Hostile Faith Kills Faith

When I was a "youth," our church used to do this thing called Disciple Now weekend. The title doesn't do it justice. We looked forward to this all year. It was a weekend where all the youths were split up by age and gender and went to stay in a "host home" for the weekend. So, families in the church would volunteer to host the youth and they would be assigned a grade and gender. If you signed up to host, you might be given 6th grade boys or you might get 11th grade girls. The logistics don't matter. What matters is this: We got to have a weekend long sleepover with our friends in someone else's home.

Perhaps 20-odd years later, this scenario sounds strange or dangerous or creepy. I'm not here to comment on that. All I can say is, as a 14 year old, it was fun. Now, it wasn't all fun and games. At each home, you would also be paired up with a few "leaders." Sometimes these were other church members, sometimes they would bring back former members of the youth group who had gone off to college to play the role of mentors. These mentors would lead bible studies at scheduled times throughout the weekend and, in between sessions, you got to play and hang out.

But- if you were lucky- you got cool mentors who didn't want to do 25 bible studies in 2 days time so you would get to play a lot more. That's what we were always hoping for. It's nearly always what we got.

But that's not even it. There's more. They would bring in a special speaker to present on Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, and Sunday morning. The sum total of all this was supposed to be: all the youth in the church become better Christians because they've been through bible study and worship boot camp. Like I said before, this event ended up being a lot more fun than it sounds. This is how the adults saw it. We're going to spiritually mature our kids.

Anyway. One year they brought in an extra extra special teacher. I have no idea who he is or where he came from. I wish I could remember his name because I would publish it here. I think his first name was Ronnie. We'll go with that.

Ronnie was some kind of celebrity Christian who toured around giving speeches and kissing babies. He was probably pretty used to being praised as a godly man and a speaker of truth. This phrase, "I speak the truth," has really evolved over the years, hasn't it? It used to mean: I speak words that are grounded in fact and reality. Now it just means you speak in a harsh tone of voice and belittle people all the while maintaining an heir of superiority.

Ronnie was an early example of this evolution. I'm not sure if he cared about truth- but he sure loved to upset people and seemed to equate ruffling feathers with being a prophet, priest, truth-teller, godly man, and so on and so on.

Ronnie spent the weekend telling children and young adults that they were personally responsible for the death of Jesus and that we were inherently unworthy of God's love. On the one hand, this wasn't our fault, we were born this way. On the other hand, it was our fault because we were all sinners of the highest order and we deserved to be sent to hell where we would experience, for eternity, flames hotter than the sun while worms and snakes crawled through our empty eye holes. The highlight of the weekend was a lengthy sermon about the biological realties of Christ's death, in a level of detail so inappropriately grotesque that Mel Gibson, The Road Warrior, himself might vomit...let alone a group of 12-year-old boys and girls.

Here's what I took away: I don't deserve love. I don't deserve love from people, certainly, but, even more so, I don't deserve love from God. Not only do I not deserve it, but it's impossible to get it. Not only that, but also, I don't deserve to live. That's what Ronnie taught me. I don't deserve love and I don't deserve to live.

Now, I know better today. This isn't the gospel message- it's a popular scare tactic that was invented in the late 19th century to get converts quickly and in large numbers. It's a parlor trick. That's not even me being mean- that's just a historical fact. I'm just telling the truth! (See how effective that is?)

The church for nearly 2000 years did not preach about hellfire and brimstone. It was invented as a marketing tactic during the age of big tent revivals on the frontier during Westward Expansion. Think about that- because this version of faith is still very present in the church in America today. (It's not particularly present in the rest of the world- so consider that as well. We're the only ones who went all in on this American horror story).

Ronnie wasn't a pastor, a preacher, a priest, or a truth-teller. He was an angry kid who aged a little and then grabbed a microphone. He was a middle school bully. Except I was the one in middle school and he was 40 years old.

I hate guessing, but if I had to guess, I would guess Ronnie is responsible for more de-conversions from Christianity than conversions. Why? Because he presented an utterly hopeless version of the gospel. He presented a vision of an angry and violent God who could not be pleased and who hated his own creation. Ronnie presented a vision for faithful life based solely on fear and anxiety. He presented a vision of God's creation as unlovable and unredeemable. There was no good news. The news was bad but, if you're lucky, you wouldn't get a worst-case-scenario. For Ronnie, the good news was that you might not get the worst news.

Regardless of what ole Ronnie is single-handedly responsible for, I know first-hand that, for many, this approach creates a loss of faith. And that brings us to a very important question: When we talk about faith, what are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to put people off? Or, are we trying to help people find ever new ways of exploring and engaging their faith so that the world experiences more and more of God's love?

I suspect we all agree it's the latter. The shouting-screaming-waving-your-hands-and-kicking-your-feet approach simply does not accomplish our goal: to model a way of being that reflects God's values of forgiveness, grace, mercy, and love, to point people to the new reality God is creating where there will be no tears.

You may or may not agree with these ideas or my approach. In fact, I know that if we had more than a couple hundred readers I'd get more hate mail over this post than I would know what to do with. So let me take a step back from trying to get revenge for a second and say what I really want to say.

So many of you have quite likely been harmed by a version of the message Ronnie preached. You may live with a great deal of fear or anxiety or insecurity about your faith, how God views you, and how you should live. That, to me, is deeply sad. Here's Romans 5:1 from the Common English Bible:

Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Faith can and should begin with confidence in our standing before God. In faith, we are at peace with God. For simplicity's sake, we'll define faith as being the combination of belief in God with the willingness to live a life in community with others who reflect God's love to the world around them. It does not require perfection. It does not require improvement. It simply requires us to continue walking the path and to see where it leads.

Even if we take perfection and goodness off the table, it's still a challenge to stay on this path that leads to reflecting God's love to the world around us. Being a decent human often feels like work. What we need, in my opinion, is encouragement. So often what we've received has been some combination of shame and hopelessness. What we need, in order to stick to the path, in order to see God's love spread and transform our world, is encouragement.

So I'll close with two questions:

1. How do you best experience encouragement? (Share this with people where you can so that they know what to offer you).

2. Where could you offer some encouragement?