The Wilful Sunflower

Darren Rowse has a true story of, how shall I put it, an exclusivist church:

This story made me angry. It's an extreme illustration of something that I feel many churches today are guilty of - building walls. The pastor that day put a boundary around his congregation. It was publicly stated and well-defined. Everyone knew that morning who was IN and who was OUT. If you had questions, doubts or wanted to try to make sense of the gospel in relation to another belief system you were excluded in a vindictive way from the community.
– thanks to Mike Todd for the notice

Let me just say that in my experience, Christians don't have a lot of room for people who with questions. These very inconvenient people tend to be shushed with the admonition, "You gotta have faith, man! Just have faith!"

I've said this before and I'll say it again: I have faith, but that doesn't make my questions go away. Alistair McGrath wrote that questions, or doubts, are an expression of our humanness. (I'm paraphrasing, if you're wondering) As humans, we will never completely understand God, His ways, or even His reasons. We'll always have questions. Blind faith isn't that easy to come by.

But, McGrath says, we choose to believe DESPITE our doubts; that is "faith". The opposite of faith isn't doubt; it's unbelief, a refusal to accept the Truth.

God doesn't have a problem with us asking questions. In case you hadn't noticed, the Old Testament prophets used to ask questions all the time. "What are You doing, God? Why are You letting us go through this? Have You abandoned us?" they asked with monotonous regularity.

Philip Yancey pointed out that Job asked questions of God, trying desperately to understand why God was allowing those misfortunes to happen to him; his friends told him to shut up and admit his sin, and... guess whom God was displeased with? Yup, you guessed it: the friends! Frankly, with friends like those, who needs enemies?

It's a difficult balance, trying not to let your (unanswered) questions undermine your faith. A friend once accused, "When you Christians run out of answers, you use the 'God's ways are higher than our ways' line as a cop-out!" But it's true – God's ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). And when we run out of answers, we need to know Whom it is we trust.

Because, ultimately we're trusting a Person who is trustworthy. It's like Paul wrote, "For I know Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (II Timothy 1:12).

Do we know Who we believe in? Why do we feel so threatened when people start asking questions? An atheist friend said he didn't want to ask me too many questions or say anything negative about my faith because Christians always reacted badly to such things. I told him that if my faith can be shaken by a few questions, then it is a weak thing, not worth having in the first place!

I don't think we are meant to simply accept everything we're told at face value, no questions asked. Even if it is told to us by a high-profile, famous teacher of the Word. Thinking and Christianity are not mutually exclusive and it's high time we realise that we ought not to put our brains away in a box the minute we embark on the adventure of knowing Christ. And we shouldn't expect others to do it, either! God, who made our minds, surely intended us to use them, yes?

So I am thankful for Dave's comment on the story of the twenty-six angels. He checked up on the one verifiable fact in the story – something I never thought to do – and discovered a glaring discrepancy.

Sometimes I think churches are wary of thinking people because thinking people ask uncomfortable questions and show up unsupportable practices. You either toe the line or you're labelled a rebel, a "difficult" person, a troublemaker.

Again, why the insecurity? Because we tend to forget it's GOD's church. We think of it as our church. How many times have you heard this? – "Our church does things this way." We can't do things any other way because that would mean change, and if we change, we might lose our identity, the identity of our church. Frightening, really.

We have committee meetings, methods, systems and programmes, trying to find something that "works", and we define our churches by these things. The "cell church" is an example. We are a cell church, so we have cell groups. Cell groups work. Work in what way? Oh, the church growth is phenomenal. It works, I tell you. Yeah. So we're a cell church. That's what we are. We can't do things any other way because this is the way a cell church does things and that is what we are, a cell church. Did I hear anyone say, "Ouch"?