Going the Road Alone? The Church Universal

There are a range of different life events that can lead to a great deal of anxiety and depression and various charts have been devised that attempt to measure and evaluate these life events. Not surprisingly, death of a loved one and divorce rank on the extreme upper end, illnesses, injury, and health related issues are generally ranked near or below that, in the upper middle are typically ranked financial concerns, and the lower half tends to represent various changes in a person’s lifestyle or habits that effect stress down to much smaller stressors like parking tickets and the holidays. Such indicators are likely far from comprehensive and it is further questionable just how universal such lists are, for what gives me a relatively small degree of stress may for you be the source of great anxiety. Suffice it to say, however, that we do not make it through life without experiencing at least some degree of stress and anxiety from time to time. As for myself, there have been a number of factors working together which have been producing an unbelievably high amount of stress lately which have made it difficult for me to think or concentrate. I will list some of them here briefly and we will use them as a springboard for our deeper points today.

Most of you who have been on this mailing list for any length of time have read that I was terminated from my job back in March of 2004. Unfortunately, my unemployment officially ran out at the end of October and my attempts to find work since have all met with failure. It should come as no surprise that the insecurity such produces can in itself cause a great deal of anxiety; one notices every burned out light bulb, every empty box, every one of those little things one ordinarily takes for granted, wondering from whence the money will come for even the smallest of these things. To this end, I have mercifully been afforded some relief from friends and family and soon, I hope, will be eligible to take out more student loans. The latter “solution,” however, is never the remedy one wishes for oneself, for it merely holds the debt at bay a bit longer before it comes crashing in once more upon the shore. It often seems like troubles follow one after the other: that when you’re down, more troubles are certain to be on the way, or, as the old proverb so succinctly states, “When it rains, it pours.” I recently have been having pain in my right upper quadrant (that is, a dull, unremitting pain directly below my ribcage on the front right side) and have been through a battery of tests and an ultrasound to determine what the cause might be. My suspicion is that it is a case of gallstones, but I will not know anything for certain until the end of this week. Because a person without employment and health insurance can often receive free or drastically reduced health care through charities and municipal clinics, I tried going that route. When the powers that be finished shuffling me back and forth, I learned that because I am a full time college student at a university that has its own dedicated health center, they would not help me. Of course, it remains true that as one friend put it, “One can’t put a price on one’s health,” and I have acted accordingly, hence my description of the battery of tests whose results I will hopefully learn this Friday. There is also a great deal of uncertainty about this semester: the college has not yet sent me a letter notifying me of my eligibility for any loans, grants, scholarships, or qualifications to participate in the federal work study program. I am not at all certain that my scholarships are renewable for this semester and if they are not, the hardship will be much greater, as these are what has primarily kept me afloat throughout my academic career. There is nothing like the combined effects of health and money concerns to turn an otherwise stable person into a walking ulcer.

When I read over that last paragraph, it doesn’t really sound that bad: there are plenty of people—perhaps some of you even—who are currently going through much worse circumstances. Yet that does not make it any easier for me to deal with. In fact, I was not at all certain there would even be a newsletter this week until moments ago when the idea came to me how I could use my own current experiences to hopefully be an encouragement to those on this list.

Hidden below the surface of my outwardly calm demeanor are other worries and fears, among them my faith, which has been taking a serious beating for the past several months. I think such can be especially true for persons attending college and for many reasons. One of the factors that is often overlooked deals with the very nature of college itself: its relative transience. Unless a student lives on campus—and even if he does—the sea of faces shifts every semester. What is more, few college students really know what they are going to do with their futures—few college students really know what to expect once they get “out there,” which renders planning for the great unknown almost oxymoronic. So college is that great temporal zone in no man’s land: high school graduates caught in limbo between their educations and the working world and an increasingly large number of non-traditional students seeking better jobs or just to better themselves. Particularly for those who do not have funding from parents, institutions often make promises in order to attract students, but those promises can’t always be cashed in when they are most needed. Invariably, it seems, headaches with financial aid result and the endless stream of paperwork itself becomes so overwhelming that the temptation is just to go belly side up, letting “them” stick you where they will. Even those students who do not have to worry about their finances are often under conflicting pressure to conform with their peers on the one hand (among other allures, binge drinking being notorious on American campuses) and pressure from parents to excel academically on the other. It should not surprise us that college students statistically have the highest level of depression of any age group within the United States today (and I suspect in other developed countries as well, though I have no research at the moment to corroborate this point).

What is one of the major causes of depression based on the above account? Is it the transience? Not directly. Much of it is a matter of perception; much of it amounts to the sense of not really belonging, not really fitting in or being a part of anything larger. According to a 1999 study from Ann Arbor:

How many of us can relate? We have probably all felt, at least at times, that the people around us simply do not care and have accordingly put on our best performance just to make it through the day while we were secretly dying inside. For some of us, it is probably the story of our lives and when we arrive home, the mask comes off and the familiar sense of death settles in. There is also an interesting side note to all of this as well, particularly for the college student, though I believe the application is universal. According to the news article “Study: Spiritually Inclined Students Happier” from app.com (archive note: link now defunct) that cites an American study funded by the John Templeton Foundation: “College students who participate in religious activities are more likely to have better emotional and mental health than students with no religious involvement, according to a national study of students at 46 wide-ranging colleges and universities.” But do you notice that it says, “students who participate”? It does not merely say “students who are spiritual.” (More on that in a moment.) And of course, to be completely fair-minded, we should acknowledge, along with Alexander Astin, the co-principal investigator of the study, that these results could simply indicate that “more psychologically healthy students are seeking religious and spiritual activities” rather than the other way ’round, though other studies seem to indicate at the least a very high correlation between faith and a general sense of well-being. Further, it would seem that there is a hidden barb even here, for the same study conversely found that “highly spiritual students are more prone to experiencing spiritual distress, or feeling unsettled about spiritual or religious matters, than students who aren’t as spiritual.”

It has been my experience that spiritual doubts often arise on one of two fronts depending on the person involved or the particular period in a person’s life. When I was growing up, the doubts that plagued my father when they came round were often ones concerning God’s provision for him personally. He believed God could provide and that God was a benevolent and loving Creator, but somehow when push came to shove, his heart frequently caught in his throat when it came to his own individual needs. In a very similar manner, several of my friends struggle with self-doubt about their motives for why they serve God. They feel like they are play acting and suffer doubts of being truly used of God. Still other friends I know struggle with doubts about God’s righteous anger, feeling like He is frequently disappointed with them even though they admit to me that this perception is irrational. Many of these friends have not had strong, supportive homes and believe that at least a part of their perception of God is based around their conception of male figures in general, just as Freud popularized between the span of the previous two centuries. Yet while I have experienced many of these same impressions at various times—and in particular that God would not help me personally or that I was merely play acting—the vast majority of my doubts come on an entirely different front and one that I feel (whether accurately or not) is scarcely understood by many within the religious world. Fittingly for an apologist whose role it is to look at the Christian faith in the large as it contrasts with other systems of belief, most of my doubts have been with the very nature and existence of God Himself and the Christian faith in general.

I couldn’t fairly characterize my current bouts of doubt as being entirely external to Christianity—for I am, after all, a man of faith—but they do not seem to be on quite the internal level that the doubts of many of my friends experience. For most of my friends, their faith in God, the Bible, the importance of church, and any number of other articles of faith is soundly intact; they simply question their own relationship to it. Woe be it to the man or woman who suggests that any of these articles of faith might be suspect; no matter how much they personally doubt their role in God’s kingdom at any moment, they are quick to defend the Lord’s honor. But I find myself so often the lonely other whose gravest doubts are those of the faith itself and not merely my relationship to it. I suppose that it is part of what gives me the skill to defend the faith as I do in the large and I would further suggest that there can be a difference between doubt and disbelief. Doubt, when it is itself regularly and systematically questioned, can become quite a finely tuned instrument with which to test claims of truth—at least if we accept the definition given of doubt from classical realism: “Doubt is the suspension of the mind between two contradictory judgments, between ‘It is’ and ‘It isn’t’” (A Mini-Course in Epistemology: Section 1: Truth and Certitude). As we will define it here, disbelief, on the other hand, does not admit to even uncertainty, for the question has already been dismissed; thus doubt is potentially open-ended whereas disbelief is completely closed. That is why, I believe, often those who believe the most strongly suffer the gravest doubts; those who never doubt have probably never truly believed.

Let us again return to what we have learned about college students who participate in religious activities. We noted that it said “students who participate” and not merely “students who are spiritual.” Why is this distinction important? So that we can club ourselves over the head on yet another guilt trip for not being more involved and more committed? Not at all. Rather, we should tie this bit of information together with the findings from Ann Arbor, Michigan, that suggest that a social network alone does not inoculate against depression—only a sense of belonging is capable of that. In just the same way, many of us have had so many bad experiences with church, which we may call “institutional Christianity” or perhaps more popularly “organized religion,” that we tend to view “participation in religious activities” with a very high level of suspicion. We may very well have good grounds for doing so, but in the process we often inadvertently cut ourselves off from a faith-based community that could help support us and sustain us. As I survey the stress I have been feeling lately, I realize that much of it is the result that I have no real sense of mooring. The church I attend meets once a week, I generally have Ju Jitsu practice on Monday nights with some fellow Christian brothers, a Christian discussion group in my home on Wednesdays, and a Bible study at friends’ houses on Thursday. However, over the holidays all of these support structures dropped away and the pain in my side precludes me from participating at the dojo on Mondays, at least for the time. And, while I’m certain it is a reflection on me and not on my brothers and sisters in Christ, even when I do meet with many of these groups, I still often feel somewhat alienated and rarely feel fully a part, though they nonetheless go a long way and I really feel a difference when I don’t have their support.

You see, when doubts come around, when finances run out, when health problems rear their ugly heads—when untold countless other things happen to us in this life here on earth—we can survive the storms so much better when we feel that we belong, when we can be a part of a family that accepts us and allows us to be real and authentic. Many of us long for just such an experience and have all but despaired of finding it. I don’t really have the answers either, because I often find myself on that same ship. But one thing we should be very careful about is being critical of the church in general and turning our back on it altogether. Recall that we recently recognized just how destructive talking behind other people’s backs can be, noting that “most of us do not have a huge problem with slander” but we all “sometimes get careless in what we say about others and a gentle reminder from time to time is helpful in focusing our awareness” (Slanderously Snuffing Smoldering Wicks). In just the same way that slander spoken behind a person’s back can be destructive on an individual basis, so too can criticism spoken against the church serve no higher purpose.

Perhaps for many of us, we have had truly unpleasant experiences which have disillusioned or soured us on what we term “institutional Christianity” or “organized religion”; almost certainly, people have let us down. Beyond this recognition, for those of us who have been around church for any length of time, there have probably been times we have taken a rather dim view of the way a particular church or denomination conducts its worship; if we attend somewhere regularly, we might even feel that way about our own place of worship. We have looked around at the people assembled under the same roof and wondered to ourselves if they were at all sincere. In fact, many of us have gone past the level of wondering if others were sincere to asserting with utter confidence (at least within the privacy of our own minds) that they weren’t. We feel certain that no true believer would act as they do; we have little doubt that if these persons were truly begotten of God that they would behave in this way. In addition to our own thoughts, we also hear criticism leveled against the church from the outside as well; criticism that is not so much different than that which we have expressed on the inside. Just recently I came across a website that featured a page of (primarily negative) quotations relating to theology. One of the many quotations that was referenced was that of Emo Phillips; the tragic part is that I don’t think he was ultimately trying to be humorous in what he said. Phillips begins (I have taken the liberty to punctuate the quotation properly):

If we are honest and have been around the church for any length of time, we will probably have to admit that there is likewise truth in what is being suggested here. But now that we’ve seen the problem, what then is the proper response? Many times I have traveled back to that ancient book of wisdom in the Old Testament otherwise known as Ecclesiastes in which the author notes that there is a season and a place for everything: a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to sorrow and a time to put sorrow away. Implicit in these statements is that wisdom will know the difference; wisdom will know the right time and the right place for the right action. When the right time, right place, and right action all coalesce together with the right motivation, something truly beautiful invariably results. I am reminded of the sixth line from The Tao Teh Ching of Lao Tsze (as translated poetically here into English by Charles A. Mackintosh):

Goodness’s goodness, like beauty’s beauty, is only good when motivated from proper motives. So then, with the view toward the coalescence of right time, right action, and right motivation, let’s see if we can’t begin to discern something about how we might respond to the all too common problems in the church. The first and most central guideline we should affix in our minds is that our Lord’s wish is to redeem that which is fragmented, to restore that which has been lost, and to set the captive free. If then, our Lord’s heart is to bring redemption, we should ask ourselves when we speak of the church: “Are the words I am expressing—however true—in any way redemptive or will their employ help to bring about redemption?” This consideration is an important one, for it is very easy for us to criticize the church with no higher view in mind than savoring the thrill of being a bit rebellious or cynical. We feel it is our due to enjoy a bit of humor at the expense of the church and we justify our actions by correctly noting that the church does have its many faults. And yet, do our criticisms take those faults away, or do our criticisms further add to those faults? Many times, I would maintain, they have no redemptive purpose in mind whatsoever and merely serve to depreciate further that which has already been brought low, dragging the credibility of Christianity along with them through the mire in front of a watching world. Negative humor tends to subtly tarnish everything—and everyone—it touches. I would maintain that it is often the case that such criticisms are merely expressions of cynicism and generally do little except reveal the heart of the cynic for what it is: disillusioned, unhappy, bitter. I would further maintain that if all we are doing is savoring our cynicism, the end result is its effective spread like the contagion it is. A side question now emerges that we should first address before we proceed: “Is there ever a legitimate time, place, and way to level criticism? If so, how so, and what would it look like?”

In answer to this question, we should look at the different sides to the same equation: two mirror images reflecting the same source of light. On one side, we may encounter persons who are disillusioned by Christianity. Particularly if we love these persons, we want to see them come to the saving grace of the Savior. If this be the case, we probably do well to acknowledge along with them that there is a problem with the church. We probably do well—and let us trust again that wisdom knows when to speak and when to refrain from speaking—to tell them that we understand why they feel as they do and that we too have felt as they have. Often, of course, a little bit of empathy is all the cure that is needed. But sometimes we realize that while our empathy may have taken great strides toward resolution, we may have simply reinforced their sense of disillusion, taking them little higher than where we found them; sometimes we might even find we too have begun to descend the negative stairwell into the dungeons of cynicism. That is one side of the mirror.

The other side of the mirror is when we ourselves are wearing those shoes, when we feel particularly affected by what we see in the church around us and it begins to poison our thinking and our sense of perspective. Rather than bottling it up inside, it is wonderful to be able to express it to other brothers and sisters in Christ who will not judge us for our honest thoughts. But do you see how the motivation is different here? When we open up to others and share with them how deeply disillusioned we are, the end we have in mind—indeed, the thing that we seek—is release and redemption. We do not delight in bashing the church; rather, we are seeking to release the poison so that we are no longer held captive by it. And just as we seek to release the poison so that we are no longer in its throes, so too we should respond to those who are struggling who come to us and have nothing but negativity to express for the church. We acknowledge their pain and we don’t try to sweep their accusations under the carpet or minimize them. But what we are ultimately seeking to do is take the negative and replace it with the positive; we are seeking to restore and redeem that which is broken. Let us now take into consideration something else.

For many years until it began to fall by the wayside with the rise of Modernity, literature was seen to have two major purposes: to entertain and to instruct. The premium was placed on the didactic, but it was recognized that without having an element of entertainment, few would wish to read the then newly conceived literary form known as the novel or listen to plays and poems performed in public settings. William Shakespeare was one of the best known examples of many who adopted the dual aspects of entertainment and instruction—and while we should, of course, acknowledge right from the beginning that some of Shakespeare’s writing is a celebration of the ribald and bawdy and certainly not at all redemptive—by far and large, he has been immortalized by his sympathetic and insightful portrayal of characters who are themselves in search of that which is higher. And if not the individual characters themselves, the sum total of the events within the play at large point to honor and virtue and shun pettiness and vice. In my opinion, Shakespeare’s less successful plays seek to ridicule vice and thereby espouse honor (The Merry Wives of Windsor comes to mind). Of course, by successful, I mean plays that truly inspire and instill virtue and honor. By contrast, often the plays that are most successful are those in which the central characters model virtue (Pericles comes to mind). Put another way, the less successful plays portray vice and ridicule it; the more successful plays model virtue and exalt it. Of those literary works that fall into the first category, there are two divisions known as Horatian satire and Juvenalian satire, named respectively after the Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. Horatian satire smiles gently at human foibles whereas Juvenalian satire is sharp and biting in its attack of vice. Both can have their place, but the problem with either is that the intended effect can backfire and rather than promoting virtue can instill cynicism.

In a similar manner, there is a reason why ridicule of any sort has only limited effectiveness when used in service of the good. The simple fact is that ridicule is itself negative, even when one attempts to use it for a higher purpose. What one finds oneself effectively doing is fighting negativity with negativity, fire with fire. Just as the most effective plays of Shakespeare model virtue—not merely berate vice—so too, a better response to the crisis within the church is to proactively seek a remedy rather than risk furthering the problem by heaping ridicule upon it. The simple fact is, most people are tired and weary and have grown somewhat jaded by the cares of life. Another scandal, another juicy bit of gossip, another broadcast of the evening news brings a yawn and reinforces the stereotypical prejudices. Altogether too often when we volunteer criticism for the church, we simply add to this jadedness and serve to inoculate people from a desire to ever set foot in the doors of a church again—negativity, as has oft been said, breeds further negativity. But you do see the problem, do you not? If we wish for the church to be the place where sinners and saints alike are welcome—for the church’s mission on earth is most concerned with these two groups of persons (otherwise known as the entire human population)—the turning of the tide has to start with us.

The church is not perfect and never has been; we are not perfect and never will be. Yet while people are not perfect, others prefer to be around us when we see the good in others and we ourselves likewise benefit with greater health and happiness. In just the same way, we can choose to see what good is in the church and when we see that which is bad, rather than flapping our gums about the scandal to the four corners of the globe, we can either silently address the problem or take it before God in prayer. In either instance, we truly are advancing God’s kingdom on earth, but when we merely sit and criticize, we have effectively become agents of another kingdom altogether: one that is antithetical to the will of our Father.

As we looked at recently in Slanderously Snuffing Smoldering Wicks, our tongues are truly venomous at times: we talk about other people behind their backs and criticize things we know ought to be sacred, delighting in finding their flaws. Once we have exposed them like so many witches at Salem, we pick the scabs until the blood flows, howling with delight. Yet we ourselves are scandalous, we ourselves are unworthy, we ourselves have enough faults to last us a lifetime without ever once lifting our gazes beyond our own noses. In order to get better, our sins have to be acknowledged of course, but they are acknowledged in the redeeming light of God where transformation is wrought. As the best-selling Christian author Max Lucado is famous for writing, “God loves you just where you are, but He refuses to leave you there.” In just the same way, if there is a problem—any problem of any sort, whether spiritual or otherwise—we have to first clearly see that there is indeed a problem: denial never got anyone anywhere. But once we have seen the problem for what it is, we then seek a solution, rather than simply complaining and reveling in the problem. Sin must be repented of and confessed before God; as we have likely heard before, repentance involves a “turning away.” I am reminded of the words of Frederica Mathewes-Green:

So, while we smile at the oversight of the enthusiastic retreat leader, repentance means a turning away: a full 180 degrees and heading in the opposite direction. We take our sin before the Lord so that He may change us; if we continue to sin, we continue to take our sin before the Lord and keep doing so for however long it takes. In just this way, we do well not to criticize the church just to criticize the church. Instead, we first acknowledge the fault and take steps to be a part of the solution and not merely add to the problem. We remedy what we can and pray about what we cannot. And, if the problem continues, we continue to remedy as we can and pray about the rest. We are not perfect, of course, and old habits die hard deaths. If we find ourselves becoming critical of the church toward no redemptive end, we do what we do when we are convicted of any sin: we take it before the Lord and make what human amends we can. Or, if we are in a position like the one we mentioned earlier in the newsletter and we find ourselves greatly hurt and disillusioned with the church, we seek to release that poison and try not to spread the infection. It takes time to heal and the process is never easy. Yet we can, with God’s grace, find healthy release from the cynicism and comfort in the arms of God.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

So then, all of this is what we do well to avoid in our impression of the church in general. It says nothing about how to become a part of a church and have our needs for belonging met (save for the fact our conscious decision to see the positive makes us far more likable). At present, I have little advice to offer on the subject, save this simple idea: “Make the subject a matter of prayer that God would help you drop the negative feelings toward church and find the one He would have you attend.” It will not be perfect, for if it were, none of us would belong. The reason we need church in the first place is because we are not perfect. It is so true that when we try to go the road alone, no matter how spiritual we may in fact be, we will still not have that necessary support to bolster us when the storms of life assail nor anyone with whom to share the sunrises. And with that, I will close with one final request: would you please remember my finances, my health (be it gallstones or otherwise), and the decision for my future education in your prayers? Like you, I too frequently struggle with depression, doubt, cynicism, and feelings of alienation; like you, I frequently need a helping hand to pull me out of the muck and mire. The fact continues to remain: “We don’t generally fare too well when we go the road alone.”

“I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, accepting one another in love, diligently keeping the unity of the Spirit with the peace that binds [us]. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope at your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

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