On being Christian and Non-Christian

Last Sunday night I went to Blueprint Church. It was ten years to the day since I’d become a Christian, and I felt so grateful I just had to go to a good old-fashioned Pentecostal service to hype it up a bit. Blueprint is run out of the Global Cafe at Glover Park, by my mate Sam Harvey - that's right, Sam the blogger from Deep as a Puddle.

And it was superb. The music there is great - Hayden Shearman (ex-Moped) knows how to pick songs and music that inspires actual worship, not buzzy hype or soppy sentimentality, and that's quite a rare achievement in Penty churches these days. We even had a good old singing and praising in the spirit session after the preaching. Now I know what Sam means when he says the Charismatic Movement didn't finish in 1989 - it's still going at Blueprint!

That fact was proved with the preaching too. Three members of the church got up and shared stories from their life about how they were learning things from God in different ways. What was interesting was that all of the stories were about the way God has blessed them in hardship. Get that. Not out of hardship - in hardship. In trial, in struggle. One guy talked about how God relieved him from anxiety - not by rubbing dirt on his temples and saying be healed, but on his bed so nauseausly sick that he couldn't look at a tv screen without wanting to spew up. For a whole year!

What really got me though was when Sam's bro Pete got up to speak. One of the first things he said was something about not being a Christian. I figured I hadn't heard him right and waited for him to explain about how he wasn't a Christian, or about how one of his friends wasn't a Christian. But no, he said it again! And he went on to talk about how he believed in God, but was having difficulty believing the things we preach about Jesus. But he was still praying, and he asked God what the deal was with that - "I can't believe in Jesus, it doesn't make sense to me, is that ok? Please give me peace anyway." "Ok," says God. "Peace." Real and experienced. Now I don't really know all the theological implications of that sort of prayer, but I do know its much the same sort of experience that I had in my fourth year of being a Christian.

After Pete spoke Sam talked about how important it is to be honest with God. He said that something like two-thirds of the Psalms are complaints about God not coming through. In my last two posts I talked about my experience of being born again. I talked about the struggles, trials and confusion I faced before, to use Paul’s terminology, Christ was formed in me – before I was made fully alive in Christ. But being born again, having Christ formed in oneself, losing one’s life and being made alive in Christ, does not mean one has completely arrived. All it means is that there is a permanence of Christ’s spirit at the depth of one’s being. And while that makes it easier to face trials and challenges, those challenges only become more difficult!

For my first few years as a born again Christian things were actually very easy. The decision to live for Christ rather than myself, or the social norms around me, was such a radical decision that the effect of its distinctiveness on my life and identity was impossible to avoid. The sense of love and purpose it gave me, the amazing community of Christians around me at Massey, and the way student life gave me so much space to devote time and energy to God’s kingdom, made serving Jesus highly desirable and full of social and psychological benefits. But by the time I entered my fourth year of being Christian things very much began to crumble for me, even while I was president of Massey University Christian Fellowship, the biggest Christian group on campus.

Pete’s prayer at the moment is, “God, I can't believe in Jesus, it doesn't make sense to me, but please give me peace.” My situation was much the same as Pete’s. As I went through my own "dark night of the soul," or "year of despair" as I like to call it, I did a lot of writing. I've scrambled through my archives to dig up my own prayers and reflections on the time, and I found a similar prayer to Pete’s.

My prayer was;

“Lord, if I can only pray to you through Jesus then take me that way, I will gratefully allow him to be my atoning sacrifice. But if you don't actually have that much to do with Jesus God take me the way you want to. Reveal to me how I am to come to you, how I am to approach you, what sort of relationship you want to have with me.”

My main problems with Christian theology and our dependence on Christ’s atoning sacrifice for our salvation were: a) the assumption we have sufficient power to be held responsible for our sin (ie addressing problems of predestination, fate, determinism), and b) the implications of Christ’s centrality for “God-fearing” Muslims, Sikhs, etc. (ie will God comdemn those people to eternal judgment for ignorance of a gospel they haven’t heard of?). Thankfully I came to a philosophical position by which I could reconcile God’s sovereignty with an idea of human freewill and moral responsibility, and I also found a satisfactory way of understanding the nature of salvation and God’s grace with regards to people of other faiths. With these issues resolved, the story of Jesus as God’s ultimate and definitive demonstration of his love towards us remained irresistible to me.

I may blog a series of posts on that “dark night of the soul.” As I dig up what I wrote at that time I am surprised at the depth of thought and authenticity I find there. We are beginning to touch on existentialism in my philosophy class at the moment, and the idea of spiritual crisis seems central to an existentialist approach to life and thought. What is not central is a positive role for religious belief as a free act or “upsurge” which resolves the crisis – in fact religion is more typically seen as the trappings that are stripped away in such a crisis. As I prepare for my own essay on existentialism I may review that “year of despair” in this light.