Out of Sorts: Making Sense of an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

Sarah has taught me that deconstruction has its place, and there is holy permission to lean into it. She has also taught me that the rebuilding and reclaiming is sacred territory, and it is noble work that heals.

The second naiveté is life after the death of what was once so alive, after the sorting through what remains, after the rummage sale perhaps. We have an inheritance that we have carefully curated. No wonder Nadia and I were crying in the car. We had sorted through our faith. We were still tossing what needed to be thrown out and reclaiming what needed to be treasured. We had found beauty and pain were threaded together. We were choosing this life, this Jesus, over and over again.

To us, Christ was the cord that bound us together, the reason for our resurrection, the north star, the center, the foundation. Some churches focus on memorizing the Bible, some on learning fine points of doctrine. Others gather for the cause of justice and mercy, others for political purposes. Our simple center was the man from Galilee.

It feels as if the more I moved into church culture, the less I heard about 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.

Church became a social club at times, then it became a burden to bear. I’ll write more about Church later in the book, but for now, I’ll just say this: I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.

I instinctively knew that this Industrial Church Complex was not the stuff of the Prince of Peace. Even as I grew more disenchanted with organized religion, I was still hanging on to the hem of his garment, begging for healing.

Jesus. His name felt like every question and every answer. There was a strain of something like unearthly music to His name, and part of me still believes that my desire to be like Jesus was the Spirit’s call—deep calling unto deep,8 as the psalmist wrote. My broken heart—cynical, jaded, frustrated, angry, wounded—somehow exhaled at every mention of His name.

I wanted to follow Jesus: not a way of thinking or a doctrine, not a sermon or a list of rules, not political affiliations and church denominations or a path to a shiny-happy life or anything like that. I wanted to follow Him and love Him, right to the end, wherever He led.

Jesus isn’t our mascot and He isn’t the magic word.

This was when Jesus became the center of everything to me. I began to understand that if I wanted to see God, I needed to see Jesus. He was the image of God for us. Everything I didn’t understand about the Bible and about the Church was now filtered through the lens of Christ. If Jesus came to show us what God is truly like, then perhaps there have been ways—so many ways—in which we have missed it. Myself included. We aren’t so different from the people of Jesus’ own time here on earth: He is not the king we expect.

Theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now lives. So theology matters, not as a vast scholarly exercise or a fun way to tie knots in each other, but because those ideas trace their way back to what we truly believe about the nature and character of God, which informs everything in our lives.

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.

I think it’s a bit dishonest to use “Have faith like a child” as a way to shut a person down. Like, somehow, it means we’re not supposed to wonder, we’re just supposed to accept. Now that I have a house full of small humanity, I think I’m beginning to understand why Jesus would encourage us to have faith like a child. They don’t know. And so they ask. We don’t know. And so we ask.

The asking isn’t wrong. The wondering isn’t wrong. The doubt isn’t wrong. It’s humbling to admit you don’t know; it takes guts to ask and wrestle. The childlike quality isn’t unthinking acquiescence: it’s curiosity. But here is the key of a child, the true wonder of childlike faith: They truly want to know. They’re not asking to be cool or to push back on the establishment or to prove anyone wrong or to grind an ax or make a point without making a change. Tinies ask because they want an answer.

God isn’t threatened by our questions or our anger, our grief or our perplexed wonderings. I believe that the Spirit welcomes them—in fact, leads among them and in them. We ask because we want to know, because it matters to us, and so I believe it matters to God. And sometimes the answers are far wider and more welcoming than we ever imagined; other times our answer is to wait in the question, and sometimes the answer is another question altogether.

It’s interesting how often Jesus disrupted the comfortable—the ones who thought their answers were settled and done, the ones who were convinced that their righteousness was equal to their rightness. It’s interesting how He poked and prodded, even how often He turned their answers around and moved them further into redemption than they were willing to go.

We want the Right Answer, once and for all. I think those things happen sometimes, absolutely, but my catalog of Right Answers grows smaller every year.

We live out of our imperfect answers. We want so much to do things right, that it seems odd to start even before we’re ready. We want our ducks in a row, our answers indexed in three-ring binders. But instead, this is faith at its core.