I Just Don’t Know

Someone said once (or many times, but maybe I just heard it once) that a sign of maturity is when the stack of questions in your mind begins to get larger than your stack of answers. If that’s true–I must be growing up fast.

When I started off this journey of faith as a youngster, I admittedly had a lot more answers than questions. Knowledge puffs up, but presumed knowledge can be even worse. I had a lot of passion, but not a lot of wisdom, and somehow I thought my passion would overcome my lack in other areas. I did some good things, but I also hurt people along the way.

It’s taken a long time for God to sift through my stack of answers, taking each page representing each issue, and showing me how misguided my logic had been on each issue. But then, each time this happens, God does something interesting. Instead of taking my wrong answer and changing it to the right one…He dries my tears, and calmly moves the page from the answer stack to the question stack.

Sometimes that’s just plain infuriating. He knows the right answer, after all.

Anyhow.

I’m looking back, not just at my journey out of institutional Christianity, but even at the history behind this blog. When I started writing Losing My Religion, I was still deep in the process of re-thinking a lot of things. I had a lot of opinions about what didn’t work with the church as it stood, and wanted to know what would work better–a quest for understanding that continues to this day. I’ve always been pretty good at articulating my thoughts and feelings, and as I expressed those thoughts and feelings over a period of several years (and as a group of people on the Interwebs began relating to them), I came to be considered by some as a “thought leader” on the issue of re-thinking institutional Christianity. I had people asking me questions, asking me to contribute to other writings, and so on. I even had my share of adversaries and attackers.

But as I’ve gone on, I’ve found myself trusting my own opinions less and less, and even less eager to express the opinions I have. One blogger friend of mine recently expressed that she realized she’d stopped writing on her own blog because she was afraid she would be wrong about whatever it was she was sharing. I can relate, but for me I don’t think it’s so much been a matter of fear as it has been not really knowing what to say. I don’t want to keep ragging on the institutional church and talking about what’s wrong with it, if I don’t know that what I would offer as an alternative would be any better. I still might think something is wrong, but I don’t know yet how to correct it.

I can tell you that I firmly believe that church planting as a business model is incongruent with the Scripture. But that doesn’t mean I know the right way to plant a church.

I can tell you that institutional structures put a lot of pressure on church leaders to perform and measure up, and many times that translates to manipulating the people they should be nurturing. But I can’t necessarily tell you how that pattern can be broken. (I broke it simply by stopping. I’ll have to wait until the next time I have a community to lead before I can even know if I’ve fixed the problem.)

I can tell you that the church has become a bubble unto itself and has become more and more irrelevant to the world around it. I can’t tell you how to become purposefully relevant. I’m still working that one out myself.

See what I mean?

In each of these things, God didn’t write the correct answer on my sheet; He just moved it to the question stack. So I wait for the answer to come, and when I get it, I’ll be sure to share it. 🙂 In the meantime, my blog seems to have shifted more from opinion to reflection.

This not knowing even extends into our family’s spiritual life. The Wild One and I have this conversation often. We realize we’re still in this in-between place when it comes to the church. We know we don’t want to try “launching” a “new work” because we don’t want something fake to maintain, and we can only wait for God’s unction and timing on that. Meanwhile, even though we long for the community of believers, we simply don’t know where we belong. The church groups similar to what we came out of are now so foreign to us that we know we could not function within them, yet the alternative seems to be so theologically liberal that we do not fit there, either–so we sit in this no-man’s-land somewhere in the middle. We know more about where we don’t belong than where we do belong. So we wait, and we do what our hands find to do in the meantime to try and be productive.

I suppose I could blog every day about that. The posts would go something like, “Still Waiting (part 237)”, “Still Waiting (part 238)”…I just think that would bore people after awhile.

I guess that what I’m trying to say with all this rambling is if you stumbled upon this blog looking for answers, I have fewer and fewer of them to give. My question stack is on the rise, and I am asking, just like you.

I just don’t know. All I do know is that God knows. And I suppose the reason He simply moves the answer pages to the question stack is because that is the only way I will trust Him.