Not The Religious Type

What Types of Things Make a Faith Worth Having?

Like most things in life, my idea turned out to be a little more complex than I thought it would be.

I spent the weekend, as I do many of my days, in ever-overlapping talks about what comprised actual, living faith. This took many different forms—from talking about what makes up a faith community you or I would thrive in, to what people overseas are learning about these things, to what's current on that front with various friends.

But it struck me as a winner question: What are the elements of a faith worth having? I smelled a top-5 list brewing.

But then the qualifiers came, and, responsible citizen that I am, it seemed worth our time to define a few terms and roll the much-anticipated list out a bit more slowly.

Here are a few things that struck me as noteworthy about any such list I'd put together.

1. It doesn't begin and end with: It's true.

It would be fair enough to think that a faith worth having would be the true faith. This is, after all, the claim of most faith traditions around the world, my own certainly included. And, in its own way, the list that at least I'll come up with will make its own left-field claims to truth, so I expect we'll get there one way or another. But does it strike you, as it does me, that in the last century or so we've redefined that key idea of a "true faith?"

It's in that time frame that we've come to define a faith as true based on argument and reason. Spending as much time as I do reading the Bible, I'm hard-pressed to find a person discussed in the Bible who came to believe anything based on rational argument, except, perhaps for Saul of Tarsus, whose potent arguments made him into the most unpleasant religious person on earth and whose arguments were shortly to be demolished by something else entirely. (I'd love your suggestions if I've missed someone.)

So, while I'm all into truth, as we work on our list, let's talk about what it is that persuades you that something as difficult to pin down as faith in God is "true." I, for one, will be entirely interested in what you have to say.

(Did I mention that I'd love your thoughts on this? I'd love your thoughts on this.)

1. Perhaps repeating myself, it will be subjective.

And maybe not just "subjective." Maybe something close to "top of the mind."

That's what strikes me as fun about lists at all, much less lists like this one. I'm curious what it is about faith that's either really helped you and persuaded you to stick with it—or what strikes you as being the kind of faith you'd aspire to have. (I'm assuming, say, that something like, "It makes me bitter and oppositional" won't be high on your list. So what would be on your list? Subjectivity is strongly encouraged.)

In the end, I suspect my top-of-the-mind thoughts will cohere intriguingly with models of faith we see, say, in the Bible or in people of faith we admire. But it will be fun to find out!

So…give me your top-five list of a faith you'd regard as worth having. J I'll start mine tomorrow.

(PS: For those tracking with the response to Not the Religious Type, here's a link. Publisher's Weekly also weighed in with, after an opening quibble, some kind words. You have to scroll about two-thirds of the way down to get to my review.)

Summer reading!

We'll be hosting a conference on these themes in Cambridge this summer (August 18-20) that I'm pretty excited about. We're calling it the "Center City Summit" and folks from all over the country will be joining us (perhaps you!) to think together about engaging the secular world around us (for some of us, this will be in contrast to "doing battle with it" as per yesterday's post).

I'll be sending registrants a recommended reading list, and I thought I'd give you a heads-up, in case you're the reading type. Each of these books is terrific, to my mind, but in very different ways.

Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World, by Chris Lowney

Bert Waggoner, the national director for Vineyard churches, of which my church is a part, recommended this to me. It's a history of the Jesuits from the perspective of a man who left the Jesuits to work for JP Morgan. He discovered that the business books his colleagues were reading were, to him, substantially less helpful than the training he'd received as a Jesuit. So Chris very engagingly details the four fundamental practices that shaped this "company" that's lasted for centuries. I've had a number of our leaders read it and form reading groups around it, and I was impressed enough that I invited Chris to come to Cambridge and present to us at the Summit, which he's kindly agreed to do.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope, and Happily Ever After, by Trish Ryan

Trish is a friend and this is the only book I'm aware of in which I'm actually a character, so my objectivity is low. But—now that claims of objectivity are out of the way—this is a pretty great book that's very much in the spirit of the conversation in this blog. Trish is writing about faith and about her hopes for romance and marriage in a way that does its best to cross lines between religious and secular folks. She has Christian endorsers, she has secular endorsers. There was a recent feature on the book in the Chicago Sun-Times that compared and contrasted it with the Sex and the City movie. Trish, by the way, also blogs winsomely.

The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, by Christine Wicker

Christine Wicker, a former religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, writes that evangelicalism, rather than representing a growing area in America's religious landscape, is fading. There's controversy about whether she's right or merely hopeful (she's an ex-evangelical), as a scan of the book's comments on amazon.com will reflect. But on the themes we talk about here, it certainly gave me plenty of food for thought, and that's not an especially common experience for me on these themes.

 

Do Battle with the World around Us? Or Engage It?

I had two very different experiences yesterday that came from the same starting point.

This book of mine that just came out has taken me into some striking conversations. My publisher, Tyndale House, is most at home in the conservative Christian world, not always my best setting. So they set me up with two different experiences yesterday. One is this fun review of the book on Deena Peterson's book blog. Deena describes herself as "a pastor's wife, mother of 6 (3 step-children and two at home), homeschooler, part-time secretary, avid reader and reviewer, women's ministry leader, worship leader, and sometimes pianist" along with being "a 30-year Christian" and begins her review of Not the Religious Type by saying titles like mine make her want to "run screaming into the night, 'Stay away! Stay away!'" And yet she's entirely gracious towards the book once she reads it, closing by saying:

So, while I squirmed a bit and questioned a lot and pondered more than I thought I would...I come away from this book thankful and grateful that Dave Schmelzer put his thoughts down on paper and called it "Not the Religious Type" for me to read. I'm giving it five out of five bookmarks, with a light-up cross as a charm.

Read the chapter titled "I'm Not a Jerk (I May, However, Be A Fool)" and you'll understand why.

And however one interprets "five out of five bookmarks with one light-up cross as a charm," it sounds like a good thing.

I also had an hour-long radio interview that ended in quite a different place.

I'm learning in my early forays into radio interviews that you don't really know with whom you're interviewing until you're actually on the air. I'm also learning the surprising lesson that there's a good bet the interviewer hasn't actually read your book, even when they're planning on interviewing you for a full hour. In this case, we turned out to be—I'd assume from both of our points of view—almost perfectly mismatched. Their interest in me, I think, was sparked by the thought that I'd help them battle atheists, given my willingness to lead a church in "Nineveh." Their fear, as they expressed it, was that perhaps our gang here had only grown because of our willingness to "water down" the Bible's message, but, heh heh, surely we hadn't done that. Had we?

We mutually realized, midstream, that perhaps our passions were just in different places—theirs to do battle with the secular world, mine to engage that world. And that proved to be a surprisingly difficult difference to bridge. It was genuinely hard for my interviewers to believe I'd have so little interest in that battle, and equally hard for me to understand their disinterest in that kind of engagement. Surely--we both seemed to say again and again--in the end you're on my side? But--we sadly seemed to conclude together--perhaps not.

But it was very fun to have made a new friend in Deena.

Oprah, Eckhart Tolle, and Spiritual Transformation

I talked with a man awhile back who'd never met anyone who talked about God.

He worked at one of the nearby chichi universities, which might explain it. And then a couple months back, he started chatting with a co-worker who brought up our SEEK course and how helpful it had been. To the surprise of the man I was talking to, this new friend was thoughtful and helpful.

Within a few weeks, the man was experiencing what seemed suspiciously like transcendent, maybe even supernatural experiences. What, he was asking me, should he make of all this? And why hadn't anyone brought this up before?

I talked with a woman recently who said she'd been an atheist until seeing some cool graphics in a poster about faith.

Being a graphic designer, she followed up and ended up hearing from me and others some thoughts on faith that struck her as helpful and not dogmatic. She's stuck with it since.

You might not track with such things, but Oprah has been aggressively offering spiritual direction to the Western world through the thoughts of a man named Eckhart Tolle and his new book, A New Earth. I'm reading it and might have some thoughts to share in subsequent posts (in brief: really helpful in lots of ways, effectively Buddhist teachings in a form that recasts Jesus as a good Buddhist, seems a bit limited—to my mind—in ways that are not acknowledged, a mixed bag [as are most things]).

What's striking to me is the massive response she's gotten. There's a HUNGER for spiritual direction, particularly if it doesn't come in a package that seems directed only at a small subgroup (preaching in a given church—maybe mine!—for instance).

It can be difficult to separate broad-based spiritual direction from the form it comes in: like, say, Lutheranism or Pentecostalism or Shi'ism or whatever. Whatever people find helpful in the tips offered seems pretty tied up in the culture. But what if you heard you could have access to amazing spiritual things at a nearby place that was completely foreign to your culture—for many Westerners, what if it was at that mosque down the street where you'd need to adopt wearing a burqa if you were a woman or pray towards Mecca at each call to prayer. Or, if that's a familiar thing to you, let's say you could really experience spiritual transformation if you joined in with a local snake-handling church.

Most of us would wonder if we could get the spiritual transformation without the burqa or the snake-handling. Do we need to adopt the culture to get the goods? I'm banking on the answer to that being "no." But what are your thoughts? Does that seem glib?

At the very least, so far so good for the university man and the graphics-loving woman.