The most important aspect of your faith is it’s object and not it’s vivacity. This means that a weak faith can lay hold of a strong Christ. It also means that a really strong faith can be misplaced and ultimately end up with the Son of God saying, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” An implication of this truth, though, is that the Spirit of God is constantly working to tear down an impure Jesus-sounding faith and replace it with an unadulterated Jesus-grounded faith. The gospel aims to deconstruct your faith.
Two Paths/Two Trends
This truth, I believe, explains two trends which I see. The first is the almost weekly occurrence of a well known celebrity-type renouncing their Christian faith. It seems to me that in a vast majority of these stories what is happening is that a nominal Christian who was heavily steeped in a Christian sub-culture no longer finds that culture appealing. Therefore, they reject the faith altogether. As Josh Harris explained, it became too much work to untangle his faith from the culture of his faith so he just threw out the whole thing (that’s my summary more than his exact words).
Now, I don’t want to overly simplify what is happening here. Nor to dismiss their stories and try to put them into a neat little box. But I’m writing about this general trend and not specifics so forgive my simplification here. Rejection of Jesus Christ doesn’t seem to be the issue these days as much as it’s a rejection of a certain type of Christian sub-culture. And it’s a sub-culture which I’d argue Jesus would be fine with us abandoning.
Which leads to my second observation. This is also why I hear so often of Bible-preaching and Jesus-loving pastors being eaten alive in churches—especially in the South or rural settings. These pastors have been brought to a difficult mission field. Dean Inserra says it well:
But many American pastors are faced with a similarly daunting task: to bring Jesus to a place where He is admired but not worshipped, where God is a grandpa in the sky, where many of their congregants are ‘good people’ who don’t know they need to saved. (Inserra, 30)
And they will fight tooth and nail to hang onto a culture that Jesus is working to overtake with His kingdom. The gospel calls “good people” to give up their comfortable Christianity. And there are many cultural icons which must fall by the wayside. When Jesus-loving pastors preach through the Bible and apply the Scriptures they are met with an angry resistance.
In both instances I believe Jesus is calling people to abandon their faith. Not to abandon their faith in him, but to abandon a faith which is more grounded in the culture and less in Christ. And it really is a difficult task, but it’s worth it.
The Path of Embrace
Some people aren’t able to give up their faith in order to embrace Jesus. Some choose a path of anger. Others choose a path of abandonment. But there is another path—the path of embrace*.
I found myself at one of these moments a couple years ago. I was crushed by Christian sub-culture. I’ll give you one little slice. I was tasked to write an article about a few hymns which might have theology we need to reconsider. I’m a pretty modest and moderate dude. I don’t write articles with a flame-thrower. I think my tone was pretty irenic in the article. But I received hate mail. Yes, HATE mail. I was told that I didn’t know Jesus. I received threats. A big part of me was able to laugh it off and just shake my head. But it was also eye-opening to see how ugly “good church people” could be.
There was so much more going on in my life at this point as well. That article wasn’t written in a vacuum nor was the criticism received in a vacuum. I was hurting. And I found myself at a crisis point. There are two things which the Spirit of God used to helped me choose the path of embrace instead of the other paths.
First, a little book I’ve read multiple times on pastoral ministry—The Sacred Wilderness of Pastoral Ministry. In that book there is a chapter called Confusion, and it’s on “risking doubt versus denying dissonance”. It was an invitation for me to dig into my doubts and all the things which I was feeling. The words here of Dave Rohrer were being played out in my life:
What we try to push away or deny always seeps out somewhere else, and any futile attempt to try to plug up these cracks in our armor diverts our attention from doing the very work we are trying to protect. To make this choice is to live with a divided heart, and this is the beginning of the end of effective service as a pastor. (Rohrer, 137)
And so I dug in to my doubt. I put it all on the table. If God wanted me to step away from pastoral ministry I would do it. I had to press into all those doubts. I had to wrestle with feelings of disappointment in God. Why did God call me to a place which was, to put it bluntly and honestly, pushing me to the brink of suicide? Why take me to a place to crush me when he had promised His presence? And there in the doubts I found these words of Rohrer to be true as well:
When we are confronted with the truth that God is not at all like what we might have expected him to be, when we have to face a crisis where God has not come through for us in the ways that we had hoped and believed he would, we are invited to let go of our projections and make space in our lives for the God who truly is. (Rohrer, 140)
At this same time God placed into my life a second resource—a godly man who is a Christian counselor. He was used by God to help me rethink what the goodness of God meant and to tenaciously cling to hope. He helped me confront some of the emotions that I was feeling and take the shame out of much of them. To sum, he helped me to see Jesus in the midst of all the fog.
And eventually the fog lifted as I abandoned many of those Christ-haunted but ultimately Christ-empty aspects of my faith. The truth is my faith is still deconstructing. But it’s being wrecked by the wrecking-ball of the gospel and reshaped by the nail-scarred hands of the God who stoops and saves.
And maybe that’s a difference too. It’s not for us preachers to deconstruct the cultural faith of others. We don’t have the surgical precision our Master does. It’s our task to faithful preach the gospel and love people. And that’ll come with blows, certainly.
It’s also not for us to deconstruct our own faith either. We’ll throw out the wrong stuff and keep all the wrong things. We aren’t the source of truth. We need the good news of Jesus to be our anchor. But that’s not a tidy task.
So when I hear of another pastor being decimated by “good Christian people” it hurts me. It gives me great sorrow. Likewise, I’m deeply grieved when I hear of folks abandoning their faith. But there is another story here—God is working to deconstruct any faith which isn’t grounded in Him.
So when I hear of these two trends, while my heart breaks, I’m left with just one overarching conclusion…
Aslan is on the move.
—
Photo source: here
*I almost used the word “acceptance” because alliteration is part of the preaching culture I grew up with. But I have, without anger, abandoned that practice
