Actually reading the Bible.

How many churched people read their Bibles? How many read outside their daily studies? Or weekly study? Or Sunday message?

I grew up in a mildly evangelical but otherwise not terribly fundamentalist church in white suburbia. This involved Sunday School every Sunday it was on, and since this was before the widespread trend of running that at the same time as the morning service, I also got to spend time in the church service with my parents. So I heard many many Bible stories told and re-told in many different ways over the years.

I am also a voracious reader. I was brought up to enjoy reading and being an Introvert, reading was for the longest time the best way I had to disconnect from the world around me (still is). But I didn’t always remember to have a book to read at church during a sermon that was usually too long and boring for a kid to understand.

So I read my Bible.

My first Bible was a Children’s Living Bible. I have no idea where it is; it may well have fallen apart by now (I had a habit of wearing Bibles out when I was a child). The trend for putting section headings through the text hadn’t been made popular yet – as far as I remember, the Good News Bible popularised that, and that was published later. Or, at least, I never saw a copy of it until later. My childhood Bible, though, had short topic summaries in the header of the pages, generally no more than half-a-dozen words describing what the current page’s text was about. This meant I got to read vast tracts of Scripture without any unnecessary textual interruptions. I actually remember the delight I had the day I discovered that the stories of David were hiding in the books of 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel. Explained why I could never find them in the “book of David” (which, of course, doesn’t exist)!

Later, when I was high school, I discovered I had a much better than usual knowledge of the Bible. I discovered this because what passed for Sunday School for a while when I was thirteen or so was a weekly trivia contest. I and the Pastor’s youngest (who was a year older than me) were streets ahead of everyone else – and I was usually better than him. Better than the leaders, too, who started sourcing older, rarer books to ask their Bible trivia from. Of course, being a teenager, I revelled in the adulation, but never once thought to ask just why my fellow Sunday School attendees were so far behind.

Fast-forward to a year or so ago.

There are two young ladies in my current church who did not grow up in a Christian home and have not been in the position to having gone to church all their lives. They don’t know their Bible at all well and don’t automatically know how a lot of the stories fit together. And they are not huge readers, either. In a way, they are the opposite of me: there are big slabs of their Bibles that they have simply never read (or only read once).

I wondered for the first time today just what is more usual. A comment on this blog post by Fred Clark set me wondering. So much invective by church-goers against other church-goers is based on faulty knowledge of not just the other party, but also of their own scriptures. And by “faulty”, I mean how many of them read it instead of just regurgitating the teachings of their pastor? I have railed against church teaching that stays firmly within the canonical scriptures, ignoring not only the archaeological and textual evidence about where Israel and Yahweh came from, but also new ways of looking at Jesus and Paul. However, maybe this is more difficult than I realize if most church-goers simply do not, in fact, know their way around the Bible.

I don’t have an answer to that.

My life on a map.

The one thing about journeys is that they take you from one place to another. I have found myself often using the imagery of a map to describe this. Turns out I’ve been using this for a long time. What can I say? I have always loved maps and often think in terms of a journey across a map.

My recent spiritual journey has some of that characteristic, too. Raised in a Christian church that was always mildly evangelical and mildly charismatic and definitely middle-class white suburbia kind of made my map smaller than it should have been. I still cringe when I think about some of the attitudes and opinions I used to hold.

But I’ve walked off that map. I have made friends outside the church, I’ve had deep conversations about current issues, I’ve even had a deeply personal experience. I made my map bigger. I learnt to accept that life happens outside of church attendees and with people of all sorts of different religious and a-religious tastes. I’ve learnt that the black-and-white world of most Christian teaching is really grey-and-gray.

But I’ve walked off that map, too. I’ve questioned why the church does things. I’ve found research about bible history, about church history. I’ve found that Christianity as taught to me doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. I posted a few months back about “coming out from under the Christian guilt“. This wasn’t something I did lightly. And it wasn’t done in isolation. My map had been “folded out” to some seriously non-Christian spirituality.

I came out as “almost” Wiccan this morning to the first person whose reaction I didn’t know beforehand. And it went well. He was my counsellor and would be used to dealing with people of all sorts of faiths. But he is also a Christian and is skilled at encouraging people to learn and know themselves.

My map is taking me in direction he might not have seen before. It’s also a direction I haven’t seen before, either.

 

 

Teaching Evangelism to the Tired

One more week, one more bible study/home group/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I was expecting to start a study on Jeremiah or Ezekiel. No: apparently all bible study groups at my church are to eventually do the four week course called “Just Walk Across The Room”. And between last week and this, a copy became available for us.

It’s a DVD plus study guide from Bill Hybels of Willow Creek based on a book by the same name. It is, essentially, Christian teachings about how to evangelise.

On the surface, this is a good thing. Using modern mass-media technologies, we can do nearly what the early early church did: have a guest speaker come into out group and talk and teach. The only drawback with that structure is that it is one-way. Otherwise, so far so good.

But the church as an institution has been trying to teach its congregation how to evangelise for decades if not centuries. Having been a church-goer all my life, I can remember some of the gradual shifts in teaching. Much teaching when I was an adolescent seemed to be focussed in teaching to everyone what came automatically to those with the gift of evangelism, for example. “Just Walk Across The Room” is recent enough that it doesn’t do that: it starts with saying that evangelism happens when you act yourself. The title, in fact, comes from Hybel’s pithy observation that Jesus would walk across a room if necessary to meet someone’s need.

For me, however, the bigger problem is that I am much less Christian now than I was six months ago. When I sit and meditate to pray, I don’t see Yahweh waiting for me: I see Cernunnos, often called The Horned God. This is a god of Wicca, not Christianity. Meanwhile Yahweh is off doing his own thing, happy to leave me with Cernunnos. But one big thing Wicca does not do is evangelise.

This puts me in a little bit of a pickle. My home group know I am on a spiritual journey (and I called it a quest tonight for the first time). They don’t know it is taking me away from the familiar stomping grounds of Jesus and Yahweh. And I’m not ready to tell them. Unfortunately, it seems I must either fake Christianity for a few weeks as we not only hear about Hybel’s current teaching about evanglism but partake in practical steps to improve it, or I finally bow out of my home group, undoubtedly leaving more questions than answers.

Friends and Church

It seems to be a persistent problem that when you leave a particular church community, friendships are rarely retained. It is as though the friendships built in a church community are rarely strong enough to not need the church services to maintain them.

I say “church community” deliberately. Maybe I should be even saying “church congregation” because even the meaning of the word “church” has been diluted and corrupted over the centuries. In a Christian context, it is supposed to refer to all believers. But for most people in this day and age, it usually means either a purpose-built building for Christians to meet in or the people that meet there. And such groups of people don’t normally socialize well either with other “church groups” or outside organised church activities.

Of course, I may be in a minority who don’t socialize with fellow church-goers all that much, but I kind of suspect I’m far from alone. Very far.

Churches in our modern western, secular society are not much more than glorified social clubs. Many church-goers would not even consider belonging to more than one at a time, for instance. It becomes something to devote time to and to acquire an additional circle of “friends”.

One thing that social media is actually rather good at is mixing up your circles of friends. The first few friends I got on Facebook were people I had known in High School. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Then I found some other friends, people who used to go out together and stuff. The next major group of people were my church friends. And most recently it has been a new group of writerly friends. But whilst Facebook is good at connecting you with people whom you might not see in person so often what it doesn’t do so well is let you categorise your socializing with them. When you post a status, all your friends see it. That means it is very possible for two or more of your friends who would otherwise never meet to have a conversation in the comments of one of your posts! One of my friends on Facebook discovered this when a staunchly Christian friend of hers started conversing with a solidly Pagan friend of hers.

The design of Twitter actively takes advantage of this. Because you see the conversations of people you follow, stepping in to participate brings you to the attention of those who don’t already follow you. I’ve made numerous friends on Twitter through exactly that mechanism, some of them minor celebrities in their field because another thing Twitter is also good at (though not perfect) is levelling social strata.

But church communities don’t seem to work well with that. There are just two people in my church I follow on Twitter, and neither post very much. But one of them is likely to respond to things that don’t agree with his religious POV. (Annoyingly, it makes me reluctant to swear on Twitter, which is ironic given its uncensored nature.) If or when I leave the church community I’m currently a part of, I don’t know what is going to happen to that friendship. At least we already have a way of keeping in touch.

Of course, friendships require effort. I value my writer friends because they accept me just as I come. I take the time to go to see them and to participate in events they are likely to be at. It could be argued that church is exactly analogous, except for the small but important fact that I socialize with my friends because they’re my friends: we’re told that the reason for most church services isn’t for socializing with my friends but for worshipping in fellowship. If I don’t or can’t worship in that way anymore, it makes the event uncomfortable for me and I don’t want to go anymore. (I know of people who have left churches, but still turn up in time for the morning coffee afterwards. Some members hadn’t realized they hadn’t been at a service for months.)

But not wanting to go to the services doesn’t mean I don’t want some of those friendships to survive.

 

What do I do with Sunday morning?

Stepping away from the church means several things. First and foremost it means I don’t feel so obligated to go to Sunday morning service. But that brings up another thing: now I have Sunday mornings to myself more often than not. And it’s a trifle weird having a whole ‘nother morning to myself on the weekend.

I’m used to doing my washing on Saturday and generally bumming around the flat. Occasionally, I never even make it out of my pyjamas. Can’t do that two days in a row!

 

It’s Easter again

And for the first time ever, I seem to be looking at Easter as just another long weekend.

Many people I’ve encountered in my life have no idea why Easter doesn’t have a fixed location in the year. But since they’ve grown up with it, they don’t question it.

Easter has an oddity amongst other Christian celebrations, but because Jesus was crucified during the Jewish Passover, then the date of the Easter celebrations depend on when the Passover occurs. This is set according to the Jewish calendar, and one of the peculiarities of that is that the Jewish calendar a solar/lunar calendar, unlike the Western Gregorian calendar, which is a solar calendar. In practice, this means Easter is generally the weekend after the first full moon after the March equinox.

So far so good: it’s a Christian celebration whose date is based on the date of a Jewish celebration. But the name in the English-speaking world is something else again. Historians aren’t fully sure, but it looks like the word “easter” is probably a modified version of either “ostara” or “eostre“, which is a Pagan festival, based around the March equinox. And I’ve become really aware of Pagan festivals in recent weeks.

The possibility of a pantheon of real gods in modern times is something that sounds incredulous and impossible to most people today – whether they’re Christian or totally atheist. Yet millions of Pagans and Wiccans believe this happens.

My own journey of beliefs is heading down that road. And one of the casualties is Easter.

 

Telling my Bible Study

One of the more difficult things I’ve discovered since “stepping out from under the Christian Guilt” is that it is quite difficult to talk to people at church about it. Almost all of them will have had no idea I’ve even been asking questions. Or that I’ve been searching in a wider and wider circle for answers… That’s kind of why I haven’t left my bible study. But when your whole attitude to seeking divine assistance (i.e. “Christian” prayer) has been completely changed, it can make it awkward when asked for prayer points. So my prayer points have been “praise points” that my exploration is, well, bearing fruit.

My fellow study-ers have been curious, naturally. Last night, we had a member come back to the group after being in a special-purpose study for a few months that ended last week. So she hadn’t heard anything about my journey before. Not surprisingly, after the prayers were over, I got quizzed about what I meant.

I didn’t tell them everything. I couldn’t tell them everything. But I could tell them about The Naked Pastor. I could tell them about my frustration that the church seems to so solidly ignore the Bible’s provenance. I could tell them about the Mankind Project and the New Warrior Training I did two years ago. I could tell them about Pagan Christianity, which I have started reading. I could also tell them about Jesus Through Pagan Eyes, though that was a bit riskier. I did not tell them about The Path Of A Christian Witch. My spiritual library is obviously growing highly eclectic! I also realized last night that I felt a bit like Peter in the story from Acts just before he met Cornelius, and could say so, too, because one of my strongest convictions is that God is telling me “go look at Christianity from the outside but also go see what other spiritual practices are there. I’ll be here if you come back. You may not need to.”

This was a bit of a gamble, but it seemed to have been taken well. The person who asks may have gotten more than she bargained for. The host was curious and didn’t seem much surprised. There were a few people missing, including two or three people I thought would be less receptive to what I said.

I might have under-estimated how much they might respect a spiritual journey. Many journeys are better shared but some are better shared more carefully, especially if the ones you are sharing with think you are going “off-road” a bit too hard.