I’m very thankful now, when I look back at who I was and all I’ve learned in the roughly 6 years since everything changed – but at the time, it was lonely and infuriating. I couldn’t ignore the issue and still be honest with myself: the Christianity that I knew was, well, a failure. I’m just being real here. Christians, following a form of Christianity that I also adhered to, had been hateful and vicious. In the name of Jesus. I had to walk away from that.
Not everyone needs to go through such a crucible. I’m sure it’s possible to metamorphose without an existential crisis like I had.
The “one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) for such a transformation is humility – the kind that says, “I might not know everything, I might be wrong about some things.” (I don’t want to imply that I should be congratulated because I was humble. The failure of my Christianity humbled me.)
TBH, I haven’t seen a huge amount of this kind of humility in conservative Christianity. I recognize now that there is a false humility: “I am just a poor sinner, saved by Jesus,” followed by an unspoken “in Christ, I can discern right from wrong, and I’m right.” (The screenshot to the left is an example from a friend’s Facebook.)
I sense that, at least some forms of Christianity are really obsessed with being right, at the expense of being Christlike – as though Jesus said, “you shall know the facts, and the facts shall make you superior,” instead of “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Look at the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). The young son screwed up his life and shamed his family – but in humility he made a change, and lo, there was a party! But his brother did everything right, and was judgy toward everybody. We all know which son Jesus preferred.
But I digress. Back to the humility that says, “I might be wrong about some things.”
This should be a no-brainer, but it’s not.
We should be able to look back over Christian history and realize that the body of Christ is very capable of being wrong, on a very large scale (think Crusades, slavery, inquisition, indulgences to name a few). That alone should make us humble! (Oh, and the ignoble downfall of so many big-name evangelists too.)
Because of my grace-colored glasses, and because of my own conversion (of sorts), I believe it’s possible for anyone to change. I won’t give up on anyone – but I also won’t engage with everyone all the time.
With the upcoming election, and all that’s at stake, it’s worth making the effort to be a catalyst for change! But we need to be careful to not be guilty of the self-certainty that we want others to let go of.
I have lots more to say about this.
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Featured photo: “Ernst Henri Dubois – The Prodigal Son” by pcurto is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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