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she gave permission to struggle, to doubt, to leave, to come back.
He is under the steeples and in the wilderness. He is in the megachurch and in the spiritual conversation at the bar. He inhabits our certainty and also our doubt. He is every good thing that ever was or will be, and He is still in the business of saving our lives.
It’s hard to move forward when you feel like you never properly said good-bye or resolved your memories.
Whether it’s in our relationship with God or with our own families, at some point we find that it is time to sort. It’s time to figure out what we need to keep, what we need to toss, and what we need to reclaim. And we need to tell our stories in order to move forward.
We sort through our mess on the threshold of change, don’t we?
Counter to our intuition, the solution is to lean into the pain.
If we are looking for ways to sort our beliefs, we need to start at the center of everything: Jesus.
Perhaps Jesus was a bit too wild for the Church. It was easier to expound on Paul’s letters, for instance. Ah, Paul, here was a finely tuned mind, a man of practicalities. Jesus probably didn’t know that we had bills to pay, budgets to meet, programs to run, bylaws to discuss, deacons to nominate, culture to influence, public-opinion battles to wage, doctrine to parse, lines to draw in the sand to mark who was in and who was out. Jesus became the stuff of childhood song lyrics. Church became a social club at times, then it became a burden to bear. I’ll write more about Church later in the
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There are a lot of Jesuses running around these days. There is the Jesus who wants you to find a good parking spot at the mall. There is the Jesus invoked at music awards and the one raised like a flag to celebrate capitalism and affluence. There is the Jesus drawing lines about who is “in” and who is “out,” and there is the Jesus on both sides of the picket lines. There is the one in the slums and the one in suburbia and the one in Africa and the one in America and the one in Calgary. There is the Jesus who told Mother Teresa to touch the lepers and love with her hands, the one who led the
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Jesus was not what I expected.
Anytime we wrestle with our theology, with how we live out the hope of glory, with what we know or believe or think or even hope about our God, I pray that we will have that same boldness to testify, to bring healing, to speak the truth, to worship.
We have much to learn from the ordinary people, from people on the margins, from people who experience God and life so differently from ourselves. I’m still a recovering know-it-all.
There is a long legacy of troublemakers and question askers; there’s a lot more room than we think.
When we’re sorting things out, when we dare to ask questions, sometimes someone will pat us on the head and say, “Well, you know, you need to have faith like a child.”3 Pat, pat, pat, right on the head. Patronize, patronize, patronize, right on the soul. Just stop wondering, stop wrestling. You aren’t supposed to be a grown-up in the kingdom, darling, you’re supposed to be like a child and accept what you’ve been taught and stop asking questions. Trust the truth you’ve been given.
Fowler provocatively argues that our current way of doing church “works best” if we remain in this stage.6 After all, this is the point of our journey where we obey authority, seldom question, are suspicious of challenge, or see anomalies to the expected script as a threat. It’s telling that our faith communities are often structured not only for people at this stage of faith development but, in fact, often unwittingly work to ensure that we remain there.
the poverty of the soul and of ignoring the cries for justice from the oppressed. I am sick of vending machine prayers, performance, easy answers, and formulas that don’t add up. I am sick of feeling like a misbehaving cog in someone else’s broken-down machine.
Lean into your questions and your doubts until you find that God is out here in the wilderness too.1
Don’t worry about the “should do” stuff anymore. It might help to cocoon away for a while, far from the performances or the structures or even the habits or thinkers that bring you pain. The Holy Spirit isn’t restricted to meeting with you only in a one-hour quiet time or an official 501-3(c) tax-approved church building.
He was not threatened by my honesty.
My experiences with the Church have often felt program-driven, a tail-wagging-the-dog kind of thing. We trust in our techniques in order to achieve “success”—which too often means a certain number of attendees or a line item on the budget.
A lot of people in my generation might be giving up on Church, but there are a lot of us returning, redefining, reclaiming Church too. We aren’t foolish or blind or unconcerned or uneducated or unthinking. We have weighed our choices, more than anyone will know. We are choosing this and we will keep choosing each other. And sometimes our way of understanding or “doing” church looks very different, but we’re still here. I know some of us are meant to go, some are meant to stay, and most of us do a bit of both in a lifetime.
I hope we all wrestle. I hope we look deep into our hearts and sift through our theology, our methodology, our praxis, our ecclesiology, all of it. I hope we get angry and that we say true things. I hope we push back against celebrity and consumerism; I hope we live into our birthright as a prophetic outpost for the Kingdom. I hope we get our toes stepped on and then forgive. I hope we become open-hearted and open-armed. I hope we are known as the ones who love. I hope we change. I hope we grow. I hope we push against the darkness and let the light in and breathe into the Kingdom come. I hope
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This is another way to fall back in love with the Bride of Christ: open your doors and welcome her into your life.
Churches have really gotten into the word community lately. I’m glad for that. It’s important to make sure people don’t fall through the cracks and that as a body we have a way of making sure we see each other. But in our rush to do so, we can take the Spirit out of community. We modernize it, quantify it, formalize it, and assign people to groups. We think we can arrange community. Or we think that because people are in the same stage of life, they will be friends—young marrieds, singles, mothers of young children, men, whatever grouping is in vogue at the moment. Sometimes these methods work
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When I stopped going to church, I didn’t know how to make friends anymore. When your entire friendship network revolves around church, it’s disorienting to step outside the system. Even the friends who want to stay in touch with us simply can’t: so much of friendship relies upon our joint participation in gathering together at a particular place or event. If we don’t go to the Bible studies or show up on Sunday mornings or help to teach Sunday school, we miss out on the moments of our friends’ lives and they miss out on ours. It’s that simple even if it is sad.
But it can be just as lonely inside the building as out. I know this too well.
Brené Brown says we should only share with people who have earned the right to hear our story.
If you can’t find God while you’re changing diapers or serving food or hanging out with your friends, you won’t find God at the worship service or the spiritual retreat or the regimented daily quiet time or the mission field. If you can’t embrace healthy conflict, you’ll never have a truly honest
friendship.
The modern church always taught us to forsake all for the Gospel and go. We were more likely to celebrate the forsaking or sacrificing of home and community and friendships. We go, we move, we grow, we create destination churches and video venues, programs every night of the week, and then wonder why we don’t know our neighbors or why we feel so alone.
I don’t think we give enough credit to the ones with questions. Oftentimes they are simply saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking or wondering.
I released a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.
When I couldn’t find my way through the clutter of praise and worship, I found Jesus in the silence
Faith becomes more complicated when we allow our hearts to break. When we become present with and for the suffering of the world, when we begin to pay attention to our own stories and the stories of those alongside us—when
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that much of the African American community uses the phrase “stay woke” to describe the need to pay attention to the world around us, to remain vigilant in times of turmoil and conflict, to question authority, to be suspicious of the empire that rules and the media’s spin—particularly in times of change and reckoning.
I have an uneasy relationship with death and suffering, with grief and lament. Perhaps it’s because, as I told you earlier, my faith tradition is more comfortable with the light of certainty than the darkness of mystery and questions. Our narratives celebrate the simple wins and victories, not the complex heartache. As a people, we prefer stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end. We like our testimonies to end on a high note: and they lived happily ever after.
Our culture makes little space for the mess. We are expected to have it all together. Don’t let them see you sweat, keep your dirty laundry and unsanitized stories to yourself, thank you very much. Be successful, look good, feel good.
I made secrets out of my questions and doubts and sadness and grief because I didn’t know how to simply sit with them. Even now, I fight against the urge to explain or pretend or ignore away the darkness. It’s uncomfortable to lean into the pain, to seek God there in the darkness.
When their stories didn’t line up with our narrative, they felt shame and eventually disappeared.
yet there are so few among us who will make peace with our despair.
too often we seek to comfort with the platitudes that have held the Church captive for years: God is all-powerful, God could have stopped it, God didn’t stop it, therefore this—all this—is God’s plan for us. And so this is how we comfort the grieving, the abused, the oppressed, the beaten, the exhausted, the broken.
I see the promise of sovereignty not as hypercontrol over the minute and painful details of the world, but as a faithful promise that all things will be restored, all things will be redeemed, all things will be rescued.
There was no “everything happens for a reason” or “God has a plan, you just have to wait.” There was no “the Lord gives and takes away” or “greater good” of proper theology and doctrine’s triumph.
It’s easy to fall for the bright colors because we want so badly to believe in a good and resolved story. We want the good guys to win—quickly.
Keep caring. Let yourself be angry. Let your heart be broken. Let yourself be uncomfortable.
That’s because religion tells us that it’s all figured out, there is nothing left to learn, here are the answers, so learn them.
Don’t outsource the work of the Holy Spirit in your life to someone else.
