Deconstructing? Re-Constructing? Or Constructing for the First-Time?

Folks who are deconstructing their childhood faith have something in common with adult converts like me. We all want to live well in relationship with God and other people. And most of us feel short-changed by our church experiences.

Image by Alisa Dyson from Pixabay

Those of us not raised in church often find ourselves seeking God’s family because we want to live in a place where someone like God is in charge. We don’t have those words to describe our longing, but we know that the world that surrounds us is not the kind of world we want to live in. From our first encounter with God, we recognize the parent and vision that has been calling to us from far away.

I was assured, shortly after my baptism at age 26, that it would take a lifetime to read and understand God’s Word. And of course that’s true. None of us needs to ever stop growing in our understanding of God’s Word. None of us should ever stop growing in our skill at living out what God has shown us.

Constructing faith: Those of us not raised in church often seek God’s family because we want to live in a place where someone like God is in charge.

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It’s also true that no one gets into God’s family just by obeying God’s directions for living. That’s a good thing. Otherwise, none of us would get to be part! God invites us into the family as we are today, adopts us into His household of faith, and embraces us as would a  perfect and loving parent—which He is!—despite our many failings. Also like a loving parent, God is prepared to constantly coach us toward the kinds of character and behavior that represent a family and a world where God is in charge.

Church is the place we go seeking to know and live with God, and that’s a good beginning. But spiritual growth takes much more than a sermon a week. At the same time, many will find, as I did, that spiritual growth doesn’t flourish in the midst of hectic church activity. In my first congregation, I was expected to attend Sunday church, Sunday school, a weeknight small group, and also maintain a personal devotional life, each of which ran along a different track of Scripture. Any Christian service came in addition to these. I was hard-pressed to get it all done while still working full-time and managing my household. And when I sought one-on-one guidance for Christian living—called “discipleship” in that context—my small group leader sighed. All the church’s leaders were barely beyond the intense years of campus Christian ministry they’d endured as undergrads. Wearily, he told me, “I think we’re all discipled out.”

Constructing faith: Hectic church activity doesn’t always foster spiritual growth.

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Still, I was thirsty for the Word, and I couldn’t wait even long enough for coffee to brew before sitting down with my Bible each morning. I would make up a thermos full each evening and set it on the nightstand. I would pour my first cup and reach for my Bible before I even got out of bed.

That was about 40 years ago. Over the last four decades, I’ve still been mostly unable to find one-on-one support for Christian formation. I’ve been surrounded at different times by various forms of legalism, sometimes by implied legalism (for example, that Christian women should wear our hair long and loose), and, on the flip side, a casual disregard for God’s law “because we’re saved by grace, not works.” 

Constructing faith: I’ve found 3,027 commands from God in Scripture (so far). And being a geek, I’ve got them in a spreadsheet.

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Lacking access to the kind of intensive training I hoped to find, I started my own training academy, reading the Bible to find what God directs us to do and the character God directs us to nurture. Because I’m a geek, I collected them in a spreadsheet and worked out some systems to categorize them. I started to discover how frequently our New Testament guidance is a paraphrase of Old Testament direction. And that makes sense, of course, since God gave us both the Old Testament and the New.

So my attempt to construct a Christian way of life is based on collecting God’s commands from Scripture. As of yesterday, there were 3,027 commands in my spreadsheet. This chart is far too large for me to imagine even remembering them all, let alone getting them all right. And that’s part of God’s point, isn’t it? We will fail, and thanks to Jesus, we’re still family.

Grace releases us from the obligations of the Law, but it doesn’t release us from the need—and hopefully, the desire!—to live up to the expectations of the family into which we’re adopted. Some of the family rituals are just family quirks, like the difference between families that get their Christmas stockings in bed and those who run to the mantel. Others are foundational to the very nature of the family our God has chosen us to join.

How are you learning into God’s purpose for your life? What is most helpful for you? Let’s encourage one another as we build on the solid foundation of God’s Word!

Looking backward for what’s better? God has an opinion about that.

A political movement based on looking backward wants to “Make America Great Again.” God says looking backward for vision is not wise.

God is typically short and straightforward in commenting on the idea that we can find our vision for greatness and our purposes for the future by looking to the past:

Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?”
For it is not wise to ask such questions. Eccl. 7:10

Why would it not be wise? Shouldn’t we want to learn from the past?

Of course. What God says is that it’s unwise to look with longing on the past. “Why were the old days better than today?” is a question that faces us in the wrong direction. Because God, though timeless, has set us into a timeline that moves in only one direction. To long for the times that once were? That’s like craving leeks and onions when God is leading you out into a land of promise (Numbers 11:5).

God’s not particularly concerned about whether the empires to which we pledge allegiance remain. In fact, He knows they will fall! “The Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone He wishes” (Daniel 4:32) but “the God of heaven shall establish a kingdom that will never be destroyed” Dan. 2:44. He’s not focused on making a particular country great, but on making His people great.

I have this weird vision of God as editor getting the slogan right. Here’s what I see:

As God revises the slogan, it reads:
“Let Me make My people great!”

That’s what God wants to do: Make His people great, today and in the future. He’s done it before, which is why God reminds us again and again to “remember!” God’s mighty works.

What does God have for us in the future? I don’t know. But I know that our world today and in the future is where God lives and will live with us, and it’s therefore where I want to live with God.

Make God’s people great. Not as we think we were, but as we can be, in God’s power.

We’re Not Nostalgic: We’re Hopeless

Americans are not nostalgic for the ways we once lived. We’re missing the hope we once had that things would always get better.

The TV Cleavers were well-off; still their two boys shared a bedroom.

Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, in a recent column for the Washington Post, that the key driver to American nostalgia isn’t a longing for the way we used to live. After all, our way of life in the 1950s was more constrained in many ways. Women and minorities lacked many rights, we all had less stuff and our larger families were crowded into much smaller homes. Remember the TV show Leave It to Beaver, where an ad executive’s teenage son shared a room with his grade-school brother? What 21st century executive in the US would feel adequate if the home didn’t have a separate bathroom for each child?

So we had much less stuff in the 1950s. But what we had that has been lost, Ponnuru says, is the hope that things would always get better.

That is, of course, a very American belief. We’ve always been a restless people, moving from place to place in search of the imagined better life that we hoped to find. In the mid-20th century, our self-displacement became chronic as households changed domicile every three years on average, mostly to chase job promotions.

But at some point, we started to recognize that all our chasing and changing hasn’t brought us to a better place. It’s brought us to an anxious and overwhelmed place where we can’t allow ourselves to sit for a moment, because if we slow down someone might overtake us on the path to wherever it is we’re trying to go. Except we also know that wherever we’re going, it won’t be our goal once we get there. It might be different, but it won’t be better. Just more of the same exhaustion and frustration, forever and ever, amen.

So we begin to reminisce about the days when people had hope. But can we reasonably hope to improve our lot today by returning to the times that created this hopeless mess? Solomon warned against thinking backwards like that:

Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). 

The hope we need for today is the hope that is for now and for the future. For me, at the most difficult times in my life, that hope has been the vision of God’s Kingdom to come, the new heaven and the new earth where ” ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

God doesn’t promise that in the new heaven and earth we will all have the latest fashions, shiny Tesla cars, and screens larger than anyone has imagined. God promises instead that all our suffering will be gone–including the suffering we’ve accepted when we make the standards and desires of this world our own highest hopes.

“In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus promised us. “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:13).

Let the hope of your heart rest in the true hope of the future that is assured to come. Peace.

God so loved the orcas …

Orcas interrupted a sailing race off Spain last week, and NPR reminds us that in 1987, orcas were killing salmon and wearing them as hats. These news items took me back to a column I wrote at another time when orcas were making headlines. And don’t miss comedian Josh Gondelman’s Pep Talk for Orcas at the bottom!

PETA sued on behalf of five orca (killer whales) that it said were enslaved at Sea World.

Here in the Bible Belt, there are few things that Christian people find more entertaining than organizations like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). We’ve read our Bibles and we know God gave us dominion over creation. If we want to teach four-ton orcas (“killer whales”) to leap, splash, and otherwise entertain tourists in the name of “conservation education,” why not?

So when PETA tried to have a federal court label the orcas’ service as “enslavement” under the 13^th amendment, we pretty much took another swig of sweet tea and sniggered.

Down at the church, a few of the old-timers – the ones who were “sword drill” champions in the day – got down to chapter and verse.

What they found was a little surprising.

Earth Day: God So Loves the Environment

I’ve been collecting commands in the Bible for more than 10 years now (3050 and still counting!). Some are familiar. And some, like the commands about the environment, stopped me in my tracks.

God says some remarkable things in Bible books many of us tend to skip over. Take, for instance, this command from the often unread book of Deuteronomy:

If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life. (Deut. 22:6-7)

Joan Wiitanen, a reader of Birdwatching Daily, took this photo of an American robin on its nest.

What a remarkable command! And what a remarkable promise. The blessing we get for treating a mother bird with care is the same blessing we receive for honoring our human parents – a long life in which things will go well.

This command to honor our human parents is the first command that comes with a promise (Eph. 6:2-3). It appears in Exodus 20:12 with the blessing of a long life. It is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:16, where the blessing of long life is expanded to include that “it may go well with you in the land God is giving you.” And here, also in Deuteronomy, God promises the same blessing to those who treat a mother bird well.

What does this say about the importance of birds in God’s created order?

Birds, and by extension all of the animals in God’s created order, must be very important to God if our care for them is blessed in exactly the same way that God blesses our care for our human mothers and fathers.

And our care for those parents–both human and animal–brings to us God’s blessing of long life in the land God has given us.

This Earth Day, remember that you can enjoy a long life in the beautiful land God has given us by caring for all of the parents who bring new life to God’s land.

That’s me as a toddler on our family farm in Maine, visiting with young-ish resident of our hen house. The photographer was my father, Dave Hill.

PS: Did you know that the idea of Earth Day was first put forward by the son of a Pentecostal minister? John McConnell Jr. came up with the name “Earth Day” to describe his vision of an event to unify all humanity around an issue that affects every person living. Read more in this essay by Pentecostal historian Daniel Grigg.