Yesterday in Sunday school my pastor told a story that I really appreciated. He said there was a pastor who went to the leadership board of his church to hand in his resignation. He told them he had all sorts of doubts, and felt that he had lost his faith, and thus was convinced he should tender his resignation.
The board refused to accept his resignation. “Preach your doubts,” they told him. “We can come back and revisit this in six months’ time if necessary.”
The pastor stayed, and spoke about the doubts, issues, concerns and struggles that he was wrestling with.
In the end two years passed, and he once again stood before the church’s leadership council, this time to thank them for the opportunity they had given them. He had gone through the tunnel and had come out the other side, finding faith again in the process.
I share this story because I am convinced that if there is something that is harmful to a healthy faith, it is those environments that encourage (or perhaps I should say compel) religious believers to keep up an outward appearance of everything being OK, with no sins, no doubts, no difficulties in their marriages or challenges bringing up their children. What results is not a pure community of the faithful, but a community of hypocritical actors who compete for first place in a race to appear outwardly the most different from their actual inward reality. The worst is when we sometimes manage to deceive even ourselves.
Some will object that the church in the story above made a bad choice, because people with doubts are dangerous. It’s true: we are dangerous. But there is only one other category of people, those who never doubt, and they are far more dangerous still.
Others may object by pointing out that they know many people who have ventured into the tunnel of doubt and have never made it out the other side. To this I respond with a question: Have you ever considered that so many who lose their faith never recover it because they are forced to go through that tunnel alone?
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