What Happens When God Doesn’t Answer Our Prayers
Late last night, a friend send me a text message. “Have you seen, #wakeupolive on instagram?” it read. I jumped on over and saw every mothers nightmare. A beautiful little girl name Olive, 2 years old, full of life, had suddenly stopped breathing and died. She was taken to hospital and declared dead on arrival. She was not on life support. Olive was gone. My heart sunk to my shoes. I wanted to wake my sweet 2 year old girl and cuddle her forever. Because no parent should lose a child. But little Olive’s case was different. Her mother is a worship leader at Bethel and the last five days have been filled with worship sessions, worldwide prayer and fervent beseechings for God to raise this little girl to life.Now read me right, I’d be thrilled if the best were to happen. I’d pull a Tom Cruise and jump up and down on the couch with my kids.
But we are heading into day six now and so this story will have a lot of people asking “What if she doesn’t get raised from the dead?” Well that, my friend, is a very good question.
I want to start by saying I believe in miracles, in that I have been the very reluctant recipient of two of them. (I.e. It wasn’t mind over matter because I was sure that I was not going to be healed from these conditions. I’d even been in big arguments about it. There were witnesses to that.) Long story…
But miracle healings do happen. In the science world, they are called spontaneous remissions. There are thousands of documented instances of sudden and inexplicable recoveries in both Christian and secular settings. When you look at people like Dr Joe Dispenza, Dr Gregg Braden and even illusionist Derren Brown, you actually do get some pretty fascinating explanations for how these healings might take place. I’mma blog more on that another day because it’s complicated. But for the sake of today I want to say this:
I believe that God, or whatever you choose to call the force that animates the universe, can use various mechanisms to heal us. Science and metaphysical philosophers of various streams may be able to explain some aspects of it. Great. I’m not offended by that. I believe that God can do whatever He wants to do. I also believe know it can be profoundly disappointing when it doesn’t pan out the way we’d have liked.
Real talk: God has been profoundly disappointing to me at times. I remember sobbing in the shower after my fourth miscarriage and telling God some things I really hated and was furious about. Then I hated myself for hating God. And then I realised God has big shoulders. He can handle my anger and my questions.
When these questions become deep questioning, that can be called deconstruction. It’s the moment we start to grapple with whether or not our faith and worldview holds up to scrutiny. The issue with deconstruction is not whether God can handle it. Its whether we can. When I look at the Bethel movement, I can see some pretty big red flags. One is the doctrine that complete healing is guaranteed as part of atonement at the point of salvation.
Bill Johnson believes and teaches that [1]:
God never causes sickness.
God always chooses to heal.
Paul’s thorn in the flesh was definitely not a physical ailment.
If you do not believe in healing on demand, you are preaching another gospel
Johnson has said “I refuse to create a theology that allows for sickness.”
Well! Bill isn’t God. He doesn’t get to decide that, but…
The first point I don’t have an issue with per se. Although, as we age, the body is subject to entropy and atrophy. That, to me, seems to be just part of life after Eden.
The second is rubbish. God doesn’t always choose to heal. Jacob walked with a limp. God didn’t choose to heal him. The argument that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was “definitely not a physical ailment” is laughable. There is no way we can tell. I know plenty of people of great faith, who walked closely with God, who were constantly bringing their sin and failures before him who did not receive their miracles. I wouldn’t dare question their salvation. I wouldn’t dare question anyone listed in Hebrews 11 who didn’t receive their healing or the thing they were praying for.
The moment we create a theology that portrays God as a genie in a bottle who grants our healing wishes, we deny the sovereignty of God. If we believe that God is God, we have to believe He is sovereign over the timing of healing (i.e. here or eternity). We have to believe the choice is ultimately His. If not, we are demoting Him to genie, and promoting ourselves to deity.
And hey – the scripture tells us that if we share in his sufferings, we share in his glory. Why would that be dropped into scripture if salvation meant life would be a painless walk in the park?
The idea that healing is guaranteed on demand is a bad doctrine that has the potential to knock someone right out of the church door if tragedy strikes. It’s bad theology. And bad theology is dangerous.
I used to come at faith from a position of, I don’t know, superiority maybe? I had some bad theology of my own. Now, having lost the blessed naivety of my youth, I know that Christianity isn’t a magic wand, a silver spoon or a genie in a bottle. It is a comfort and a guide. It is a set of ethics and morals. It is a way of seeing the world. It’s a reverence and a reference point, and so much more.
I believe it should constantly be something I wrestle with and think about in terms of how best to live it out. But it doesn’t change the amount of struggles I will face in my life (spoiler: there have been a few!). I doesn’t change the amount of struggles anyone faces. The Bible never said it would. It said though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will *fear* no evil for you are with me. It said thy rod and staff comfort me. It said all things would work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. But that never meant we would be immune to pain.
Hey. I’ve got unanswered prayers. I have significant health challenges. I don’t for one minute blame God, and I don’t for one minute blame myself. Those challenges mean I can sit with people who have invisible illnesses, support them and understand them. I grieve my angel babies. But I’ve been able to hold the hands of people walking the road of infertility. Sharing those deeply personal struggles is an honour I don’t take lightly. I might not be healed, but I am bloody resilient. I thank God for that gift.
(I’m not suggesting that poor Olive’s mum looks for any such silver lining right now. I am hurting for that woman! Let’s make that clear.)
The case of young Olive is a tragedy. I hope it doesn’t become a dual tragedy that causes her mother to lose faith, or causes other people to ask God why He didn’t be a good genie and bring her back when we demanded it. If it did, I wouldn’t blame the parents. I wouldn’t blame the people who are praying for these precious souls because of the compassion and empathy and faith they have right now. Thank God for them!
I’d blame the people who trot out bad theology and raise expectations above the Biblical bar.
God isn’t our genie. He is our father in heaven. He is the author and finisher of our faith. He is sovereign. He is not able to be fully understood and I cringe at even using male pronouns for him right now. God is too big for our petty labels. God is too big to push around.
And hey side note: I read this fabulous quote on instagram (I’m looking at you, Jess Hugenberg): Types of witchcraft: 1) incantation: magic spells, a series of words or phrases believed to be uttered to achieve a desired result. 2) Divination: seeking knowledge by supernatural means, such as necromancy, which is summoning spirits or raising the dead.
Proclaiming “resurrection power” with poor understanding is heresy. Resurrection power is NOT the power to raise anyone from the dead. Resurrection power is the power that fuelled and accompanied Jesus’ resurrection which defeated sin and death. That doesn’t mean we will never die but that our souls will have eternal life in Jesus.
Look, I don’t know about you, but I like to stand well clear of the line that tells God what to do. The rationale above is pretty good reasoning as to why. My witch friend (yes! She’s fab) has shown me there is far more to witchcraft that what I wrote above. Her practice is quite different. But I’ve put that quote up there for thought provocation. We need to be careful which lines we cross. In my mind here, Bethel is crossing some dangerous lines.
If God didn’t answer your prayer, If he didn’t heal your child, or your sibling, your friend or partner, if He didn’t grant your wish on demand, that doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. Look for him in comfort you receive. In the medical treatment you can access. In the faces of the friends who support you, and hopefully even in the blogs that try and help you to grapple with the questions that fall out of that disappointment.
But when we subscribe to the genie in a bottle doctrine of complete and guaranteed healing as part of atonement, then we not only question God but our very salvation. There is no biblical case for us to think we get to demand God heal us and have him scramble to snap his cosmic fingers.
Now, for my atheist readers, Hi! Good to have you along. I’m sure there are a million thoughts you have here, including the power of the mind and the placebo effect in healings. I’ll get to that another day! But for everyone else who believes there is something out there, for those of us who believe that something out there is called God, hang tight.
Unattained healing, ungranted wishes, unrequited desires – these are not evidence of an absent God. I like what a friend of mine says “Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.” She was saying it about the world of research, indicating that there is much yet to be discovered in terms of the power of the body, the mind and the forces that animate and impact upon it.
I think it applies to God, too. I look at world history, at world religions, at the different denominations that exist around the world and I know that we are all striving to find meaning on this planet and to try to understand and explain the uncontainable Divine.
If God hasn’t answered your prayer. I’m sorry. I hope in time, He does. But if tragedy has struck, I hope that you can find comfort in the knowledge of a loving God who will carry you through the aftermath. When we subject ourselves to bad theology that treats God like a genie and denigrates His sovereignty, we can’t find comfort in God when we go through hard times. We can only be angry that our genie didn’t perform, or we can think that somehow we weren’t good enough.
Don’t do that. Life is hard enough. My heart is with the Bethel Church and the Heiligenthal family. I’m praying for them right now in this horrendous time of grief. I’m also grieved that this has played out in such a public and desperate fashion. Gosh. Imagine.
That’s all I got. I’m going to go hug my daughter real tight.
Over and out
Internalised Victim Blaming
One day last week, my husband got home and asked me how my day was. Ordinarily, it’s an innocuous question. This day, it was loaded. We had just posted something big on the blog. Something I had been carrying around for years, and he for decades: his story of surviving gay conversion therapy (what others might call ‘sexual orientation change efforts’ or the ‘LGBTQA+ conversion movement), which of course involved him coming out as bisexual. That kind of thing can make you feel a little vulnerable. Brene Brown tells me that vulnerability is courage though, so I was mentally feeling like a badass, while emotionally feeling a little…meh.
I rambled, as I tend to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed. As I rambled, I explained my fears that people would make it about them when it wasn’t, or that it would be seen as an attack on churches when it isn’t…that it was, in fact, a call for churches in general to wake up to damage that may be invisible to them and to become safe places for LGBTQA+ people. But I was scared that it would be taken the wrong way, and I was pre-empting the responses. Then my husband said something that made me sit up and listen.
He said, “Babe, that sounds like internalised victim blaming.”
Yowza. He didn’t tell me what to do about it. He just let me sit with it. And sit with it I have.
I wanted to take a moment on this blog to pass on that little lightbulb moment. Victim blaming happens. We see it all over the news in all sorts of horrendous situations. It happens when people try to cover up institutional abuse. It happens when judges take the side of a neat, tidy, middle class perp and offer un-earned leniency or when people say the victim was asking for it. It happens in all sorts of places. It’s wrong on all counts.
But it also happens inside us. We blame ourselves. When someone has been the victim of any type of abuse, be it psychological, spiritual, physical, or sexual, it might be hard to realise that we are internalising the victim blaming – that we are blaming ourselves for things others might say or think, or pre-empting how they’ll react. I’m inviting you to notice it. In particular, I’m inviting survivors of religious abuse to take a moment to do so. Because noticing matters. It can be so healing.
Over the year that I’ve been writing this blog, it has gathered together a unique readership: we come from all over the world. We are mostly Millennials and Gen X’ers. We have been raised in and around churches, but have found ourselves at odds with doctrines or power structures that we weren’t allowed to question, or that crushed our spirits. Many of us are spiritually curious. We are Christians in and out of church, many of us are agnostics who have been burned by church, or atheists who have walked away from their childhood faith. So many of us are closet progressives who are wondering if we can be called “Christian” and still sit to the left of Judo-Christian conservatism.
I like you. You are my people. I blog for you. And me, but I’m one of you so there’s that.
A lot of us, sadly, have left groups that were toxic to us. I have a feeling a lot of us have suffered some type of religious abuse. So here are some things you need to know [1]:
Religious abuse is real. It can involve psychological manipulation or various types of harm inflicted on a person through the teachings of their religion.
It is often perpetrated by people in positions of power within the religion, but I’d argue that it can include lateral violence (whereby the abuse becomes part of the culture of a group or religion and is then inflicted by peers as well).
Wikipedia, the font of all wisdom as we know, says “It is most often directed at children and emotionally vulnerable adults, and motivations behind such abuse vary, but can be either well-intentioned or malicious.”
It’s confusing as heck, because sometimes it is well-intentioned and is interwoven with empowering moments or talk of a benevolent, loving God. A lot of us have heard church referred to as a “Family.” That can be so promising but so traumatic at the same time. All of this amounts to what can be well-intentioned and damaging at the same time.
Regardless of the intent, the effects are real. Long term damage may include “the victim developing phobias or long-term depression. They may have a sense of shame that persists even after they leave the religion. A person can also be manipulated into avoiding a beneficial action (such as a medical treatment) or to engage in a harmful behavior.” Depression, anxiety, PTSD and dissociative disorders are among the other mental health issues that may arise from religious abuse. So it is serious. It shouldn’t be fobbed off.
It’s not that uncommon. You might be surprised how many people relate to it. A recent study took a sample from a College campus in the States and found 12.5% of participants had experienced religious abuse.
An expert in the topic, Ronald Enroth, wrote a book called “Churches that abuse”. In it, he proposed 5 categories of abuse (Thanks wiki *again.* for the summary [1].)
“Authority and Power: abuse arises when leaders of a group arrogate to themselves power and authority that lacks the dynamics of open accountability and the capacity to question or challenge decisions made by leaders. The shift entails moving from general respect for an office bearer to one where members loyally submit without any right to dissent.
Manipulation and Control: abusive groups are characterized by social dynamics where fear, guilt or threats are routinely used to produce unquestioning obedience, group conformity or stringent tests of loyalty. The leader-disciple relationship may become one in which the leader’s decisions control and usurp the disciple’s right or capacity to make choices.
Elitism and Persecution: abusive groups depict themselves as unique and have a strong organizational tendency to be separate from other bodies and institutions. The social dynamism of the group involves being independent or separate, with diminishing possibilities for internal correction or reflection, whilst outside criticism.
Life-style and Experience: abusive groups foster rigidity in behavior and belief that requires conformity to the group’s ideals.
Dissent and Discipline: abusive groups tend to suppress any kind of internal challenge to decisions made by leaders. (end wiki quote)
You can imagine that all sorts of ploys would be needed to maintain that sort of control. The book is excellent. Read it if you need to. But consider the ways in which mind games, gaslighting and manipulative control methods would be needed to create such an environment (Even if it started out, or is still to some degree (of cognitive dissonance, I’d argue) well-intentioned).
Research has shown the people who depart from such groups often show symptoms associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In fact, complex PTSD is one of the points laid out in something called “Religious Trauma Syndrome [2] Mensline Australia has published a list of things to watch out for in terms of religious trauma [3]. Some of these cut pretty close to home, so I’ll leave it to you to jump over to that page if you feel the need. But why am I talking about this in an article about internalised victim blaming. Well for one thing, we need to understand the harm is real. For another thing, this:
Someone raised a point to me a few months back that really made me think: he said “people who have been gaslit (made to question their own mind) in abusive situations are often chronic over-explainers.”
Again. Yowza. When my husband mentioned the term “internalised victim blaming” it connected for me, instantly. When you’ve been made to question your own mind, you over-explain because you need to be believed. When other people have blamed you or made you question your own nature or worthiness, you can blame yourself too. Long after their voices are absent from your life, you still hear them. As long as this goes unchecked, the damage can continue. And you deserve better than that. We all do.
I lay all these things out for a few reasons: Firstly, I want you to know that you aren’t alone. Secondly, I want you to know that internalised victim blaming isn’t uncommon. But thirdly, that doesn’t mean what happened to you was your fault. And it doesn’t mean you have to continue to listen the voices that blame you. Even if those voices are from your own mind, or echoes from memories you’d much rather forget.
I’m a strong believer in therapy. I’m a strong believer that the company of positive people, intentionally chosen to support and empower you, is therapeutic. I’m a strong believer that meta-cognition, or the act of noticing your own thoughts, can help free you from the prison built by trauma.
I didn’t know that internalised victim blaming existed until this week. Or perhaps I did, I just hadn’t given it words. I didn’t know that victims of gaslighting were often chronic over-explainers until recently. I’ve noticed now. So if this is you, too, then I want you to know that you don’t have to blame yourself or explain yourself to anyone. I want you to notice that internalised victim blaming can sometimes mean feeling the pressure of what you are sure people are thinking even when it isn’t said to you. Hey – no one can read minds.
You don’t have to blame yourself or be responsible for what others think about you.
You don’t have to avoid God just because church was traumatic.
Not all churches are traumatic but that doesn’t meant you have to step inside if you just can’t bring yourself to.
If you can’t be a Christian inside church at the moment, then you can be a friend of mind and we can follow Jesus together, and grapple with the big questions, and get into the philosophical and hermeneutical mess of life knowing God’s shoulders are big enough to carry it if we stuff it up.
I just don’t think God would be nearly as hard on us as we are on ourselves sometimes. The irony in fearing hell is that sometimes you can live it anyway. I hope that, in noticing with me that internalised victim blaming and chronic over-explaining is a thing, we can release ourselves from that kind of hell.
Hey people – take care of yourself this Christmas. I’m aware this can be a triggering time of year for some. Make sure you check in with yourself and exercise some self-care if you need.
Peace!
Kit K
Jesus: God, Man or Mascot?
A good many writers have considered the formula C.S. Lewis put forward: who was Jesus? Was he a liar who defrauded the public on purpose, a lunatic who believed he was God but wasn’t, or was actually he who he said he was – the son of God? That’s a paraphrase, obviously. But you get the gist. It’s a question many of us have asked ourselves. Once we’ve come to the answer on that, which inevitably tells us (in our heart of hearts if not in our rational minds) whether he is God or man, I believe there is another question we need to ask: have we reduced him from divine status to simply a mascot? Have we edited him and changed his appearance until he is acceptable to us, but merely a caricature of himself?
A little context for you: Some months back, I wrote a series on dominionism. (You can find that hereand follow the links through to the end of the series if you so desire). Dominionism is the belief that there are seven mountains in society and God has destined Christians to dominate in all of them. The irony is that it is, according to my interpretation of the Bible, a pseudo-Christian heresy at best and completely unbiblical at worst. But how seductive it is: to leave behind the idea that God might have called us to minister to the poor, lift the broken, sit with the outcasts, give voice to the voiceless, and love those whom society has left behind, and trade this for a “predestined” position occupying the seats of power in society and letting other people do the nitty-gritty work of Christianity.
While dominionism has been around for quite some time, it was recently made chillingly and abundantly clear in the form of a Netflix documentary based on the investigative journalism of Jeff Sharlett. He infiltrated an American dominionist pseudo-church movement (my best explanation of the bizarre yet eerily familiar scenes laid out in that doco) and wrote two books about them, thus exposing an organisation that had made every effort to stay as secretive as possible.
I can’t tell you how many times words were uttered in that document that made my skin crawl – because I had heard them before. Almost exactly. But the thing that made my stomach drop was this ponderance: it was abundantly clear how “The Family” reduced Jesus to a mascot. They used His name to appear righteous but their one-eyed pursuit of power, and the methods they used to infiltrate high places and secure powerful allies, would have the real Jesus doing a heck of a lot more than throwing some tables around in the temple. But in truth, it isn’t just pseudo-Christian cult groups that use Jesus as a mascot and then just do their own thing. If we look at it, if we study Him then look hard at the world around us, we just might see it everywhere.
Jesus isn’t a mascot we can use to influence the mood of the crowd before we just go ahead and do whatever we want. Nor is He a “get out of jail free” card people can wave around to cover up wrongdoing committed in the name of the cross. We can’t just choose our own gospel and call it Christianity when true Christianity is followership of one who embodied truth, compassion, self-sacrifice and more, one who seemed to shun self-interest all His earthly life. I think Jesus would be angered by people using partial truths to advance a cause so far from His nature yet trotted out with His name emblazoned upon it. It made me mad. Then it made me think.
People of colour have long been joking about how there are different Jesus’s. There is white Jesus who appears on white Christian’s artwork (for those who like that sort of thing). When we pray, an image pops up in our heads of a white guy with sandy blonde hair, a beard, and flowing white robes. Go on. Admit it. It’s true. Then there is Black Jesus and Mexican Jesus, who appear a lot closer to those cultures. Rinse and repeat around the globe. But hey, reality check, the real Jesus was Jewish. He was Middle Eastern. We need not airbrush him to fit our cultural ideals and yet it seems we have. Already, by virtue of his appearance, He is a mascot of sorts.
We’ve made him a caricature of himself by changing how he looks, altering the Bible to suit our need for power or influence, and we seem to have painted over the parts of Jesus we don’t like: we choose the prosperity gospel, or the gospel of the tidy middle class instead of the kind of gospel that takes us to the poor. We choose the purity gospel instead of the gospel that was shared with the woman at the well, who had had seven husbands and was living with a man who she wasn’t married to. We choose the shallow gospel that doesn’t confront us even though the Jesus who walked the earth stopped people in their tracks and made them want to change. We choose a gospel of aggressive conservatism, even though Jesus may have indicated his progressivism when he stood on the mountaintop and uttered the words”But…a new law I give to you.”
Christianity over the years has taken many forms. So very many. From dry, unengaging, obligatory attendance to immersive worship experiences that could take any secular song and swap the words “Baby” for “Jesus” and emerge with something like devotion.
But is this a caricature of Jesus too.
For once, I’m not blogging with the answer in mind, or a tidy list of references, or a neat ending waiting at the end of this paragraph. I’m asking us to think: the Jesus who walked the earth was a revolutionary not because of violence or stoic observation of the good old days. He was a revolutionary because of love. He did not defend himself when accusations came against him. He did not seek power. He took time for the unclean, the unpopular, the at-risk and those the world had cast aside. He was not controlling. He spoke in parables and allowed the listener to find the interpretation within their own heart. He was humble, seeking out another revolutionary with a camel-skin robe and an unkempt beard to baptize him.
That was Jesus. Who is it that we have created? How have we changed him so that he is fit for us to worship? That’s mascot Jesus. That’s not the real Jesus. As the church across the globe grapples with how to hold on to millennials (who seem to be seeking truth, not entertainment), we need to ask ourselves if we are failing to keep the interest of the next generation because we have disengaged mascot Jesus from social justice, equality and inclusion, and made him a vanilla, middle-class white dude who doesn’t ruffle feathers.
Just a thought. (I finish a lot of blogs with that sign-off, don’t I? I’m not even sorry about that. I guess I’m sort of inviting you to think with me.)
Peace
Kit K
The Deconstruction Deluge and Why Millennials Are Leaving Church
We meant to have a games night. And by games, I mean chocolate, wine, trash-talking and friends with a side of games. Instead, my husband, three friends and I ended up having a long conversation about Church: the local church, the global church, deconstruction, attendance, and what we need from the church. It got me thinking. People are deconstructing, the world is changing, but the church (globally) seems to be clinging to old structures and wondering why people aren’t flocking to it like they used to. In fact, church attendance has been on the decline for the last century with recent statistics revealing that 59% of Millennials raised in Church no longer attend. Last month, we read as Christian relationship guru, Josh Harris, donned the hat of the “apostate” and walked away from the faith. This week, Relevant magazine has carried a story detailing Hillsong stalwart Marty Sampson’s disclosure that he too is losing his Christian faith.
It might be easy to assign blame and get our good Christian “judgment and gossip” hats out, but I think there’s a better way to go about this. It isn’t just Josh and Marty who have issues with the church. Millennials seem to be telling us that they aren’t happy here.
Of course, I have to hit you with the good old-fashioned disclaimer – I don’t have all the answers here. I only have my experience of deconstruction and my own observations from looking at the church at large (albeit with a big penchant for Googling what the experts have to say.) I can’t ‘tell you why Josh Harris or Marty Sampson walked away, but I can tell you a few thoughts that have been burning in my brain over the last few months as I have pondered the plight of this vast and varied institution we call “the church.”
First, the stats: According to Pew Reseach, 59% of American Millennials raised in Church no longer attend. This has corresponded with an 8% dip in attendance overall, which perhaps shows that while older generations are holding on to Institutional church, we young whippersnappers aren’t. While Judaism is no longer the largest non-Christian religion (pipped at the post by Islam), the biggest growth in the religious survey was those who practice no religion. Interestingly, this has been marked by only a small bump in atheists (+1.5% of the “no religion” cohort) and agnostics (+1.6%). What this means is that there are a lot of people out there who believe in God, but don’t believe church attendance is the best way to outwork this.
McCrindle Research offered up some insights into why Australian church attendance is sliding. These data points relate to the church as a whole, not just to Millennials, but they are fascinating none-the-less. They found that:
47% believed church attendance was irrelevant to their lives.
26% didn’t accept how “it” is taught.
24% believed church had an outdated style.
22% had issues with clergy/ministers.
19% didn’t believe the Bible.
It’s not hard to see why some people would have issues with the clergy, as members of major institutions get hauled through the legal system over and over again because of child abuse. Even this week, Melbourne Catholic Archbishop Peter Comensoli said he would rather go to jail than report sexual abuse disclosed in the confessional. This sort of thing can leave young people (with an increased interest in social justice) scratching their heads over why on earth that is thought to be noble. I mean…What the?
Its no longer good enough to blame people like Josh Harris and Marty Sampson for leaving their faith, when it is highly possible that these exits were fruit of a church that isn’t serving its people or recognizing their changing needs. Following Josh Harris’s journey over the last few years, and reading Marty Sampson’s statement about why he was losing his faith, I am seeing something familiar: they have deep questions about life, equality, purity culture, church culture more broadly, eternity, and the meaning and authority of the Bible that the church just has not answered. The word “Deconstruction” is being thrown around the internet a whole lot more as communicators and influencers go public with their journey into applying critical thinking to faith. A lot of them lose their faith during this time.
I didn’t. But my faith has changed a lot because of my own deconstruction. I don’t regret staying a Christian, but I do have some observations.
Its time we do away with the “Don’t ask questions, just have faith” approach to Christianity. Parenting a generation or two ago was guided by an ethos that said children were to be seen and not heard, and that they didn’t ask questions of their parents. “Why Mum/Dad?” was often answered with “because I said so.”
We don’t do that anymore. We don’t do it with kids (all the time at least). We shouldn’t do it with adults. But somehow, the experience of many millennial Christians (myself included, and I have to acknowledge my own bias here), is that “because I/Jesus/The Bible” says so cuts off our deep need to understand. The ability to go the hard yards and grapple with the big questions seems to be cut off at the knees and what I’m seeing in my own circles on the interwebs and in real life is that this isn’t good enough anymore. We want deep answers to the big questions. We want to know our faith is relevant.
We have witnessed our parents and grandparents generations somehow equate Christianity with voting patterns (republican in the US, and oftentimes Liberal or minor parties in Australia). We now get left with the question of why being a Christian means you have to support Donald “Grab ’em by the pussy” Trump, or Scott “Lock them up in detention indefinitely” Morrison. We get left with the question of why the church willingly throws open its doors to anyone, no matter their past transgressions, as long as they are straight and cis-gendered. We aren’t sure how the best way to show the love of God is to hurl abuse at women who feel abortions are their only (heartbreaking) option. We are baffled as to why so many Christians are climate change deniers as if the Bible ever admonished us in the direction of denying science and being poor stewards of the Earth.
Denying these questions, applying the “because I said so” logic, isn’t serving Millennial Christians. We want the depth. We want the grapple. We want to hear if you don’t know the answers. We want to be open to the search.
My solid belief is that truth stands up to scrutiny. If you apply the critical thinking lens to matters of faith, and if God is real, He will still be standing at the end of the search. It’s interesting to me that, of the 59% of American Millennials raised in church who no longer attend, only a total of 3% profess atheism and only 4% profess to be agnostics. The rest are saying “There is a God, but I don’t want a bar of church.”
So what do we need from church then?
We want something more than shallow Ted Talks and mediocre music. Church used to be the great obligation. A century ago, if you weren’t at church on a Sunday, then there were serious questions raised as to your morality and ideology. It might affect your employability or marriageability. As a young person, it certainly affected your social options. There were church dances, church bake sales, church missions, church church church. Many of the service clubs still hanging around the traps had their basis in church or faith (Scouts, Lions, Rotary for example). To step away from Church was a big, big deal. You were either in it, running it, or receiving its charity. Then the world evolved. Church isn’t a big obligation anymore. It has become an option. Gradually and over the years, the church has been evolving to suit the target market (except that very few churches have put those words with it).
We now have coffee machines in foyers (thank God! Because parenthood!), youth groups, kids ministries, shortened service times, hot topic Ted-talk-length sermons that barely have the time to delve into the big issues. We compensate for this with small groups and special interest courses. People have less and less weekend time they are willing to sacrifice for a service, so we shorten them. It’s needed, but it also means we have to cut content. It’s a conundrum. New research seems to be indicating a perplexing picture: we want digital engagement with quality resources, we want community but we don’t want to turn up regularly. We want deep intellectual reflection in big issues, but don’t turn up to hear it. It’s a contradictory wishlist and in truth, I don’t envy the people at the helm who have to sort through these debacles in order to create a picture of “church” that works for their tribe.
I love my church. I love serving in it. I’m also happy to acknowledge its shortcomings and to put my shoulder to the plow in order to fill the gaps that I can. It seems to do a pretty good job at giving progressives like me a seat alongside stoic conservatives and giving us all room to flourish together.
But when I look at the broader picture I can see something that’s an issue: Church isn’t blowing our minds anymore and obligation alone won’t pull us there.
We want to stand for something, not just against everything, even if it requires deep thought to re-form our picture of how to do that. In the beginning, Church stood for belief in Christ, the benefit of community and a shared desire to emulate and imitate the Son of God who was the greatest example of love and life above temptation. (Ek, look that’s a crappy definition but it would take a whole series of blog posts to even get to the tip of the iceberg on that). My point is that church was for something. Now it seems to be an institution that is largely against things. You really only hear about church in the news when it is against marriage equality, or refugee rights, reproductive rights or left-leaning politics. etc.
Maybe there is a role for that among the non-progressive Christian cohort. But other indications suggest that millennial and progressive Christians want us to be standing for something. Church should never have been reduced to strong opposition to social evolution, and bunkering down on old social conventions. It used to be about giving to the poor and fulfilling the great commission too. It used to be about reaching out, not holding back. I found this quote interesting:
“Christianity in the United States hasn’t done a good job of engaging serious Christian reflection with young people, in ways that would be relevant to their lives. If it is the case that millennials are less ‘atheists’ than they are ‘bored,’ then serious engagements with Christian social innovation, and with deep intellectual reflection (and these two things are connected), would offer promising signs of hope,” said L. Gregory Jones, a senior strategist for leadership education at Duke University in North Carolina.
I know. Its a US-centric quote but it works anywhere there are millennial Christians grappling with faith. Since I started this blog, I’ve been a little flabbergasted with how many people have said to me “I didn’t think I could be a Christian because I didn’t agree with the Christian doctrine on X, Y or Z.” It seems to me that “Christian” is anyone who fits the Romans 10:9 clause (Confesses with their mouth the Lord Jesus, and believes in their heart God raised Him from the dead. They will be saved.)
Somehow, we have made Christianity mean “Unquestioning agreement with dogma and conservative ideals.” It doesn’t have to be that. It can be faith, belief and your best efforts at following Jesus who was divine love made human. I’m not saying conservative ideals are bad. I like some of them. A lot of them even. But that doesn’t mean I would say someone more progressive than me isn’t a Christian. Gosh! Why are we excluding people? That’s not our job.
We aren’t admitting that church is a social club, albeit one that isn’t really fitting the brief. I can’t exactly close off this blog post without commenting on community, can I? I do agree that church has a valuable part to play in providing community – a village of relatively like-minded people where you are likely to find people who can become your tribe. This provides a valuable asset for mental health and wellbeing, but its not the whole shebang. What concerns me is that people put too much pressure on the church to fill every void here.
The truth is we can’t and shouldn’t outsource our social life to our pastor. It’s not his/her job to fill our dance-card of friends. When we connect with a church, regardless of its size, it is our responsibility to choose and manage our friendships within this. Of course, this needs to be balanced by capable pastoral staff to recognize people in need and assist them in finding community if it’s difficult. It also needs to be balanced with a welcoming and accessible atmosphere. It’s a tricky balance, especially on either end of the size spectrum: this is hard to adequately manage in large churches, and easy to over-manage in small churches. My point is every individual is a contributor even though the church provides a pretty good social structure.
We hear often that the church is a family. I both agree with and cringe at the phrase. Why? Because family means a lot of different things to people. To some, it is trauma and mistreatment. To others, it is guaranteed inclusion with no personal responsibility. Both ends of the spectrum open people up to become disgruntled. “Why isn’t the church coming to seek me out and invite me to things? I’m part of this family,” or “Wow. Family. Triggered.” Throw into the mix the need for digital engagement and the management of changing expectations and wow – what a puzzle we have for post-modern pastors! Good luck with that guys and girls!
I don’t envy church leaders right now. I believe the right approach is to give them grace while they figure it out, offer our talents to help solve the puzzle and have patience while we also make the shift in our own hearts to be willing to go deep and ask the right questions. Like Jones said – social innovation and deep intellectual reflection. I like that. I like that a lot.
Just a thought. Or three.
Peace: Kit K
Make sure you follow my socials and/or drop me line if you like what you read. Because COMMUNITY people.
BIBLIO:
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/12/living/pew-religion-study/index.html
What Made You Hold Onto Jesus?
If you know me, you know I love a reader question. Not only does it mean that someone’s reading my blog (and those stats aren’t lying to me after all!), but it means I don’t have to think of a blog topic for the week. That, right there, is a ‘double yay!’ This weeks reader question wasn’t necessarily a tricky one, but it did still make me delve into the archives of my brain and wrench up some details I’d sorta forgotten. The question was this: “In the enormous process of dismantling and re-establishing your faith, what made you sure that Jesus was still real and worth committing to?”
I’m not going to lie to you; my first answer was “fear.” It’s an answer shared by many a person with a similar background to me. Evangelical, a bit fundamentalist, raised in churches – we Christian kids learn to behave for Jesus before we fall in love with Him. I’d behaved for Him all my life. Of course, there was genuineness in my faith, but for the early part of my walk with God at least, fear was the big motivator. No, not the “awe-inspiring, fear of God” type. Just pure, unadulterated fear. Fear of judgment, hell, stuffing up, getting caught, getting embarrassed, missing out – you know the types.
But in the early process of deconstruction, I realized that the way I’d been viewing faith so far was incongruent with the message of the cross.
If love drove Jesus to the cross, why should fear be the thing that drives us to Jesus? Was it possible to discover a love-based faith rather than a fear-based religion? Was it possible to have Christianity without fear and self-loathing?
As a loving mother, as the wife of an incredible husband, there is nothing in me that wants to scare my husband or my children into devotion toward me. I don’t want to scare my husband into cuddling up on the couch and watching movies with me on a Friday night or whatever. I don’t want to scare my children into sitting on my knee and letting me cuddle them or read books to them. I don’t even want to scare them into behaving well. Rather, I want them to understand how to be safe in the world, and to grow up to be people who make it a better place.
If we stop and think about the reality of scaring our partner or children into loving us, we understand pretty quickly that it isn’t love. It’s abuse.
This equated to a bit of an “ah hah” moment for me. It was followed quickly by another “ah hah” moment: Jesus wasn’t a Christian. This means that this thing we call Christianity is simply mankind’s best attempt at building rituals, systems and understanding around a God too vast and infinite for words. It was always going to fall short. It was always going to be messed up by messed-up people and made better by the best efforts of the well-intentioned ones. It was always going to be a mish-mash of the good, the bad and the ugly. Because Christianity was only ever going to be an attempt at humankind housing the divine.
Expanding the search beyond the fear
The realization that fear was my first motivator was a sobering one. Thankfully that lightbulb moment happened in a church while listening to a level-headed, and theologically strong pastor. He had dragged a scripture out of the archives that I’d only ever heard one way: it was the scripture about Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s son with the clubbed feet. I’d only ever heard it preached one way – that because when Jonathan gave his armor to David, he held back his shoes. The message was always that what you don’t give up in covenant becomes a curse on the next generation. The message below that: obey because of fear that God will curse your kids.
But that’s not what this pastor had said in his message. My husband mentioned it after the service, and the pastor’s words have stuck with me ever since. “To read it that way is to completely misunderstand the nature of God.” He went on to explain himself in more detail, but I wasn’t listening at that point. I was thinking “What else about God have I misunderstood?”
The truth is that Biblical scholarship is an art almost entirely lost. It used to be that people didn’t read the Bible because they couldn’t. They were illiterate, or the Bible was only in such short supply that the scribes were the only ones who could access it and read it.
Now, in an age where most of us can read, and all of us can get free Bible apps on our smartphones, we still seem Biblically illiterate. Thus, we trust the people standing behind the pulpit to explain what we need to know. But what if “what we need to know” is tainted by lost context, personal agendas, leadership challenges, or the colored lenses of the pain and loss life might have thrown them?
There are a million reasons why we can’t just do this. We don’t know what a preacher is thinking when they choose the message for the morning. We don’t know what lens they are viewing that scripture through or what motive is behind it. If we don’t have enough knowledge about God and the Bible to inform us and ring the bell when and if something is a bit skewiff, then we are at the mercy of bad doctrine that takes us further away from a relationship with God, not further into it. But the sad thing is that bad doctrine almost always drives us further into fear and condemnation than into the redemptive love of God.
That realization drove me into the thing I’d always had in my pocket but never had the power to use: the Bible. But I ditched the complexity of the whole thing for a while and just stuck with the Red Letters.
Red Letter Christianity
I blogged on this a while back, and I won’t rehash the whole thing (because you can read it here). But a personal challenge I took on back at the beginning of my deconstruction was to read just the Red Letters for a while. After all, these were the words spoken by Jesus who was one-third of the Trinity. What could get us closer to the nature of God than the words spoken by the Son of God?
They are a big challenge in and of themselves, so much so that the rest of the New Testament seems largely geared at helping us understand how we can live out followership of Christ. But the revelation that I got from my foray into Red Letter Christianity was that judgment was not the goal of God. Love was. Love had always been. Judgment was a thing that He hoped He could spare us from, so much so that He sent Jesus.
He wasn’t after a perfect people. He was after a devoted people. And if our hearts are turned to him, then despite our humanity and the inevitability of failure, our imperfections are all covered. This, essentially, is the nature of God – love. He is love. He does love. He gives love. Yes, he is holy. Yes, he can’t stand sin. But because he loves us, he found a way around that.
That took me back to the fear-abuse conundrum I spoke about in the beginning: If God loved me, then He wouldn’t want to use abuse to drive me into His embrace. And right there, in that sentence, was the great inconsistency I had witnessed over and over again – People professing to have been moved by the love of God, and the higher way of living He called them to, using the fear of Hell and judgment to drive people into salvation and keep them there. “Just do this one thing different and God will love and bless you. Just change this. Just repent of this. Just cease this…” Always one more thing when the truth of the matter is that His Grace is sufficient and His strength made perfect in our weakness.
Boy, it takes the pressure off. Just like that, a lifetime of striving and wrestling got swapped for the safety in knowing God loved me even in the midst of deconstruction. Even if I had difficulty trusting Him or understanding Him for a time, that was totally okay. Because God has big shoulders. He can deal. He could see the grapple, and he could see my struggle to get to the heart of true Christianity, and He wasn’t going to judge me for that. Because that’s not in His nature.
Other World Religions
During the heavier initial stages of my deconstruction, I read a lot and watched a lot of documentaries. I always did so with one thing in mind: my own life experience had taught me that there is a God. That was something that history and science both echoed and did nothing to refute. Even atheism seems consistent with the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, as written in Genesis. If we choose that tree, we eat of its fruit.
(Whole magazines are devoted to these topics, so I’m not going to talk about that in this blog post.)
But one documentary series stood out: Morgan Freeman’s “The Story of God.” In it, he looked at many different world religions including Christianity. It seems that, throughout the world and throughout history and even the post-modern age, we all seem to seek out the divine. And though our words for it differ, very similar themes echo through.
It seems to me that from the beginning of time, mankind has been aware of the divine. From the farthest stretches of the world to the modern centers of civilization, there exists an awareness that there is something out there – some greater power. We find different words to wrap around it. We find different lenses and structures to see it through. But its there.
What makes Christianity different? Well, I guess that’s a series for another day. But the place I arrived at is this: throughout my life, I had seen the hand of God. I had seen Him protect me from certain things, and seen him enable certain things that I’d always thought impossible. He had seen what I prayed in the silence of my room, or in the loneliness of my darkest times. He made these things happen in time. Other people might call this divine force something different. But I call Him Jesus. He calls Himself the way, the truth, and the life.
One day I’ll tell those stories, of the things he rescued me from and the things he bought me through. But for now, here is my truth:
Illness, personal upheaval, loss of church, loss of community, financial hardship, deconstruction of faith, a search through science and other world religions, a critical look through the Bible in its various translations and iterations, a critical look at the world around me – none of it has driven me away from God. Rather it has driven me towards an understanding that He is bigger than what I can possibly understand, and more loving than I ever thought. I don’t have to understand everything about him. But I can spend the rest of my life trying and that will be just beautiful.
Anyway! That’s kinda my thoughts on it. Its taken years to live through, so it’s going to take longer to unpack. But these are some of the things that made me realize, throughout the enormous process of dismantling and re-establishing my faith, that Jesus was still real and worth committing to.