Religion, faith and life

Over the past number of months I have felt a rapidly growing sense of disconnectedness with my church. I’m sure this is in part connected with the fact that I have been accepting myself as a gay man, something for which I will certainly find no ‘official’ support in the church and no real support among the majority of members. But my feeling of alienation runs deeper than that. I have allowed myself to ask many uncomfortable questions that I had long avoided, to question the unquestionable. I suppose both these things are really part of the same small attempt to be more honest with myself and others.

The small denomination I grew up in could be described as fundamentalist. It places paramount importance on a set of theological propositions (“first principles”) which are seen to be the fundamental teachings of the Bible, propositions relating to the nature of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, angels, human beings, the devil, and salvation. It considers that all these propositions are taught in the Bible, and that acceptance of them is a requirement for inheriting eternal life.

It is a unique and unorthodox denomination in many ways. It is a lay community with no paid ministry or hierarchy of any kind, a somewhat loose association of independent congregations. Its teachings differ in many respects from those of mainstream Christianity, although most of them can be traced back to various protestant and earlier nonconformist groups.

As I have allowed myself to reexamine what I believe, what has struck me increasingly is how little emphasis there seems to be on this sort of theology in Jesus’ teaching. He seems to be completely concerned with the state of people’s hearts, their relationships with others and with God. And sadly, although over the years I have acquired quite a broad academic knowledge of the Bible, although I can quote numerous passages and engage in intelligent discussion on a wide range of subjects, truthfully I don’t feel as if I have developed a close relationship with God, nor do I manage to live the kind of loving life Jesus was calling people to live.

It almost seems as if for me (and I am speaking only for myself), this academic learning, this focus on ‘the Truth’ as a set of ‘facts’, has been a distraction rather than a help in becoming nearer to God. Perhaps this is because accepting this ‘Truth’ as a monolithic whole required me to be dishonest with myself, to bury the doubts I had about the literalness of the Bible or the nature of inspiration. As a result, I was having to play a kind of role, to appear to be something I was not, and my faith became more and more hollow.

So in parallel with the other changes in my life, I find myself having to redefine my relationship with my church and what it means to me to be a Christian. Thankfully, I don’t feel alone in this. My wife is on a very similar wavelength, and I have good friends with whom I feel free to share my thoughts. I’ve also found some great people in cyberspace whose blogs are an inspiration. Still, it’s unsettling to be drifting loose from the anchor of that simple and powerful relationship with my religious community.