No Sunday Christians
Any time we place our identity in anything secondary, tragedy results. When we try to ask of something more than it’s equipped to provide, a letdown is inevitable.
Image: AbsolutVision/Pixabay
When I was in transition between jobs in 2018, I had an incredible opportunity to spend two full days of “life planning” with a mentor, Michael Gray, who guided me through a very detailed and methodical process. One of the highlights was a life map, where I listed key events or turning points in my life along the top of some newsprint, in chronological order. Some of those events were obviously significant, while others were a misspoken word or an unexpected health issue that had much greater impact than perhaps it should. Along the left column we listed different quadrants of life, and then identified how those events affected me in each of the areas. When we were all done, we put a data point for my own sense of spiritual health at each stage of life, and drew a red line connecting each dot. My red line looked like a stretched out EKG reading! My greatest Eureka moments in those two days came from examining what was happening when I was healthy and getting healthier, versus what was happening when my well-being was plummeting. Here’s my story, which I believe can help us identify the chief cause of the donkey elephant war.
Childhood
Nobody comes out of the womb with a heart and soul already surrendered to God. We all enter the world selfish, focused on what we need and when we need it, and willing to do what it takes to get it. I’m sure my self-centered nature equaled or surpassed everyone else’s. Nevertheless, I was raised in a Christian home, and I don’t remember the time when I first started loving and caring about God. My parents told me that as a preschooler I would sometimes wait out on the street corner as kids walked home from school to tell them God loved them. I guess this preacher thing started rather early for me.
I grew up in a Lutheran tradition that baptizes babies. For those of you ready to write me off over the error of my ways, please keep reading. For children raised in this tradition, Confirmation was the opportunity to make our parents’ faith our own. (*1) Confirmation for me was meaningful – I wasn’t there because I had to be, I was there because I wanted to be. I wanted to learn more about this amazing God, and when the process was complete, I was grateful to profess my faith and receive the prayers of others.
“So you’re saying you had it altogether as a kid, huh?” Hardly. Faith was a compartment in my life. An important compartment – one that I’d have argued with you about it you tried to take it or demean it – but a compartment, nevertheless. In seventh grade I desperately longed to be a pro basketball player when I grew up. I could have made it, too, except for a couple tiny problems: my height (I was the shortest kid in junior high); my asthma (I struggled to run the length of the court); and my allergies (I often had to wear sunglasses indoors due to my oversensitive eyes). To say that I was an easy target for bullying would be to state the obvious. “But God helped you through all that, right?” Well, if you mean “Did I survive adolescence?” I’m still around, so yeah, I guess so. But my solution for bullying was to become the king of the cut down. I used words to fight back, and I fought back hard. Making other kids feel worse only helped me feel better for the briefest and sickest of moments, but that didn’t stop me from trying. My wit and words simply weren’t weighty enough to carry my sense of self-worth, and my faith (which could have helped) was locked away over in the Sunday morning and Wednesday night boxes.
So as a sophomore in high school, when I heard a speaker proclaim, “There’s no such thing as a Sunday Christian,” it was even better than making a three-pointer (I could only dream of slam dunks.) And to complete what this man’s sentence had begun, a woman at church offered to meet weekly with six of us sophomores in order to help us not only learn the Bible but learn how to live life together as people loved by God. God used those two people – Kevin Murphy and Diane Scholinski – to change my life. My red line was on a steep upward incline, as compartments kept being dismantled and I started caring more and more about what God thought about all kinds of things: how I viewed myself, how I viewed others, how I viewed sex and marriage, my choice of words, my choice of friends, and on and on. In college the sharp upward trajectory continued when I finally burst out of my Lutheran bubble and started hanging out with Christ-followers from all different denominational backgrounds. I probably grew more in those six to seven years than any season of my life until the last six or seven.
If you remember how EKG lines look, what caused mine to fall precipitously? I can answer that in two words: Lutheran Cemetery (I mean, seminary).
All Christian churches believe that God saves us apart from anything we do to earn it, and that we have some role to play in receiving/acknowledging that gift. Churches that emphasize God’s part often baptize babies (who obviously aren’t doing anything except receiving) and confirm youth/adults when they’re older (so they can make faith their own). Churches that emphasize our part typically dedicate babies (so parents can promise God and others to share faith with their children) and baptize youth/adults when they’re older. I’m not minimizing the difference, but I don’t think it has to be another dividing wall – which, of course, means that I potentially caused a rift right now with both sides. And yes, for many Confirmation is an empty ritual. For some, so is going forward for altar calls. We can ruin any good gift if we work hard enough at it!