Questianity
I was bound to be a rabble-rouser.
All the warning signs were there, most notably, my questions. My mother says they never stopped. On 2 AM mornings as a pre-kindergartener she was finding me next to her bedside, tugging on her sleepy sleeves, my curiousity and wonder weighing so heavily upon me that sleep was not an option. I clearly had to know how the moon shone. It simply couldn’t wait for morning.
My quick wit, sarcasm, and generally innocent cheekiness also played into that rabble-rousing tendency. In the seventh-grade, the librarian at my Mennonite school caught one of my classmates awkwardly doing his homework for our sex-ed class. We were supposed to reserve that time for reading for enjoyment – not assignments. She loudly asked him if it was homework to make an example out of him. In my best know-it-all voice I jestingly sneered “Noooooo, he’s reading for pleaaaaassurrrrreeee!” The teacher found it less humorous than my classmates.
I was always a little cheeky. But my desire for harmony paired with my Anabaptist upbringing (along with the occasional shame inducing disciplinary tactics like standing in the hallway after making sex jokes in a Mennonite classroom) usually kept it in check. I learned the value of respecting authority, especially spiritual authority. In many ways it has served me well, but in others, it has constrained me from being productively curious, and even intellectual, about my faith.
As an adolescent, I listened as thoughtful questions in my faith environments were responded to with eye-rolls and answers that started with snooty words like “obviously” and “clearly”.
I learned the place for big questions wasn’t the church.
In my churches, discipleship took a back seat to indoctrination. There was no room for discovery of what we believed. We were just told what we had signed up for. Questions were silenced or mocked rather than honored, welcomed, engaged, and investigated. I didn’t want to be a silly juvenile Christian, so I didn’t ask the questions I wanted to ask. I just “had faith.” There was no need to suppress my curiousity and my questions in faith environments because they weren’t even welling within me anymore. They had died entirely.
The last several years have captured me with honesty, curiousity, and boldness to ask the questions I have so long been afraid to even admit exist. It’s not a phase. It’s a worldview. Questions must be cultivated. My mind must be engaged. It makes me a better Christian, a more faithful one.
I’m not going to reason my way out of my faith. I’m reasoning my way back into it. I’m back to my rabble-rousing tendencies, asking questions about my faith which cause discomfort strong enough to transform the way I live. For every question I ask I find a dozen more, so these days I favor a Christianity that engages them: QUESTIANITY.
In my own faith communities, orthodox and fairly conservative evangelical as they are, many are too embarrassed to be openly inquisitive and curious. They check their minds at the doors of the church and the seminary for fear that the pastor or professor will drop the dreaded “h” words – “heresy” and “hell”.
But the silently restless ones saunter up to me privately after I shout my rabble-rousing questions and they whisper to me their thanks. They are the reason I rabble-rouse. If I don’t, both I and they will be left vulnerable to one jarring life circumstance or another that will push our present hidden dissonance into temptations to dispose of a faith that isn’t faithful.
Endless questions hold with them the power to propel us forward to a more faithful Christianity that teaches us to seek the Answerer even if it costs us the answers that have always been comfortable. I still haven’t discovered how the moon shines, but I revel in the mysteries of the One who made it so.
What about you? Have your questions been welcomed in your faith environments?
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