Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 19, 2026
I have a confession: this was supposed to be a different letter.
Martin Luther King Day is today, and I sat down to write something about the Birmingham Jail, white moderates, and the fierce urgency of now. I was going to challenge the clergy who've stayed silent. You know, invoke the prophets, call the church to account, that sort of thing. Lord knows, I’ve written that “letter” before.
But when I sat down to write it this morning, it wouldn't come.
What came instead was this:
I'm tired. I've been doing this work for a lot of years, and, frankly, it feels like I should have more to show for it.
Instead, I have exhaustion, a handful of relationships that survived, and a question I can't stop asking: “What does faithfulness even look like when you're running on empty?”
I don't know. Maybe you're asking that too.
After November 2024, something in me broke. Not entirely. I still preached, taught classes, and worried about the state of the world. But underneath the performance, the part of me that believed this work might actually bend the arc just ... stopped. Like a clock that finally wound down. I've been waiting for the ticking to start again. It hasn't.
That's not entirely true. I've started writing in earnest again, which has been a joy. But because I'm paying more attention, I'm also aware of how little I'm able to change.
I've preached about hope for decades. Told congregations that despair is a luxury we can't afford, that the arc is long but bends toward justice, that resurrection is the shape of reality. All that stuff.
And I still believe those things. Mostly. But belief and energy aren't the same thing. You can believe in the sunrise and still be too tired to get out of bed to see it.
I keep thinking about Sisyphus rolling that rock up the hill ... and that damn rock rolling right back down. Here’s what I keep thinking: Come on! I've rolled this rock before. After elections, after setbacks, after watching the church choose power over faithfulness again and again. Each time, I found something in me that could start me climbing.
But this time, I'm still sitting at the bottom, staring at the rock. My hands are raw, my back hurts, and I'm wondering if I’ve got it in me to roll it up the hill one more time.
The thing is, I’ve been working on this stuff since before “Christian nationalism” was a phrase I recognized.
I've written essays, preached sermons, marched in the streets, and had hard conversations that cost me friendships.
I've been that guy, the one who made it awkward, the one who said the thing everyone was thinking but didn't want to say out loud, and especially not in public.
Don’t get me wrong. I'm not telling you any of this to congratulate myself. I'm telling you because it didn't work.
Or maybe it worked in ways I just can't measure. Maybe somebody somewhere made a different choice because of something I wrote. I have to believe that's possible.
But the big picture? The trajectory?
I've been swimming upstream against this current for years, and the current is currently winning.
In 2022, I even tried something different. I thought maybe the problem was that I'd been standing outside the system when what we needed were people on the inside. So I ran for the state legislature. Knocked on doors in the August heat and the January cold. Put my name on signs. Let myself hope that maybe this was the missing piece.
I lost.
I'd be lying if I said that loss didn't crack something in me that hasn't fully healed. I'd tried the sermons, the essays, the marches. And when none of that seemed enough, I put my actual body into the machinery of change, and the machinery spit me back out.
I've run out of strategies. And maybe the reason that stings is that I've spent all this time believing the right strategy would eventually work.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from the Rev. Derek Penwell's Facebook page. Click here to read the rest of his Substack essay.