The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

by Terryl L. Givens

The challenge, then, and the enticing opportunity, is to find a pattern of devotion and nourishment that extends beyond the confines of a Sunday curriculum, one that constitutes our private life of discipleship. (“Ah Lord! Be thou in all our being; as not in the Sundays of our time alone,” prayed MacDonald.)15 For while the established Church provides a framework of service, an occasion for community, and a vehicle for saving ordinances, it is in the secret chambers of our private temples that we must have ultimate recourse to the inspiration and revelation that guide our discipleship. In establishing this pattern, this private watering place, we can feed on those spiritual nutrients that most inspire and sustain us. “The great heresy of the Church of the present day,” added MacDonald, referring to the Christian community generally, “is unbelief in this Spirit. The mass of the Church does not believe that the Spirit has a revelation for every man individually—a revelation as different from the revelation of the Bible, as the food in the moment of passing into living brain and nerve differs from the bread and meat.”16