While Alene and I were vacationing at Antioch Ranch in Mendocino, I was reading in “Practicing the Way” by John Mark Comer. It’s a book about discipleship to Jesus; learning to be with Jesus, becoming like Jesus, and doing the things Jesus did. These are all life attributes that I am drawn to.
Discipleship has been on my mind as of late. I feel like my relationship with Jesus isn’t what I wish it was; not as close, or intimate, or robust as I wish it were. I’ve felt as if I have somehow missed out on ‘Kingdom growth” or “Christian purpose” in my life that I could have been cultivating for years had I paid more attention to being a disciple of Christ.
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in feeling this way. I’ve felt as if I’d been wasting time, or missing out on “growth opportunities” with Jesus. I’d try some new spiritual practice, hoping it would ignite a growth spurt in my discipleship, but most often I’d find myself disappointed with my lack of self-control, or perseverance, or “grit” required to make said practice stick. I’d find myself in the New Years Resolution Syndrome of promises made, promises broken by the end of January.
Comer makes the point in his book (a point I’ve embraced for years, but for which Comer subtly reframes) that as humans, we are constantly undergoing “formation”, be it spiritual, communal, or societal.
We are constantly told the right way to live, the best ways to joy and peace, the most efficient means of economics and the best way to security and safety. Since childhood, I’ve been influenced by parents, siblings, friends, schools, churches, television, advertising, books, newspapers (yes, I’m that old), politicians and a plethora of other influences that come in and out of my life, daily. I’ve had favorite authors, movies, and stories that have ignited my imagination. Music, art, mathematics, science and religion, have all helped shaped the ways I view, understand, and feel life.
All of us, every single one without exception, from the lowliest to the greatest and most admired, have been “formed” into who we are by what we've lived, and by how we’ve let those experiences and influences shape our thoughts, desires, and actions.
In short, we’re all disciples in one way or another. We are all people who’ve been formed and molded by our culture and society. No one is “un-discipled”. No one is "un-influenced".
The question for the Christian (me, too) is, have we intentionally worked to form ourselves to be disciples of Jesus, to become more fully human, more grace-filled, merciful and loving, in the manner of Jesus? Not just “believers”, but “followers”, people who not only believe and have also chosen to be influenced and formed by the practices and ways of Jesus. Have we become doers and disciples of the Way?
After all, discipleship is something we can choose. Most often we don’t “choose”, we just kind of go with the river we’re swimming in and go where it takes us, but we can “choose”. I believe that, once we become aware of the influences around us, we can begin to choose what influences we allow deeply into our lives and our minds. It takes practice and intention. I don’t have a handle on all of this yet, but that is what “following Jesus” is all about. Learning to follow the practices and ways of Jesus, in order to be formed more and more into “Christlikeness”, for our own good and for the good of our community and others.
I’ve been struggling with that question of “am I a disciple of Jesus” for a long time. I’ve felt a discontent in my soul about how closely I’ve been “walking with Jesus”. I’ve felt like I haven’t been a good enough follower, a true disciple of Jesus, one who lets Jesus transform me into His likeness.
It’s been kind of a depressing time, seeing as how I take seriously the quote by A.W Tozer, “the most important thing about us is what comes into our mind when we think about God”.
But in reading “Practicing the Way”, I’ve come to the conclusion that, at sixty-two years old, I have had quite a journey of discipleship to Jesus, a “long and winding road”, beginning in my early childhood. I was constantly being formed by my life experience but much of the time I simply didn’t know it.
My parents were wonderful people. Christians both, deeply spiritual in their own faith, but not folks that carried their faith around on their sleeves like a talisman or a badge. They lived their faith in quiet ways of love and mercy and grace as parents to a rambunctious, often willful group of seven children. No matter what, there was always love in their home. Sure, there was discipline and impatience and occasional raised voices and all the rest, but all of it, to my memory, tempered by love and understanding, a true desire to guide us children in the ways that would benefit and be good for us. This foundation of love would be absolutely foundational to everything else in my life. Without it, my life would have been much different.
I have snippets of memories as a child at First Baptist Church of Sacramento. I’m in Sunday School with other four-to-five-year-old’s, sitting in a half-circle on the carpeted floor, watching my teacher on a small chair with a children’s book about Jesus on her knees, reading the simple paragraphs on each page, then opening the book towards us children and showing us the illustrated drawings on the pages of the book. Those faithful and kind Sunday School teachers were among my very first rabbis, my first teachers of the Way, done in the simplistic manner a child could enjoy. They were my first rabbis in the way of Jesus’ love.
Attending church was a part of the fabric of my childhood. As I grew into elementary school and further, I attended the Free Methodist Church of Sacramento, where much of my Christian foundation was laid. There was Sunday church and Wednesday night activities that I attended regularly. I have so many fond memories of learning songs during youth group, playing games, all of it sort of suffused with teachings from the Bible and stories of Jesus. I recognize now this was also a foundational time in my Christian formation, where I learned the Bible stories and beginnings of Christian thinking that would last a lifetime.
In high school, Wednesday night youth group took on a deeper seriousness for me. Our new youth pastor, a young recently married Christian college graduate, began a purposeful program of discipleship with our group. This was leading up the heyday of the “Jesus Movement” in the late 1970s. I remember he taught us to journal. The life of a teenager was no easier in the 1970s than it is today. Knowing that our youth pastor would read our journals, he asked us simply to journal about life, what we were feeling, our fears and joys, whatever we wanted to talk about. We’d turn them in and he’d make small notes in the margins, encouragements and observations, sometimes a prayer for us or a verse of scripture that may offer us something. Though hesitant at first, he gained my trust and became a true mentor, helping me to understand and navigate some of the pitfalls of being a teenager. The accountability and trustworthiness I found in him gave me an image of what it means to be trustworthy, to live a life with as much honesty and integrity as you can, knowing I’m not perfect and neither was he, but always with grace and kindness and compassion for one another. His influence was short, only two or three years at our church, but I learned so much from him. He was one of the first men I could say “I think I saw Jesus in him”. Mind you, he was just twenty-four or so when he started as our youth minister.
But life was not to be a straight line of discipleship in The Way of Jesus. Although the things I’d learned in church, about love and kindness and compassion were never lost on me, they didn’t always have center-stage in my life.
While in high school I discovered the burgeoning popularity of marijuana. Around 1978, I began hanging out with some more free-spirited kids at school, and found that checking out at the park after school was a pleasant distraction. It lasted until my parents got wise to my newfound habit, but that door had been opened, and new experiences continued to pour into my life.
While being formed and discipled in the ways of Jesus at home and at church, there was a wider, wilder world opening up to a maturing young man that also held a fascination for me. A car brought previously unknown freedom, and a job brought previously unknown wages to finance that new freedom. New friends where I worked brought all sorts of new experiences and the girls in my life were no longer children (as I had been, too), but young women. I found myself (not consciously at the time, mind you, but in hindsight) conforming to this new world I was a part of, and I was enjoying it! Fooling the clerk at the AM-PM with a fake ID so I could buy beer at nineteen years old is a disturbingly fond memory of the time. Going out with friends, mostly leaving the church life behind, was a slow and inexorable movement. I wasn’t a bad kid by any means, but I was definitely being formed by what I let into my life.
I was married at twenty, and as most young marriages go, there were times of great joy and happiness, and mountainous struggles to overcome. We had three beautiful girls that were and are a joy for us both. Church, as in attendance and belonging, wasn’t a big thing for us as a couple. I still had a fondness, and my wife was familiar with church but had a different experience in youth than I did. Eventually we both decided to attend a church for a while, which filled a space in my spirit that had been missing for a time, but that too eventually tapered off as the life of young parents took us elsewhere.
But my faith and a feeling that I still loved Jesus and wanted to be a part of that life persisted with me, even if I tried hard to ignore it most of the time. The foundation I was given as a child still formed much of the foundation of my life, even as I tried to ignore it or run from it. This caused some dissention in our marriage, and some times of trying to reconcile my faith with my life as a father and a husband and my love for my wife. Trying to straddle two worlds never goes well.
At one point while we were separated, living in separate homes, my eldest daughter was invited by a school friend to go to her church youth group one night. She went and enjoyed it. She kept going back, which made me quite happy. Then one day she suggested I should go to church too, because they had a church choir. Knowing my love of singing, she had me with that. This turned out to be one of the great inflection points in my life. I found at that church, First Baptist Church of Fair Oaks, a renewed love for Jesus, for the church, and an outlet for my suppressed longing to be a part of a Christian community.
Eventually my wife and I divorced as amicably as one can. I continued at church, becoming active in choir, in studies, and eventually in facilitating and teaching Sunday School. Teaching became one of the great joys of my life, and I point to it as the season when the Bible began to open up to me, since teaching required a great deal of study. I sometimes refer to this time as my second “born again” experience, a time when Jesus and the Holy Spirit began to be real to me, not just abstract ideas.
At this same time, I’d been working as a 911-operator and telecommunicator for about 14 years. It’s a stressful job. I started in 1990, as a young twenty-six-year-old, and learned that the world is not as kind as I thought it was while growing up in a loving, safe home and environment. I found myself depressed and scared a lot of the time, looking over my shoulder in public, watching for the “bad-gay” who’d mind was set on havoc. People who called 911 or other lines became problems to solve, not people to listen to. We were taught a quasi-combative form of communication meant to allow operators to “take control” of the conversation and guide it how we needed it to go. For me, this began to de-humanize people, turning them from callers with real fears and difficulties, into customers to simply process and move on from. Seeing as how this was eight-to-ten hours a day, I was being formed at work into someone who lived and dealt with my community and family as if they were problems to dispassionately solve, not people to love. I didn’t like this about myself, and that had to change.
Eventually, at the same time I was teaching Sunday School and learning so much about what the Bible teaches and how Jesus teaches his followers to live, I found myself being gentler and more compassionate with callers to 911 and other lines. I had learned that Jesus loves everyone with a fierce love, and began to feel like I should do that same. It wasn’t an instant change, but gradually the entire focus of my career as a 911 operator turned around. Each caller became someone to help, not a problem to solve. What I’d been learning and teaching at church I began to put into practice at work. I began to love callers and view them as beloved children of God. I found that if I treated callers with respect, and let them know that I hear what they are saying and understand, even while guiding conversations in a manner that let me get the information I needed, I received so much more cooperation than before. I found callers saying thank you for listening, thank you for being patient while I tried to explain myself, thank you for being kind.
I began to discover that the ways of Jesus have some real value in the real world. I began to discover maybe Jesus knew what he was talking about.
At the same time, while studying the Bible for Sunday School, I began to see a vein of scripture that spoke to me of a truly loving God who wanted to save the entire world. This began my slow journey toward a Christian-Universalist point of view on the bible.
This view went against everything I’d been taught in church to that point in my life, but to me was simply jumping off the pages of the Bible everywhere I looked.
I tried hard to believe that God chose who were saved and who were not saved, which is what I was being taught at FBCFO. I tried hard to believe that I should be joyful that I found myself among the elect destined for glory, but began to worry about my children, who were becoming disillusioned with church and, much like I did, were discovering the wider world around them, and some of the “temptations” that brought. Were they still among the elect? Could I rejoice in heaven and enjoy eternal salvation if I somehow knew my own children were suffering in hell because they weren’t among “the chosen”?
Equally as important was the question, could I love a God who chose me, but not my children? Could I enjoy the glory of heaven if I knew my loved ones, my beloved children, were suffering for eternity in a hell created and sustained by a God who is supposed to love them?
That began a long journey of purposeful formation, of searching and looking for information. I needed to study and find a more comprehensible theology than what I’d be given.
As I studied, I found in the pages of Paul's letter to the Romans a far more loving and saving God than I’d ever seen before in scripture. It was in the Apostle Paul’s writings to the Romans that I found the first kernels off a new thought that God truly loved his world, and Jesus truly was the savior of all people, everywhere. I believe this was an inspiration given to me by the Holy Spirit, and I soon found I was not alone in the world with this revelation. As I began looking, I found books upon books have been written about what is known by some as The Blessed Hope, the Reconciliation of All Things. Some might say they learned that “Love Wins”, as Rob Bell titled his seminal book which landed him in no end of trouble with traditionalist thinkers.
As my new ideas began to cause some concern at FBCFO, and around the time of the 2016 election, my current wife and I (who I met at FBCFO) began to feel a shift in our church community. It was subtle but real. We both still served and loved our community. My wife was a leader in the women’s ministries, organizing luncheons and times of fellowship. But those opportunities began to dwindle. We were increasingly uncomfortable, feeling like our beloved church had shifted under us, and after a time, we left FBCFO.
As we left, some asked us, why have you left Jesus? Don’t you believe in God anymore?
Well of course we believed in God still. We were just in search of a different community, grounded in Christ, where we would be accepted as we are.
In time we found a new church home, Centerpoint Community Church. It’s a good church, a good community that serves and loves well. The basic theology of Centerpoint is no different than others churches I’ve attended, but the love and community is different. There is an acceptance of differences that I’ve not experienced at others churches I’ve attended. There is a gracious spirit, a pursuit of harmony, and a depth of love that is beautiful. I desire to foster and promote that spirit with what has become our community of faith.
That’s led me, informed by my lifetime of formation in Christ (which is far from complete but further along the road that it’s ever been), to be a glad member of a community which does not profess the same exact theological beliefs that I hold. Together, though, we hold to core truths of faith, the work of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus which brings new life, and the love of God for his creation.
But maturity has taught me I no longer need to stomp my feet and fold my arms in anger because others don’t share my deeply held theological beliefs. Those (all to recent) leanings have been the result of fear and a need for confirmation that what I believe to be true IS actually true. It came from a place of insecurity, a need to be affirmed. Vestiges of my early formation in cultural norms and the "ways of the world".
I’ve learned the only affirmation I need is the testimony of God’s spirit with my own.
The “truth” is that none of us actually know the ultimate “truth”. That sort of “truth” we seek is literally unknowable.
What we can know is Jesus. The Jesus who is the perfect image of the unseen God, full of grace and truth. We can learn His ways, His rhythms, and His love. That's truth enough, to be honest.
Now, looking back, to go from a kindergartener sitting at his teacher’s knees, to a mature adult who can say that I do have deep beliefs that I think are true and that I will cling to, is quite a journey.
I have gone through so many seasons of change, of renewed thought, of changing views and beliefs. Does that mean those previous beliefs I held are wrong? Of course not. Learning is done in stages, and as understanding and revelation stack one upon another throughout life, they inevitably lead to new conclusions and new ideas. None of us think the same things we did when we were children, or teenagers, or even young adults. Wisdom and experience temper our ideas about God and everything as we mature.
I have been on a journey my whole life, without really ever realizing I was walking a journey’s path. We all are on a journey, on a path that has brought us to where we are today.
I guess it takes looking back to finally realize just how long and winding my journey has been. I bet you’d feel the same if you took the time to think and ponder and consider your own journey.
My journey has taught me, it's difficult to say that “God is in control” anymore.
First, because it’s impossible for me to live day to day as if God "controls" everything. You and I live in a world where we seem to have lots of say-so about what we do, where we go, how we behave. We wake up and decide what to wear, what to eat, where to go, what to do. Whether God controls that or not, I just don’t know, and I couldn’t tell if he did, so for me, it’s a non-issue.
Second, I don’t think scripture tells us that God intimately controls everything that happens. I think scripture more accurately portrays God as someone that walks with us on our journeys, and guides us if we’ll listen him. God, through the Holy Spirit, is ever present with us. Jesus said he will never leave us or forsake us. To me, that means he’s been on the path with us, guiding us as much as we’re willing to listen, helping us to follow him to develop a life of joy and peace within ourselves and in our community.
But I do insist that God us sovereign, and will see all of history to a conclusion that he has in mind for us. I believe there may be many ways for God to accomplish his will, but I think God is wise enough and patient enough to work with the freedom of his beloved children to bring about all that God intends. Jesus IS the savior of the world, and all of creation, and I believe he will save it. All of it. Every last bit.
And all shall be well. All shall be good.
Having said all this, and, in light of my earlier “discontent” with where I am, I can say I’m not really “discontent” after all. It’s been a “long and winding road” and think I just lost sight of how long the journey has been, and all the hills and valleys I’ve traversed, how far I’ve come.
I can instead feel joy that I am as far along as I am on my journey, recognize and rejoice that God and Jesus have been with me every step of the way, and look forward to where the journey will take me tomorrow.
With Jesus by my side.
We are all formed and discipled by something. Be it the world or be it Jesus.
I pray for each of us that we will take a chance and listen to the still, small voice speaking in our ears. Give in to our better angels, as it were. There's joy down that path.
As the country song goes, “Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance, and if you get the chance to sit out our dance…... Dance!”*
The time is never too late to chart a new path. The one thing I’ve learned is that the path of following Jesus is a good path, and though there are times I’ve regretted straying from the path, I’ve never regretted the times I’ve returned and walked on the path with Jesus.
I’ve come to a place of comfort where I can quote Rachel Held Evans who said, after her own doubts and misgivings on her own journey,
“I am a Christian, because the story of Jesus is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”
*I Hope You Dance (Leeann Womack)
I hope you never lose you sense of wonder
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger
May you never take on single breath for granted
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one door opens
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance!
I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Livin’ might mean taking chance but they’re worth takin’
Love might be a mistake but it’s worth makin’
Don’t let some hell bent heart leave you bitter’
When you come close to sellin’ out, reconsider
Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
(Time is a wheel in constant motion)
(Always rolling us along)
(Tell me who want to look back on their years)
(And wonder where those years have gone)
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
Dance!