Part II: What Is This?

Ideas, though often ill-advised, are generally a good thing. Sometimes there are bad ideas that make you want to slap your forehead and say, "What were you thinking?!" And sometimes there are those great ideas that make you want to slap your forehead and say, "What was I thinking?!" The exchange of ideas is one of the most important parts of who we are as human beings. We're hard-wired to approach a situation and begin thinking of things- problems, solutions, methods, or even something completely unrelated to the topic in front of your nose- you know, ideas! Cute little bubbles above your head, light bulbs, question marks, etc. What makes us human is thought, and the essence of thought is ideas.

Humans have figured out that if they can control thought, they can control other humans. They, often unconsciously, establish certain thought patterns. Usually these patterns have a very specific goal in mind and because of that they become rigid and immovable, and any ideas introduced into the fray become enemies that must be silenced, because this whole thing is already thought out to its end. This is where we enter into the realm of the "ideology". Ideologies have the tendency to shut down thought, to discourage ideas and to bring into line anything that is separate from the established thought process. It would seem to me that this act would cheapen the decisions made from this process… it would make everything simple, and it would get results, but it would cheapen everything. This is the epitome of industrial age thought, and the cheapening of things is a necessary and acceptable byproduct. But when it comes to people, I don't think anyone is interested in a cheap and simplified way of treating each other, especially when it comes to faith tradition.

There was a time during my senior year of high school that myself and some other people, mainly from the Pentecostal youth group I was involved in, decided it would be a good idea to start a Tuesday morning Bible study at school with some students from other churches. We asked permission from the principal to have a designated room, and asked one of the math teachers (who also served on the adult leadership team at youth group) to be our faculty representative. So we'd meet, and the idea was to have a topic of discussion pulled from a passage in the Bible and toss around ideas amongst ourselves, hashing out what it meant. We'd invite our friends, and I think at one point we may have put up fliers on the walls around the school or something to "advertise" our little weekly early-morning shindig. I think we mainly existed to make a statement to the folks around us, something to the effect of, yes, you go to school with Christians and yes, we're here and active and yes, we can pray and read our Bibles in this public place because yes, it's our right. We were alive and we were organized, so watch out! God's really gonna get ya now! While I liked the idea of having a group of us meet and talk about God stuff, I think I wanted it to be more about the conversation and the exchange of ideas than about the delivery of some kind of message, or keeping up some kind of appearance. However, I think that's all that most of us knew. Each week, we'd take turns leading the discussion, which was less a discussion and more like delivering a "message", a compilation of passages that we felt strongly about, to those who gathered with us- usually about 8 or 10- and no one would really have anything else to say about it and so off we'd march through the door of our meeting place, knowing that people knew where we met and who we were, and that they were probably watching us and might even ask us what we were doing in there and so we should be ready to speak confidently of our convictions. We'd then walk into our first period class and lose whatever we'd just talked about.

I think where it went wrong was in missing the conversation part. Somewhere in our subconscious effort to make a statement, we lost what we (or at least what I thought we) were going for- a group of people on a similar path exchanging stories along the way. Instead, we became some kind of support group for preaching at each other to keep each other "in line". And I think it happens all the time. We have this disproportionate focus on our message delivery- how we're presenting what we're saying, how we look while doing it, etc. And when it comes to learning about God, we are trained to sit and listen to the message. We don't know how to converse with one another anymore, because we emulate that which we are accustomed to- a monologue designed to convince someone of something. It becomes a sales pitch. There's no room for disagreement, and by the very nature of a message-delivery-focus, there is a specific need to have a unified front, with not even a hint of disagreement, because well, what does that say about the God that we serve? The message delivery becomes the most important part, and don't even bother questioning what the message is in the first place. And so it is no wonder that none of us really knew what to do with a "Bible study", and those who had the most sharply-honed message eventually began to assert their authority. Pretty soon, one person began assigning verses for each person to look up and read to the group, ensuring that everyone had something to say, but what was said was set up to be a unified voice, the voice of the message-bearer. Conversation was limited to a few comments on how to apply said message to one's life; no one even thought about stirring the pot a little bit.

My goose was cooked.

Not only did I not feel comfortable in this sort of environment, I probably spent too much time and goodwill trying to explain how this approach was even less effective than what we had been doing before. But there was to be no change; we must be unified, I was told. God hates division in His church. I was not the lone voice of discontent; there were a few others who felt very cramped by this approach as well. We began to talk about meeting on our own; this talk was swiftly met with vehement scolding from other students in the group, as well as adult leaders from the youth group. So instead of stirring the pot, I simply removed my spoon, as did a handful of others. I think the thing eventually dried up and died after awhile.

Around this same time, I was in a Social Problems class with a few of the same people who were in the Bible study and youth group with me. Our big semester project was to, with a partner, choose a social issue, invite a person from the community on each end of the spectrum to give a presentation of their side of the topic, and then present our own point of view. This was worth half of our grade- the other half was based on attendance and our performance in a stock market game, and though I had no actual stock in Enron, I can say that I incurred a personal loss when the company crashed, as my partner and I invested heavily in their stock, causing us to earn an "F" on that portion of our grade. But I digress. So after a demonstration at our school by a "God Hates Fags" church group with fiery signs and screaming people protesting the genesis of a Gay-Straight Alliance at our school, a group in the class chose the issue of homosexuality as their topic. The first presentation was from some lady from a local GLBT support organization, and was very interesting, to say the least. The next presentation was from the minister of a local ultra-conservative Baptist church. After giving his spiel about homosexuality being a perversion, God's impending wrath, and God desire to "save" people from homosexual sin, an angry discussion broke out amongst two of the Christian people in my class and a few others. Feeling it was not my God-given duty to make people feel bad about how they felt about gays and lesbians, I sat on the sidelines until one of the people from my youth group said "C'mon, Ian? I need some support here. Tell them you believe this stuff, too."

And I couldn't.

I didn't believe it was my place to argue against a lifestyle that, for all I knew, might not be completely in someone's control. I mean, yeah, gay pride parades and naked dudes and rainbows and stuff weren't my thing, but if my first reaction is to be grossed out, or even to hate them, shouldn't I step back and check why I feel that way in the first place, and that maybe I should be feeling how God feels about them? And as far as what the Bible tells me, I think God might actually love fags. And if God hates fags, why does He love me? Am I that different from a homosexual dude that God views him differently than He views me? I'll bet he and I and the next guy have the same problems, and might even love God just as much. I think far too much time is spent divining between sins. I also don't think Jesus was killed for being exclusive of certain people groups- it was because His message was so incredibly IN-clusive that the establishment killed him. And I think He'd probably stand out in front of the "God Hates Fags" people and challenge them to cast the first stone. Call me weak, but I just can't do it. And I heard an earful for it. "If you can't stand up for your sister in Christ, can you even stand for CHRIST?" "I'm supposed to stand for Christ, not against people." "Well, Christ stands for people!" "And fags aren't people?" "I can't believe you!" I guess I can't, either, but I think if Christ actually was with us today in the flesh, after he got done shaming the "God Hates Fags" people, he might want to have a few words with all of us because not any of us is without fault; no, not even one.

I just don't want to be, and I don't think a Christian should be, known best for what they are against. And the majority of the time, that's where we're at.

After these episodes, I began to feel as though there was a deeper thing going on than God and gays. I'd see it in youth group worship band practice when someone would introduce a new song or a new way to try a song. Or when someone would challenge the usefulness of those little fill-in-the-blank sermon follow-along sheets. Or when I asked about our attendance at the youth conferences we'd been involved with for the past few years, only to find out that a decision had been made by someone disconnected from all of us to uproot us from that sphere of influence. "God is moving. God is good." I don't know how many times I heard those sorts of words in connection with various odd and shadowed decisions by the "spiritual elders" that I was supposed to honor and have respect for.

"God is moving in a different direction."

Here's a thought: God is constant. It's us who move in different directions. Why is it that we have this need to invoke God when making decisions? I absolutely agree that it's important to discover what He's doing, but what He's doing doesn't involve every decision we make. Rather, it should be flipped: every decision we make should involve what He's doing. What He's doing is good, and you can join in the good things He's doing in any way you are able. Slapping the God label on things which are ultimately human decisions is just plain wrong at best, and evil at worst. I wonder, too, if that is actually a closer application for the Biblical mandate to "not use the Lord's name in vain."

Eventually, things came crashing down at the youth group. Initially, we were given permission to take a group to this youth conference, and we made plans accordingly. Then as it came down to crunch time, we were told that if we went on this trip, we'd be kicked out of the youth group. Long story short, we resigned our various positions in leadership and left. The 6 or 8 of us who left eventually began conducting our own Bible study. We were accused of being divisionists, of hurting the youth group (the numbers began to dwindle even further after we had left), and I was accused by name of being a hand of the devil, "leading people astray".

This is the first time I realized clearly what I was seeing. Because I knew I wasn't "the hand of the devil", because I knew I was following God, I began to see that what I WASN'T following was the man-made system that was the church. Now, before I get all bleary-eyed about my patriotism for this or that, let me make something very clear- there was some pride involved. Of course there was. I felt that I was very right for doing some of these things, and while feeling you're right about something is a good reason to do something, it should never be the ONLY reason. As an eighteen-year-old, that wasn't always the case. But what I will say is that I began to notice that this whole thing called Christianity had a very deeply-seated streak of self-preservation in its system, that it was often less about God and more about just keeping this thing going, and keeping it going on a very ideologically set path.

It's a really funny human tendency, how we can take something that at first is so good, so genuine and turn it into something so synthesized, so robotic that it takes all the life out of it. Nowhere has this been so evident than in Christianity. We've become afraid of talking about what it is we're actually supposed to be about, and we're afraid of new ideas, because we're so worried that our "good and pure" religion is being defiled, so we take control of it and entwine God with all of our theologies, traditions, morals and leadership structures, and then we wonder, "Why is all this bad stuff happening in this world? Where did all the good go? Why don't people care about God anymore?"

I'll wager you that people care much more about God than we give them credit for.

It's our god that people don't care about.