Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Envolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

There is no end to the ways God will work in and through the Scriptures to reach us. We read the Bible as it reads us;12 it is the two-edged sword rightly dividing truth, separating and seeing through us. How we read and study Scripture—and then how that reading changes minds and hearts and lives—is a great testimony of the Spirit’s activity in us and through us.

I now have a higher view of Scripture than ever before. As Brian McLaren wrote, “The Bible is too good and too important to be left to those who won’t think critically about it. And frankly, it is too dangerous.”13

I spend these moments reading Isaiah and I pray. I write and I refill my cup, I bow my head over these sacred words that I love all the better for the wrestling to release them from the prison I built for them.

If we want to know what God is really, truly like, we look to Christ first: the Scriptures testify to Jesus, not the other way around.

I cling more to my Bible now than I used to; I lean more heavily on the stories and the promises, on the visions and the hope. I am challenged and changed in ways I never was when I took every word literally—now that I take them so seriously. Now the Bible places a demand on both my mind and my heart; now I finish with my hands open and prayer in my throat, a fire in my bones and worship rising up, and the ferocious appetite to be transformed, even more, into the likeness of Jesus, into the heart God has for humanity.

The seeds of skepticism and disillusion I carefully keep hidden grow long tendrils around my faith. I am sick to death of prosperity teaching masking 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. I get up. I walk up the aisle to the exit, my hands push against the heavy wooden doors, and I walk right out of church as an act of protest for the first time.

Someday I’ll add the woman I am now, the theology I practice, the words I write so earnestly to that list. I know I will. There’s room for all of us. There’s room for all of me.

So even though Brian still refused to give up on the Church as an ideal, in reality I opted to stop going to church. For six years.

My friend, don’t stay in a religious institution or a religious tradition out of fear. Fear should not drive your decisions: let love motivate you. Lean into your questions and your doubts until you find that God is out here in the wilderness too.1 I have good news for you, broken hearted one: God is here in the wandering. In fact, you might just find, as Jonathan Martin wrote, that the wilderness is the birthplace of true intimacy with God.

Sometimes we have to cut away the old for the new to grow. We are a resurrection people, darling. God can take our death and ugliness and bitterness, our hurt and our wounds, and make something beautiful and redemptive. For you. In you. With you.

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. Set out, pilgrim. Set out into the freedom and the wandering. Find your people. God is much bigger, wilder, more generous, and more wonderful than you imagined.

Easier said than done, right? Yes, a renewed theological understanding of the Church as a Holy Spirit gathered-and-sent community is right on. But that understanding is the easy part. Living that ideal in our current context, in the midst of a congregation or community, is just a tad more difficult.

The way we do church is often called “the form” or institution. So while God is responsible for its essence, as Charles Ringma wrote, “We are significantly responsible for its form.”

Claiming someone else’s redemption story as a castoff that you hope will fit you is a recipe for disaster. But one day, six years into that detox from institutional religion and with a long list of very sound and well-reasoned arguments for why I was over it, we went to a local church for Easter Sunday as a concession to convention. And all I knew was that I felt like I was home.

I am back at church because I began to figure out that all the people I loved most, the ones who were quietly doing the work of the Gospel, who were peacemakers, who were people of love and grace and mercy, they were the Church. I was part of the Church. We all were part of the Church if we claimed Jesus as Master. I didn’t need to pretend allegiance to everything, but I did need to be part of a community. I stopped thinking macro about Church and started to think micro. I let go of my modern ideals of control and sank right into the grassroots theology of place. I practiced the radical spiritual art of staying put.

I believe we don’t give enough credit to the ones who stay put in slow-to-change structures and movements because they change within relationship, because they take a long and a high view of time. I believe in the ones who do the whole elder board and deacon election thing, in the ones who argue for church constitutional changes and consensus building. This is not work for the faint of heart.

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 have learned to love the Church, perhaps because the Church has so beautifully loved me. I love the Church in all the places I find her now—cathedrals and living rooms, monasteries and megachurches, school gymnasiums and warehouses.

Abstracts are a bit overwhelming. Some days, I don’t sign up for the whole big institutional abstract or ideal thing of Church: that feels overwhelming. But I do entwine my life with our local church, our community: this is something I can do. I go small, I choose reality, I choose the daily mess of an actual place and actual people over the abstracts.

But how can you Instagram the rush of cold air in your lungs and how it makes you feel so beautifully, so fully, alive?

In a fractured and mobile and hypercustomized world, intentional community—plain old church—feels like a radical act of faith and sometimes like a spiritual discipline. We show up at a rented school and drink a cup of tea with the people of God. And we remember together who we are and why we live this life, and we figure out all over again how to be disciples of the Way.

Some folks think we need to be vulnerable and transparent and deeply connected with everyone and their dog and Facebook and our church. But that’s just not so. Brené Brown says we should only share with people who have earned the right to hear our story.3 We’re not made for friendship promiscuity. That’s not community anyway, that’s just casting our pearls before swine, and it’s probably a profanity to our souls.

thing. I just can’t say “community” without thinking it requires a measure of friendship and loyalty. These are the people who require commitment from me. I enjoy our time together, absolutely, but I’ve also decided to love them and decided to do life with them, and so now I act like it by showing up and by being committed to our friendship.

Then there are My Somewheres. We all need somewhere to say the private things, the vulnerable things, the scary and true things, the victories and the defeats. “I need to say it somewhere,” we say. So then the temptation is to say everything, everywhere, or we end up saying nothing, nowhere.

In times of conflict or difficulty, I tend to withdraw—big-time. I pull deeply inward and don’t emerge until I’ve settled whatever has been ailing me, until I have developed a nice story with a bow on the top. This is the great frustration of the ones who love me, I hear. I withdraw, I shut down, I retreat in times of conflict—both external and internal. So this is my learned spiritual discipline: I talk to my Somewheres. I say discipline because that is what it takes for me to reach out during conflict. It takes intentional discipline to be honest while I’m still in the midst of the unfinished struggle. I have to say the words out loud: here are my contradictions. I don’t always do it well.

“I need to say it somewhere. And you’re my Somewhere,” I said to my friends. And so we embraced the word, this idea of being each other’s Somewhere. We are the Somewheres for an unapologetic brag or a tearful admission or a “here’s the whole story behind this thing” or a disappointment or frustration in every corner of our lives. We all need somewhere to say that your heart is broken and you can’t get your baby to sleep and you wonder if you’re wasting your life and your marriage isn’t doing so good and you feel alive for the first time and you are tired and you heard a terrible joke you can’t wait to tell someone and you found a new paint color for your bedroom and your teenager is giving you attitude and you want to sell everything you own to move to Paris but this time you mean it.

The best relationships are reciprocal, an intentional but unchoreographed give-and-take.

My friend Kristin—who is one of My Somewheres—references these circles far more spiritually than I do. She says that Jesus had the Crowd, then He had His large group of Followers, then his Disciples, then the Twelve, then just the Three—John, Peter, and James—who went into the Garden with him while He prayed before His crucifixion. So Kristin calls her most intimate circle her “Garden Friends”—the people she would want with her in the garden before death, standing watch with her. I like her way of looking at it.

Real life is the undignified life, and it is the classroom for holiness. 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.

The act of staying and living in our place has an impact on us practically, of course, but also on us theologically. It’s not always sexy to stay put, is it? In most of my church tradition, no one ever mentioned the holy work of staying. No one talked about how the places where we live life matter to our spiritual formation, how we are shaped by our communities, by our rootedness, our geography, by our families, and by the complex web of connections and history that emerge only by staying.

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Our skin is made of dust, so we often catch the perfumed scent of the Garden in the cool of the evening, and we know, somewhere inside, that we’re supposed to be walking with God, un-ashamed still. I wonder if that’s really what happens when we meet Jesus. It’s not that we meet Him or that we believe in Him or that we “invite Him into our hearts” or that we mentally assent to some nonnegotiable truths that will govern our best life now. No, I think it’s that we recognize Him.

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 think my discovery of the difference between converts and disciples—a discovery, which, let’s be clear, shouldn’t have been a discovery at all—has changed me and has given me hope and direction for my life. This orthodox teaching of Christianity has seemingly been lost in all the Salvation Olympics of “soul saving” in the past fifty years. I tend to agree with Scot McKnight’s belief that “Kingdom of God” is one of the most misunderstood phrases in the Church today.6 We either neuter it into a social gospel or reduce it to an individual salvation experience. No, the Kingdom of God is the Church active and alive today—the disciples of Jesus in the world.

The Kingdom of God was the message of Jesus and it’s the work of every believer now. This gives me focus and understanding for my life today. I am not in the business of sin management anymore: instead I am being transformed into His likeness.

As Brennan Manning wrote, “The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.”7

In 1 Colossians 2:20, Paul writes that it is not he who lives but Christ who lives in him. Christ is in us: that’s the hope of glory. It wasn’t “get saved, go to church, be a nice person, die, and go float on a cloud.” It wasn’t “do good things for the poor.” It wasn’t a list of dos and don’ts. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue and read the words of the prophet Isaiah aloud into the incredulity of the crowd, He announced that these words had been fulfilled in their hearing, this is the Kingdom of God come and coming:

Dorothy Sayers wrote, “We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.”9 I think that’s because God is love.

I’ll confess to you that I am often too quick to dismiss the “now” part of the Kingdom of God. It’s easier to say, “Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus,” and wait for the sweet by-and-by to fix it all. I think it’s time for us to start leaning into the “now” part of the Kingdom of God a bit more.