In “The Ragamuffin Gospel”
Brennan Manning calls it a “Crisis of Faith.” It’s sort of a mid-life-crisis
but instead of concerning your age, it concerns your Christianity. I never
thought I’d have one…but I’m having one.
I became a Christian at the
tender age of nine, after Sunday School one morning at the Baptist church of my
childhood. I was convinced of my need for a Savior, and I asked Jesus to become
that for me.
But even before that...I loved
God. I attribute this to the godly grandmother who really raised me until I was
five and my mother got married. My mother worked and we lived with my
grandparents, and my grandmother really was more like my mom. She was a devout,
wonderful, saintly woman of immense prayer and wisdom. The first songs I sang
were Sunday School tunes. I remember bedtime prayers being among the first
words I spoke.
I recall trying to read the Bible
when I was maybe six or seven years old. The KJV was too dry for a little boy,
but I really wanted to read that
book. My mom came to Christ when I was nine, after a small earthquake in the
middle of the night shook her to her core.
We went to church the very next Sunday, and I’ve been going ever since.
I went to a Christian high school
and a Christian college. I can’t recall a time when the Bible didn’t fascinate
me, when reading it and studying it didn’t bring me immense joy, when teaching
it to a group or sharing it one on one wasn’t a burning passion.
When I rediscovered my talent for
writing, I also discovered how much I enjoyed writing about my Faith, and how
good I was at it. Not that I broke new theological ground, but that I had a
true gift for explaining timeless truths. I am good at word-pictures and this
is useful in writing about the Faith.
In my life, I have wanted to
pursue only a few differing passions as a vocation. I wanted to play hockey for
the longest time. I love the game but I was realistic about my abilities. I
satisfied myself with a couple of seasons at the collegiate level and that was
that. I wanted to build a construction business and did that for a while. It
pacified my creativity but it’s a tough racket. I succeeded in the mortgage
business, mostly by default. I was very good at it, but it wasn’t my passion.
No matter what I was pursuing
vocationally, there remained beneath the surface a deep desire to have some
sort of ministry. I’d always thought –since I was a teenager—that, given my
talents and gifts, I would be in ministry full time. That was always my goal
and I have wrestled, for forty years now, with the feeling of shame,
disappointment, and failure, that I never did achieve this goal.
I feel like I’ve failed God
somehow, even though I’ve always been willing, and I have literally failed to
achieve all that I might have in my other pursuits, because part of my heart
was always looking for this phantom ministry opportunity.
For the past couple of months, I’ve
been trying to put this to bed once and for all. I think I finally have. I
have, and it’s caused this Crisis of Faith I now find myself mired in. I’ve
accepted the fact that there is no ministry door opening for me. Not full-time
anyway. But it’s more than that. I’ve watched, especially over the last four
years, as the Evangelical world of which I was a part, has become increasingly
liberal, increasingly more godless, more commercially driven, more
man-glorifying and Jesus ignoring. Oh, they’ll tell you they love Jesus,
alright. But not the Jesus of the bible. He’s the Jesus of their own creation.
The social justice warrior Jesus who’s only attribute is love. (at the expense
of all other attributes of God…holiness, righteousness, etc.) Jesus is just a
slightly better version of all of them, now. He’s no longer the holy son of
God, who demands a pure, righteous life as a result of the salvation He
bestows. Jesus wears skinny jeans. Jesus doesn’t believe in sin anymore. Jesus
doesn’t demand change. Jesus confronts nobody about anything…except for
capitalists. Neo-Jesus hates capitalists and wealthy people. He hates America
and commands American Christians to walk around in sackcloth and apologies for
being Americans. He hates Donald Trump and his followers had better not have
voted for Trump or else they can just stop following right now.
Skinny-jeans Jesus wears trendy
clothes, because otherwise He wouldn’t be relevant. He has a stupid, hipster
beard because He isn’t sure whether he’s a man or not. In fact, nobody ever
explained to him what manliness was, so he grew that beard because
biologically, men can grow beards and so if he grows one, it must mean He’s a
man. Neo-Jesus thinks homosexuality is okay. Not that He loves gay people…because
all Christians do that, (the real ones at least) no…He literally thinks it’s
okay. He thinks the Bible is wrong on the matter. He feels abortion is a matter
of “deep personal conviction” (Neo-Jesus’ buddy Carl Lentz told us this so it
has to be true) not murder, like Traditional Jesus said.
I’ve watched as we’ve created a
star-making system within Christendom. If a “pastor” draws big numbers it HAS
to be because he’s “anointed.” (A word so dreadfully overused, but poorly
understood as to almost be criminal) If he tells great stories, and makes us
feel warm and gooey inside, like a delicious gluten-free, vegan, Tollhouse
cookie that our non-gender-specific parent baked or us when we were kids…they
tell us he’s a great preacher. He lives in an enormous house, drives an
expensive car, dresses like he’s twenty-five (even though he’s forty-five) and
uses cool words. He’s known on all the social media outlets, but anonymous in
Hell. He’ll greet you warmly if you’re famous, but ignore you if you’re
everyman. He says less and less about the Gospel, salvation, sin, virtue,
circumspect living, and anxious, desperate prayer…and more and more about
success, blessings, prosperity, “love” (as he defines it) and social justice.
He’s never experienced a hardship
and yet he is an expert on enduring them. He’s never spent an entire night in
prayer, but he writes books on the matter. He can’t wait to drop the name of
the entertainment idol who goes to his church, or the other famous Flockstars
with whom he associates, but he couldn’t tell you anything at all about the guy
who cleans the church during the week, or the kid who cuts his grass.
These people own the Christian
media outlets and they have no need for guys like me with dirt under our
fingernails, spit in our speech, and mud on our shoes. We wear regular Levis,
construction boots that have actually seen a job site, and we’re man enough to
not need a beard. (My bearded friends who sport them because they like them,
notwithstanding) We’ve been broken and bent. We’ve cried out in the wolf hour
and waited for an answer, and when no answers came, we soldiered on because we
know Whom we have believed. We didn’t lick our wounds. We didn’t cry like woman
and ask lisping existential questions of ourselves. We didn’t get a stress
puppy or a facial. We sucked it up, got up off the ground, trusted that God was
Who he said He was and we kept going. Our stories are born in actual life
experience…not second-hand observation. We grant fame and honor to those worthy
of it…not to some sawed-off pop singer who acts like a boorish frat boy but
suddenly wants to “just love everyone” and call that Christianity. (COUGH
Justin Beiber COUGH) We aren’t enamored with the famous, but the faithful.
There is no place left for guys
like me. Not really. We’re offensive. We’re too rigid about things like truth, righteousness,
holiness, purity. We’re too patriotic, too American, too conservative. The
Neo-Jesus says we can’t be followers if we’re those things.
Well…Neo-Jesus wins. I can’t walk
this world with this battle in my soul anymore. I can’t look at the state of
Christianity as it is currently constructed, and see any place at all where I
fit. Everywhere I look, I see the same faces clawing and grasping for power.
Demanding that their opinion be adhered to. Not just heard…followed. Demanding that to be a Christian (as they define it) you
must vote this way, act this way, listen to this music, read this book, (not
the Bible of course) participate in this social cause, eat no meat, fell no
trees, burn no fossil fuels…
I can’t stand the internal
battle. So…I surrender. I’m not giving up my Faith, I never could. Jesus is no
mere historical figure to me. He is everything. But these people have ruined it
for me and I want no more to do with them. There is no place for me in their
world, and so be it. I fear more and more real Christians will begin coming to
this conclusion. Once the power brokers within modern evangelicalism realized
they could actually steer their culture…they headed right for the rocks. I’m
jumping ship.
I wanted to write faith-based
books, and speak to churches and Christian organizations. But now I see that
only as futility. It ain’t gonna happen and I’m not going to try any more.
Neo-Jesus and his followers win. I surrender.
I feel better already. Not really,
but I’ll keep telling myself that until it’s true.
