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(Date Posted:08/06/2007 04:30:31)
...I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior when I was 12 years old. During Vacation Bible School at a small Baptist church, I heard that he loved me and died for me so that I could someday go to live with him forevermore. It was a simple message (followed with a simply warning about the alternative to rejecting Jesus) and I responded to it in childlike faith. I really wanted to have a personal relationship with him. In some ways, maybe I still do.Through my teens and twenties, I turned to the charismatic faith for answers as to how to know God in a personal way through the Spirit. To the charismatics, Jesus wasn't just someone who died 2000 years ago and then left earth to return again someday, but a very real prescence who was with us today. To me, this sounded much more in keeping with the kind of God and Jesus I read about in the Bible who actually spoke with people, who had a very personal relationship with them. In contrastto the Baptist notion that Jesus is not here (except in their churches on Sunday mornings between 9 and 12), I discovered a lively faith that claimed to believe that God could and would do the same things for his people today as he did in Bible times. But does he?In my thirties, I became disenchanted with the excesses in the charismatic movement and the judgmentalism that I felt constantly pervades that faith. Never having spoken in tongues myself, I was made to feel that I was a second-rate Christian who had some secret sin that, despite Jesus' sacrifice, kept God from giving me his Spirit. Not knowing any better, I returned to my Baptist roots, believing that maybe having blind faith was the answer.But my forties brought experiences and questions into my life that the kind of Christianity I knew either wouldn't acknowledge or had no answers for. The more I read my Bible and stopped blindly accepting everything I heard from the pulpit as truth, the more that I saw that modern Christianity has very little to do with the teachings of Jesus or the way that he lived his life. And the more I studied systematic theology, the more I found it rife with contradictions and ambiguous absolutes.My mid-forties were probably the worst time for me "spiritually speaking." I felt that I no longer belonged within Christianity but I found some truth in the teachings of Jesus. I felt that if Jesus were to return, that 1) church is probably the very last place he would go and 2) he would not destroy the world as I had been told.So where am I now? I don't know. Again, alot of what Jesus taught resonates with me so I guess in some ways I am still a follower. But I want as little to do with fundamentalism and fundamentalists as possible, feeling that their whole paradigm of "God will send you to hell if you don't meet his requirements" is a distortion of what Jesus really believed and taught. I don't know if I'm a liberal to the extent that I believe the entire Bible is fiction and that God is only a concept, not a real person. I guess I am in the middle of the road. And that is where I am most likely to get run over by both sides. I'm at a point where I want to be eclectic in my beliefs, choosing and holding to what I believe is good and dumping the rest. That involves, of course, trusting that I will know the good and the truth when I see it. But I find more freedom in asking questions than in giving simplistic, pat, unquestionable answers.
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