Author: Through Grace

I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12). I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ. 1 John 4:7-8 7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. 10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

Questions, Doubts, and Disbelief… Not the same

“Doubter…” “Just like doubting Thomas…” I heard those types of statements enough. Doubt was bad. As in near blasphemy, you’ll-go-straight-to-hell bad. Doubt led to disbelief. Doubt came from questions. Therefore questions were bad. Doubt was worse. Disbelief… well, don’t think about it. And do not ever ask questions. Because questions lead to disbelief.

Questions, doubt, and disbelief loomed. Ignore the questions. Always have THE answers. Think in blacks and whites. Questions lurk in the gray areas. And questions lead you astray. They lead to disbelief. Don’t ask questions.

Where in the Bible is it written that we shouldn’t ask questions? The Bereans were praised for asking questions. Paul and David both indicated they had questions, and in David’s case, a LOT of questions. Job had questions. Yet all three are “good people” in the Bible. No one ever called David a doubter. They must have been reading from a different set of Psalms than me. And Job… I always kind of wondered how Job got away with questioning God like he did. He asked God some pretty hard, pretty accusing questions right to his face, if you will. I’ve never heard him referred to as a doubter.

Even Thomas, though he’s called a doubter now. We heard sermons about how Jesus rebuked him. However, in John 20, this is what happens:
26 Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
27 Then Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and look at My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Jesus made a special trip for Thomas. He invited him to touch the wounds, even to put his fingers in them. Yes, he tells Thomas to stop doubting, but he doesn’t rebuke him for having doubted. He simply tells him to stop doubting. Yes, he goes on to say, 29 … “Because you have seen Me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Maybe that could be construed as a rebuke to some, but it seems like a very mild rebuke if it’s a rebuke at all. He doesn’t say “bad for you for doubting. Bad for you that you only believe now.” I don’t see that at all.

There are places in the gospels where Jesus says “oh ye of little faith.” True. Over time I’ve begun to see that as less of a rebuke. Maybe it was said with some humor. Or a sigh. Or maybe with a bit of irony. But it wasn’t something Jesus called the Pharisees… it was something he said to those closest to him, to the one who got out of the boat to walk on water, to the ones out on the lake with Jesus in the middle of the night in a storm, to those who’d just divided a few loaves and fish among five thousand and then picked up baskets full of leftovers. Sometimes it was the precursor to a miracle, and others it followed soon after one. And from a search in an online Bible, it appears that it may be something he said far fewer times than I thought from all the sermons on it that he must have said it. (Mt 6, 8, 14, 16, 17 and matching stories in the other gospels.) That’s just FIVE times. Five times in three years, or five times in 28 chapters. Including Peter sinking after he started walking on the water to Jesus. However, even if you want to take those five instances as rebuke of the disciples doubt, it still gives hope to us doubters… because Jesus obviously didn’t give up on them even when they did doubt. So there’s hope for us as well when we do, no matter what was yelled from our pulpits.

Doubt isn’t bad, and neither are questions. Both actually take faith. It takes faith (or absolute desperation) to ask questions about God without fearing the consequences. And neither leads to disbelief. Not really. But what about disbelief? Surely disbelief is bad. Except I’m not so sure in all cases it is. Sometimes we need disbelief to unbelieve some wrong things. Wrong things about God, the Bible, or even ourselves. And disbelief in those cases, as hard as it may be to accept, may even be a gift.

During the process of leaving my unhealthy church, I realized any God that was omnipotent and omnipresent wouldn’t be afraid of my questions. God is bigger than my doubts. And even before leaving, I came to understand that if truly “…neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (Rom 8:38-39) and if really I was a creature, a person created by God, then even I couldn’t separate me from God’s love. Nothing I can do, no questions I ask, no doubts I encounter, will separate me from God’s love. Nothing. I may not see it, I may not feel it, I may not understand it, but it’s there nonetheless. It doesn’t stop even when I ask the questions that scare good Christians. And God already knows I have them. So I might as well ask.

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Just be Real

It happened again. I shared a part of my personal experience as it relates to Christianity, and felt rejected for doing so.

The fact is, repeatedly I’ve been made to feel, both in my former unhealthy church and in Christian circles since, that I’m not Christian enough. Not in all, but in too many. I’ve been told by pastors that I’d take too much work. Members have questioned and seemingly quarantined me. I asked a question in a Sunday School class that brought abrupt silence. The next Sunday only the teacher and I showed up. I’ve found myself unfriended on Facebook. And again, this is not by members of unhealthy church groups. This is by people who I’ve met since. This is not because I’m “confessing my faults” or participating in some accountability group, either. It’s because someone hurts and I have the audacity to say, “me too.” For me that’s a way of respecting others’ vulnerabilities as they share as well as growing, myself.

So am I not Christian enough? I really don’t care at this point. Judge me for that. I’m sick to death of Christians who believe we should not lie expecting me to live a lie, to hide behind platitudes and facades, pretending to believe just like they say they do, acting like everything is perfect in a fallen world, denying my own sorrow and grief and doubts and failures. So if being a Christian means living a lie, I hope I’m never THAT “Christian.”

I don’t think that’s what real Christianity is. I think that the whole idea that we have to “fake it til we make it” is an insidious lie and one of the most commonly accepted hypocrisies of American churchianity. The fact is we’re human. We live in a world filled with other humans. Sometimes life stinks. Sometimes things go wrong. And when that happens we hurt, we cry, we question. Sometimes we doubt God and sometimes we doubt ourselves. And pretending we don’t doesn’t fix one blessed thing.

God calls us to honesty. Honesty with ourselves and with Him. We don’t do that with fake smiles and hurried “amens” said while brushing all of our questions, fears, and doubts under the nearest rug. My life isn’t a Facebook wall. There are studies that use of Facebook actually has a correlation with increased depression and loneliness, and one of the reasons most cited is that on social media people tend to put only their best face forward. Most people don’t post on social media that they spilled soup down their blouse right before their presentation, that they have had a week of bad hair days, or that their child smeared poop on the wall for the third time that day. They post about the successes and share the cute baby and toddler pictures. The rest they leave off Facebook. Doing this leaves everyone reading their posts with a false impression that their friends’ lives are near perfect while their own are… a mess.

Think of what this might implicate within Christianity. If we only hear about the great services and prayer meetings that everyone else has been in and we privately realize we almost fell asleep in church for the third Sunday in a row, or our Christian friends talk about faith, faith, faith and how sure they are that everything will work out and itemize ALL the times God’s answered their prayers and never admit to the other times… or perhaps worse, if we get strange looks and sense mild shudders if we acknowledge we don’t understand something about God… what does that do? What image does that portray to those who are honest enough to have admitted to themselves that some things just don’t make sense? What does that teach those who aren’t quite ready to be honest, even with themselves?

To me, there are a lot of similarities. So I choose to be honest. And if that makes me not Christian enough, so be it. If people judge me, I’d rather them judge me for my honesty and not the design of my facade, but hopefully more will stop to see the beauty of the nuances that make me who I am and will relate and reflect themselves in their own honesty. Hopefully more will hear my respect of and empathy for their vulnerabilities. Hopefully more will take off their masks, strip away their facades, and enjoy the reality of each imperfect and incomprehensible but still very real moment with me.

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Of Korah, Jezebel, and Job

It’s often difficult for people to resolve the bad stories they heard preached often when they leave unhealthy churches. Korah, the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath, Ananias and Sapphira, Hymenaeus and Philetus, Achan, Jezebel. These are the names that still ring in my ears nine years after leaving. They are individual stories that seem to show God as punishing and demanding (“kill them if they don’t obey”) BUT those don’t match the overarching themes of the Bible. Love does.

It’s scary to not take these stories as threats. We were taught that they showed a big part of who God was. But what can we do with them after leaving?

To me, the ones that stray from the central themes I consider more people’s perspectives or their own desires. They don’t change the central themes, but they show peoples’ struggle to understand, perhaps.

This may be a leap, but this helps me put all the other stories in perspective:
It’s kind of like the book of Job… there are people who quote Job’s comforters as “truth.” And yes, their statements are part of the story, but not the central theme. Their stories don’t give accurate information about God, even though they talk about God. They show something, but they’re not the part that shows God. Job’s part and God’s part show that. Not the comforters.’ It’s the same way with things throughout the Bible. It’s the Jesus part that shows God. The rest shows people trying to understand, some for better, others for worse, but none shows God like the Jesus part. The Jesus part says God is love.

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Study and research, or proving you’re right?

When I first started attending a United Pentecostal Church, I “did my research” to find out if they were right. I looked up the verses they gave me to look up, and they’d accurately quoted them. I did NOT read the surrounding verses or consider the Bible as a whole, however, so I didn’t know they were sometimes taken out of context or twisted to fit their desires. I also searched Bible dictionaries and commentaries for the specific words the UPC used… and thought “Wow, even other churches’ commentaries say the UPC is right, even though they don’t follow it’s teaching!” BUT I never checked to see why those other churches did NOT teach like UPC or why they decided to teach what they did.

I run into the same issues today. I and others too often call something “research” when really what we’re doing is trying to find backing for the thing we WANT to believe, rather than looking for the truth in a matter. We want to be right. We want what we now believe to be right. And we’re willing to go to great lengths to silence opposing opinions, when really if we’re seeking truth, we should be doing the real research of studying out those opposing opinions and why people hold them, and comparing them to our own opinions and our reasons for them.

Cults love to “stack” false teachings by using our desire to justify our opinions and be right with a misconception of what study and research really mean. They’ll use obscure sources (or their own publications) to “prove” that what they’re saying is right, without giving consideration to any other perspective. Others “don’t have the truth” or are “lost”. They don’t have the great “revelations” that we’ve now been presented with [and had better accept or we’ll also be lost]. And so begins the stacking process. Then they do this, for example:

1) there is one God. (of course there is)
2) His name is Jesus. (wait, that’s not quite… but they have plenty of verses and we want to understand, and the verses are in the Bible, so…)
3) And every believer should be baptized in Jesus’ name (I was already baptized. Oh, but that’s not how you should REALLY be baptized. But maybe you don’t have this revelation. But if the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is Jesus, then I HAVE been baptized into Christ. No, not the same. The right words weren’t said. But don’t worry about that right now. Just keep coming and you’ll see…)

And after awhile, a person accepts the teaching as true. And because it’s preached often, even to a room full of people who already believe it, it’s reinforced and reemphasized until it becomes fact in their minds.

When I first started attending a UPC, on several occasions I was told not to ask certain questions or think about certain things yet, because they didn’t want to “confuse” me. The truth of the matter was that if I’d considered them at that point, before they’d finished stacking their false teachings in my mind, I WOULD have seen. I would have seen that what they wanted me to believe wasn’t all Truth at all. If I’d known how to research, how to really study rather than just trying to prove my own point or verify theirs, then I would have grown.

It’s easy to prove a point. There’s always someone, somewhere, who will agree that you can use to back your point. But it’s harder to take years of various opinions and consider and weigh all of them. It’s much harder to read about why people disagree with something you want to believe – to read respectfully, without constantly thinking what they’re saying is all wrong, but actually considering their words. It’s hard, but it’s healthy. And often it’s the only way to untangle unhealthy religious teachings at all.

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Love… ?

Churches, even bad ones, emphasize love. They just put their own spin on what it means to love. We were told they loved us, and that if we loved God and loved Truth, we’d stay in their churches, that if we loved our brothers in Christ, we’d wear long skirts and never look a man in the eye, and that if we loved the pastor, we’d obey him. If we loved… Yet they didn’t know what love was. I Corinthians 13:4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Yet they were jealous, proud, loved talking about all they’d done and hearing others say how wonderful they were. They talked about how only they had the truth and called other churches trash cans. They yelled at people, publicly berated and humiliated them without ever even first hearing both sides of the story or searching for the truth in the issue they were yelling about. They were quick to judge and condemn, and if you did any little thing they could bring up the whole laundry list of everything they knew or thought they knew you’d ever done in a heartbeat no matter how you’d repented. They had no problem throwing people out or creating an atmosphere were certain people couldn’t stay, and immediately washed their hands of those “hell-bound reprobates.”

Love. One simple, yet very misunderstood, word.

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