Where Have all The Bible College Graduates Gone? Chapter 5

Eyes Wide Open: How My View has Changed.

This blog is a semi-fictional forum of twenty Bible College graduates covering a fifty-year period.

Again, the names have been changed (with biblical names 😊 ) along with specific details. The stories you hear are all from individuals who graduated and started in vocational ministry in the PAOC. Some are still active, some are retired, some left pastoral ministry, and some left the church entirely. The setting, however, is an imagined scenario in which they have been invited to a forum to respond to one question. How has their faith/theological journey shifted since leaving the college 20 or more years ago? The stories are real even if they have been mashed artificially together. You are invited to be the twenty-first member of this group with me as the moderator.[1]

Moderator: Recently I read of David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech to the 2005 class of Kenyon College. He described the experience of two young fish swimming together only to be passed by a much older fish, who kindly remarks, ‘Mornin’, boys, how’s the water?’ This unexpected greeting leaves one of the young fish to turn to the other with a question for the ages: “What the hell is water?”

Welcome to this forum. After 20,30,40 years of life post-graduation, “how’s the water?” In college I had no idea I was swimming in water. This question would have been non-sensical. But here we are alive swimming and/or treading surrounded by water.

Phoebe: Is this like an AA meeting? I have always thought the church should be like an AA meeting. If I have learned anything it is the value of being open to the stories of those around me. Everybody has a walk finding God and everyone is unique.

Moderator: And if I have learned anything, not everyone wants to hear your stories in the church. Pastors are examples of faith; you are supposed to have it all together? Or so we are led to believe. And if/when you show some vulnerability people get nervous.

Boaz: I’ll bite. For 14 years in ministry, I wasn’t swimming. I sat outside near the pool of Bethesda unable to get to the water when it was stirring. I couldn’t walk. For some time, I had been asking questions that good pastors never ask or at least they never ask out loud. Did God really hate Goliath? Would God have fist pumped after the defeat of Goliath and what does that say about God if God did? Would it change anything for me if Mary wasn’t a virgin? Would it change the way that I love Jesus, and what he did and how he presented God in a new way? I began rethinking everything. I was confused and angry. Angry with God, with the church and with myself. The innocence of those days in college were gone.

Michal: Did you ever get to the waters? And if so, how did that happen?

Boaz: Losing your innocence is scary, but it's important. I lost my innocence. I lost my black and white simple answers. And I had to face ambiguity and grace. Grace is such an incredibly difficult thing.

The catalyst, however, came one week when we hosted a visiting group at our church. I asked one of the members of that group how do you do it? How do you walk in faith and keep your integrity and sanity. One of the members said to me, “I have no expectations.” He said, “everything is a gift.” And that led me to see that my complaining, my anger was a result of feeling entitled. And when I came to terms with that, I found myself in healing waters.

Tragically however, when I began walking again there was no shortage of leadership who responded, “Who says you can walk on the Sabbath?” Who says you can be going here and there, and I thought, wait a minute, guys, I'm walking again. You're missing the point. I'm walking. You would rather me sitting down and watch everybody else walk.

Michal: I asked you how you got to the waters because I left ministry more than ten years ago and presently do not attend church. I had come to see too much hypocrisy in leadership. I had experienced too much personal abuse. Today when people try to correct me and tell me that their point of view is God ordained, I tend to disagree. This is what you understand, what you have experienced maybe, but it may or may not have anything to do with God. I have come to understand the same thing when it comes to scriptures. They are written from a man’s point of view living at that time.

I don't need to go to church to hear the “Word of God “or to hear God's message for me, or to be energized or invigorated or whatever. That's the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the one who nudges me. I can’t afford to get hurt again in the church.

Samuel: I understand those questions, but for me my wakeup call began by paying attention to church history. It is a messy thing. In college I paid attention to Pentecostal history, which was a messy thing. I paid attention in my church history class, but I didn't hear about slavery until I brought it up at the end of the course. I paid attention to Pentecostal Distinctives, and I talked about the psychological, psycho sociological bits about how we express the charismata. I got an A plus on my paper and then had my professor tell me, but you might not want to mention any of these things when it comes to your credential’s exam. I took heed and managed to skip those exams.

And then as a young minister I got to experience how the “sausage” was made. I was 29 years old and suddenly I couldn’t look the congregation in the face anymore. I couldn’t tell them that I have no doubts about the things I'm telling them. And it was tearing me up. I was fighting with God to speak to me. I was Jacob. I was holding on to the angel telling God to touch me because I needed to hear from him because I needed to lead these people so that they could be different. And all was quiet. Even Job eventually had God come out of the whirlwind and say something. And I felt like I was making a call and there was nobody on the other end of the call. And it was exhausting. How can I tell these people to struggle with God and I'm not hearing from Him.

Caleb: I went the other way - history is what saved me. No, it did not keep me in the Pentecostal fold, but the broader church history was in some sense my salvation.

Ironically, in Bible college I remember writing an essay against historical church structure. I was all about individualism and the ‘freedom” of the Spirit. But I discovered there are a lot of crazies out there. Today I really appreciate the structure of being in church with a “hierarchy of experienced leaders.” I appreciate the role of the bishop to protect and guide the church.

So, I now serve in the Anglican Church of Canada. I fell in love with the ordered nature of the liturgy, and specifically the prayer book, and praying scripture. I came to really appreciate that the work of the Spirit is also an institutional reality, it cannot be separated from the Spirit’s work on the individual. The church is that reality on the ground. I have a deeper appreciation around the nature of the church’s ordered worship - the nature of the sacramental life of the church that is not so dependent on our feelings, or on our measuring up. The centrality of baptism and the Eucharist were not something that I got in Bible College. But historically, theologically, sociologically, they are central to the life of the church. Honestly today I have a deeper appreciation of the nature of what the church is called to do and be.

Lydia: For me, I was clinically burnt out when I left the church. For a long time, I was in quite a state and unable to be functional enough to work again. I have since learned to simplify things. I feel like we've got to stop trying to fit everything into a neat box when life is so messy. Since I've just stopped trying to do that life has been freeing.

Growing up I had this unhealthy twisted theology. I believed that if you did the right thing, said the right thing, dressed the right way. God would be pleased with you. Everything would work out the way you wanted. As has already been said, I was “entitled.” That is what I was taught and believed. I had no other story to think otherwise.

When I was just eleven, a close relative of mine died in a place crash, a couple of years later a friend of mine died in my arms of a heart defect on the way to youth group. And nobody talked about it. Back then dealing with any kind of pain you just prayed about it, maybe had an altar experience, and everything was supposed to be okay. But it wasn’t okay.

We sell short our children if we think these life experiences slip by unnoticed. “God is in control, except when God is not. All things work out together for good except when they don’t.” How are we supposed to process this?

Everything changed on my 15th birthday. I remember I bought my first pack of cigarettes. I figured if everything is pointless and I am probably going to end up in hell anyway, I may as well have a good time now. I decided I wanted nothing to do with God. I consciously thought if I run far enough away from God, far enough even from the pool of Bethesda, and make enough of a mess of my life, God won't be able to use me. I'll be damaged goods, and he'll leave me alone.

Okay that did not last, a few years later I rededicated my life to God. I applied to Bible College and was accepted. But I carried with me my past, my shame, my unanswered questions, my failings, and a fear of what God was going to require of me.

That was compounded because I also had a pedigree to live up to. I never really had the permission to be me. So, when I graduated, I tried to live up to those expectations. For twelve years my husband and I served, gave, and voted. The church was everything. We didn't have a life outside of it. And it was okay because we were both in it together.

But as life started happening again for us, real life, and real church experiences. I came to the place where I realized to build a church all you need is a bit of charisma, and the right sales approach. God does not have to be part of any of it. And yet in the back of my mind, I could not dig deep into that, because I was afraid it would shatter my foundation because, you know I was taught to believe something.

Today as I said earlier, my theology is simpler. I believe in Jesus. And I if I can model my life in any way after Jesus, then life is good. And beyond that, I'm no longer sure what I believe. I don't know what I believe about heaven and hell, don't know what I believe about salvation. I don’t care about some sexuality, I don’t care, it should not make me treat others differently. Today I can be truthful about this, but I couldn’t have been in this position when I was someone’s pastor.

Caleb: I too had a pedigree to live up to when I graduated from Bible College. My father and grandfather were both ministers.

When I graduated, I believed in the power of the Holy Spirit to change people's lives, and hearts and everything else. But I also saw plainly that everybody was just like everybody else that I knew. I had to work also outside the church at the time to make ends meet. So, while keeping the church going, I worked a lawn sprinkler job with a whole bunch of guys who swore, pissed and drank beer. And they were good people. And some of the people that I was dealing with in the church were not good people.

Benjamin: Like others here, in the last five years I have had to bring everything back to Jesus. My doubts, my disappointments, frustration with the Bible, how it's written, what books were included, and all those kinds of things. All the early Christians had were what Jesus said to them. They preached what Jesus said. And that's what changed the world. I keep coming back to the gospel story.

For me, the scariest thing is that we can no longer have different opinions and still go to the same church. If we don't agree on a subject, then that person is shunned as if they have leprosy.

Moderator: Truth be told were it not for your anonymity, much of what you have expressed here in this first round could not be shared without perhaps losing some friends. I should qualify that, if anything shared here resulted in the loss of a friendship, they probably were not friends to begin with. And you probably already know this. So maybe this is an AA meeting. But there is no fear here of being shunned. And this much I know, after 70 plus interviews you are not alone in your journeys. Some of you, however, have yet to speak. You will have an opportunity to carry on this conversation next week and this time I want you to think about some specific issues that you have changed your minds on.

[1] Given the responses emerged out of individual interviews, I have taken some liberty creating dialogue between the participants. In 1995 as part of my doctoral work I ended with a five-page personal reflection on what had become my truth prejudices on a range of theological issues. It is an interesting exercise to do. I had not looked at it for many years until I embarked on this blog. Surprisingly, 25 years later there is little I would change. Changes would come by addition not subtraction. I would add something on soteriology as I have largely abandoned the substitutionary atonement of my youth. And I would probably add something on heaven and/or hell. For the curious, I am including a link to that section of my thesis. I am calling it, In search of the Holy Grail.