Still Not Your Formula

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called Not Your Formula: What a “Personal Relationship with Jesus” Really Means.

Looking back, I still believe every word of it.

In that post, I argued that if a relationship with Jesus is truly personal, it shouldn’t be expected to look exactly the same for everyone. I questioned the tendency within evangelical Christianity to take a phrase that suggests intimacy and individuality and turn it into a checklist of approved beliefs, behaviors, and political affiliations.

At the time, I thought I was writing about conformity. What I didn’t realize was that I was also writing about questions.

Over the past year, I’ve continued to wrestle with faith, scripture, church history, and the complicated relationship between religion and politics.

In the process, I’ve discovered something I didn’t fully appreciate when I wrote that original piece: many people are comfortable with a personal relationship with Jesus right up until it starts asking different questions than theirs.

The Fear I Didn’t Mention

If I’m being honest, one of the things I’ve wrestled with most over the past year isn’t whether I’ve lost my faith. It’s whether other people think I have.

I’ve had conversations with family members. I’ve had conversations with friends. Dawn and I have talked about it while driving down Texas highways on weekend road trips.

Some of those conversations have included genuine concern that I may be drifting away from God altogether.

I understand why it might: I no longer attend church and I’ve abandoned many of the interpretations I was taught growing up.  I’ve also become skeptical of certainty masquerading as faith and I’ve questioned doctrines I once defended.

I’ve openly discussed things that many Christians consider settled matters. From the outside, I can see how that might look like someone walking away. But from the inside, it doesn’t feel that way at all.

In fact, I sometimes think the opposite is true.

The Questions Didn’t Kill My Faith

One of the great assumptions of the religious culture I grew up in was that questions were dangerous because questions led to doubt. Doubt led to compromise. Compromise led to unbelief. So questions were often treated as threats rather than opportunities.

The problem is that life doesn’t cooperate with that formula.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that many of the things I was taught weren’t conclusions. They were interpretations. And interpretations deserve scrutiny.

Not because truth is fragile. Because truth is worth pursuing.

If God gave us minds capable of reasoning, questioning, and learning, I find it difficult to believe that He expects us never to use them.

What Started This Reflection

This entire train of thought began after I read about a proposed bill in North Carolina that critics argued could allow deadly force to be used in defense of an unborn fetus. The political details aren’t really the point in this post.

But, what struck me was how easily people can move from an interpretation of scripture to a position with profound real-world consequences.

That realization brought me back to a question I’ve been asking for years: how certain should we be before we start telling other people how to live? Or legislating what they can do? Or claiming that God unquestionably agrees with our position?

I’m not an abortion advocate.  Personally, I would encourage my daughters to carry a pregnancy to term under most circumstances. But I also recognize how complicated these issues become once they leave the realm of theology and enter the lives of real people.

And because it is not ultimately my body, it’s not my decision to make or offer any unsolicited advice on.

And that’s exactly why certainty makes me nervous. Not because I don’t believe in truth, but because I’ve seen what happens when people become convinced they no longer need to ask questions.

What I’ve Actually Lost

Over the past several years, I have lost some things.

I’ve lost confidence in certain institutions. I’ve lost confidence in some religious leaders. I’ve lost confidence in simplistic answers. I’ve lost confidence in the idea that every problem can be solved by quoting a verse out of context. I’ve lost confidence in systems that reward certainty more than humility.

But those losses are not the same thing as losing faith.

What hasn’t changed is my fascination with Jesus. Or my belief that grace matters. Or my concern for justice, compassion, and human dignity. And, what also hasn’t changed is my desire to understand scripture honestly rather than merely defend interpretations I inherited.

Mostly, though, what hasn’t changed is my conviction that relationships matter more than religious institutions.

In many ways, I think that’s why I continue to wrestle. Because I still care. And people who stop caring don’t spend their evenings reading about church history or wrestling with Greek words like ekklesia.

They don’t write thousands of words about faith They don’t spend road trips discussing theology with their spouse. The questions remain because the relationship remains.

What Has Changed

But if I’m completely honest, my relationship with God has changed.

When I was younger, I often felt like I was being trained as a salesman for Team God. God was the manager. The church was the company. And my job was to get out on the road and convince as many people as possible that our product was better than everyone else’s.

I don’t mean that cynically. I enuinely believed what I was taught. I wanted people to know what I knew. I wanted them to experience what I had experienced.

But over time, I found myself asking questions that didn’t fit neatly into the sales pitch.

• What made my tribe right and everyone else’s wrong?
• Why was I so confident that God favored my interpretation over countless others?
• Why did sincere people from different traditions arrive at different conclusions while claiming to follow the same Jesus?

And perhaps most importantly:

• Was I more interested in understanding God, or in defending a system?

Somewhere along the way, my focus shifted. I became less interested in selling the program and more interested in understanding the One the program claimed to represent.

I stopped feeling responsible for winning arguments. I became more interested in asking better questions. Less interested in proving I was right. More interested in discovering where I might be wrong. Less concerned with defending my tribe. More concerned with understanding the God my tribe claimed to know.

That shift has made my faith more complicated but it has also made it more honest.

The Relationship Test

One of the reasons I continue to reject formulaic Christianity is that it doesn’t match reality.

My relationship with Dawn is different from my relationship with my children. My relationship with my coworkers is different from my relationship with my friends.

Every meaningful relationship in my life has evolved over time. Some have grown deeper. Some have grown quieter. Some have survived disagreement. Some have required difficult conversations.

None of them have remained frozen.

So why would my relationship with God be the only relationship that isn’t allowed to grow, change, or mature? Why would the relationship that matters most be the one relationship where questions are forbidden?

Still Not Your Formula

When I wrote Not Your Formula a year ago, I argued that personal should mean personal and I still believe that. If anything, I believe it more strongly now.

My relationship with Jesus doesn’t look like it did when I was twenty years old. It doesn’t look like it did when I was a pastor. It doesn’t look like it does for some of my friends and family members. But it is still mine.

And maybe that’s what has been so difficult for some people to understand.

Questioning isn’t the absence of the relationship. For me, questioning has become part of it.

I don’t know where every question will lead. I don’t have every answer. I suspect I never will. But I’ve reached a place where I’m less afraid of asking the wrong questions and more afraid of pretending I don’t have them. Because if a relationship with God is truly personal, then honesty should have a place in it too.

And if grace is really grace, then it ought to be big enough to handle the questions.

Grace and grit to you! –LK