Lately I've been feeling the desire to get back to God. Now now now, let me unwrap that statement. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am feeling the desire to explore God, religion, and spirituality once more. Specifically, I am taking another look at the life and meaning of the person Jesus. This may come as a surprise to many. Let me explain for those who don't know me very well.
I grew up in a small southwestern Ontario village of about 1,000 people. Each Sunday morning my family and I would drive the twenty minutes to our small fundamentalist evangelical Christian church in order to attend Sunday school and church service. Then as I moved into my early teens I would attend Youth Bible Study on Wednesday night, as well as a youth group activity night on Fridays. Of key importance when I was growing up, and throughout my time within fundamentalist evangelicalism, was the need to "accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour." On Sunday mornings we were taught that because of the sin of Adam and Eve, each human being since then was tagged with original sin. Without accepting Jesus, they said, we were destined to spend eternity in a damning Hell. Let me say here, looking back at 41 years of age, that the emphasis was on "right belief," as in correct theological beliefs, as well as a heavy emphasis on the afterlife. Occasionally my family would attend special evangelistic rallies, often called crusades. It was at one of these crusades in April of 1986, when I was 7 years old, that I responded to an altar call by the evangelist and repented of my sin (I'm not sure which sin I was in need of repenting of at 7 years of age), and I prayed to accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour. Perhaps most clearly from that night I remember a Christian counselor asking me backstage after the event was over what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I responded by saying I wanted to be a fireman. Probably a good idea with all the messages of hell that I was receiving!
During high school I was heavily involved in singing on church worship teams and was also involved in the Christian students club at my high school. I was a rather serious teenager at times. While others were involved in sports or music clubs, I would find myself hunkered down at my local coffee shop with my journal and inevitably a book on Christian theology. It was during this time of my life that the heavy presence of guilt came into play and would wreak havoc on me until I was approximately 21 years old. You see, I was taught and believed that not only did I have to accept the package deal - that I was a sinner who needed to accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour - but also that I needed to live a good enough Christian life. This meant, among other things, reading my Bible enough, praying regularly, and evangelizing my non-Christian friends. As a teenage boy, however, I became obsessed with the need for absolute sexual purity. I was taught that not only was sex before marriage a "big sin," but lusting after someone in my mind was also pretty much an abomination. Try telling a 15 year old boy who is beginning to have sexual feelings to basically shut those feelings and thoughts off; it was impossible. Still, I thought something was gravely wrong with me, and that despite having accepted Jesus at age 7, I was still on my way to Hell if I didn't immediately and continually confess my sin to God. So it was that, as young boys do, I would sneak into my parents room when they weren't around and gaze at the beautiful women in the Sears catalogue swimsuit section (as time went on and the internet became all the rage, I would eventually find more tawdry images to view.) And so it became that I would find myself "sinning" and then getting on my knees to ask for forgiveness from God on hundreds if not thousands of occasions. This played into my growing struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder as well, which I might touch on a bit later.
After high school I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, so I took a year off. After that, I moved to a large central Ontario city to attend a small fundamentalist evangelical Bible college. My goal for most of my three years there was to become a missionary - that is, to travel either somewhere within Canada or elsewhere to bring the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to the unsaved. Meanwhile, the weight of guilt that I had felt in high school only grew, to the point where I had convinced myself that God had kicked me out of his family and I was no longer saved from Hell. This was during my third year of college and I was in disastrous psychological and emotional shape as a result. Somehow, someway, after several weeks of this guilt I decided I couldn't live with the weight of it anymore and I decided that I would jettison the guilt and despair as best as I could, no matter what that meant for me spiritually. It was around the same time that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I allowed myself to begin to doubt the major beliefs or tenets of fundamentalist Christianity. I asked myself several questions: Was Jesus Christ the only way to get in God's good books? Was there really a Hell that God condemned everyone who didn't believe in Jesus to? Were gays and lesbians really sinning by simply loving one another? After much thought and wrestling, my answer to all of these questions was a resounding "No." This was a problem for someone attening a fundamentalist evangelical Bible college, so I told myself I would "take a year off" and think about such things and then return to my program. I never returned.
After leaving the college I remained in the same city and worked as a bartender and server in a hotel, and while I still called myself a Christian in name for a few years, by approximately 2004 or 2005 I jettisoned that word as well. I then entered what I call my teenage rebellion years, only I was in my early to mid twenties now. I didn't want to hear anything about God or Jesus or the Bible, probably due to the amount of guilt that I had experienced within Christianity for my whole life up til then. I began to drink too much as well.
It was after a few years that, while I still didn't want much to do with the Christianity I had grown up with, I began to miss the community aspect that belonging to a church had provided. So it was that one Sunday I made my way into a more liberal, mainline Christian church. The minister and people there were very nice, but the service still, naturally, continued to use a lot of "Jesus-y" language. I knew that this church wasn't for me. The next Sunday I stumbled out of bed and walked the 15 minutes or so to the Unitarian Universalist congregation. I had probably only heard of them through a World (read: false) Religions course at the Bible college. However, within 15 minutes or so of being there, I knew I had found my new religious home. It fascinated me that people of various faiths, or in some cases no faith at all could come together each Sunday and form a caring, loving community. I have called this congregation my religious home from that time til now, occasionally involving myself in classes, singing or speaking in Sunday services or our annual coffeehouse, and briefly on a Social Action committee. I made a slight detour for a couple of years to the local positive-thinking Unity congregation (which differs quite a lot from Unitarian Universalism), but I always came back to the UU congregation.
Over the years I have kept up my interest in the Christian religion, though from an outsiders view. I admittedly have troubled and even alienated certain members of my family and some old friends who remain in the fundamentalist evangelical Christian faith. This has been due to the fact that I have often been highly critical, even angry toward the faith that I grew up with.
All of this brings me to today. Over the last several years I have been made increasingly aware of something called progressive Christianity, which is considerably more liberal than fundamentalist evangelicalism. I hesitate to call progressive Christianity "new" however, because if one digs a little deeper into it, many of its doctrines and ideas point to a way of following Jesus that has been around since the days that Christ walked on earth. There are several elements of progressive Christianity that intrigue and fascinate me, including:
- Within progressive Christianity there is more of an emphasis on a way of life that follows Jesus, rather than "believing the right things about Jesus and God."
- There doesn't seem to be the strong emphasis on "selling the whole package" of sin and salvation to people who don't believe the same things as fundamentalist Christians do. I think that many progressive Christians would rather that people be attracted by the counter-cultural way they are living their faith, rather than having to "save" anyone.
- There is a respect for people of other religions or no religion at all. Another group that highly interests me are the Quakers, whose theology asserts that everyone, no matter which faith or no faith, has the light of God within them.
- Following Jesus is about this life, here and now on earth, as opposed to an emphasis on an after-life. Something else that scared me out of my wits growing up was the emphasis on the "end times" and something called the Rapture, an idea which states that at some point in time, God would raise all of his true believers up into the sky with him. Being terrified that I wasn't a true believer because of my sin, I would tiptoe down the hall to my parents bedroom at night and make sure that they were still there and that I hadn't missed being called to Heaven by God. Of what I know, many progressive Christians are content not to know what happens after we die. The emphasis is on living justly and with love, mercy, and kindness now, just for goodness sake. Concentrating on living and loving in this present world rather than focusing on an afterlife is very refreshing for me. Growing up, I was suspicious of this world, even holding an animosity towards this world. As a teenager I listened almost solely to evangelical Christian music. One song by the Christian rock band Petra was simply called "Not Of This World." It stated that we are "aliens and strangers" to this earth. An early album by the Christian singer Larry Norman was titled "Only Visiting This Planet," as if we are merely passing through. Indeed, the emphasis on Heaven was palpable and forefront when I was growing up. On the weekends we would visit my maternal grandparents and watch southern gospel music videos, where the singers would sing about a place where "We'll Never Grow Old." A place where we would be with our loved ones who had died and where we would find out all the answers to our difficult earthly questions. Whether such a place exists is beyond me, and I would argue beyond anyone, but the thought was comforting.
Currently I am becoming interested again in this progressive, more liberal Christianity. In the last decade or more there have been many authors writing about such a faith. The pioneer may very well be the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong, whose books include "Why Christianity Must Change or Die" and "A New Christianity For A New World." Other authors and scholars come to mind, such as the late Marcus Borg and Rachel Held Evans, the Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz Weber, and Quaker author Philip Gulley.
At this point of my life, I am hesitant to think I will ever use the word "Christian" to describe myself again, because the word tends to have certain fundamentalist connotations to it. In some circles the word Christian means that you are suspicious or even condemning of people of other faiths or no faith at all. It can also mean taking certain stands such as "standing up against" homosexuals and transgender people. In this regard, I know of several family members and friends who refuse to use the term Christian to describe themselves. Instead they say that they are a Jesus-follower. I think I could get behind this wording a lot easier than identifying as a Christian again. As I begin this exploration again, I am reading books by the above-mentioned authors, and I have stumbled back into the same liberal, mainline church that I visited back in the mid 2000's. This past Sunday there was no mention of the atonement theology that I grew up with (that it was only by Jesus blood that we are saved from sin). Instead the focus was on the various ministries of the church such as a soup kitchen, a group for people with dementia, and alcoholics anonymous. All things that I'm pretty sure that Jesus himself could give his stamp of approval to. I also plan on revisiting the local Quaker meeting, which holds "unplanned" meetings. This is to say that there is no set pastor of the group, and the entire hour-long service is spent sitting in complete silence, waiting on God's Spirit to speak to those in attendance. There is something innately lovely about such an experience.
I don't believe that Jesus' mission was ever to start a new religion based on himself. I do not believe that Jesus ever intended to die a bloody death simply to appease a God who needed payment for sin. The atonement theory including the blood of Jesus frankly has no place if you don't believe that every human since Adam and Eve are originally sinful or fallen. There is no reconciling to God that needs to happen. Instead I have come to believe that we are originally blessed. The mission of Jesus and the meaning of his life instead have everything to do with a new, radical way of living, including humility, service, forgiveness, and amazing love. It was this way of life and the appeal that it had to so many in Jesus' day that led to his murder - it wasn't our sin.
Thank you for taking the time to read about my journey and my current exploration. Life is for exploring and evolving and growing, not for making sure we can check off all the "right" boxes of what we theologically believe.
With love,
Mark-Andrew
