Faith Journey

In light of the good news that I have finally been offered a job, I am currently reflecting on my "testimony," which is the evangelical word for the story of how one comes to faith in Christ. Thankfully, I have written and rewritten, told and retold, my own story many times, so I am not starting from scratch. However, it is a weighty thing to describe to a congregation the intricacies of how you have encountered the living God. I find that to give this account is never a regurgitation of a previously-told tale, but an all new expression of an always-new story. It is a story that is shaped continually, every day, in both our waking and our sleeping. This Sunday, in what I expect will be my new local church home, I will express my story anew.
I have realized that I have never done this via the blog, so I found a recently written version of my story that I thought I would share ... in forth-coming parts ... in case anyone was curious about my faith journey. If anything, perhaps it will inspire you to consider more deeply your own journeys, either to faith, or fleeing from it.

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“It was on a Monday somebody touched me …”

On a Sunday night sometime within my tenth or eleventh year, in a celebratory, hymn sing-a-long service at a small Baptist church in Buda, Texas, where I attended with my parents for the majority of my youth, I summoned enough courage to profess a faith I was not even sure I possessed. This was quite a change in activity for a boy who usually passed most of the time in the traditional services with a tired head reclining on his mother’s shoulder and the slightest of snores in his nose. The music minister led the congregation in “Somebody Touched Me,” a chorus that always seemed to me as depicting Almighty God as no more affectionate than a golf buddy encouragingly patting his friend on the back. Still, to stand up during this song was to announce the day in which one accepted Christ as Savior, and to me this felt like the equivalent of Peter stepping out onto the tumultuous waves. As the simple chorus repeatedly bounced about the little sanctuary, and as members of the congregation stood to declare which day of the week it was they had prayed for Jesus Christ to save them, I prepared myself to respond, despite the childishly narcissistic fear that all eyes would immediately focus on me when I did indeed rise from my pew. The chorus rolled on, “It was on a Thursday somebody touched me … It was on a Friday somebody touched me …” and the members continued to stand, some clapping, most beaming, and all appearing to me both pure and confident. No such assurance could I feel inhabiting me. But as the final day of the song was sounded, with knocking knees and trembling legs I pulled myself up from where I sat and contorted my face into the most satisfied and joyous grin I could fake. “It was on a Sunday somebody touched me …” Looking over my shoulder, I caught the eye of my mother, who had recently sat back down after her day’s verse ended. I’m not sure if she stared back in surprised happiness or startled confusion, but in that moment I realized that this decision I had made was not meant only for me personally; instead, it affirmed a connection to all these other people, whether I knew them or not. It would be a long while before I found myself comfortable with that radically communal reality.

Mine was not the most convincing of new births. Around three years earlier, it was another Sunday night service at First Baptist of Buda – a choir concert followed by a simple Gospel presentation – that carried me to the brink of the decision to pray for salvation as I then understood it. Months earlier, my only sibling, Katy, had died suddenly in a freak accident during a Christmas caroling hayride with the church youth group. My parents were still coping with the initial devastation of her loss, but as I was still a child, I know longer suffered the shock of separation, and in its place I was experiencing a morbid fixation on the inevitability of death. This concern kept my ears piqued during any time the church pastor would mention heaven or salvation. That particular night, following the concert, he spoke of the grave importance of making a “decision” for Christ so that we might one day be with him in Heaven rather than separated from him “and those we love” in Hell. Later that evening, I lay huddled beneath my covers, a nervous eight year old normally frightened of whatever shadowy terror my imagination could conjure. Only this night, what struck the greatest level of fear within me was the thought of Hell – that dank, cavernous wasteland where red-eyed, razor-toothed demons prowled on orders from their dark master, the Devil. I was terrified of ending up in such a place and, even at such an early age, I was weary of dreading death and of fearing that my end could come without warning, as had Katy’s. Praying to Jesus to save me meant I could avoid a hellish destination at my imminent death (which is a plausible possibility to an eight year old afraid of the dark); there was no debate. Under the covers, I mumbled to Jesus that I was a sinner and I needed him to take my sins away. The early formation of my theology was thus concerned with little more than a “Get Out of Hell Free” card; I became a Christian to avoid Hell and gain Heaven.

In those transitional years from childhood to adolescence, Christianity and the Church always went hand in hand, by default. I never considered their separation, mainly because one did not make sense without the other. This is perhaps the one theological ideal that has remained constant throughout my life. However, the thrust of Christianity to me as a young teenager all boiled down to the matter of moral obedience. Am I obeying my parents? Am I respecting my teachers? Am I treating my friends hospitably? Am I a “good” person? Therefore, church was not a center for worship or, as it has been famously described, “a hospital for sinners,” but a command post for the enforcement of morals. When I thought of myself as a Christian, the roots of such an understanding were shallow, concerned only with the cosmetic. Nowhere was this thin belief inculcated more than at church. There, in that quaint, small-town gathering, I grew up within a community of people who considered themselves as genuinely loving to one another, but, in actuality, were concerned chiefly with keeping up appearances and offering allegiance to conventional moral standards. This small-minded faith became not only the plumb line for determining whether or not I was being “good,” but if I was worthy of God’s love. Though it was preached with good intentions, the message of the church was a gospel of moralism. The salvation that I sought years before under the covers became to me akin to a loan that must be paid back by daily deposits of moral obedience. And I did my best. We all did our best.

If life is a road, then eventually my journey down it wound away from First Baptist of Buda. It was a forced change of direction, for the church split ...

To be continued soon ...