losing faith

Yesterday, I had the great privilege to attend a lecture by Scot McKnight, he wrote some pretty amazing things about Jesus. Read ‘the Jesus Creed’, it’ll change everything.

He talked about how people convert to Christianity, how people become followers of Jesus. It seems to be a universal process with almost set dimensions, some of which may surprise you. I believe he wrote about it in his book ‘Finding faith, losing faith’ though I must admit I haven’t read it, not heard about it before yesterday.

This is all semi-interesting, but what hit me right between the eyes yesterday, was that he claims (and I think he is right) that people leave the faith the same way they came in! Not backwards though but the same process of conversion with the same 7 dimensions in roughly the same order. So becoming a Christian and leaving or losing your faith follows the same steps.

When you become a Christian you experience some sort of crisis (side note: he discovered after mapping 100’s of stories that this crisis is almost never a realisation of sin...) which leads to a quest which leads to an encounter with some carrier of the gospel which eventually leads to a life in the body of Christ or in the church or whatever you want to call it.

But when you leave, you experience a crisis as well in the forms of questions (he listed five):

1. The infallibility of scripture (for instance when a person discovers that the bible was not dictated by God, but written by human beings)
2. Conflict with science, specifically the evolution vs. creation debate
3. The picture of the ‘cruel’ God in the Old testament
4. Hell.
5. Dodgy Christians.

Then the reason people leave the faith is mainly because these questions aren’t allowed in ‘church’. They are ignored, shouted down or at the best answered with terrible theology or sweet nothings.

Now to be clear, I do not have all the answers and to some of these questions I simply have to say: I don’t know.

Why is it so hard for the ‘church’ to be the least and say I don’t know? Christians should be the perfect agnostics since we can never fully know God. So why pretend that we do?

Probably to keep up appearances, to keep the facade of the powerhouse that in any case has little or nothing to do with Christianity.

If society (and secretly the church) are struggling with these questions and the very role of the church is to engage society (if I read my bible correctly), then the obvious route is to engage and allow these questions, is it not? Why is this news to anyone? Can the church be that disconnected?

Sad to say but yes it can and is.

I do see light though; I see some beautiful churches and communities welcoming questions while patiently and honestly walking alongside these angry almost non believers. We should (I included), leave our masks at the door and sit at the feet of these teachers. Where do you find them? I suppose where you would have found Jesus, where the people are. We need to get out of our buildings and into the streets and on our way there maybe even read a little Dawkins.