From naivete to.... something better.

So, at church we have been going through a pretty long and, to be honest, grueling process. We are talking through many of the difficult issues faced by churches today, and really the issues face everyone. How do we respond to people who disagree with us? Why do we believe what we believe? What if we are wrong?

As we walk through this journey, I know it has been hard on many of us. I know that some of the questions that we have raised are not fun to confront, but I believe in the direction we are going.

I think most of us started at "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." And that works pretty well for some people. But the fact is that even if that little syllogism were true, the question could still be asked, "Does the Bible say (it)?" We take certain things for granted, like the existence of an eternal hell, the salvation of the elect, or that all the Bible agrees on any particular issue.

I wish I could remember the exact phrase he used, but Kester Brewin talks about this particular journey in his book "Signs of Emergence." He speaks of moving from a naivete that takes certain things for granted to a certain wisdom in acknowledging that we don't know all the answers, but we are comfortable asking the questions.

I honestly think in this particular area that the clergy in churches have let their people down for a very long time. We have become as comfortable as the Catholic clergy were in the middle ages. We love the fact that people "trust the pastor." We love people asking us hard theological questions and we love hearing them reply "I hadn't ever thought of that." We have become obsessed with our own genius. And it is pretty sad to me.

If, as clergy, we know more about an issue, we should be incredibly humbled by the discoveries of what we don't know. If, as clergy, we are educated on a particular passage, we should be in awe of that many meanings that that particular passage could have.

It's not that I don't think we can be fairly certain about some things, it is that I don't think we can be all that certain about everything.

One of the main jobs of clergy should be to propose questions for the people. The problem with giving out a list of answers isn't that so many are wrong, in my opinion. It is that we are robbing our people of the very important journey that seeks the answers. Part of the reason I think God made pregnancy last nine months is because it takes about that long to discover some of the questions we should be asking, to face the reality that a life is soon to be in our care. Why do we think we can give glib answers to questions that God spent the better part of history trying to get people to discover? If the Bible is God's word exactly as he intended it, then why should we take away the process of people searching it for riches? I would rather frustrate the people that I am called to minister to than rob them of the all important task of realizing their own spirituality.