When the Wheels Were Already Coming Off: What I Saw at the Beginning of The Ramp

I grew up in Hamilton, Alabama. It is a small town in Marion County, the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, where you go to school with the same people from kindergarten through graduation, where the bonds run deep enough that when something goes wrong, it doesn't just hurt, it hollows you out.

Something has gone wrong.

The news coming out of The Ramp, the ministry and school that put Hamilton on the map for a generation of charismatic Christians, has left me sitting with a grief I don't quite have words for. I know these people. Not as names in a headline. I know their families. I grew up with them. And that changes everything about how this lands.

I am not writing to examine the specifics of what has come to light. Others will do that, and they should. I am writing because I was there at the very beginning, before The Ramp had a name, before it had a building, before it had any of the infrastructure that would eventually make it known far beyond Marion County. And from that vantage point, I watched something take shape that had all the right ingredients and almost none of the right guardrails.

I think that matters. I think it has always mattered. And I think it matters now more than ever.

Before it was called The Ramp, it was a Bible study in Karen Wheaton's upstairs dayroom.

A loose gathering of kids from different churches and different backgrounds, sitting around with Bibles and guitars and what I can only describe as a genuine hunger for God. There was something real in that room. I want to be clear about that, because this is not a story about fake faith or cynical manipulation. People surrendered their lives to Christ. Things happened that I am still processing as an adult, things that defy easy explanation.

The motives were right. I believe that with everything in me. These were not people building a brand or chasing influence. They were kids who loved God and wanted more of Him, and that desire was sincere. That has to be said, because it is true, and because the tragedy of what has unfolded is made heavier, not lighter, by the fact that so much of it began with something genuinely good.

But we were teenagers. And in a movement built almost entirely on the energy of teenagers, nobody seemed to think that was a problem worth naming.

The theology we were immersed in was Pentecostal, which was new territory for a lot of us who hadn't grown up in that environment. The worship was loud and unscripted. The expectation was that God was going to show up and do something extraordinary. For kids coming out of more reserved church traditions, that kind of spiritual electricity was intoxicating.

The problem was never the hunger. The problem was the absence of anyone older and wiser to help us steward it.

There are things I cringe at now.

Some of the youth told people, directly and without much tact, that if they didn't repent they were going to hell. They believed it. They weren't lying. But teenagers have almost no emotional regulation, and some of us wielded theological conviction like a hammer because we didn't know how to use anything else.

It is also worth remembering what we did not have. This was before smartphones. Before you could pull up a commentary, a church history podcast, or a theological debate on your phone in thirty seconds. If you wanted to study a doctrine, you needed books you probably didn't own, or a pastor with formal training who was willing to sit down with you. Most of the adult leaders around us hadn't been to seminary. Most of them were sincere, faithful people who loved God and loved the community, but who had come up in the same environment we had, where biblical understanding was largely shaped by how a passage made you feel rather than by careful study of the text in its context. We were all, in a sense, working with the same limited tools and passing them down to each other.

That is not an excuse. But it is important context. There is a difference between people who knew better and chose wrong, and people who genuinely did not have access to the resources that might have helped them see more clearly. Most of the people in that room fell into the second category. And I think they deserve to be understood that way.

There was a strong belief in what is sometimes called the second blessing, the idea that the Holy Spirit is received not at conversion but in a separate subsequent event, as in Acts. I am not here to re-examine that doctrine. What I can tell you is what it produced in practice: a spiritual hierarchy. If you had the experience, you were in. If your church was quiet and liturgical, it was a dead church. If your parents weren't pursuing the sign gifts, they were spiritually asleep.

A lot of kids went back to their home churches carrying that attitude. And because they weren't doing drugs or drinking or getting into the usual trouble teenagers get into, their parents didn't know how to push back. What were they supposed to say? That they didn't want their child reading their Bible? That they were against them surrendering their life to God?

So the parents let it go. The home churches let it go. And the movement kept growing, largely on its own terms, with very little external accountability and almost no older voices with the authority or proximity to call anything into question.

We rented a storefront. We filled it with teenagers. We played guitars and worshiped and had all the drama that comes when you pack that many adolescents into a small space with a shared conviction that you are on the front lines of a spiritual awakening and no one above you to say otherwise.

It was beautiful in moments. It was chaos in others. And the adults who might have provided structure had already been maneuvered, however unintentionally, out of a position to do so.

Here is what I see now, looking back from where I stand as an adult.

The wheels were already coming off. The structure that should have been there was never built. And movements that grow without that structure do not simply stay messy. Over time, they become dangerous.

The structural problem was never the passion. The structural problem was that there was no scaffolding of wisdom around all that zeal. Proverbs has something to say about this. So does Paul, in nearly every letter he writes to young churches. Desire for God is not self-correcting. It needs formation. It needs elders. It needs people who have lived long enough to know the difference between the fire of the Spirit and the fire of unchecked emotion, and who love you enough to say so out loud.

And that last part matters more than we usually admit. The voices that push back on us, that tell us we are wrong, that slow us down when we are convinced we are unstoppable, those voices are not the enemy. They are often the most loving people in the room. The friend who says you are moving too fast. The elder who says you are not ready. The parent who says I am not sure about this. We tend to hear those voices as opposition. But more often than not, they are the voices of people who love us and can see what we cannot see about ourselves.

What happened instead is that the young people who gathered in that dayroom eventually became the older generation of The Ramp. They grew up inside the movement and then became its leadership. But here is the question that haunts me: when were they discipled? When did someone with thirty years of hard-won wisdom sit across from them and ask the hard questions? When did someone who was not already inside the culture love them enough to say slow down, wait, be formed before you form others?

When were they just kids? When did someone treat them that way?

The abuse that has now come to light is not just a scandal. It is a tragedy. And tragedies of this kind do not come from nowhere. They grow in environments where accountability is structurally weak, where charisma substitutes for character over many years, and where the people who might have raised concerns were quietly, often unintentionally, kept at the margins.

That was the culture from the beginning. Not malicious. Not calculated. But a culture that had no category for outside correction, that had been shaped from its earliest days by the idea that what was happening here was too important, too anointed, too alive to be slowed down by the kind of oversight that might have actually protected people.

I grieve for everyone touched by this. I grieve for those who were harmed, whose pain is real and whose voices deserve to be heard above everything else. I grieve for the families in Hamilton who are watching something they loved and believed in come apart. I grieve for the people who gave years of their lives to The Ramp with sincere hearts and genuine faith, who are now left trying to make sense of what it all meant. I even grieve for those who led poorly, who were handed platforms and positions before anyone had ever truly shepherded them, who never had the gift of someone stepping in and saying: you are not ready yet, and that is not a punishment, it is an act of love.

Everyone in this story needed more than they were given. That is what breaks me most.

And I grieve, in a quieter way, for the movement that could have been something different, if somewhere along the way, someone with wisdom and authority had walked into that dayroom and said: this is beautiful, and it needs guardrails, and you need to be discipled before you disciple anyone else.

Right motives are not enough on their own. They never have been. The Church has always known this, which is why it built structures of formation and accountability around even its most passionate members. Not to extinguish the fire, but to keep it from burning everything down.

That is what was missing here. And the cost of that absence is now impossible to look away from.