I'm Not Sure Where to Start

A few weeks ago, my wife received a letter in the mail with her name and address handwritten on the front.  We had no idea whose information was on the return address, and were hoping it wasn't clever junk mail or worse...a Christmas card (I'm sorry I don't get Christmas cards.  You post a picture every day on Facebook; do I really need one of you on my fridge?)  Anyway, we opened the envelope and inside we found a bible tract (something like this), and a generic letter telling us if we have questions about the tract, to visit a church's website.

Two things: 1) How did they get our address!?  2) Kristin must really look like a heathen (which is probably a good thing since I'm writing this blog).  Now, I know whoever sent this meant well, genuinely cared about Kristin's spiritual well being, and at least made some kind of effort to share their faith.  But, I couldn't help but wonder if there is a better way.  If there was something more that could be done than handing out a tract, saying "Jesus loves you", and answering any religious question with, "because the Bible says so."

From my experiences, nobody intentionally sets out to leave their faith behind; they just reach a point where it seems irrelevant.  What we get taught as a child in Sunday school, at church camp, or in synagogue doesn't hold up to the pressure and stress of our current lives. We find ourselves wrestling with questions like: If God is good and all-powerful, why doesn’t he do more to prevent the bad things in this world? Why does prayer seem like such a shot in the dark?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why are some religious people so judgmental and mean?  Why don’t science and religion line up?  And our childhood faith begins to shrink under the pressure of these real-world questions.

Because of this, most of us need a new starting point.  It’s not that what our parents, pastors, and priests told us was wrong.  It was that their faith never became our faith, and thus was not big enough for the stress and rigors of our lives.  So the question is, where do we start?

For most Christians, we grow up being taught that regardless of the question, the answer should always begin with, “The Bible says.”  In childhood, this is enough.  If God wrote a book, there is no reason to challenge what it says.  But for some, “The Bible says” became an incomplete answer just north of our eighteenth birthday.  In college, the Bible gets transformed from an irrefutable religious text to literature.  It becomes scientific, not sacred; factual, not fascinating.  And when spoken of as a book, it becomes a house of cards.  If a professor or a friend is able to prove that only one small detail could be untrue, the entire structure falls.  It’s not that we lose our respect for the Bible; it just seems to lose its relevance to our lives.

The truth is, if you want to restart your faith or share your faith, “the Bible says” is not where to begin.  The first Christians didn’t even use the Bible as a starting point for their faith!  For the first 300 years of Christianity (quite possibly the most explosive growth in the history of the Church), Christians did not support their faith with a book.  Their starting point was not something that was written.  It was something that had happened.  And what’s fascinating is that when we are able to get a glimpse of how the earliest Christians shared their faith with non-Christians, they started with common ground: “There is a God, and you aren’t it.”

The apostle Paul traveled around the Mediterranean ring planting churches during the 1^st century, just as the Church was entering into infancy.  And while he was in Athens, he met a group of philosophers that gathered on a regular basis to discuss and argue the latest ideas (we really haven’t changed much since then.  The only difference now is we can stay on our couch and get on Twitter). 

These philosophers were discussing what framework the world should be viewed through in order to make the most sense.  And, like most people in their culture, they believed in a pantheon of gods.  But, they willingly recognized that these gods still left a void in their pursuit to feel whole.  Today, while we don’t worship Apollo, Zeus, or Aphrodite, we worship the gods of love, wealth, and power.  And just like those 1^st century Athenians, we recognize that all of the money, power, and sex in the world don’t make you feel whole.

The Athenians were so cognizant of this void that they even erected an altar “to an unknown god.”  They were covering all of their bases.  And Paul took this opportunity to introduce his new friends to the central message of Christianity.  But, he couldn’t start with “the Bible says” because there was no New Testament!  So, Paul found common ground. 

He argued that there was something in everyone that wonders, questions, and seeks, and that these desires come from our Creator.  In fact, this Creator so desperately wanted us to seek Him that He entered into His own creation in the form of a man…Jesus.  And Jesus came to explain what God is like and to reconcile humanity back to Himself (you can read the full story here).

This was not easy for Paul’s audience to digest.  They had never heard of Jesus, and the notion of a single god was absurd.  But, to think that this God had entered creation in the form of a man only a few years prior was completely insane to them.  But, one thing was certain: Paul was not asking them to believe in a book, but to believe in a person.

The question he left them with is the question that anyone exploring faith must answer:

Who is Jesus?

But, that’s for next week.

In the meantime, I want to give you a homework assignment.  Sometime this week, answer these two questions to yourself:

·      How and when did your faith journey begin?

·      How well has your faith held up under the pressure of your life?

Be honest.  Be open.  This is the Christian Safe Zone.