Certainty and Delight

Thanks to everyone who gave Grace and me suggestions about what we might explore near Bath, England.  The winners?  We spent a day in, yes, Bath itself, which couldn’t have been more fun.  (We also managed to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of a Terrence Rattigan play, which was dynamite.)  And we hightailed it down to Devon, where we had a hiking day around Salcombe, which was also spectacular, if a little rainy.  We couldn’t have had a better time with our hosts at C3 Church—Bath and Bristol.  The whole experience was a noteworthy gift to Grace and me.

(Also, I’ve just been alerted to a pretty fun part-time job opening for those of you with a particular love for college campuses.  Dan Cho, who leads the awesome Veritas Forum, let me know that they’re looking for regional directors for the Northeast, South and West Coast regions of the U.S.  [It sounds like you don’t necessarily have to live in those regions to get the job.]  All to say, if you’d like to hear more, here’s a full job description.)

Having all this time together unfettered by the needs of 5 young children and an awesome community of faith to run, Grace and I were able to chat endlessly about endless interesting things.  And among them was the often-subtle differences between what we sometimes call here “Stage 2 faith” and “Stage 4 faith.”  (Note the button, above, for more on this.)  Grace and I learn so much in healthy examples of either setting, so the distinction was by no means that one type of faith has something to teach us and the other doesn’t.  They both, clearly, do.  So what’s the difference, really? 

We realized that one key difference boiled down to certainty.  Healthy, growing Stage 2 settings (either leaders or individual believers) often project a lot of this—they have a plan, they know what works.  Other churches or believers looking to learn from them often express inferiority.  Clearly these people know what they’re doing—why can’t we do the same things and get the same results?  Along with certainty, a key value here—or so it seemed to Grace and me—is strength. 

And there’s nothing wrong with this!  I’m always in the crowd trying to learn from this certainty.

But it seemed to us that Stage 4 settings we appreciate pretty much don’t ever play on certainty.  I never get the sense that they’ve got life or God or church figured out.  That said, it’s not that they play, say, on doubt, on the opposite of certainty.  It’s as if they’re on a different spectrum.  What seemed best to characterize these folks is that they play on delight. 

They often seem surprisingly self-reflective in ways we don’t experience with most people of faith.  They’ve gone through their crises and failures and they laugh at themselves quickly.  They seem unusually in touch.  If they’re leaders and if they’re leaders who draw people around them, the “success” they experience often seems to come from the pleasure people experience around them and around their community.  It’s as if they realize that, for all its pain and failure and tragedy, life is too short to miss the delight that’s offered us nonetheless.

I’m sure there’s much more to be said on this, but I wonder if you resonate?