being on the outside
I haven’t been in an Evangelical church for a couple years now but a couple months ago I went to a Bible Study hosted by a dear friend (at her request). It was truly a surreal experience. I was an outsider. I understood the words and knew the Scriptures and cognitively “got” what was going on but I wasn’t connecting with it, I wasn’t frenetically nodding my head like a bobble head doll or muttering mmm-hmmms to every little jab at “non Christians” or “the world” or to all the little trite Christian platitudes. I felt like a … *gasp* … seeker. And I was treated like one too…even though I’ve been a Christian longer than most people there and been in ministry longer than all of them combined.
Last night, I listened to This American Life and it was about Carlton Pearson - someone I grew up listening to as a Pentecostal word of faither. He was recently denounced as a heretic by his tribe (and indirectly by much of the Christian world) because he denounced hell as an eternal place where God sends people (he believes in hell, just not as an eternal home for the “unsaved” - he calls it the Gospel of Inclusion). In the podcast, Pearson and some of those who have stood by him talk about what it’s like being the target of Christians, what it’s like being on the outside. Pearson has found acceptance and welcome in places he previously would have never thought of. He is still charismatic and his church is just as culturally and in many ways theologically pentecostal as ever…just minus the hell messages…and yet, he is finding safety with Episcopalians, Pentecostal churches that have predominently gay members, the UUA, the UCC…we have had this same experience over the past few years. Even though our “holy spirit talk” sometimes makes some folks shiver a bit, they have never turned us away or rejected us outright. Even if our theology is sometimes a bit more “conservative” than theirs, we have always felt welcome.
I could very much relate to the feelings Pearson and his friends had about their experience being cast out of the fold. One thing that I found particularly odd at the Bible Study was that one of the people there had known me relatively well when we were attending that church. We were a founding family and leaders. I have no idea what’s been said since we left (we only left to take a college ministry position, we actually had no issues with the pastor or church at all) but it was apparent in the way this woman was talking that she essentially sees me as “outside the fold” now. What is it about my current expression of Christianity that would give that impression? Especially since we haven’t talked since we left. Is it that we supported Obama? Is it that we don’t attend an institutional church? The only thing I can assume is that it’s my more open-handed approach to the Bible and Christian doctrine…but that’s very frustrating - to have a Christian see you as “not Christian” simply because you don’t champion their brand of Christianity.
Basically, certain Christians create their own image of God using their own understanding of the Bible and hold it up in front of every other Christian calling them to bow down to it and follow them…sound familiar? Remember what God had to say about this behavior back a few thousand years ago?
Even though the experience was a bit odd, was also refreshing going to this Bible Study and not really caring what anyone thought, not having to tow the party line, not having to live with anxiety for weeks afterward wondering which pastor would be calling to “correct” me and warn me about my inappropriate comments and questions. Not having to qualify every comment to make sure I was understood as being “fully Scriptural”.
Being on the outside has been so freeing.
But more than that, it’s been good for my soul - good for me as a human being. I have experienced the behavior that is so ugly in so many of our communities, perpetrated by so many (yes, well meaning) Christians…behavior that was perpetrated by me. I have been forced to see what it looks like when Christians don’t “do unto others…” I have been forced to sit with ambiguity, ambivalence and question marks peppering my faith journey…and today, I don’t have any fewer question marks or any less ambiguity and I’m still pretty ambivalent about it all.
These things don’t scare me or worry me or cause me to doubt God or care about my faith any less - in fact, in the midst of my journey, I find a bigger God and a more resilient faith … because now, it’s not about me knowing that I’m doing all the right things and believing all the right things and preaching the right things and singing the right songs and hanging around all the right people and voting for the right politicians…it’s about me having NO CLUE whether or not I’m doing the right things but believing that I don’t shape God, I don’t hold God, I don’t guide God - God shapes, holds and guides me.
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These are GREAT thoughts - I’ve cut and pasted a few things.
I totally resonate with the notion of feeling like an outsider. I remember my wife and I (we were just dating then) at a Bible study of our college classmates the summer after we graduated. Mind you I had been accepted at Princeton Seminary with a B.A. in religion and she was staying for another term to finish her sociology degree and had already completed her christian edu. degree. A campus minister and his wife led the study. They were of a group called Coalition for Christian Outreach where workers are not ordained, have minimal education in religion other than party-line evangelicalism, and have to raise their income.
I disagreed with the interpretation of a text everyone other than my future wife was rendering of a text. Now I was the only one there who had studied biblical exegesis and so on and had good reason to believe that their reading was not a sound one. Rather than discuss my reading, I literally got a shaking head with “No, no no” from the study leaders. It was at that moment when I realized that evangelicalism was about indoctrination and not growth. After my second year of seminary I truly owned the realization that I was an outsider. And like you, the burdens of people’s expectations crumbled. Scary, but I think all liberation is kind of scary.
Now I would be too pissed off to join a study like that! Guess I get super cranky when people refuse to actually grow in their thinking. That’s what teaching does to ya!
Great little book for you though. It’s called Three Outsiders by Diogenes Allen. It was one of the books he wrote with a pastoral intent and speaks exactly to this position. He talks about how Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil were outsiders to the establishment, and had a firmer grasp of the Gospel as a result. From what I know about you, you would totally resonate with it.
Peace.
Great post.
I have started church in a gay bar in Newcastle, Australia.
I am an ordained Baptist pastor but lean towards openness theology and have been thinking through some of the “status quo” conservative ideas which contain a lot of our own worldviews and less Bible information.
I appreciated this story as I find myself increasingly on the outside.
Mak,
It is 10.20 PM local Sao Paulo time and I’m sitting n my hotel room bar restaurant after 2 glasses of Cran Tarapaca, a glass of some brazilian red and now my last glass of Malbec after doing all my e-mails and now reading some of my favorite blogs and all I can say s ditto;
On my way down read Lewis the great divorce in preparation for myLewis group meeting in January; interesting book if you haven’t read it.
As my second son (Bethel Seminary Graduate and fan of Boyd) says, God is doing some interesting things which is playing havouc with traditional evangelicals…which I used to be one…
Love y’a sister rebel rouser…
awweee thanks Carlos, you’re such a dear blog friend
I love the Great Divorce and reference it often in “afterlife” conversations.
Bless you (Sao Paulo, wow!)
Good one! the other thing i find in being an outsider is that it’s not always quick and easy to explain your position when you have a very different worldview and use different language. they may be looking for neat black and white answers so that they can put you in a tidy box. i am sure that half of the time, our friends go away not really understanding what i have just said, due to the lens through which they see the world.
“Being on the outside has been so freeing.”
So true. So very true.
When I finished seminary in 2002, I was working at an Evangelical church, one that was started as a GenX church, and one that had spun off a few emerging type churches (such as one that Alan Hirsch features in his Shaping book.
It was quite dysfunctional and almost entirely, stereotypically Evangelical by the time I had graduated. It was my home church, though, so I stuck with it until burnout got so near I had to step away if I wanted to retain any semblance of love for the community of Christians.
I stepped away. Left the church. Didn’t go to another one. Moved into some nearby mountains. Tried a few local churches. Realized I was so, so good at playing the church game I could fit in, no doubt easily find some sort of leadership role, and continue to try to establish myself in the church world.
I stopped visiting. Stayed away from churches altogether.
And it has freed my heart and my mind and my soul, restored my love and hope, oddly enough, for the church. This latter love and hope totally resonates with what you said. I visit churches on occasion as both the utter insider (at an Evangelical church my first week of life, grew up in such churches, was always a young leader in such, Evangelical college, Evangelical seminary) and now an outsider. Though not an outsider on the surface, because I easily slip back into that world. But truly an outsider on the inside, because what was so familiar is now unfamiliar, I see all the customs and acts and patterns as someone who isn’t committed to that anymore and doesn’t sit in that world anymore.
It has been 6 years now, or so. And I’ve learned how to interpret my frustrations from those dysfunctional church years, and learned how to highlight was is best, and learned how to truly live a life of faith and spiritual community without the programs that take away our own responsibility in seeking God and each other. It’s been healing and freeing and entirely enlightening, a freedom that doesn’t ruin me for God or the Church but has helped me find a more whole relationship with both. Even as I’ve not entirely made my way back to the latter.
Hi Mak, back in St Louis and bracing for an interesting night of freezing rain which will make things interesting tomorrow in time to go to work - should’ve have stayed in S. Paulo but my wife wouldn’t have like that
Had my volume of George Macdonald’s “unspoken Sermons” for reading on my way back (8 hours to Miami on coach) and I am getting to like him more and more; maybe the fact he was resigned from his position in the church of England and prior having his pay cut in half has something to do with it, however I think he had it mostly right in my my mind.
His novel “Thomas Wingfold - Vicar” may be Macdonald’s story. I digress though; we had read some selections previously in our C.S. Lewis group and now I just started reading from the begining and one of the chapter (sermons) was on John 20:29 has some barbs applicable to te church today (he wrote in the late 1800’s). This quote is particularly applicable to your present post as I see it:
“The Son of God is the Teacher of men, giving to them of His Spirit - that Spirit which manifests the deep things of God, being to a man the mind of Christ. The great heresy of the Church of the present day is unbelief in this Spirit. The mass of the Church does not believe that the Spirit has a revelation for every man individually - a revelation as different from the revelation of the Bible, as the food in the moment of passing into living brain and nerve differs from the bread and meat”….and he goes on to warning against the emphasis on the letter of the law vs placing emphases on the Spirit and not blapheming agains It; The evangelical church today is to a great extent guilty of honoring the Word above the Spirit as well sadly. Macdonal says elsewhere that the purpose of Scripture is to bring us to Jesus and the Father so we may not the heart of the Father and not for Dogma and Doctrine.
Sorry, this was supposed to be a comment and is turning out into a post…
BTW. Lewis said he never wrote anything that wasn’t influenced by Macdonald, and this may sound sacrilegious, I think I now like Macdonald more than Lewis.
Have a great week sista…
Sorry I meant to say “know the heart of the Fathe”
Sorry I meant to say “know the heart of the Father”