Great Expectations

While chatting with a friend and her husband in the middle of Chuck E. Cheese, children racing by to the sounds of 100 video games bleeping and whirring, her husband asked if she had told me that her father had recently become an atheist. This not being the usual content of a Chuck E. Cheese conversation, it took me a minute to process that before they began their story.

Apparently, despite having attended church all his life and even avidly studying his Bible for many years....he has recently, and without much warning, decided that he no longer believes anything. Not a single speck of what he used to believe.  He has been writing e-mails to all of his friends and family members, desperate to convince them of their religious folly. He has become an atheist evangelist--his own self-description.

The only reason he gives for his sudden change of heart is the existence of so much suffering in the world.

There wasn't much for me to say to my friend.  I said I was sorry and hoped that, maybe after some time had passed, her father would become slightly less gung-ho in his approach.  What could I say to her?  As a Christian, it's a devastating and bewildering blow to her and to the image she had of her father.

One of the things her father told her was that he was happier than he had ever been.  He didn't worry about things anymore. I understood what he meant, and wondered if it might have something to do with his attraction to atheism in the first place.  If God is out of the equation, the world can still be an evil, awful place, but at least we wouldn't be pressed to find some noble, God-inspired reason for it.

When DH and I were first married, I had a certain narrative in my head about our relationship and how God had brought us together.  I truly believed that there were very specific reasons that we had found each other. These reasons were quite spiritualized and heady. They made me feel as if I was on the right track with my life and that I knew exactly what it meant to know God's will.

Fast forward a couple years.  I realized that I had been dead wrong.  The story in my head did not match up with reality. This is not an indictment of DH, or me, or our marriage.  We are quite happy and usually work through our marital issues in a relatively healthy way. However, when trouble hit us early in our marriage, it was a double blow to me.  Not only was I having to struggle with the normal marital strains of the newly married, but I also had to come to terms with how off I had been in assigning specific meanings to our relationship.

It shook me to the core to realize that I could be so wrong about ideas of which I had been so certain. I began to question every decision associated with any trace of certainty similar to what I had experienced. Unsettling emotions washed over me.

The intersection of arbitrary expectations and reality lay at the crux of my crisis. I had constructed an unsustainable scenario from my assumptions about God and what it meant to follow Him. 

As I continued talking with my friend, I wondered whether her father had experienced a similar disappointment. When we are told that there is always a "reason for everything" that happens in life, we're put in the position of finding a reason for the most awful things. Inevitably, all our reasons regress back to God: 

God has decided to cause or allow A, B, or C in our lives.  A, B, or C in our lives causes a lot of pain and doesn't seem to have any bright side or purpose to it. We declare that it has a purpose, we just don't know what it is. 

After several years of trying to console ourselves that there is a purpose to A, B, or C, we begin to suspect that it really is purposeless.

Our disillusionment isn't based on the terrible things that happen, it's based on the idea that terrible things shouldn't happen. When they do happen, we have to resolve the dissonance caused by our misplaced expectations.

I have changed the way I look at my life.  I try to never fall back into assuming that there is a specific reason for circumstances in my life.  Instead, I try and think about how God would want me to respond to the circumstances I encounter...whatever they might be.

It's a subtle difference, but it has an enormous effect on how I see God, the world and myself. Releasing the need to determine the cause and meaning of every misfortune in life is freeing.

I'm curious if my friend's father had considered altering his view of God, rather than rejecting Him outright. 

The Damage We Do To Each Other

"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us."

--Samuel Johnson

I have been struggling with my faith for the last year or so. That is not to say that I am struggling with the concept of God or whether there actually is one. Instead, I have been struggling with what it means to be a follower of Christ. Which of the many beliefs that have been imparted to me over the years, through some sort of spiritual osmosis, do I actually believe...and why? I have never been one to accept part and parcel of whatever someone has told me to believe. I have always had the need to look over things for myself and come to my own conclusions, which sometimes were the same and sometimes drastically different from those around me.

When we left our church about two and a half years ago, it left me with a lot of collateral damage. Although there had been a tipping point, which ultimately made us make the painful decision to leave, things had been brewing for about 6-9 months previously. The church had started pursuing a doctrine of deliverance from demons that was disturbing on many levels. This particular doctrine held that all the Old Testament generational curses still had effect in the present world. One could be a Christian and simultaneously controlled by a demonic force of some sort. Careful to try and not run everybody out the doors in a mad stampede, the leadership pastor labeled this control "oppression", avoiding the highly charged term "possession".

The teaching went something like this--If you, or your parents/grandparents, had participated in some sort of occult activity, or habitual sin, then you had some sort of "hook" within you that could be used by Satan to "oppress" you and cause you to struggle with the same sin or let Satan have a portion of control within your life.

It was based on Exodus 20:4b--

"I the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me."

and Deuteronomy 5:9--

"You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me"

An intricate theology was built around these verses, replete with detailed descriptions of "soul ties", how to rid people of them, and what might happen when praying for people who were demonically "oppressed". Needless to say, such a dramatic turn in theology at a non-charismatic, biblically conservative, evangelical church caused enormous problems. It wasn't helped by the fact that the pastor had begun teaching these principles in a very under-the-radar kind of way, beginning with a small session on Sunday nights, and later beginning a prayer group on Wednesday nights to implement this new spiritual practice of praying for people's "deliverance". He was very careful in the way he introduced things to the congregation. Some would say he was being cautious, others would say manipulative was the right term.

I have come to believe the latter is closer to the truth.

Once the pastor had developed a core group, who had come to accept this new teaching, he was emboldened to begin introducing it in the normal Sunday morning service; even inviting the proponent and originator of this particular doctrine to use our church as a "school" for teaching lay leaders how to "deliver" others in their respective congregations. That was pretty much the beginning of the end as far as the health of the church went.

As the rest of the congregation became aware of the intricacies of the teaching being presented, several important questions began to arise.

1. Does the regeneration of a Christian break all claims that Satan has on an individual?

2. Is the individual Christian really at the mercy of the actions of their forefathers?

3. Is it true that committing some type of sin "opens the door" for Satanic influence and control in the life of the believer?

There were many more nuanced questions, but these were the biggies.

What made things worse was that the congregation had been covertly divided. In any church, there will always be members who disagree on doctrinal issues. Most of the time, they are not important in the big picture and there is room for a certain amount of freedom in the individual's life and spiritual bent. As long as members don't make it their mission to "convert" everybody into their identical way of believing, peace and diversity can be had. Of course, the essentials of Christianity must be held in common--Jesus as the Son of God and Savior, Sin, Forgiveness. A standard reading of the Apostles' Creed or even the Nicene Creed conveys the roots at the core of Christianity. Anything more detailed than that is usually up for grabs.

The pastor's decision to make this a new article of belief for the church, and any newly appointed elders, and to have certain ministries dominated by these questionable teachings had upset the balance of co-existence. Also, it is hard to argue against a teaching that states that believers can be controlled and influenced by demonic forces. Objecting to the teaching instantly places you in a category of a possibly "oppressed" individual being used to cause strife and division in God's Kingdom. Nothing like head games to cast doubt on other people, their motives, and their spiritual state--a very useful tool in the hands of someone pushing an agenda.

The problem with all of this was that by the time the teaching had wormed its way into the church, several couples/families who were devoted, godly, salt-of-the earth kind of people had fully embraced it. Their motives were pure. They were loving people. How do you look people you respect--and have come to know over the course of seven years--in the eye and say that they have bought into something that is not only wrong, but damaging to the church and to an individual's spiritual life? How do you pray with people who think you are less spiritual or demonically influenced because you haven't accepted the "truth" they believe in? How do you listen to a pastor who has begun to use the pulpit manipulatively, in one sermon comparing those who reject his new teaching to the people of Gerasenes who asked Jesus to leave when he healed some demon-possessed men.

You can't. You worry about what visitors who just walked into the church are thinking. You wonder how an elder board, half of which doesn't believe the teaching, can be persuaded to sign a statement that says that everything is hunky-dory. You wince as a member is asked to leave because he is a vocal opponent of the teaching. So, you make the painful decision to leave people you care about because you no longer feel comfortable inviting people to the church you attend. You walk out the door, your spirit torn asunder and bloody from the most disillusioning experience in your life. You lick your wounds.

The damage my faith has sustained has been extensive. It isn't based in my belief in God, or disappointment with my life. I do not falter when things go wrong, because I have no expectation that following Christ means that I will never suffer or never have obstacles to overcome. However, my faith in others' abilities to "hear from God" or "be led by the Holy Spirit" has taken a huge beating. I don't even completely trust myself and my own experiences at times. I look back at things I have believed or said and question which ones were "true" and which ones were merely some form of emotional rationalization.

It's been hard. There have been a few things I have flip-flopped on--decisions that sometimes seem providential, and at other times mere flukes. I have had to rethink what it means to be "inspired" and what the purpose of my experiential spiritual life is. I'm still uncovering and examining the layers within and without me.

I have come to the conclusion that the most damaging thing to most people's faith is not our relationship with God, but the relationship we have with other Christians.