21/50: Testimony: Thirty plus
I played this song on repeat as I drove back and forth to seminary.
“I followed the voice you think you gave to me
But now I’ve gotta find my own.”
My changing theology caused conflict and eventually made it difficult for us to stay in the community we had helped birth and where we had given so much of ourselves. Chris and I spent months wrestling, praying and talking, and together we decided that it was time to leave the church.
This was a deeply painful decision. Many long-time friends stopped calling or trying to understand where our honest following of Jesus was taking us. I don’t know why — maybe I alienated them through the messiness and confusion of my transition. Maybe they were afraid of where we were going. Maybe they felt they would be disloyal to others who remained. Nearly twenty years later, I mostly feel a lot of compassion for all of us. But at the time, I was profoundly alone and immersed in grief. My entire life had been built around evangelical structures. Exhausted, hurt and confused, we landed in the back row of a large Presbyterian church.
The pastoral staff made time to listen to our story and allowed us to take the space we desperately needed to soak in the liturgy, music and teaching, with no expectations. While the church was moderately conservative in its orientation, I found an intellectual rigor and space to grow that fed my soul. It was a place to call home during my graduate studies, which eventually shifted to a Masters of Divinity program at the local Presbyterian seminary.
My theological and philosophical intuitions found expression in the papers that I wrote on salvation, suffering, and biblical exegesis. Alongside the intellectual journey, a good therapist who understood the particularities of fundamentalism, helped me unravel how interwoven faith was with my identity. A passage I discovered in college had taken me ten years to live into:
“When faith is all connected up to your childhood identity–your sense of reward and punishment, your standing in society, your own place in the world–it’s hard to reach into that switchboard of interconnected relationships and come up with a line that is truly your personal possession, a faith you would hold on to if all the rest were taken away. And even if you did have ahold of it, it would be hard to know for sure–and hard to tell it from everything else.” (John Fischer, Making Real What I Already Believe)
To be honest, there are still days when I recite this passage to myself, not out of grief or regret, just because a switchboard of interconnected relationships has defined my faith journey in a very particular way.