No Shame
Since I was a teenager, I’ve dealt with low self-esteem and shame. Sometimes my esteem issues had crippling effects, such as depression and feelings of failure. My shame inhibited and strangled my self-expression. It is the source of feelings of brokenness, incompleteness, and a deep sense that God made a mistake with you and that there was no hope. The abundant life that he died to give me, I wasn’t close to experiencing.
My deliverance began when I truly began to understand Jesus’s death on the cross and God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, which had nothing to do with my successes and failures but was solely a gift from him. In our faith, it can be difficult to fully embrace God’s forgiveness.
The mission of NoShameGospel.org is to help people fully embrace the work of the cross with its unconditional love and forgiveness, and all of its other benefits—the healing, freedom, and abundant life that it brings. The ministry provides a website that focuses on biblical teachings that explain the efficacy of the cross and the message of forgiveness of sins by curating the teachings of ministers who emphasize this aspect of the gospel message in their preaching. This is often referred to as the Pauline gospel, which teaches that individuals have unconditional access to a loving God through faith in Jesus Christ, not by performing good works.
Christian teachers and preachers often under-emphasize this aspect of the gospel message for fear that people will take God’s graciousness for granted and act licentiously and irresponsibly, abusing their relationship with Him. Our experience is that as we share the goodness of God and people embrace the message with their whole hearts, He makes them far better people than they could become by motivating change through messages of threat and condemnation. Paul writes, “the goodness of God leads you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). The goodness of God always proceeds positive changes in behavior (repentance). NoShame.com focuses on ministers who preach God’s goodness.
Merchandise
The ministry also offers tangible, wearable reminders of our liberation from guilt and condemnation by selling high-fashion clothing that depicts the message. With the NoShame brand, the objective is to create merchandise, primarily clothing, that promotes self-expression. We want you to wear the words and the symbols that remind you that you’ve been set free from shame and that you don’t live in condemnation. But it also is a double entendre, because the merchandise also allows you to express that you are not ashamed of the gospel and your relationship with Christ. Both of these forms of expression go hand-in-hand.
Our objective is to use the proceeds from the sale of this merchandise to fund our ministries. We first considered solely asking for donations, which is the traditional way of raising funds for faith-based ministries. There is no shame in doing so. But our approach addresses three things in one offering: we’d create merchandise that allows you to be fully self-expressed, while at the same time raising funds to fund our various ministry efforts, while also providing you with clothing that makes you look good and feel good when wearing it. That last objective is one that we took seriously and spent much thought and time on how to accomplish.
NoShame will collaborate with up-and-coming clothing designers, as well as amateurs with good ideas, to design the clothing that is part of the NoShame brand. We think that collaborating with these designers, who are not yet well known, will allow us to create and sell to you fashionable clothing that supports the ministry, but that also gives these designers an opportunity to show their talents.
We are excited about this collaboration and curious about how it will be received by those who feel the same way that we do: that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, that the greatest thing that we can do for this world is to make Him known so he can deliver as many from shame as possible, and that expressing our freedom through our clothing and lifestyle spreads the message of what is possible. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed, and freedom of expression becomes the outward manifestation of this.