jeff’s blog

As you seek God,
may you be drawn
into the glorious presence of Christ.

May he embrace you,
guide you,
protect you,
empower you.

And with his power and grace,
may you move
in a desperate world,
sharing the blessings of Christ
with hurting souls;
blessing from blessing,
peace from peace,
hope from hope,
love from love;
God’s messengers in time of need.

As my small group discussed tonight, one of the questions asked us to talk about a time in our lives when Christ had “restored our soul”.

For me it wasn’t hard to think of the time. I’d just returned from Africa for the first time. The trip had been challenging in so many ways - encountering unimaginable poverty, stretching my comfort zones in ministry, learning to deal with people who I didn’t get along with - so many lessons in such a short time.

As I returned to American culture, I was filled with doubt and confusion and anger. The church I was attending was going through a campaign to raise money to build a new building, and I felt tremendous conflict within my heart as I thought back to worshiping in a burned out truck in the slums of Eastleigh. For a while, I physically couldn’t deal with going to church on Sunday mornings. I couldn’t deal with the masses of people who just didn’t seem to understand the realities of the world as I’d seen it, and who seemed more concerned with their comfortable lifestyles than with helping others. I raged inside when people talked about how God “provides everything everyone needs” - trying to reconcile that with the visions burned in my mind. I wanted those people to go sit in trash piles with starving children and tell them that God was providing everything they needed, or that they should just “have faith”. It seemed to me hypocrisy on a grand scale.

At the same time, I underwent profound spiritual changes. I began to question many of the ideas and beliefs I’d grown up with, and began to wonder about their consistency. I had difficulties reconciling the things I’d grown up with to the things I’d encountered, and didn’t know what to make of any of it. Each answer left me with dozens of new questions, and I began to seriously doubt whether any of it was worth the effort.

It seemed to me that church was about the last place I was going to find the answers I wanted. When I did go, week after week there were sermons that seemed to do nothing but give the same formulaic answers I’d heard for 20 years, never really acknowledging that there was something going on in my head that seemed vastly different from everyone else. Whenever I did talk to people about how I felt, they generally tried to “fix me” by giving me some set of Bible verses I could go read to understand why I was wrong and tell me how I could return to the straight and narrow.

I don’t know how close I was, really, to packing it all up and deciding that it wasn’t worth it. I never reached a point where I decided it was “the last time…”, but I did spend several weeks away, not really certain if I would come back.

As I look back, I’m fairly certain the thing that kept me going was three people - Traci, James, and Kelly - who provided a safe place for me to talk, complain, question, and doubt without fear of judgment or retaliation. Their desire to listen and journey alongside me instead of trying to “fix me” right away proved to be exactly what I needed. I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t had that, but I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

As we explore what it means to have a relational dynamic within our churches, I think it’s important that we remember to create such safe places. I’m not sure that it’s possible to do that on any kind of large group level, but I hope we can brainstorm effective ways to create a culture that fosters such relationships between people.

On Monday night, we discussed the assumptions we often make in attempting to explain Christ to others. Often, our hidden assumption in how we talk and explain things is that the person we’re talking to really wants to be a Christian, but doesn’t have enough information in order to know how to do that, or to make that decision. As a result, our explanations often boil down to feeding people information about what it takes to become a Christian, while more and more people we talk to don’t really have a good feel for what being a Christian actually means. (And, as a side note, it could be said that the more I reflect and talk and discuss, the less confident I am of what being a Christian actually means at times.)

One of the key points that James brought up was that often we go from proposition 1 - “You’re a sinner”, to proposition 2 - “You need Jesus” - without any real justification or explanation of that huge jump. One of the main reasons for that, I believe, is that we’ve grown up around our religious framework so much that we don’t see this as a big jump at all, where as people looking from the outside find it hard to comprehend how A leads to B.

Put another way - suppose that I’m someone who has never really heard of God. Suppose I also accept the fact that God exists, and I am a “sinner”. What does that mean? When we jump to the next step in our line, “You need Jesus,” I think most people scratch their heads and say, “Huh? Why’s that?”

I think the fundamental message here to me was this: when we speak to non-believers, each of us must try as best we can to identify all the assumptions we bring to the table and be aware of them when we’re talking to others who may not have the same background we do. As we attempt to bring Christ to others, we need to recognize that there is a difference between trying bring Christ to others, and trying to bring others to Christ. My hope and prayer is that as we consider that picture, each of us would seek to meet people where they are and bring Christ to a broken and hurting world, instead of trying to bring others along without first addressing the needs, concerns, positions, and beliefs that place them where they are. My prayer is that just as Christ started with people where they were but didn’t leave them there, so we too would be willing to go the extra mile in order to model Christ in their lives in all aspects - including the ways we minister to them.

“I have learned not to look too far ahead, but to concentrate on the present.
I am not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die.
I have so much more I want to do.”

-Stephen Hawking, in a recent BBC interview.