, to come alongside parents and families and local churches, not to quietly displace them. What we experienced was a slow erosion of every other voice until only one remained. And when only one voice is left, there is no correction available. There is no check. There is no one to say, this has gone too far.

The founder may not have set out to build that kind of influence. I am willing to extend that grace, because I believe the motives at the beginning were real. But intentions do not determine outcomes. And the outcome was a generation of young people who had been taught, at the most impressionable stage of their lives, to filter everything through a single human authority who was herself unaccountable to anyone outside the movement she had built.

I want to be honest about something else, though. Even now, even after everything, many of us who were there still want The Ramp to succeed. We want it to be what it always said it was. We want to see lives changed and young people genuinely encountering God and the kingdom advancing in Marion County and beyond. That desire has not gone away, because it was never really about The Ramp to begin with. It was about God. And God has not changed.

What we want is for that work to be done the right way. With accountability. With genuine pastoral oversight. With leaders who are themselves under authority and who handle young people with the care and the sobriety that the weight of that responsibility demands. The passion was never the problem. It was always the structure around it, or the absence of one.

We are still rooting for something good to come out of Hamilton, Alabama. We just know now what it actually requires.

If you were shaped by The Ramp, if you sat in that dayroom or that storefront or those revival services and gave yourself over completely to what was being built there, I want to say something directly to you.

What was done to you was not nothing. The displacement of your parents, your pastors, your own developing judgment, that was not discipleship. Discipleship does not ask you to give one person total authority over your life. Discipleship does not send people to your house in the middle of the night to tell you to leave town. Discipleship does not make you feel, twenty years later, like you still need the approval of the person who formed you.

You are allowed to examine what happened. You are allowed to name it clearly and to grieve it without feeling like you are betraying God in the process. The faith that was awakened in you in those early years, whatever was real in it, belongs to you and to God. It does not belong to the movement, and it does not belong to the person who led it.

There is a difference between the God who was present in that hunger and the structure that was built around it. You are allowed to hold onto one and honestly reckon with the other.

That reckoning is not a betrayal. It is, in fact, the kind of hard and honest work that genuine discipleship has always asked of us.