Hello, once again,

Introduction

It’s getting harder to write these posts because there are so many things I want to say that to include everything would be a never-ending quest. I want to hit the highlights of my theological development, but there are so many twists and turns in my own mind that it’s truly hard to put words to these things. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ll do my best.

I told you that after high school I chose to attend a fundamentalist Baptist college. That’s the truth. Why? Is the natural next question. It’s one for which I both do and don’t have a good answer.

Fear and Hellfire

One primary reason is that I wanted to attend a Christian school because I was worried what would happen if I didn’t. Another reason is that I was truly unsure what I wanted to do with my life. I signed up for a secondary English education degree, but I already knew that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was a bit aimless, looking for direction, looking for answers to the questions that were beginning to come up about my faith. So I chose a place where I thought the answers would be easy to find, a place where my faith wouldn’t be significantly challenged.

I was both right and wrong about that last point. You see, this experience did answer some of my questions, but it raised significantly more, nuanced questions. It also had a different effect than was probably intended. It kind of helped crystallise some of the criticisms I had of fundamentalist theology and push me further to the fringes. I wasn’t out quite yet, but it helped me get there.

The second reason was much more practical. I was scared. I’ve mentioned before that I had undiagnosed depression and anxiety at this time. I didn’t sleep well, and any time something raised questions or doubts about my faith, it caused me tremendous anxiety, because if one facet of my faith turned out to be untrue, then the whole thing must necessarily collapse. I realize now that this was a ridiculous thing to think, but herein lies one of my harshest criticisms of fundamentalism: we are taught that our theology is the correct theology, and that any other way of thinking is incorrect. We are never given any kind of alternate framework that encourages doubts or questioning. So, in reality, my whole theology would have collapsed if even one thing turned out to be untrue. But above all, I was scared of going to hell, for not having a “correct” theology.

Don’t worry; I’m better now.

Doctrine and Doubt

The theological education at my college was exactly what you’d expect. Mostly it was laying out fundamentalist Baptist doctrines and giving Bible verses as support for these doctrines. When looked at through this lens, it was obvious. We were correct, and every other theological system was wrong.

This did have an affect on me. I was drawn in for a time. I would even have called myself a Calvinist, as a result of the teaching there. I’m sorry if that doesn’t mean anything to you; I’ll explain in a later post. I came to believe that the Bible must be inerrant.

But at the same time, I knew something was missing.

You see, when you read the Bible, you constantly see verses about God’s care for the poor and the outcast. You constantly see a longing for justice and peace. I was already a pacifist at this moment, because I didn’t think you could take the teachings of Jesus seriously and come to any other conclusion.

A Gospel of Two Halves

But when the professors were asked about outreach to the homeless and the poor, the response was always the same: “We don’t really do that, because any time we give aid there has to be some kind of gospel presentation.” In their eyes, people’s immortal souls were more important than any needs that they have in the present time. But I was beginning to have questions about this. I began to think of the gospel as two halves of a whole. One half of the gospel really did have to do with one’s spiritual well-being. At the time, I would have called it salvation.

But there’s a whole other side to the gospel that is (in my opinion intentionally) overlooked because of our emphasis on saving souls. If your faith doesn’t make a difference in this world, in this life, then how can you possibly hope to give people a hope in the next one?

Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
    to proclaim release to the prisoners
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to liberate the oppressed,

And to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Through my time in fundamentalism, I heard countless sermons and lectures where these verses and others like them are spiritualised, construed to be talking about those who are poor in spirit or spiritually oppressed. Let me be clear: I absolutely believe in spiritual warfare and the fact that people can be spiritually oppressed and spiritually poor.

However, I don’t think this is the primary meaning of these verses, especially when taken in whole context of the Bible. The truth is, the Israelite’s mistreatment of the poor and widows is a constant reason given by the prophets for the coming judgment of their nation. In my way of thinking, spiritual poverty and physical poverty often go hand-in-hand. People are neither completely physical or completely spiritual. Just like how I think of the gospel, I think that both sides of human nature are equally important to God.

And so I went searching.

Anabaptists Attraction

I began looking for other Christians with whom I could agree, who really took seriously both the spiritual and physical needs of creation. As I searched I noticed that most churches tended to either one direction or the other: either they emphasized and focused on meeting people’s physical needs, leaving the spiritual as an afterthought, or they emphasized meeting people’s spiritual needs, oftentimes neglecting the physical entirely.

And then I discovered the Anabaptists.

This is not going to be a long historical lesson about Anabaptism or its theology. Simply put, what I found among the Anabaptists was something that I had been looking for for a long time. In the Anabaptists was a group of people who took seriously both people’s personal relationship with God and the words of Jesus, when he said to love your enemies and love your neighbor as yourself.

I promised myself that I would find an Anabaptists church one day. But first, I needed to finish college. There were a lot of steps between learning about the Anabaptists and finally finding myself in an Anabaptist church.

But that’s a story for another time.

Sabbath.

Sabbath is a word that wasn’t used much in my faith tradition as I was growing up. I always thought of sabbath as something that Jews do. I knew that Jesus talked about it, but since Jesus came to fulfil the law, the requirements surrounding sabbath no longer apply to the church. At least, that was the perspective I received. Of course, in the tradition I grew up in self care is considered a waste of time and selfish. 

I’m reflecting on this today because my family is working on changing our schedule a bit to make our work among the refugee population in Calais more sustainable. We’ve decided for our second two-year term to make our weekends actual weekends. This means that we don’t generally work on Saturdays or Sundays. Of course, since we’re hardly ever at home during the week, we don’t have much time to do house work on weekdays, so we spend Saturdays doing the things we can’t do on other days. We use our Saturdays to do our grocery shopping, laundry, and house cleaning.

But then there’s Sunday. How we used to do things, we were too tired on Sundays to do much housework. As a result, our house was often strewn with laundry and toys. We’re working now on building a rhythm that allows some time for rest. We’ve decided to make Sundays our sabbath, at least as much as possible. Today we spent the morning before church preparing a meal and putting it in the oven. When we came home, our meal was ready, and we were able to have a delightful Sunday dinner together as a family. Later we’re going on a bike ride and watching a movie together.

This has me reflecting on deeper topics as well. The sabbath was always meant to be a special day of rest and reflection on the God that created us. Scripture commands as much, “Show respect for the Sabbath Day—it belongs to me” (Deuteronomy 5:12). The Sabbath is a theme throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, with constant reminders to respect the Sabbath and to keep it holy. Time for rest is clearly important to God.

But, just like any other commandment, fallible humans turned something that is meant for the good of humanity into a burden to be carried. This is a constant theme in the New Testament. There’s an occasion where Jesus and his disciples were walking through a wheat field, picking and eating the kernels from the wheat stalks. They were hungry, so they were doing what was natural. The religious leaders took issue with it, because the rules that had been written down over the centuries said that one cannot do any work or anything that seems like work on the Sabbath.

When they confronted Jesus and told him their problems with what he was doing, he pointed out there had been many exceptions to the rules that were made over the course of history, up to and including King David himself, who took holy bread from the temple on the Sabbath to feed his hungry troops. He ended his argument by stating, “People were not made for the good of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for the good of people” (Mark 2:27).

The point of this story is that God established the commandment to remember the Sabbath because he wanted his people to have a time to rest and worship the God that loved them. The Sabbath was always meant to be a time for people to rest, but the religious leaders ignored the spirit of this law and instead busied themselves with trying to work out exactly what “work” means. From this perspective, they created a list of rules about what does and what doesn’t count as work. This took the joyful rest and worshipful spirit out of the Sabbath and turned it into something difficult, a burden for the people for whom it had been meant as a restful day.

During the Christian Age, the concept of the Sabbath has largely been left behind, except by a few denominations. I wasn’t exposed to the concept until I was in my early 20s. During my volunteer program, we were given Fridays as our Sabbath days. On those days, we were free to rest in whatever way was helpful for us. I grew to cherish these days, since we worked hard the rest of the week and had many responsibilities. 

As I’ve grown and been married and had children, I have begun to recognise the importance of the concept of Sabbath. For my family, we are trying to make it a day of rest, worship, and togetherness, where we take a break from the stress of life and refocus our hearts and minds on the things that are truly important: our faith and our family. It’s a day that leaves me recharged and ready to take on whatever the week has for me, in my work among refugees in Calais. It’s a work that can often be difficult both emotionally and spiritually. I need these moments of Sabbath to remember who I serve and why I do what I do. It’s also a day to focus on my kids, the most important people in my life.

It’s a tragedy that this concept has been lost somewhere along the way. I think it’s time to reclaim the concept of the Sabbath, and to focus on taking care of ourselves so that we can continue to follow God’s greatest commandments: to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

But instead of taking the tactic of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day, let’s not turn the concept of Sabbath into a burden, weighing people down with a list of rules that they must follow in order to properly observe the Sabbath. There are plenty of rules in our everyday life. God understood the difficulties of life, and so he made Sabbath for us, to give us a chance for rest, to remember the things that are truly important. Sabbath is truly holy, and God wants us to rest in this holy space.

Blessed Sabbath, my friends. May you find true rest in Jesus Christ our Lord.

“Life was easier then, but I don’t want to go back.” 

Those are the words that ended my last post in this series, months ago. A lot has happened in that time. I’ve been to North America and back. I’ve visited a number of Mennonite Churches where I experienced true and heartfelt hospitality and welcome. I’ve shared the heartbreaks and hopes that we’ve experienced in Calais so far. And, finally, I came back to France, only to shortly afterwards receive news that there was a shipwreck on the English Channel in which at least 12 people perished, and very likely even more. Most of them were women and children. I’d gone from a joyful time of fellowship with families and loved ones to the lows of reality for people on the move here in Calais.

Perhaps that’s what I meant by the above quote. My life is incredibly complicated now, filled with so many emotions each day that I don’t know how my soul manages to contain them. I’ve experienced joy beyond measure, but for every joyful moment there’s a time when the waves of darkness sweep over me like those at the beach. This is because of the task I’ve set for myself, following the calling I believe I received from my commitment to Jesus. Life is difficult now, but I don’t want to live it in any other way.

While I’ve been considering this, I’m taken back to the moments when the seeds for what my life would become were planted. I realise that I briefly touched on my high school experiences with Shane Claiborne and the development of my theology in my last post. My family life was just as complicated though. It was around this time that my parents began to broaden their worldview somewhat. It was small at first, little things like being allowed to listen to contemporary Christian music like they played in chapel at my Lutheran high school or attending a Catholic mass with me for a school project. One thing that I’ve found to be almost universally true is that you can’t put yourself into new and different cultural contexts and still maintain the same level of prejudice that you had before. That’s one of the reasons my wife and I chose to bring our kids to France with us to work with the refugee population.

And I still struggled with some cognitive dissonance as well. Having been raised believing that only my church provided the path to salvation and the truth, I was trying to understand how these kids of other denominations could truly be Christians, as they appeared to be. That’s something that took many more years for me to work through.

Along with my parents’ broadening, my world opened up. I was now allowed to go to movies with my friends, sleep over at their houses, go to school dances, and the like. These are all things that had been denied me in the years prior. I took the opportunity to rebel in some ways, though I had the problem of always being perceived as the “good kid,” so much of my rebellion fell on deaf ears. What seemed significant to me then is quite laughable to me now. For example, I would sometimes go to parties with my friends and drink alcohol when I was 16 or 17.

What you can see here is something not too different from what would be considered a “normal” teenage experience by most measures. I would drink with my friends on Saturday night, then I would go to church on Sunday and secretly judge everyone else for being hypocrites. I know, I know. My logic was flawed, but I was experience teenage angst and undiagnosed depression at the time, so I’ve learned to be easy on myself. 

The rest of my high school time was relatively uneventful. I thrived at my new school, even though I was a little lazy and didn’t always do the best I could. I broke a couple of hearts and had mine broken pretty significantly when I was a senior. I’ll never forgive myself for the immature and unkind way I treated that girl at my senior prom. She had every right to break my heart. I know she’s happy now, so I’m glad to see that.

Overall I cherish my high school memories. It was the time when I started to become the person that I am today, and I thank God often for the people that he put in my life to guide me. My only regret is that rather than continue on that trajectory I chose to attend a fundamentalist Baptist college. It was a mistake, but I met the love of my life there, so I guess it could have been worse.

What about you? Do you have memories that you cherish from your high school days? Do you ever wish you could go back?