Author: Jeff

In a comment on a recent post, Brian posed the following question:

What happened to change your thinking/attitude? The problems you encountered on your return from Africa are still there. The same attitudes are present in our churches – perhaps redirected away from fund-raising, but still there. Obviously, you were able talk, complain, and question. Were there ever any real answers to restore your soul or was it simply rediscovering your faith in a God and His world that is sometimes too complicated to fully understand?

I haven’t been dodging the question, but I’ve wanted to give it some good thought and post the answer here for all to see, because I think it’s probably a question worth looking at.

First, I think Brian is right. The same attitudes that were present after my return from Africa are still present today. At the core, very little has changed. Our churches are still plagued by the same petty attitudes, and there hasn’t been a magical renaissance where people have suddenly started to grasp our position in a global community. I still often enter into church and feel as though I’m with a large group of people who doesn’t really understand who I am, or where I’ve come from, or what I’ve seen. I still find myself frustrated often when at any number of attitudes, events, and people in spiritual arenas. So in that sense, it’s hard to see that anything has changed, or that anything is better than it was before.

So what is different?

I think the first real answer that in truth was probably the most important one was this: I am not alone. It’s easy for us to forget that there are people all around us, and easy for us to buy into the lie that we’re the only ones who are experiencing our lot in life. The reality is that is seldom the case. While it sounds rather hokey, the truth of the matter is that the safe places I found really were one of the best answers I could have possibly imagined. They simultaneously answered two of the most important questions I was dealing with: 1) Am I the only one? and 2) Are the things I’m experiencing “wrong”? I think if the answer to either of those questions had been “yes”, I wouldn’t have stuck with it. I was fortunate to find people who were willing to walk with me and encourage me, but I wonder how many other people are out there who didn’t have those people for them in their time of need.

I think the second path to restoration was service. At the National Campus Minister’s seminar this summer, Kelly and I gave a talk on student leadership. One of the questions that was posed to us was from a minister who had a leader in his group who was “on the edge of faith”, as it were. He was asking whether he should put faith and trust in him, even though the student wasn’t really 100% sure that he believed in God. My answer was yes – I would give him the responsibility, work with him, and encourage him to continue questioning. Afterward there was a dissenter who discussed the topic with me at length, but with the amount of information I had, I still stuck by my answer, and the reason is simple: I feel like placing people in a position of leadership and service is a fantastic restoration. Often we are worried that if we stick people in positions of responsibility when they’re searching, they may burn out or break because of their fragile state. While I can’t speak for anyone else, I feel like in my case the fact I had people to minister to forced me to turn my attention to others and experience the joy of service instead of the doubt of self-examination. It doesn’t mean that my questions went away or that I suddenly had all the answers, but it did mean that I had a higher purpose than serving myself, and I was able to grow and learn through God using me in the lives of others.

Finally, I think an expansion of Brian’s last statement summed up an internal change that was profound and valuable.

First, I began to understand that, contrary to what we’ve taught and believe, the words “I don’t know” are three of the most powerful words in the English language. We’ve pressed people to be certain about what they know and believe, but the reality is that each of us is wrong about something, and none of us really knows what we’re wrong about and what we’re right about. Instead of trying to pretend I had it all together, I began to try to discover the liberation of uncertainty. While an entire generation of people has thrived in and demanded a world of certainty, my belief is that the next generation will necessitate a world of honest uncertainty. Being able to admit that there were things I didn’t know and didn’t understand was therapeutic in so many ways. It took the responsibility of explaining everything off of me and put it back on God – it removed from me the qualities of “perfection” and deity that had been placed there. While I used to fear the idea of not being able to know or explain God, I now take comfort in a God who is greater than I, and knows and understands more than I.

Second, I began to believe that it was actually possible to coexist with someone I disagreed with. I realized that on some sort of fundamental level, the Good News Jesus brings can’t be some message about intellectual superiority or elitism – in fact it seems to be exactly the opposite. If we can’t coexist with our brothers and sisters in Christ – even if we disagree with them – then our Good News is rather empty. As a result, the burden is on each of us to look past the differences and shortcomings and failings of our fellow Christians – even when it seems they’re actively working against our relationship with God. This doesn’t mean that we no longer get frustrated with each other, but simply that we live as what we are – the body of Christ, held together by Christ, living for Christ, and existing in Christ.

Each of these ideas proved to be a strong pillar on which I began to reconstruct a new foundation, rediscovering what it meant to live as a follower of Christ. I feel like I continue to discover daily a little bit more what that means, and I pray that process will continue for as long as I live. My hope is that each of us will look for people who are on the edge of faith and seek to draw them into relationship with the body of Christ. I hope we will be able to find people who need a safe place of rest, who are longing to be told they’re not alone and they’re not wrong; that they don’t have to have all the answers, and that there is healing in service.

What is the relationship between action and intention? Which counts more?

What do I honestly feel about people I think are “missing the mark” in honest, well-intentioned, sincere ways?

How far do sincerity and good intent really go?

I think that question is really central in many ways to a traditional legalistic view of Christianity, but I think it has profound consequences in any new way of thinking as well. Previously we have said through our attitudes, though perhaps not through our words, that action was the only thing that mattered – well intended acts done for God that were done incorrectly were worse than no act at all. More recently we’ve transitioned into a feeling closer to our legal system – actions are most important, but intent matters also. Murder, we feel, is worse than accidental manslaughter, even though the result is the same. In those two cases, the only difference is the intent, but we feel murder deserves a harsher punishment than does manslaughter. Even still, intent only gives you partial credit – in the previous example, you still do time, even though you had no ill intent.

But I wonder what God thinks.

“Anyone who wants to come to him [God] must believe that there is a God and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.”

I believe God places intent above action. It’s not something I am necessarily comfortable with, as it seems to challenge so many of the legalities of the system I’ve built and grown up with. It does not declare action to be irrelevant, but rather makes us reexamine both our actions and intentions to evaluate their sincerity and authenticity. It doesn’t allow us to do whatever we want so long as our intentions are good, since our sincere seeking of God doesn’t involve what we want, but what He wants. Furthermore, just as in the legal system, where our intent only gets us partial credit, our actions go only so far in truly pleasing God. It is not enough to only do the right things, our hearts must be clean and pure before God as well. To paraphrase an old debate, if you have people who always do right, but hate the fact they’re doing it, have you really created moral people, or only the appearance of moral people.

In placing our intent above action, we are forced to abandon result-orientations and look instead to intent-orientations. One of our biggest obstacles to being compassionate is that we cannot externally judge the internal motivations of others. If we judged others based on their intentions, like we often judge ourselves, instead of on the consequences of their actions, how much more forgiving and understanding would we be? If we were to believe that people who acted differently than we do were honestly trying to do the best they could, how would that chance our outlook on others?

Whatever the balance between intent and action, the reality for each of us remains the same – we are all called to honor God not only with what we do, but in the internal depths of our heart and soul.

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.