Finding Out Who I Really Am

In pondering my own journey over the past 10-15 years now, I’m coming to a moment of truth. This isn’t merely a journey of re-thinking faith, or church, or theology. Lots of people do that several times through the course of their lives, and it doesn’t entail the monumental shake-up (or shake-down) that occurred in my own life. No, this has to be something more, and I think I know what it is.

This is a journey of finding out who I really am.

One key to understanding this is that for every aspect of my life that has unraveled (and granted, most of it has been in the realm of church, faith, ministry, etc.)–the result has been an identity crisis. One of the reasons it was so hard for me to let go of institutional Christianity, even while I was already on the outside hanging onto the edges and running alongside it, was that so much of my existence was wrapped up in that world that I didn’t know who I was outside of it. Add to that the great expectations that were piled upon me from my youth by the church (I’ll revisit that topic soon), and my deconstruction felt like a big fat failure. I wasn’t just re-thinking things; I was letting down everyone in my past who had believed in me, who had predicted that I would one day minister before kings and presidents, who had gushed over my talents and my heart for God and told me how “called” I was.

And now, because I saw through the facade, because I saw how inconsistent the institutional structures were with the Bible we all claimed to follow, because I saw how church politics overrode what we claimed was good and right behavior in the name of the ends justifying the means–I came to a point where I could no longer subscribe to that system in good conscience. And so I became alienated from the one place in life that felt more like “home” to me than any other. My whole person had been wrapped up in church life as I knew it, and now I felt exiled, as much by the rejection of church leadership as by my own sense of conscience.

It was never really a crisis of faith; I never stopped believing in God, and I never stopped loving Jesus. It was a crisis of identity. Almost everything I believed about myself, my gifts, my calling, my purpose in life–all of it was now lying in fragments on the ground. I didn’t know who I was anymore.

The past several years have very much been a time of picking up the fragments of who I thought I was, and looking at those pieces in a different light, a different context, to see if I can make sense of them. What does being a Christ-follower look like outside the context of the institutional church? What does being a worshiper look like when you no longer have a platform from which to lead worship, or a congregation of believers to worship with you? What do mission and ministry look like outside those typical contexts?

And for that matter, how much of all this is wrapped up in my true identity, and how much was just a matter of roles I had adopted?

There’s a whole lot of questions that still have no answers, but slowly I have come to realize a few things about myself.

First–Being a Christ-follower is not merely a belief; it is definitely part of my identity. In the words of Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” For me, that question is settled. Whatever my life looks like, I will try to follow Him with all my heart.

Second–My sense of calling is unaffected. Part of my inner crisis about all this deconstruction is that in the deep of my soul, I still feel “called”–that fire in the belly that Paul (again to use him as an example) had–that thing that caused him to say, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel.” Placing that calling in a different context did not cause it to waver. I continue to see myself as a missionary, a minister–even if that doesn’t include a pulpit or a congregation. I continue to look for ways to express that calling, if no other reason than I cannot seem to escape it.

Third–My gifts (my musical gifts, in particular) are part of who I am, but they run deeper than the context in which they are expressed. This is a big one for me. This may sound a bit ambiguous, but let me unpack it.

My musical talents were at one point so intertwined with institutional Christianity that I believed my “anointing” would only work within that context. This was reinforced by warnings by well-meaning Christians not to be “seduced” by the world or to take my gifts outside the walls of the church. If I ever took that gift outside the context of being a worship leader, it would be like Samson with a haircut. Thus, for many, many years, I simply could not write a song without it containing heavy references to God, faith, the church, etc. This was so strong in me that I once felt guilty about writing a love song for my wife because it had no overt Christian references.

You can see how this would create an identity crisis when I began to feel alienated from those church structures. I wasn’t just a musician who worshiped God; I was a worship leader. What happens when someone whose identity is wrapped up in being a worship leader no longer has that platform, and no longer relates to it? And when I did a little research and discovered that the entire “worship leader” format is less than 150 years old within a 2000-year history of the church…boy, that one threw me for a loop. 😀  I had been basing my entire musical identity around what could at best be considered a trend. Now, that was gone.

But I wasn’t gone. I was still here. All those things obviously were not the “real me.” They were simply the clothes I was wearing. And so, a huge part of this reconstruction journey has been in re-discovering how my musical gifts can be expressed in a new context.

I hesitate in suggesting that being a musician is part of my identity, because what we do and who we are are considered two different things. But music is such an integral part of my nature that I can’t imagine existing without it. Even when I don’t touch a musical instrument for weeks on end, I’m always creating melodies and running them on “repeat” in my head. If I were paralyzed from the neck down, I would still be writing songs.

So yeah, I think music is part of who I am, not just something I do. And so a lot of this journey of reconstruction has involved finding ways to express that gift outside the institutional church–not because I’ve been “seduced” by the world, but because I didn’t stop being me when I lost the context of institutional Christianity. Nor my sense of calling. Nor my faith.

I’m rambling now. But perhaps a good analogy to wrap up this monologue is one that is in the Bible, about how everything is tried by fire. I feel like my deconstruction was the fire that consumed all that could be consumed, and now I am looking around my life to see what was left untouched. And because so much of my own sense of identity was wrapped up in that structure, what remains must be part of who I am.

I’m still very much at the beginning of this re-discovery. Don’t bother asking me who I am, really–because I don’t really know yet. But here’s the best part of it: as painful as the process has been at times, I believe God has been behind this whole thing. It is what makes me find hope amid the rubble. It is also what makes me believe that the future will be much brighter than the past.