Out of Sorts: Making Sense of an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

were walking in darkness, and the Holy Spirit called us into the light of salvation. We were dead, and then we were alive. It sounds weird to write it all out like that, but I can’t figure out another way to say it.

So yes, Jesus was part of our family, but at the same time, Jesus placed demands on us. Our lives changed thoroughly and completely. We adjusted our sails for Jesus, changing our habits, our thoughts, our words, our entertainment, our opinions to better fall in step with Him. We had no illusions; we knew we desperately needed to change. And we wanted our lives to look like His life somehow.

If our theology doesn’t shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we’re paying attention. The Spirit is often breathing in the very changes or shifts that used to terrify us. Grace waits for us in the liminal space.

But I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean taking everything literally. I had to learn to read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus, and I had to learn to stop making it into something it wasn’t—a glorified answer book or rule book or magic spell. I had to stop trying to reduce the Bible to something I could tame or wield as a tool. I had to let the Bible be everything it was meant to be, to cast away the idols of certainty, materialism, and control.

I think it’s both hard work and good work to challenge our own assumptions. How unfortunate to use the Bible as a conversation stopper, not a starting point.

One day, while I was reading a story from the Old Testament to my child, she asked me, “Is God the bad guy in this one? Or the good guy?” Sometimes I felt like I was asking that same question.

We miss the Gospel forest for the word-by-word trees; we miss the Story by picking and choosing. The whole of Paul’s teaching and beliefs about women in the Church or in society could not be contained in a few lines from an ancient letter. Not when we consider the truth that women were leading, ministering, praying, prophesying, teaching, managing, and financing throughout the Church—with Paul’s full knowledge and blessing.

yet every Sunday I want to skip church because I do not feel there is room there for my grief.

Jesus isn’t only in your tradition. You get to love Jesus without being an evangelical or a Pentecostal or a Presbyterian or whatever new label you’ve acquired these days or old label that just doesn’t fit anymore.

Labels can be helpful. Now, perhaps, they are not. Our particular tradition doesn’t get our loyalty: that fidelity is for our Jesus.

I think the Church is one of the weirdest ideas and one of the best ideas. If church were just a sanctified social club, I’d be out. If it were just about singing songs or listening to a great sermon, I could do that at home—thanks to the new worship movement albums on iTunes and free podcasts. If it were just about staying busy, I’ve already got that handled rather nicely.

The leader’s role, then, is not to take control of the growth of the Church, but rather to equip the church (its present reality) to be the Church (its future hope). The concern should be to empower people to be who they are—representatives of the kingdom of God.13

In fact, God more often met me there in the valley of the shadow than in my mountain-top moments.

For new life to come forth, I need quiet and darkness. I need fewer people—only trusted and quiet people—and fewer interruptions. I need to focus and to enter fully into what my body is doing.

know now that the Spirit is trying to birth something in my life when I find myself craving silence and darkness, when I find myself editing my circle down to just the trusted few whom I know will midwife me through this birth. It’s nothing to fear; it’s the time of transition.

I think the movement lost me when it began to seek the signs and the wonders first, instead of Jesus.

Faith isn’t certainty, I know that by now. If I were certain, I wouldn’t need faith.

wasn’t created to be used. We were not saved, set free, rescued, and redeemed to be used. We aren’t here to work and earn our way; we aren’t pew fodder or a cog. We aren’t here to prove how worthy we are for the saving. There isn’t anything left to earn. God won’t use us up. He doesn’t devour all our talents, our gifts, our mind, our love, or our energy but redeems them and brings us joy in the practice of them.

It is an act of faith to live with the narrative of abundance instead of the fear of scarcity.

Scarcity tells us to work until we drop. We’ve got to hustle, hustle, hustle to get ours and then to keep it. But in the liturgy of abundance, we can practice Sabbath. Exhaustion and burn-out are symptoms of our fear of scarcity, but wholeness, joy, and rest are hallmarks of a life lived within abundance. In fact, Brueggemann calls the practice of Sabbath an act of resistance because we are saying no to “the culture of now.”