Experiential Faith (part 2)

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to get the full context for part 2, you’re going to have to read part 1.

In part 1, I rambled on about how I believe that faith in God must involve experiencing Him as well as believing in Him. In this post, I’d like to ramble some more, particularly talking about what experiential faith involves, what it might look like.

It seems like for many Christians, belief and experience actually fall on opposite sides of a spectrum, as far as how they value one over the other. For some, theology and doctrine seem to be the sum total of their faith–more of an intellectual exercise than anything else. Some experience may be wrapped into the package, but for the most part these folks are content to theorize about God. These are often the ones who seem sworn to “defend the faith,” eager to challenge anyone who in their minds is not of sound doctrine. These are also the ones who are most likely to be skeptical of spiritual experiences in general–not that they don’t believe in experience, but that they are quick to question the validity or source of any given experience, to make sure it fits “sound doctrine.”

On the other side of the spectrum are those believers who seem to depend almost entirely on experience.  These are typically folks who have encountered the supernatural, become enamored with it, and begin to gravitate from experience to experience, almost like a drug addict seeks the next high. I know the draw of this; as a worship leader, I’ve encountered God in ways I cannot easily describe, and it’s easy to become carried away with it. The problem, of course, is that without any theological foundation to serve as an anchor, it is relatively easy to drift off into imbalance, error and deception. After all, God is not the only entity in the supernatural realm, and one of Satan’s favorite deceptive tactics is to appear as an angel of light.

My take on it is that a balanced walk of faith must include both elements (that is, doctrine and experience), not one to the near-exclusion of the other.  To rely solely on theological belief is to limit God to your own understanding, and to rely solely on experience is to be dangerously ignorant of what God has already revealed of Himself, and to become susceptible to be led astray.

Having established that balance, though–what does it really mean to experience God, and how does it happen?  As a seeker, I’ve sought to experience God in a variety of ways, and I’ve seen other believers do the same things.

Perhaps the first way that comes to mind as far as experiencing God is to get involved in activities that we typically deem as “spiritual” or “sacred” (as opposed to “secular”). We pray. We study the Bible. We attend church gatherings. We sing and worship together. These are all valid things, and I’ve personally encountered God in all of those things. Unfortunately, I also allowed many of these things to become ends in themselves, which basically reduced them to religious exercises, and that ended up limiting some of my God encounters–which is one of the reasons I needed a deconstruction. I know of people who have done all these things and still feel they haven’t experienced God–or perhaps DID experience Him, and later began to question the validity of those experiences, or to disqualify them.  I’ve also known people who got completely ingrown, trying so hard to experience God with religious activities that they have completely lost their relevance to the world around them.

But I want to submit that there are other spiritual activities that help us experience God besides just those activities mentioned above.  I’d also like to submit that when all we do to encounter God is practice religious exercises, we are likely either to become disillusioned (as many have) or distracted by our own religion.  There is more to this that we must not miss.

To me, one of the most poignant stories in the Bible is at the end of the Gospel of John, when Jesus meets with His disciples after His resurrection, and asks Peter three times, “Do you love Me?”  (I recounted my thoughts about this story in this post awhile back, so I’ll let you read that one to fill in the details and won’t reiterate all of it here.) Every time Peter answered the question with, “Lord, You know I love You,” Jesus responded with a mandate to “Feed my Sheep” or “Tend My lambs.”  The gist of the story, in my opinion, is that after Peter denied Christ, he was uncertain of his own love for his Lord, and it grieved him terribly. I believe there was a deep truth in what Jesus was saying to him through this experience. I see a message in it: “Peter, you will learn to love Me the way you desire by feeding My sheep–by helping the people I died to redeem.”

I’m finally getting to my point. (cheers all around) I think experiential faith isn’t just about doing things to try and get God to encounter us. Jesus is still on a mission to redeem this world, and I think we can experience Him by partaking in that mission.  I think that God is not cloistered in our church buildings just waiting for us to gather together and sing lovey-dovey songs to Him.  I think He is out there where people are hurting and wounded and searching.  I think that, to use an analogy Jesus Himself used, He is out there in the harvest fields.  I think that when we work alongside Him in the harvest field, we get to know Him in ways we never would by just praying in some closet or going through our religious exercises.  I’m not saying those in-house spiritual encounters aren’t real; I’m just saying that there is something about “feeding His sheep” that helps us experience a whole other dimension of God. There is something about seeing God at work in someone else’s life that adds something to our own, and can make God more real to us in that time and place than countless hours of sweating it out in prayer, begging God to make Himself known.

This is something to which I can attest; I speak from experience.

Like I said, I have indeed experienced God in some powerful ways within the walls, but my hunger for Him somehow remained. I think one of the biggest reasons why I jumped the fence, so to speak, is that I knew I wasn’t getting the full picture within the ingrown church subculture. Too many of the things and ways of man were muddying the mix and distorting the picture, and I wanted to know what God looked like outside that context.  It has taken years of personal undoing for me, because I was so ingrained within that subculture. I’ve been taken back to foundation, and am re-learning almost from scratch. It has been scary, painful, and beautiful all at once. But I believe it has been my hunger to encounter God in His fullness that has allowed me to have the grace to endure this dismantling.

Through the process, my theology has remained essentially intact, except that I keep it in a healthier perspective now than I once did.  In that sense, my anchor is still in place. But I seek an expression of Christian community (which I still believe in, by the way) that is unencumbered, and I want to experience God in the places where He is doing things, and where His presence matters.  I think one of the greatest ways we can practice an experiential faith is by feeding His sheep.