Follower experiences faith outside ‘religious box’
Paradigm shifts can be frightening and exhilarating all at once.
During the 1989 “World Series” earthquake, we lived in California exactly 10 miles from the epicenter. As the quake hit, our house shook hard for one horrendous, roaring minute that felt like an eternity.
When the ground finally settled, things looked different. Thankfully, our home suffered only cosmetic damage, but elsewhere, buildings had collapsed. Streets had buckled. The landscape had been rearranged, due to a deep shift beneath the surface of the earth.
Over the last few years, I have experienced a similar major shift in my thinking regarding spiritual things.
I had been comfortably ensconced within a certain religious box – the one called evangelical Christianity – for most of my life. I was thoroughly convinced about my point of view concerning matters of faith. I was so certain of my beliefs and related habits that I invested great amounts of time, talent and finances in a way that upheld them.
Then an earthquake began rumbling in my soul.
It all started with burnout and disillusionment about being overly busy with church-related activities. My husband and I began asking ourselves some difficult questions. We found ourselves disenchanted with a form that seemed to lack substance. We were tired of feeling like two lemmings marching in a sea of furious yet unexamined busyness.
Even though we had committed ourselves to following Christ, going to church often seemed like much ado about nothing. Why?
Years ago, a friend of mine recalled how he felt when he first started attending church. He kept looking down at the Bible in his hand, then up at the ongoing church service, and wondering: “What does that have to do with this?”
That disconnect between faith and practice was the issue I had to face. So I’ve been taking a fresh look at the Bible, and specifically the person of Jesus Christ, to re-evaluate what I thought it meant to follow him.
Through much reading, praying and conversing, I have been in the sometimes painful process of sifting through my cherished religious ideals. I still worship Jesus Christ, and I still love to hang out with other followers of his. What has changed is the focus of my spirituality.
Jesus, I have realized, did not come to earth to start a new religion. He came to usher in what he referred to again and again as the “kingdom of God” on the earth. He gave his disciples a prayer model starting with, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
This invisible kingdom Jesus spoke of has to do with bringing God’s dreams to fruition on planet Earth. And God’s dreams include peace between nations, a clean and safe environment, freedom from oppression and abuse, and the like – in short, making this world a better place and providing hope for the here and now, not just for the hereafter.
This means that I have a greater concern about global crises than I did before. I am realizing that I have a responsibility to be part of the solution instead of just preaching an escape from the problem.
It also means that I am learning to relate to people differently. Instead of focusing primarily on the question of their eternal destiny, and trying to get them to come to church, I am looking for creative ways to take my faith outside the four walls of the institution.
If I am going to follow Jesus, then I need to care about this planet and the people who live on it the way he does. The new thrust of my spirituality might include actively fighting the global slave trade, volunteering at a soup kitchen, working to save an endangered species, or just listening to a lonely stranger, rather than being so busy at church that I don’t have anything left to give.
As I emerge from my religious box, I see a greatly altered and much wider landscape of faith which I am eager to explore.
I want to follow the footsteps of the real Jesus.