About The Founder – Vance Brown – My Story

LinkedIn: Vance Brown

I grew up immersed in the Southern Baptist tradition in North Carolina—right in the heart of the Evangelical movement. Church wasn’t just a Sunday event—it was life. Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights—I was there. My grandfather was a fundamentalist preacher in the Smoky Mountains, my uncle was the leader of a small group that translated the NIV Bible, and my family lived and breathed "inerrant" Scripture. Faith meant believing the right things, following the right rules, and staying on the right side of eternity.

Looking back, it wasn’t fire-and-brimstone preaching that shaped me—it was the quiet assumptions. The idea of a God who would torment you forever wasn’t screamed; it was whispered through hymns and memory verses, woven into the church culture. Scriptures like John 3:18—"whoever does not believe stands condemned already"—and Matthew 7:13—"wide is the road that leads to destruction"—hovered like storm clouds over our theology. We sang about our sins being washed only by the “blood of Jesus,” and praised the Savior who “saved a wretch like me,” never questioning what kind of God required the torture of his son in order to withhold eternal punishment from us. We didn’t ask why God would create such a system in the first place. After all, didn’t he make the rules? The whole framework was never challenged. It was simply assumed: that a wrathful God demanded justice in the form of blood to be satisfied. And so we sang the hymns, memorized the verses, and internalized a gospel that was soaked in violence, without asking why love or God's system of justice would require a blood sacrifice to begin with.

Salvation was supposedly about grace—but only if you believed the right things. It was transactional, wrapped in the language of a free gift, but with fine print: it only applied if your theology was correct. Grace, it turned out, had terms and conditions. Beneath that sat an unspoken moral code, especially around sexual purity, as if that were the true test of holiness and worthiness. Throw in the rules of no drinking, no dancing, no pornography or pre-marital sex, and doing everything right and you could measure your commitment to Jesus.

The fear was constant: fear of sinning, fear of judgment and punishment, fear of being wrong. I internalized the message that I was broken and barely acceptable to God—unless I was covered by the blood. At around age 10, when Billy Graham asked on TV, “If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?” I panicked. That night, I accepted Jesus as my "Lord and Savior"—because the alternative was too terrifying to ignore.

I studied the materials, checked all the boxes, and did my best to live up to the expectations. But the more I tried, the more shame crept in. I couldn’t resist all sin—never have and never will. Fear-based faith ruled my life.

I moved to Colorado after a family and marital crisis when I was 32. In Colorado Springs—another evangelical hub—I doubled down: led Christian men's retreats, launched a ministry called Band of Brothers (bandofbrothers.org), and even wrote No Matter the Cost (Bethany House), an evangelical book for men. I was committed to fighting the good fight. A lot of that fight, as I was taught in my Colorado Springs community, was spiritual—against Satan and his demons. The fear wasn’t just about sin or hell anymore; it was about learning how to battle a real, invisible enemy. That was terrifying. Imagine being taught that the most powerful being ever created by God—Satan—was actively trying to deceive, attack, and ultimately destroy you. And not just you, but your family, your community, your soul. You couldn’t see him, but were told he was everywhere—prowling like a lion, infiltrating thoughts, tempting actions, manipulating the world. It made everyday life feel like a battlefield, where failure meant not just earthly consequences, but eternal ones. That level of invisible threat, paired with the weight of personal responsibility, created a spiritual pressure cooker I didn’t yet know how to escape.

My faith felt like an evacuation plan—just trying to protect myself from Satan and his demonic forces, escape hell when I died, and hopefully earn my badge: "well done, good and faithful servant."

To make matters worse, another fear-based narrative skyrocketed out of Colorado Springs during that same time: the "Left Behind" series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. These books—based on the apocalyptic interpretation of Matthew 24—painted a terrifying image of the Rapture, where believers would be whisked away and everyone else would be "left behind" to suffer. The idea that God might abandon you at any moment, even if you thought you were saved, was deeply unsettling. It scared kids. It scared adults. And it reinforced the same anxious theology I was already steeped in: one rooted in fear, control, and the constant worry of not measuring up.