#class of 2018

[layla-loves-violence]

"i want to give you wings, but babe, you've got to grow them"

At my first Game Design 101 lesson, my professor told us that many of us would probably end up switching majors before we graduate. "Making games and playing them are two different things."

I wasn't deterred. I had aspirations of narrative design and character concepts, and although level design and programming bored me to death I was determined to stick it out. I wanted so desperately to give back to the media that I loved so much, that got me through my hardest times: video games. I had dreams of directing my own RPGs, of making characters that everyone would fall in love with.

I lasted one year.

It wasn't out of a lack of love of games. It was a lack of support. It was a lack of language. It was a lack of desire to live.

Freshman year is guaranteed to bring drama. You throw a bunch of 17-to-18-year-old kids into close proximity and call them independent without any of the skills and things are bound to get a little messy. Especially if you're an autistic narcissist like I was at seventeen. I won't deny my own fault in the situation, in fact, I'll be the first to gut myself over it. I was a tiny control freak with an anxious streak a mile wide. It doesn't take much pressure to break me open.

I was too dumb to realize that inviting a guy back to my dorm to "play video games" meant I was propositioning him. I was too shy to tell a guy to fuck off when his comments made me uncomfortable. I was too self-absorbed to realize I wasn't the main character of this social group, that these people I'd barely known for two months wouldn't rally behind me like I was some usurped king seeking to reclaim my throne. There was no throne. I was seventeen and stupid.

But it doesn't change the fact that, intentionally or not, someone was taking advantage of me. Whether it was the boy who pressured me into cuddling when I wasn't open to having sex, or the boy who promised to stand up against sexual harassment and balked when I actually brought up pursuing Title IX. I was "too much drama" he said, after he'd already convinced me everyone else was against me.

It's been six years since then. People change. People wash their hands of you. People will watch you drown, and say that if they tried to save you, you'll pull them down and we'd die together. And you're not sure if they're wrong.

My first semester I made the Dean's List. The second semester, I was on academic probation, because I was too terrified to be in the same room with people I assumed hated me, or worse, found me annoying. I deleted the Discord servers, kept my distance. While my classmates learned about character design, I was conducting a self study on how isolation leads to madness.

I contact a suicide hotline, keep my answers vague so I don't end up in the hospital again, like I did at 12. I tell my mother I can't take the train, because I worry that when I see it, I'll feel compelled to throw myself in front. The minute I step out of my dorm, I stop being able to breathe. I have a panic attack so loud in the bathroom before an exam that the front desk has to conduct a wellness check.

I drop out that summer.

(Someone contacts me in the fall, asks if I wanted to attend an event with him. I tell him I no longer go to that school and to never contact me again. Surprisingly, perhaps gladly, he does. His contact in still in my phone.)

I spend the next six years digging myself out of a hole. I end up in three separate outpatient programs. I cut my hair, grow it out again. I drop 20 pounds and gain it back, drop another ten, gain back five. I learn to drive. I get a part time job, get laid off, get another job, and get bullied by my managers. I move from my dad's house to my mother's. My grandmother dies. My dog dies. My sister, a once-despised rival, becomes tolerable, and then a friend. I begin losing my closest friend. I start drawing. I start writing. I listen to Mother Mother again. I play a Night in the Woods.

The game design program I chose, I chose for its capstone. At the end of four years, you get to build a real, playable game with other students. We got to pitch our games as our final for the first semester. All of us "failed," pitching things far too complex to make in a single semester. "Not every idea gets made."

There were several projects made in the 2022 Game Design capstone. I read the names of the students involved, and I can picture them in my head, and I feel lightheaded. For a moment, I can see an alternate world in which people didn't scare me. I can see a world where I connected with others on an even keel. Some of them have websites, and my mouse hovers over a "contact" button. The boy who said I was too much for him is a man with a beard now. He says his favorite game is Persona 5.

I wonder if they think about me, or how their memories erode my image in time. I picture a villain lurking in their single-room lair, pacing and stewing in between lofi hip-hop streams and rewatches of John Oliver and Polygon's Unraveled, cloaked in pilling hoodies and unwashed pajama pants, yellow-green plaid, school colors. No one is coming for them.

[wutbju]

BJU Class of 2018's Aaron Randolph is completely flummoxed by Robert Lazzell's conviction.

How does this happen?

This is the question ringing in our minds. As I’m writing this, I have in mind, primarily, those who grew up in the same educational and religious context as I did. We went to similar churches, attended the same youth group events, went to summer camp together, and attended the same Christian school.

Unfortunately, while we’ve mostly gone our separate ways, recent headlines have led us to the same questions. We know the names, we’ve watched the reports, and we wonder how we could have been so oblivious at the time, better yet how could the adults we trusted have been so deceived.

My heart goes out to Michael and his family. I won’t pretend we were particularly close in high school, but if you’re reading this know that I and many others are praying for you and are here anytime you need us.

My thoughts since the guilty plea was announced, have centered around this question. How does this happen? How does someone with these wicked desires and tendencies obtain a position of such power and influence in a ministry supposedly devoted to pursuing holiness?

How does such wickedness continue for years and remain hidden for a decade?

This is the third time in my adult life (only ten years) that I have seen this story unfold in men I knew personally who were entrusted vocationally with authority over teenagers and all three worked for Christian institutions while the abuse took place. An assistant pastor (not mine though he attended my church for a time, and I briefly dated his daughter), a work supervisor in college, and now my former Christian school principal. How does this happen?

A Wake-Up Call.

I am not the first person to label events like this a wake-up call. It’s obviously that anyway you look at it. But if we stop short of addressing the root of the problem, we’re missing the point.

Wickedness of this kind is rotten fruit decades in the making. To continue the analogy a bit further, neither a tree nor a branch grows in a day, but both a branch and a whole tree could be destroyed far faster than either can be grown. Assuming that none of the problems that led to these horrendous events have been addressed just because we weren’t there to see it is foolish. We ought not burn down a good tree just because we’re too angry or lazy to prune the rotten branch instead.

I am discouraged by the fact that the root problem here, has not yet been adequately addressed.

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Smoke!

I’m convinced the root problem, the issue most likely to produce future victims, is us, the church. I’m not just talking about a specific local church, nor am I referring exclusively to IFB and IFB adjacent congregations. I mean us, Christians!

We’ve all thought about times we witnessed odd occurrences, creepy vibes, or questionable decisions since we heard the news reports.

I remember feeling something wasn’t right when a youth pastor I knew joked along with some teenage boys claiming his son was homosexual. When he resigned due to a porn addiction a few months later I can’t say I was shocked.

But just as it’s easy for people who have already decided they hate the church to use this as an opportunity to try and burn it to the ground, it’s also easy for us as Christians to pretend the solution is developing some sort of abuser Spidey-sense.

I heard tasteless jokes and witnessed awkward behavior from the individuals I’ve mentioned, but do I remember these things because they are telltale signs of child abusers, or do the similar memories of others fade until headlines jog my memory?

The underlying issue here is that we do not practice biblical church discipline. Nothing I witnessed personally was cause for firing anyone on the spot, but many of the things I witnessed were cause for concern. Christ’s instruction in Matthew 18 is threefold. Go alone, go with witnesses, involve the whole church. I wonder how much sin and abuse would be avoided if we questioned our brothers and sisters appropriately at the first sign of sin.

Unfortunately, even in our conservative churches, we often wait till an egregious sin has taken hold of our brother. Having left him to fend for himself every step leading up to this sin, we then rush in to do all three steps of discipline simultaneously and kick him to the curb without any meaningful attempt at drawing him to repentance.

We wouldn’t wait till our neighbor’s house was engulfed in flames to call the fire department, yet we so often do the spiritual equivalent with church discipline. Is it not better to catch a porn addiction at six months and spend the next year beating it than to kick a man out of the church three years later for cheating and leaving his wife? Can we not at least attempt the former?

If in our churches we were truly iron sharpening iron, how many would be predators would be scared away by the sparks?

We Must Respond Biblically!

I am grieved by the abuse that took place in my high school, but I am also concerned by how quickly many of my friends are willing to jettison the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture.

I remember hearing a woman on Moody radio several years ago talking about the need for churches to form anti-abuse committees. She suggested that they must include women and preferably individuals trained in psychology. These committees, she said, should have free reign in the church to sit in on meetings and investigate however and whenever they deemed necessary. Evidently some of my former classmates think these are good ideas as well.

The problem of course, is that there is already a group which God has tasked with the oversight of the church. If we believe God knows best then the answer is not new committees, parachurch organizations, or secular watchdogs! Cameras, prevention policies, and increased security measures are all good, but nothing can fill the gap left when qualified leadership and biblical discipline are absent.

God ordained a plurality of godly men to lead His church and a loving vigilance among church members to protect it. That is the answer and must be our pursuit going forward.

The leadership that hired Bob Lazzell and allowed him to operate without accountability was not acting biblically. Leading up to the abuse there was no senior pastor and evidently none of the other pastors were capable of picking up the slack. One was already clearly disqualified when he was hired, and he went on to abuse a minor at another church a few years later.

To those looking at FBC and FBCS leadership in the 2000s as a case study of biblical church leadership failing, biblically qualified leadership was not there! A little research and comparison with the qualifications provided in Scripture makes that abundantly clear.

Final Thoughts

In a moment like this it is only natural to grieve with the victim and lament the blight this is on the name of Christ in our community. It is also good and normal to feel a call to action. That action though to be effective must be biblical.

We must not seek answers from unqualified teachers. Those who by word or deed have forsaken God’s instruction must not be followed. The fastest, loudest, and angriest voices are not necessarily the most righteous regardless of their sincerity on this issue. What happened is horrible, but our community will not be served by reactive rage aimed only at destruction. We desperately need a biblical response.

We should acknowledge the leadership deficiencies that existed and lead to Lazzell’s hiring, and lack of accountability are inexcusable. They fall far short of the biblical model given for both elders and deacons. We must practice all levels of church discipline as we pray that God will protect our ministries.

To those who would aim their anger at the current administration of our former school or the pastoral staff of the church, I simply ask, what’s the evidence? As I’ve already stated, an abuser Spidey-sense doesn’t exist. I simply don’t understand how we can be angrier at a man that unknowingly showed up to a church with unqualified leadership and two soon to be child molesters than we are at the men who hired these unqualified leaders and failed to provide biblical accountability for years. 1 Timothy 5 still applies here. To simply say “He should have known!” when none of us knew, is foolish.

The overarching takeaways here are these.

First, the consequences of spiritual laziness are far worse than we ever imagine. Church discipline and vigilance are not optional, they are essential at every level! We don’t need solid evidence to have a conversation! If there’s smoke, say something, we must edify and exhort one another to good works!

Second, we can’t allow our emotions to draw us away from God’s wisdom. Several of the demands hurled at FBCS should be ignored because they are entirely unbiblical! If we turn to our own understanding to “fix” the problems, our efforts will be futile, and our lives will produce rotten fruit much like the wickedness we now rightly resent.

[maalidoesart]

you are not alone

[ridaine]

Of Power and Poison

[OC]

[jopzer]

[wip] hello cherik fans. we are literally so back.

[toastytrusty]

assorted terror doodles from the past few months.. go my scarab

[pedroam-bang]

Ansel Hsiao - Imperator-class Star Destroyer Redux (2018)

[renzzarr]

"In FACT I really, REALLY"

"say it 😌"

"HATE YOUUUU"

[andysuriano]

Big News! i'll be a guest speaker at the Static Fish comic club at Pratt Institute!

From 8:30-9:30 EST, you can join us via zoom while I talk about some of my work and upcoming projects, a Q&A session and drawing demo will also be available!

This event is also open to students outside of Pratt, who can join via the zoom link. Fill out the form below if you are interested in joining online!

[bagels-and-cream-cheese333]

I just came back from writing class y’all <3

made a raph angst poem (without explicitly mentioning his name or anything) and once my teacher read over ti she was so impressed she called out my name like “BAGELS!! Wow this is amazing… can you tell me your inspiration?”

and let me tell you the fear I felt.

she was on the verge of tears

In the end I just got up and whispered “..raph the ninja turtle” and she just stared at me and started laughing really hard.

that was cute :)

[kurokmask]

literally cant stop drawing his miserable irish ass. hes such a cartoon character to me. one day ill actually draw a real illustration for this show but for now you get endless stylization experiements

[bottlemandx]

award for most neurotic 13 year old goes to...!!!!

(LOW-EFFORT FUNNIES UNDER CUT)

[daily-riseleo]

[day 13]: "Do you like it" "I LOVE IT!"

[zoniks]

Why do i always cook in german class y’all😔💪

[movfie]

Alfred Enoch and Alfred Molina in the 2018 play “Red”

[randomcerealbrand]

What if I went ballistic over these cringe guys doing cringe guy things

(@pinetreevillain’s Timothy)