A
little note: I go out of my way to be forthright in stating that what I write
is from my perspective. I am extremely sensitive about writing about others,
and in order to honor their identities, I often change names (and sometimes
genders) of the people I write about. If I use real names, it is almost always
because I have permission. I’ve been doing this all along, but thought you
should know. And with that, the story begins with where I left off at the end
of the last post….
I was so anxious on my drive back to Colorado that I wretched through a good portion of Utah. This baffled me because I was going back to my beloved homeland! Yet, I felt bedeviled. My last image of myself in Colorado was standing in confidence, in front of a group of people who believed in me and believed in the Jesus I followed to San Diego. In some ways, my return to the Rockies was overshadowed by what felt like chains of failure draped all over me, and I had to look all those people in the eye. The other part of my restless stomach indicated my aching need to be embraced, and feel like myself, in Disneyland*. I was returning weary, defeated, broken, and wonderfully tan.
*This reference is from my last post. Disneyland is my endearing reference to the church I worked at in Arvada.
Upon my return to Arvada, I began work as a 30 hour/week co-pastor of a young adult ministry called EPIC. This ministry was part of the Disneyland church where I interned before going to San Diego. I supplemented my income by working as a Starbucks barista as well. I spent almost as much time at Starbucks as I did at church, demonstrated by me calling out drinks in my sleep, much to the chagrin of my roommate. Moving back to Arvada and working at my church made me think everything was going to be okay. I had been to the battlefield, and returned with wounds and scars. I was surrounded once again by my favorite people and working at a church that I believed was doing things right—it was like coming home and getting to sleep in your own bed. It was inevitable though, that the other proverbial shoe would drop. I was "home" for less than a month when I realized something still felt wrong with me: I was enduring daily self-reproach, convinced that I sucked as a person and a pastor. I felt sad most of the time, and I realized that I was angry and distrustful at God, church, and myself.
I didn't waste time finding a counselor to help me. A Christian counselor, to be specific. Somewhere in the air I breathed all my life, I developed an implicit distrust of "secular" counselors, believing they would invalidate my faith (ironically, I now have mistrust of Christian counselors for the same reason). Fortunately, my Christian counselor actually happened to be very good at her job. The process of sitting with another trustworthy human being (if you have a good counselor) and having them help you see through to your soul, validate and normalize the dark and light, and have hope for you, can be a terrifying and powerfully healing experience. The first thing that happened is that my counselor helped me understand that I was a normal person, depressed, but normal. Up to that point in my life, I worked hard to project the image of a positive, funny, all-is-well kind of person. I had this belief, I’m not even sure of where it originated, that I would burden others if I was sad, or needed help. I was always glad to help others who were sad and needed help, but I needed to be perfect and perfectly self-sufficient. I also began to recognize my belief that I could transcend feelings and situations that most people cannot transcend, like a huge life, cultural, and spiritual transition for example. My counselor helped me to understand why my understanding of—everything—wasn’t working for me anymore, and why I was normal for needing help. I was also a person who trusted God and believed that a good Christian compelled others to want to know Jesus. I sincerely believed that I represented Jesus to others. I believed that following and trusting God, though not always easy or sane-looking, would ultimately bring blessing to others and myself. It would mean that life would better for me, and I would be better off than non-believers, otherwise why would I even hope to show others that following Jesus was the best thing to do? Since I was depressed, and felt like a failure, I believed I was not perfectly representing the fullness of Jesus, therefore failing as a Christian and a pastor, failing at being myself.
In most counseling experiences, things get worse before they get better. In order to heal, I needed to come to terms with how wounded I was. Coming to terms with those wounds, peeling back the bandages to take a look at them and understand them, that’s the moment when things got worse for me: My very identity as pastor and Christian, along with my framework for functioning in life stopped working in San Diego, and it didn’t start magically working again when I came back to Colorado. I thought Colorado would help me find North. Not only was North enigmatic, but I realized my compass disappeared too. I kept thinking I would feel free and alive in Colorado. But I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt loss. I had to grieve my loss, feel it, and experience depression because of it. The way I saw life, myself, and God was no longer working for me, so things got worse before they got better.
Things getting worse meant that I felt stuck for a little while, stuck in the darkness and hopelessness, and not sure how to get out. If you have experienced depression, there is no need for an explanation. If you have not experienced depression…you lucky bastard! Seriously though, one of the best summaries of depression I’ve heard is that it is anger turned inward. Not only that, but also some strange brain alchemy happens that makes it very difficult to “snap out of it” or think realistically. If you’ve compassionately lived with or spent time with someone who is depressed, you are an enduring angel. It was inevitable that my depression would impact all areas of my life, including my preaching. About three months after I returned to Colorado, I was preparing for a sermon. The sermon was based on some content from a book I’d been reading called Messy Spirituality. It was actually a very helpful book for me because it relieved me of the expectation that my relationship with God should be always on a straight path, angling toward better. Instead, the concept from Messy Spirituality that I prepared to preach about, stated that, “the point is not always to clean up our mess, but that God enters our mess and makes us masterpieces.” As a person experiencing depression, this content was not connecting. In theory, I loved the idea of God making me a masterpiece. Yet I felt like God had given up on me, I didn’t want or ask for the messiness, when I did ask for it to go away, it didn’t. I just wanted to feel normal and happy again. So to stand in front of my congregation and speak this message with conviction, felt like I’d be lying. My journal excerpt from that time said:
“I don’t believe this about myself. This message will be useless…if I can’t give a message—the one thing I love and am passionate about, and do well at, then what good am I? Why should I be allowed to do what I do? Feeling hopeless.”
I knew that I would not be able to preach this message with integrity; I did not believe what I was going to preach. Exasperation and frustration with myself lead to a meltdown, which lead to me deciding not to preach that week, and letting someone else do it. This was a low moment. To be unable to follow through on my job, and my identity—I was a pastor who couldn’t preach for god’s sake—was deeply troubling for me, and reinforcing my belief that I was failing as a Christian, perfectly demonstrating the struggle of my depression at the time. The person who preached in my stead was our church’s associate pastor, the creator of EPIC, and one of the greatest mentors of my life. The day I told him I couldn’t preach, I also told him, in the throes of distorted thinking, that I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to hack it on the team, and that maybe I shouldn’t be on the team. He told me, “If you’re in the same place six months or a year from now, we’re still committed to you. This past year has been a test for you, and continues to be.”
During this season of depression, I kept asking God why he would let me be this way; I kept begging him to make me better. I did not want to learn lessons and build my faith in a Job-like way; it felt cruel to me. I often thought life was pointless and that everyone would be better off without me. I would rather God take my life then live the way I was living. Eventually, I got to a place where I spent less time looking at the wound, and more time learning how to heal. One potent remedy for healing was learning to reframe my understanding of God, and myself too. I started letting go of the concept that God has a plan and reason for everything. There are a million examples of why that is a shitty way to understand God. The idea that God planned for me to be depressed, feel like a failure, and have to toil for hope seemed cruel. The fact that I was begging on a daily basis to either feel better, or die, was a sickening way to live. I trusted God, I believed in him, dedicated my life to him fully, including vocation—I was sold. I did not need the added injury of having to believe that God planned for me to wish a Mac truck would just take me out. I absolutely found meaning and gained insight from my dark days, but I stopped believing that God planned it, and had a reason for it. Instead, I began taking on an understanding that God did not plan all of the horrendous things that happened in the world, or the struggle of my life, but instead that God was with me during the pain, but was just as displeased about it. I was starting to see the world as a place with lots of humans, created with the capacity to love, that could make life better if we just chose love, and Jesus was the ultimate example of that love. As I began to take on this perspective, my purpose as a Christian and a pastor continued even more strongly as a mission to help people love each other. My counselor helped me remember to include myself in that love, to be good to myself, and let others love me too. I needed a lot of love in this season of change. I continued to have low moments over the subsequent year as I worked through depression and trying to understand myself. There were times when I brought hardship and pain to some of my friendships, as well as ambivalent leadership to EPIC. I had many healing moments too, the kind where people, who I suspected loved me very much, showed me they really did love me, even when I wasn’t always easy to love.
Working through depression included re-thinking my pastoral role and calling, the purpose of church, as well as whether or not I wanted to be in vocational ministry forever. I was regularly contemplating how I was taught to understand God, how I preached about God, and how to make sense of the role of the evangelical Christian church (I’ll refer to this as church from here on out). There was a popular book circulating among my evangelical sub-culture called, A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. Those of us on our staff, and a few others in our church who were reading this, were quiet and diaspora-like in our appreciation of it. The book teetered toward heretical, and some evangelical pundits dismissed it because it was too postmodern (which is translated in Greek as of the devil). It also left too many Christians questioning without providing answers. It confused people, and it lacked theological credibility and did not use the conventional evangelical framework to understand the Bible. Theological credibility was part of my own angst too: All of the theology I had studied, that cemented my beliefs, was yelling from the sidelines of my curiosity, begging proof for my expedition’s purpose, “no need to ask if the world is round, we’ve already proven it is flat!” McLaren’s framework for understanding the Bible refreshed my own perspective. I have the book in front of me right now, with several dog-eared pages and relentless underlining on the chapter about the Bible. As evangelicals, we give the Bible, and our interpretations of it, absolute authority. Yet as I learned in my Biblical Studies program, there have been a myriad of interpretations over time, and there continue to be. Everything evangelical is based on the authority of the Bible, so if biblical authority is removed, a house of theological cards comes a’tumblin’ down. At the time I was reading this book, I was questioning the lens through we interpreted the Bible, wondering if it was possible that our lens could be wrong. McLaren suggested that perhaps our interpretations of the Bible do not hold authority, but that God holds the authority (I would later question the authority we ascribe to God, but I won’t get ahead of myself here). Despite the general, evangelical disgruntled alarm about this book, I felt alive when I read it. When I read McLaren’s work, I cried and cheered through much of it. I vividly remember being hunkered down in the Starbucks on 64th and Ward, thinking this author had read my mail, while I expressed tears of joy, ensuring the book remained clandestine behind The Purpose Driven Life dust jacket (I’m kidding about the dust jacket. Is dust jacket even a relevant term anymore?). He was able to articulate something that I did not have words for, giving voice to feelings and observations that I, and many others, were making at the time. McLaren was able to decode my soul and I was jealous I had not written his book myself! He was an explorer who had begun to chart the uncharted. I can’t speak for him, but I was getting the sense that he did not intend for his work to provide answers. For me, it was like going on a hike where the path is unclear, and then I find a cairn, then another cairn, letting me know someone has forged this direction. I was not alone. I was not crazy.
While I was exploring alternative ways of being a Christian, working as Starbucks Barista provided the opportunity to build rich relationships with people of all stripes, outside of my church world. I worked with a former Colorado beauty queen who was also a Unitarian Universalist; an active environmentalist, the first I’d ever met and known by name; a father of two trying to make ends meet; a “liberal,” mainline Christian who introduced me to the idea that there are many valid Christian theologies; a philosophy major who discussed metaphysics with me; a spritely CU Boulder student who assisted the sun in generating light; a worship pastor at a local church; and a pregnant lesbian who was really funny and made me laugh. It was during 4am shifts and mid-day lulls, when there was time to linger and talk before the rush of Regulars came through the door, that helped me get to know others, and allow myself to be known outside of the confines of a church community. I could pose real questions that might have been taboo with my evangelical community, questions that were simply normal at my Starbucks. I could also be more real with some of my thoughts about God, life, and faith, sharing ideas and qualms among people who would not worry for me or think of me as an unfit minister. I had many a conversation along the lines of spirituality and life’s woes, providing a listening ear or encouraging words, or simple compassion; I was learning to give and receive in relationships with non-Christians without feeling the pressure of pretending that because I had Jesus, I had figured out the right answer to life. I had a chance to tell my Unitarian friend why Jesus made sense to me, and hear from her why she didn’t need him, and in that conversation really listen and try to understand, without the goal of influencing her toward my beliefs. As much as I wished I did not have to work at Starbucks, and be a full time pastor instead, I think I was more of an authentic pastor and human when I put on my green apron.
One conversation in particular will always remain with me. The conversation served as a watershed moment of empathy with others, frustration with church, and my role as a pastor. The pregnant lesbian I mentioned, Carly, stopped at the pastry case where I was loading a shelf with sugary, fatty goodness. Carly asked me, “does your church baptize babies?” I explained to her that, “we dedicate babies in my tradition and kids aren’t baptized until they are able to understand the choice of baptism” (logically, eight years old or so). She went on to ask, “would your church allow my partner and I to dedicate our new baby when she’s born?” I stood there, pumpkin bread in hand, trying to formulate a gentle way to say, hell no. What I did say was, “You know, I hate to say this (uncomfortable pause) people at my church would be kind to you and welcome you and be friends with you, but if you wanted to dedicate your baby, you would have to un-become a lesbian before they would dedicate your kid. They won’t do it.” Saying those words to Carly felt horrible. I was part of this tradition. I was part of a group that invalidated same-gender relationships, and believed we had the authority to do so. It was troublesome for me in the moment. Carly seemed unaffected by my response, like she had heard it before, but I was uneasy. In that few minutes, with the steam wand whirring in the background, and the blender buzzing up Frappuccinos, I realized that Carly’s experience of being a lesbian and wanting to be part of an evangelical community was similar to my experience of being a woman and a pastor. There were lots of people that did not believe that our identities, lady pastor or lesbian, were valid. I was standing there, exasperated that my faith tradition, and me at times, had the audacity to think we could validate or invalidate certain ways of being human. Yes, I was thankfully part of an evangelical denomination that ordained women, but like much of social progress in the US, I was legal, but there was still a lot of cultural catching up to be done. I don’t want to misrepresent either: the majority of the male pastors I worked with for most of my time in ministry had full confidence in my abilities and were advocates for my work, and partners in my work. But, female representation in positions of leadership had a lot of catching up to do. I simply did not meet very many other female pastors. I interpreted this lack of representation, along with some vocal Christians who blatantly challenged my role as a pastor, as invalidating my existence. This moment with Carly gave me pause, making me ask, “Who else? Who else do we invalidate?” I wanted to make this right, I wanted to fix it, and I knew I needed to continue exploring and questioning what it means to be the church, and my participation in the church. I needed to rethink my ecclesiology, to be exact.
For so long, I believed the church to be the hope of the world, the conduit through which people could connect with Jesus. I began to see myself evolving as a pastor, perceiving my role to include helping the church to minister to the world by being a community that inspired love and hope (and all the other things outlined in Moulin Rouge’s bohemian society) for all of creation—people didn’t need to stop being gay, or female, or addicts, or Buddhist, or Calvinists, or liberals, or Darwinists, or humanists, or single people, or pacifists, or poor, or unmarried and living together, or themselves, to be a part of the kingdom of God.
But what was happening is that I was part of the church, who at the moment, was getting the un-churched, churched (side note: un-churched does not equal non-Christian). I was learning that getting people churched and connecting them to Jesus were not the same thing. Getting people churched meant that we welcomed anyone into our community, but then needed to change them, so we could be more comfortable around them. Or, we were simply a better place to be than the church down the road, so we attracted people who were already churched, but wanting a different church experience. We’d introduce them to a community where they would find connection and support, and become people who would invite others to church as well, like a well-oiled machine, that existed for the sake of itself. My church in particular started transforming into a church that tried to get people saved (accept Jesus into their hearts). I was asked at one point to complete a document that tallied the number of people who accepted Jesus as their savior through EPIC. I begrudgingly guessed. I didn’t do altar calls during Sunday services, or ask people to say the sinner’s prayer over lunch. I was more concerned about getting to know people and letting them know that their life mattered. I didn’t know who was saved or not. All I knew was that because Jesus was in my life, it was my desire to show him to others through the way I treated the people around me.
Qualifier: As always, I am cautious to paint anything in broad brushstrokes. I have, and still do, see aspects of the church acting as a community that brings hope and support—in life-changing ways—to many people. And according to a recent Pew Research poll, almost 1/3 of the American population is evangelical Christian, and many non-evangelicals, view the evangelicals that they know, in a very warm way. I am good friends with, and related to, many evangelicals who I think are some of the best human beings on the planet.
During my ecclesiological questioning, I think the heart of my discomfort was that the church maintained a collective, typically well-intended mindset that said: we hold the Truth, with absolute certainty. No one else does. The less depressed I became, the more I spent time around non-Christians, and the more books I read, I allowed myself to start rethinking the Truth as defined by the church. I was coming around to a new way of seeing: understanding God in new ways, understanding people in a new ways, and understanding myself in a new way. My exploration challenged the Truth as I knew it and naturally impacted my pastoral identity and my role as a leader in my church. As all this was shifting for me, things were shifting in my church as well. It had been about a year since my preaching meltdown, our associate pastor (the one who was a great mentor) left the ministry, another one of our key leaders in EPIC left as well. I became a full time pastor, and co-pastored EPIC with another colleague, Ben. I also stopped working at Starbucks. I felt ambivalent about all this. While I was questioning whether or not I wanted to remain in vocational ministry, I became more involved in the church. And while I think I was a more authentic human being at Starbucks, I hoped I could help my church understand the non-Christians out there, and share different ideas for reaching out to them. There were also some storms brewing in our church’s leadership team, and I was ever so tentatively questioning my fitness for ministry, and continuing to question the purpose of church. I had enough career ambivalence through this period that I started a Master’s in Counseling program at Denver Seminary, thinking a vocational shift may lie ahead.
As uncomfortable as it was to be seriously considering leaving life in ministry, I continued with my curiosity-led investigation of my faith and the expression of it. Like many people who begin to realize that their beliefs, buttressed by an institution and deeply rooted history, might not be the only answer to life, I felt a sense of disillusionment. Even more so, I felt a sense of unfairness: why did we choose to embrace some ways of understanding God, while rejecting others that seemed valid, and were embraced by Christians outside of evangelicalism? Why aren’t we taught all of Christian thought, and allowed to decide for ourselves what makes sense? How could we, with intellectual integrity, claim to have the only Truth? The freedom and life I was finding in expanding my beliefs and being open to alternative understandings (at the time still fell under the larger Christian umbrella, but included theological thought accepted outside of evangelical Protestantism) was not heartily welcomed in my tradition. At best it was tolerated and seen as normal questioning that would eventually taper, and perhaps make my faith stronger, as I realized the rightness of evangelical beliefs. I was having this paradoxical experience of increased compassion and love for non-Christians and decreased compassion and love for evangelical Christian exclusion and absolutism. I was embracing the gray of unknowing, the gray of non-absolutes, living and preaching from a place of questioning and curiosity.
I describe this as an incredibly complex time for me. My worldview was changing. I was questioning my fitness for ministry and purpose of church. Meanwhile, the ministry I was running was beginning to fall apart, as was the church leadership and general morale of our staff. There were bigger things happening in Disneyland while I was working through my own questions of faith. There was a lot of turmoil within church leadership, lots of whispered conversations behind closed doors, and a palpable lack of trust among us all. My own EPIC congregation was growing disgruntled with me too. One of the young adults who was part of EPIC, Pete, came to me with a concern representing the sentiments of many EPIC attenders. We sat down in our empty fellowship hall during the middle of the week and talked in quiet voices. “Keener, I’m telling you this because you are my friend and I respect you. People are saying that when you preach, you are not black and white enough.” This was true. Gray was my favorite color at the time. “You ask too many questions and don’t give enough answers.” I stopped him and told him he was right. That I don’t give answers because I don’t have them, and I think my role is to offer various perspectives and let others work it out for themselves. Especially in light of my inner uncertainties about faith—I did not think I could preach anything with certainty. In the moment I was getting frustrated that it was only Pete who came to talk with me, wishing that the others would have felt comfortable enough to share their concerns as well. I had to guess, “How many people are worried? Do they truly have the same concerns as Pete? How am I supposed to respond to this, and who do I respond to?” I encouraged Pete to suggest that others come and talk with me, so I could hear their perspective, and so they could hear mine. Pete assured me that he cared about me, and EPIC, and wanted to let me know what he was hearing. I never got to hear from others though.
Though Pete was right about my preaching, and I chose to preach this way, I took his feedback as a gut-punch too. I liked to be liked and had a slight obsession with making sure others thought well of me. Pete’s feedback needled at my inner tension of needing to preach with intellectual and spiritual integrity, while also wanting people to like me and feel inspired by my teaching. It also reaffirmed my anger and frustration with evangelicalism in general. As he and I continued to talk, my growing self-doubt about my fitness to lead was being confirmed: could I stand to be myself and risk not being the person and leader that others wanted me to be? I felt frustrated that as I tried to be myself, not hiding my doubts, that my congregation and colleagues in leadership seemed unsettled by my genuine curiosity, and were suspicious of my pastoral abilities because I had questions. I didn’t want my own doubts about myself to be confirmed by others. As Philip Gulley says, “It’s really hard to stand in your own truth when everybody around you is telling you, ‘Why don’t you just keep things the way they are?’” The extra sting is that I was well aware that my congregation of 18-30 year olds represented the most un-churched age group in the US, and some were likely asking the questions I was asking, but didn’t feel safe to ask. I think this is one of the reasons this age group leaves the church in droves. My guess is that I was making them uncomfortable too, because when we as humans feel uncertain, we often look to others as anchors, we look to them for answers, for help to clarify the unclear. Preaching questions and leaving things gray was not calming for my congregants. I was an unsteady anchor. I wasn’t really an anchor at all.
As much as I wanted others to be happy with me, to feel confident in me, I was unable to stand up in front of people and pretend that I had all the answers, and the right answers about something so confounding as the idea of God. The reality was that I was working in a church, like most evangelical churches, that held core beliefs that needed to be adhered to, especially by those of us in leadership. This is not an abnormal or even a wrong thing for a church to do. Churches are institutions, and like any institution, they must uphold and maintain standards in order to maintain their identity. If they don’t, they cease to be an institution. At that time I my life, I didn’t care that an institution needed to be maintained, this was God we were talking about after all, and I couldn’t relegate God to a list of static beliefs that were created by men. How could I contain God in black and white statements, certain and unchangeable answers, and absolute assertions? I could not and would not, and my unwillingness to bend was problematic for my church, and especially problematic for me. I was being a little stinker.
Pete’s feedback was enlightening and crippling, but eventually I was thankful for his honesty and courage to tell me the truth. Sometimes I wonder if Pete’s message exposed what my life was trying to tell me anyway, but I was not quite ready to hear: You need to leave the ministry. You need to genuinely question your faith. You need to see what it’s like to be a Christian outside the church. This message was certainly coming from within, and to see that somebody from without was seeing this too was revealing a congruence that I was hesitant to accept. After a few days of mulling and anguishing over my conversation with Pete, I went to the office to talk with my partner in ministry, Ben. He was one of my best friends during this season of life and is one of the most kind, funny, gentle, and tidy people I know. I was recounting my conversation with Pete to Ben. As he patiently listened, I asked him, “Are YOU worried about me too? About how I teach and preach?” I was still looking for someone who wasn’t worried about me. His answer was that he was worried too. Knowing that he was worried was more than I could handle. I felt alone and began to cry. And, I mean cry. I am not a crier and I rarely showed sad emotions to others, but I wept like a close friend had died. I felt miserable about the uncertainty of my identity, and especially about the idea that my congregation was unhappy with me, and that I couldn’t just ask my questions and not have people worry about me. I was worried that everyone thought I was wrong and inept. I wanted people to embrace me and that my preached uncertainties would help them feel challenged, enlivened, and motivated to explore what God meant in their lives. Instead, they felt frustrated, confused, and wanted certainties that I could not give. I sensed (thought I am not certain) that the people around me—congregants and colleagues—wanted me to change, or get better, or read up on theology, then come back when I was ready to toe the line. Ben compassionately suggested that I take some time off, that I was being too hard on myself, and thought that I just needed a break. I felt relief and agreement in my entire being at his suggestion. A break seemed like just the thing I needed.
Ben and I met with Pastor Jim and proposed the idea that I take a mini-sabbatical. We sat in Jim’s office, he in his rolling desk chair, and Ben and I sharing a couch. A coffee table separated us from Jim. I recounted the conversation with Pete and the general sense of doubt and inquisitiveness that I was experiencing. Pastor Jim was anxiously curious to know more about the kinds of questions I was asking and wanted some specifics on my theological doubts. “How do I pare this down?” I thought. I immediately felt defensive and bumbled out “Well, I don’t believe in our version of absolute truth. This idea is only 100 years old—saying that one version of one religion is right about absolute truth doesn’t make sense to me.” The suggestion that I might not believe in the absolute truth of our faith was confounding to Jim. I’m pretty sure I sounded like a crazy, relativistic, post-modernist, who was dancing on a slippery slope, and heretical alarm bells were going off in Jim’s brain (she’s a witch!). I think the Biblical commentaries on the shelf behind his head began to quake. He leaned forward looking concerned, and agreed that I might need a break. “While you are on your break, I’d like you to write a Statement of Faith …” I perked up, that actually sounded fun! “…answer these questions: Who is God? What is Truth? What is the Church? What is Salvation? What is Sin?”
I was nerdily thrilled! I loved writing, thinking, learning, and sharing knowledge. I had thoughts on all the topics Jim presented. These thoughts had been informed not only by several years of formal Biblical and theological education, but also by self-education, my own spiritual journey, and attention to life in general. I had never had the opportunity to organize it and write it all down—at someone else’s request, so writing this Statement of Faith was a welcome challenge. I knew what the right answers were supposed to be too. I had a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies, and was in the midst of getting my Master’s degree at an evangelical seminary. Both of my educational institutions were bastions of evangelical thought and practice, and both required my commitment to the National Association of Evangelicals Statement of Faith in order to be admitted to the institutions (I had to sign in blood). I figured out pretty quickly though, that my assignment to write a Statement of Faith was not intended for my pleasure, but rather a litmus to determine how far off the deep end I had gone. Pastor Jim and five church Council members would ultimately read my Statement, a test I knew I would not pass because I was not going to deliver the right answers. I was going to tell the truth about my life and thoughts on faith.
On a cold November day toward the end of my sabbatical, I walked into the Atrium Café at Faith Bible Chapel. I was nervous, and resolute. “You’re screwed,” was running through my head. There was a knot in my stomach as I walked into this mega-church complex to meet the proverbial nail in my coffin. I’d driven past this church a million times, but had never gone inside. It is expansive, literally. The church straddles Ward Road in Arvada, with a bridge that connects one part of the complex to the other. The Atrium Café is part of this network; a coffee shop with 40 foot ceilings that is part of a larger, mall-like “foyer,” the meet and greet hub for Sunday morning worship with thousands. There were many high top tables, a few overstuffed chairs and a couch, ficus trees and other plants placed about to try and give it a smaller feel, and a coffee kiosk of course. All the tables were full of people as I searched for Pastor Jim, and one of our church council members, Stacy. I quickly found them both, seated at a table near the overstuffed chairs. As I approached them, I noticed that they both had a copy of my Statement of Faith, both copies marked with illegible writing. The knot in my stomach got tighter, and I felt brave and scared. I was at the Atrium Café because this was where Jim and Stacy wanted to discuss what I had written. With my marked-up Statement of Faith in front of them, I sat down and three of us delved into my 10-page magnum opus.
Pastor Jim told me that he and five members of the church council held a “Keener Bible Study” where they all read through what I had written. I, of course, wanted to know their response, and I half expected the ghost of Martin Luther to walk by at this moment. Stacy was genuinely amiable and she gently stated her concerns about my penned beliefs, but also affirmed and normalized my curiosity, “Keener, all of us have had questions like this at one point or another,” as if to help me feel like it was all going to be okay. Her comment was only slightly relieving, being that I didn’t know her very well and wasn’t sure of her intentions. I had this nagging feeling that there was a nice-ness about this conversation that was masking an undeveloped ability to be forthright, leaving me on edge. Jim joined in and brought forth his key concerns, “Your statement made you sound confused and like you lacked knowledge. You don’t seem sure about what happens to us when we die. Do you believe that we go to heaven? (pause) If I asked you today where you are going when you die, how sure are you that you would go to heaven?” He questioned me as if I were ignorant of evangelical theology and had never received a degree in Biblical Studies, or had skipped all of my Seminary classes, or even attended Vacation Bible School for that matter. And, of course, I knew the right answer would be to tell Jim that I was certain I was going to heaven because I had accepted Jesus as my Savior when I was eight years old and I have been following Him ever since, including regular church attendance, Awanas, mission trips, and dedicating my life to ministry. Instead I said, “I’m 99% sure that I will go to heaven, but how can I possibly say with integrity that I am certain of something that is so full of mystery and uncertainty? And I think you are asking the wrong question anyway, and I get frustrated when faith is oversimplified and hinges upon whether a not a person goes to heaven or hell.” If there were an audience at the Atrium Cafe, they would have let out a collective, head-hanging sigh of resignation and disappointment in my stubborn response. I’m not sure he or Stacy knew what to do next. I surely did not know what to do next either. I was fairly certain I was going to get fired right there in the mega church. They didn’t fire me though. Instead, they followed through with a predetermined plan to have me talk with one more council member, who I assumed would also be evaluating my heretical levels (logically, if she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood, and therefore—a witch!). I walked out to my car knowing that this was the beginning of the end, saying out loud to myself, “I can’t believe this is happening. What am I doing?!”
A few days later, I met with the other council member at a Starbucks (the same one where I read McLaren’s book), across the street from the mega church. She, like Stacy, wasn’t too concerned about my questions and disclosed that she had her misgivings that I had to go through this process at all. She informed me that there was other turmoil happening in the leadership and that I was unfortunately (and unknowingly) swept into the process. She also told me that Jim wasn’t expecting me to write a 10-page, well thought out Statement of Faith, but instead wanted a bullet pointed document exemplifying the brevity and certainty of the National Association of Evangelicals Statement of Faith. My document took him off guard. In fact, later that week, he emailed the National Association of Evangelicals Statement of Faith to me: “Read this and let me know if you agree.” I read it, and sort of agreed, only because my beliefs were changing and I had no new, definitive statements to declare. I replied to his email, saying I agreed, and annoyingly included my reservations, point by point, regarding each stated dogma. I’m sure that Jim felt exasperated by me. I truly believe that Jim respected me and wanted the best for me, but was also in a quandary because I, one of his key leaders, was toying with heresy, and not backing down.
So much of me wanted to back down, to surrender, to roll over and ask for a belly scratch to show that I was no threat. Part of me wanted to enthusiastically declare that I had no doubts and I was ready to lead again. I desperately needed my colleagues in ministry to trust me again, to think well of me, to respect me. These people were my community and support—my family. I felt very alone, as if I were repelling my support system. So much of me needed to be honest about who I was, what I was thinking, and I was willing to risk a great loss to do so. My theological and institutional rebellion included feeling alienated by those closest to me. I don’t think I was an easy person to be around during that time either. I often felt indignant and angry, laced with fear and sadness. During the season of writing and sharing my Statement of Faith, I was also pointing out other ethical faults that were occurring within our leadership at the time. I suppose I was a whistle-blower, and in order for everyone else to survive, from my perspective, they had to distance themselves from me. At the time, this was painful and difficult for me to understand, and was all muddled within my own doubts about evangelical Christianity. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I can’t give a full account of everything that was happening in my church because so much of it was kept secret, even between colleagues. In the past 10 years, since all this happened, a handful of people who were leaders during all of this went out of their way to apologize to me, telling me that me and my Statement of Faith got caught in something bigger that was going on. I still don’t know exactly what that bigger thing was.
All I did know was that EPIC didn’t seem to be fitting into the vision of where the entire church was going. It didn’t help that I was reluctant to continue leading as well. Ben was also questioning the momentum of EPIC as well as my fitness to continuing leading. He and I had several talks about the idea of disbanding EPIC because the church as a whole was considering functioning as one multi-generational unit and it didn’t make sense for us to nurture EPIC—a congregation of 18-30 year-olds—apart from the rest of the church. In the midst of what felt like a toxic environment to me, and as I was losing faith that the church was the hope of the world, I was losing faith in my faith: could I continue representing a church, theology, and way of life that was no longer making sense to me? It did not help that my community of support seemed to feel cautious and uneasy about the questions I was asking.
My own questions, and weariness in conjuring motivation to revive a ministry on life support, made it fairly easy for me to agree to Ben’s suggestion: what if we closed down EPIC? I remember sitting in his office that day, among the order and neatness that was Ben’s lair, organizing our exit strategy, who we would talk to, how to keep praying, and how to move forward as church leaders and individuals. Less than three months after this conversation, EPIC closed its doors and I was writing my letter of resignation. During this uncomfortable transition, our associate pastor (he started after the former associate pastor, my mentor, left) invited me to his office for an unexpected heart to heart. He apologized to me, through tears, “Keener, I feel like this experience has taken you off the battle field of ministry. We are losing you too soon. I’m so sorry for how you’ve been treated, I feel sorry that this happened. I wish there was more I could have done for you. I don’t want you to give up on the church.” I was shocked that I had an advocate, and felt some healing knowing that he had been standing up for me without me knowing. I too, was crying. I left his office, feeling a mix of bitter sadness and much needed validation, and some hint of closure as I walked forward into the unknown. My plans of being a pastor and being an evangelical Christian were fading as I walked away from a life of ministry. When I left, I thought I just needed a break and a new ministerial context that allowed more freedom of thought and liberalism in theology. But in my soul, I knew I would not return—to church or to my evangelical faith tradition.
I felt that questions as to the meaning of life, and
the possibility of the constructive improvement of life for individuals, would
probably always interest me, but I could not work in a field where I would be
required to believe in some specified religious doctrine. My beliefs had
already changed tremendously, and might continue to change. It seemed to me it
would be a horrible thing to have to profess a set of beliefs, in order to
remain in one’s profession. I wanted to find a field in which I could be sure
my freedom of thought would not be limited. –Carl Rogers
APPENDIX:
National Association of Evangelicals Statement of Faith: http://www.nae.net/about-us/statement-of-faith
Influential works during this time period:
A New Kind of Christian. Brian D. McLaren; The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church. Reggie McNeal; Blue Like Jazz. Donald Miller; Sexual Shame: An Urgent Call to Healing. Karen A. McClintock; Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel. Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo; Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. David Burns; Faith and Feminism: A Holy Alliance. Helen LaKelly Hunt
