Changing my limited view of how God works
“We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is for us”
It didn’t take much for me to dismiss someone who shared a notably different perspective of church. I had grown so sure of my belief system I didn’t find it necessary or beneficial to explore something that might prove me wrong or upset my framework.
I did it with my theology, with my supporting doctrines, with my leadership framework, and with my church structure.
After all, it’s hard to imagine something being largely different than what you’ve known. According to brain science, experiencing something in a repeated way forms your worldview and most of what could be associated to it.
I grew up in a “non denominational” denomination, and whether subtly or overtly stated, I had things figured out. I could teach, I could defend my positions using scripture, we were praised for our worship leading, and I experienced the supernatural more times than I could count along with the stories to tell.
I had it figured out right to the point that I didn’t…
Right to the point that I woke up and didn’t want to be in ministry anymore…
Right to the point I realized that as a people we weren’t really growing, weren’t maturing, and I as a person wasn’t either. And my inability to understand that, or to do anything meaningful about it was killing me.
I had begun actually studying the early church and was finding things that I couldn’t reconcile being lost or abandoned. Why do we approach modern church the way we do? Why is it so different from what it was at first? I tried to communicate some of this to others but it was generally dismissed.
And honestly, I didn’t even know how to say what I was feeling. At times it came out forwards, sideways and backwards. In my lack of understanding I still managed to do some things with grace, but other things I had to go back to and clean up.
If you’ve ever been in that kind of situation you may understand how deeply I needed a witness to what I was feeling. I didn’t need to be right in those moments, I just needed someone to understand and be willing to walk with me through it—someone who could hold-gently their own perceptions so I could at a minimum know I wasn’t going crazy.
Somehow, this mix of hitting the wall of inability for myself and the ceiling of discipleship in our community combined with my new (limited) understanding of the early church left me willing to question what I had never questioned before.
For me, it took both failure and courage to realize how incredibly narrow my perception was… how little I cared to hear from perspectives that did not gel with or uphold my own perspective.
By the grace of God, I had my wife and two men willing to walk with me as I began to slowly process the good, bad and ugly I saw in the predominant Western church structure, and unavoidably, in myself within that structure.
We didn’t solve the issues together, and didn’t even come to fully understand what was going on at the time, but it was enough for me to know it was okay to question some hard things, okay to not be okay, okay to sit in the tension of the uncomfortable and the unknown. And that was enough.
Discovering limits and finding freedom
Even though I did not have the answers, we would ultimately choose to leave what we had known. I could not ignore the conflict in my soul and would need to take shallow, uncertain steps in a different direction.
In some ways I thought I knew what I was doing, and in others I was openly unsure. While I knew that what I knew before was now in question, I did not know to what degree that was. It’s the classic statement, “you just don’t know what you don’t know.”
Those small steps would eventually lead to a community that would bring healing and transformation I didn’t really think possible. The irony is that what led to that reality was not my gifting, perspective, leadership, or wisdom. It was everyone else’s gifting, perspective, leadership and wisdom. It was being in a space where every person mattered equally, where every person was valued for being themselves, not for being more right. Over time it became the space where possessing a greater capacity for love outpaced possessing a greater capacity for doctrine, knowledge or even power.
My perspective and my perceptions changed drastically because my love for others changed drastically. And it was the open, authentic community I belonged to that primarily brought that about. The attachments within a community where relationship matters more than being right or being wrong led me to more authentically be myself, and it led ultimately to a Christianity that transforms more effectively.
As I loosened the grip on my own perspective and perceptions, and opened up to better seeing and knowing God in the people around me, I received exactly that: better seeing and knowing God.
Opening up possibility
If I were to look back over this journey so far, wanting to share what I think helped me get outside of my limiting perspective, I would probably want to be reminded of these things:
First, I would acknowledge that what I see is a result of all the places I have “stood”, and that even under the best circumstances this is very narrow. How much more might God show me simply by opening up to value more of his kids in the context of loving relationship and discover who he is in them?
Second, I would want to be aware that repositioning requires more than hearing different ideas, it requires an adjustment in your value system and truth context.
Nobody has the “most right” doctrine. If it worked that way we would surely have identified the church that looks the most like Jesus by now, and all ascribe to their doctrinal teachings. We discover the value system of our faith by observing what we believe grows and matures it. In the West, it is almost entirely intellectual, as we gather around teaching as the primary mechanism for maturing and growth. (Hint: according to brain science, knowledge cannot transform your identity or your character—they’re processed in different parts of the brain).
This also requires a shift in our truth context… the great deception in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that we would believe we were wise enough to discern between the two, between good and evil, between right and wrong. Jesus reminded us of this and again turned it on it’s head by saying that He is the truth, and he demonstrated how we live with the truth by how he interacted with the Father.
Lastly, I would want to remember that standing in a different place does not mean you are adopting that viewpoint, only that you’re open to encountering God in ways you have not before.
This resonates so deeply with me. To a certain degree it is almost embarrassing to have been so self centered to miss what Jesus really has for us!