Complicated Evangelical

(This is an article I wrote for the Spirited Exchanges group in 2009)

Frequently throughout my life as a Christian moving in evangelical circles, I have felt as though I were on the outside, standing in the rain-swept darkness looking through the window at those gathered happily round the fireside. Wanting to join them, I nevertheless have been unable to find a door which would open for me. I have blamed myself for this sense of not belonging, and have felt incredibly guilty.

However, over the years a number of costly realisations have made me increasingly comfortable in being who I am as God’s child.

Accepting what has happened in the past

I have learned to accept that I was wounded as a child by the way some aspects of Christian faith were communicated to me. I recognise that my personality made me susceptible to this wounding, and also that the words which I experienced as pain were spoken in love, but nevertheless the wounds were real. It was easy to assume that it was ‘my fault’ that I was wounded, since I had somehow been unable to exercise the right kind of faith, and it has been liberating to accept that I was not to blame.

I expect I was assured as a young child of God’s love for me, but what I absorbed was a sense that I needed to be born again, and, crucially, that God would not be pleased with me until I had joined the glad company of the saved. However, my attempts to connect with God, my urgent prayers seemed to be to be unheard, and therefore futile. Experiencing nothing of the unforgettably joyful transformation which I believed conversion to be, I continued as child and teenager to feel myself remote from a silent, disapproving God.

I was also wounded by my church’s teaching about ‘the Rapture’, the coming of Jesus prior to the end of time to take true believers to himself. The rest of humanity would be ‘left behind’ to face a God-forsaken anguish, ‘the Great Tribulation.’  How many times when my parents were not where I expected them to be was I gripped with terror that the Lord had come and I had been left? More than once, driven by thus fear, I called up someone in the church, only to put the phone down without speaking when I heard their voice, massively reassured that, after all the Lord had not come. Not that day anyway.

And there was the self-inflicted wound of yielding to the quiet pressure to say I had been ‘born again’, and living a lie for several years as a teenager, pretending to be a true believer in my church’s terms when I felt in my heart that I was deceiving them. And the deepest wound of all was not being believed when I confessed to this hypocrisy. Each Sunday I took the bread and wine in trembling expectation of instant judgement.

At last, when I was 21, oppressed by my own anxieties, by the domestic political crisis in late 1973 and by that autumn’s Arab-Israeli war which suggested to those around me that the Lord must surely come soon, some words from the Bible awakened in me. Responding to them, I received a sense of God’s love and acceptance which brought significant changes to my life, though I still struggled with baggage from the past. I began reading the Bible conscientiously and immersed myself in the printed sermons of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and there were times when God seemed very close.

Accepting my personality

A second costly realisation was that I must accept my personality. It always puzzled me that while those sitting in the pews around me seemed to find church services, sermons and hymn-singing meaningful, almost always these left me completely untouched. I occasionally remarked in my perplexity that the only services I felt in any way blessed by were those in which I myself was taking part.

Give me comfortable space, a book, pen and paper and the creative voice of God plants thoughts in my heart. But in church, sitting on hard pews, surrounded by the rest of the congregation, distracted by other people’s singing and speaking it’s almost impossible to focus on God. I came to realise that the way church is structured meets the needs of extroverts, those who draw energy from people around them, while doing little for introverts who encounter God as, alone, they find healing space.

More specifically, I had to accept that I am prone to fairly severe anxiety and depression which I understand in retrospect made me susceptible to the wounds I suffered as a child. ‘Very hard to treat,’ said the pessimistic psychiatrist whom I visited when in my early 30s. But my GP identified an antidepressant which I have taken on a low dosage ever since, and which ameliorates many of the symptoms, though I still struggle with a tendency to negativism and a low-grade melancholy which dulls my sense of God.

Accepting what was already mine

I realised, thirdly, that while in evangelical circles there is much emphasis on longing for more of God for me the emphasis should be on recognising and appreciating what I already have. When I was a teenager in the 60s, we heard whispers of the charismatic renewal which was under way in some churches, and it seemed both fascinating and alien.  Twenty years later, charismatic expressions of Christianity had become more mainstream, and the church I was attending had a visit from the members of a ministry team from a well-known Baptist charismatic church who encouraged us to seek the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Later I attended sessions on the same theme at the evangelical festival Spring Harvest. On both occasions I called out to God to receive his Spirit, and on both occasions, it seemed that God was absolutely silent.

‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ said someone at Spring Harvest who, like me, had stood up to receive the Spirit. ‘Yes,’ I lied, utterly miserable. The next day I sought help from one of the leaders of the session, who did little more to help than sending me off to read Catherine Marshall’s book Something more. But gradually I came to understand that I should focus not on seeking something more, but on embracing what I already had as God’s unique, precious, grace-blessed son. Even though my sense of his presence was intermittent, even though I heard his creative voice relatively infrequently, I was nonetheless secure in his love.

Accepting the questions

More recently, I have also come to realise that it’s OK to question evangelical assumptions. Until I approached the age of 40, I had no issues with traditional evangelical understandings of theology. But I began to find myself confronted by questions demanding answers. Is the Bible’s portrayal of an eternal hell truly compatible with the Bible’s portrayal of a just and loving God – is infinite punishment a just sentence for finite sins? Does the traditional Christian theology of suffering - which regards it as the sad consequence of human sinfulness – adequately explain why a God whose heart throbs with love for humanity does nothing when confronted with a dying, malnourished child? Is it just to condemn people who are gay to the very core to a life of celibacy? What does it mean to say that the Bible is inspired when the editorial processes are very evident, and it looks on the face of it like any other human book?

I shrank from questions like these, but I knew that if I was to be true to myself I couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist. In the process of searching for answers, I realised that those other, less conservative ways of looking at theology which previously I’d assumed were beyond the pale might be equally valid ways of thinking about God.

Accepting that others are on the same journey

It was important for me to realise that in this journeying, in this questioning, I was not alone. Many of the books which helped and affirmed me on my journey will be familiar to readers of Spirited Exchanges. I remember standing in the kitchen reading Dave Tomlinson’s Post-evangelical, punching the air and exclaiming ‘Yes!’ in sheer joy at discovering a kindred spirit. Later I found Brian MacLaren’s A new kind of Christian and its sequels equally affirming. One author whose work particularly helped me was Dr Anne Townsend a former missionary in Thailand and Director of Care Trust who described in an article in The Tablet in November 1996 and in her book Faith without Pretending her growing sense of mismatch between the person she tried to be outwardly as she struggled to conform to evangelical expectations and the person she actually was.

Ultimately, as she writes in The Table, she joined ‘former evangelical Christians from the more fundamentalist end of evangelicalism who have recently accepted the terror, isolation and guilt of moving away from their familiar religious pathways.’

A further book which helped was Alan Jamieson’s A churchless faith which introduced me to the idea that there are stages in our faith development, and that one stage involves an agonised questioning of all we have held to be true. This wilderness battle can, however, ultimately gift us a deeply-rooted set of beliefs which may be similar to those we held earlier, or may be radically different, but in either case are truly personal and wholly-owned – since what we believe we have tested and proved for ourselves.

It was good to find such fellow-travellers through the medium of the printed word, because it seemed to me that few of the folk I knew would understand the journey I had embarked on.

Accepting it’s OK to be real

The final thing I realised was the importance of being real, of not pretending to be what I am not but rather openly sharing with others my traveller’s tales. Yet this is far from easy. Life would be much more straightforward if I were an uncomplicated evangelical, but I’m not, and I never will be.

I still wrestle sometimes with fear and guilt and doubt. I still occasionally wonder if God is really there, and if my long struggle to be a person of authentic faith has been worthwhile. When heaven is silent I find myself questioning from time to time whether atheism or at least agnosticism would not be a more credible position.

But then come those quiet whispers in my heart which I’ve learned to identify as the voice of God; or some words or thoughts from the Bible suddenly come alive; or I look again at the evidence for Christ’s resurrection and am reminded that something inexplicable took place that first Easter morning; or I feel a stirring within me in the difficult days prompting me to choose goodness and truth;  or I wonder again how I with my history of brokenness ever attracted a wife, or coped as a father, or succeeded in my career, and again I realise that marriage and parenthood and work are precious God-given gifts and am convinced once more  that God is, and has been and always will be with me.

I have come to realise that while I’ve been standing looking through the window into the chapel where my evangelical brothers and sisters meet, if I lift my head I see that we are all part of a bigger family secure beneath the dome of a great cathedral whose walls of love shelter all who call upon God in the name of Jesus.