Leaving Evangelicalism: When You No Longer Belong
By
P
James Bowen
One of the
great attractions of the conservative evangelical church is its sense of
community. Fundamentalists belong. If you have been a part of an
evangelical church you will know what I mean. You will be familiar with
the sense of unity inherent in a church where conformity of belief and
practice are central to how the church understands itself. Evangelicals’
emphasis on doctrinal purity, their lively sense of purpose and their
tendency to see themselves as struggling against the world outside all
tend to create a powerful sense of belonging in the community. Sometimes
there are negative sides to this unity. Churches fall short of the
ideal, and people get hurt. But despite that, belonging can be so good.
There is nothing better than feeling accepted and loved. When you really
belong somewhere you feel secure, nurtured, and empowered. It’s
wonderful being with people of like mind who share your goals and work
with you to help you achieve them. Belonging makes you feel more human.
I have experienced many of these benefits of belonging, and for much of
my life I experienced them in charismatic-evangelical Christianity. But
now I no longer belong there. I have left evangelical Christianity
behind. It has been painful, confused and desperate, like splitting up
with a much-loved partner. It has been a process with many twists and
turns, and for a long time I didn’t really understand, or didn’t want to
understand, that I no longer belonged. It has been hard and lonely to
leave behind what has for so long been home. I didn’t get thrown out or
asked to leave; I didn’t get abused or rejected: I just felt I couldn’t
stay there any longer. I’m writing my story for those who question
whether they still belong in evangelicalism. I hope it will be helpful
to you.
My Story
Once I belonged to a little Pentecostal church. I really did belong. I
grew up in the church my parents attended along with other members of my
extended family. I still joke that I was born a Christian. I grew up to
believe pretty much the same things as everyone else in the church. I
believed in scriptural inerrancy, speaking in tongues, the Second
Coming, Baptism in the Spirit, the ‘deadness’ of the traditional
churches -- you name it, I believed it. I’ve always been the
questioning, self-willed sort, so I occasionally struggled with this or
that doctrine or idea, but on the whole I was content in the community I
was part of. So much so, in fact, that in my teenage years I considered
becoming a Pentecostal pastor myself and decided to pack myself off to a
charismatic Bible college.
Despite the reputation of such institutions, the Bible college I
attended was comparatively easygoing about students coming into contact
with non-conservative academic literature -- so long as you always
ultimately dismissed liberal ideas in your essays, stayed true to
orthodox doctrine, and towed the line of charismatic practice. But
letting me read people like Barth, Bultmann and Tillich and engaging
with their thought was a fateful turning point. My mind was inevitably
broadened, and my tendency to question became a rampant scepticism. I
shocked my friends with my questioning of biblical inerrancy. I
alienated myself from my fellow students with my increasing and
ill-disguised distaste for charismatic excesses. And finally I began, in
a painful time of personal crisis, to doubt everything. God’s existence,
his goodness, my own salvation -- everything! Needless to say, ideas of
pastoral ministry flew out the window.
Eventually things began to calm down. I found writers and mentors who
had trodden this way before me. My fear subsided. One by one my doubts
were either rejected or accepted as normal and even a good thing. But I
was forever changed. The shape of my faith was radically different from
what it had been and there was no going back. But at the time I had no
idea how much had changed, and the thought of leaving my evangelical
home barely occurred to me. When it did, the thought terrified me. I
still wanted to belong. No matter what I thought about charismatics and
conservatives now, I still couldn’t bring myself to break away. I had
always been one. They were my friends, my family. Where else was there?
I was practically born a Pentecostal for goodness sake! So I tried to
carry on as before, hoping I could still fit in. I attempted to be a
more philosophically savvy charismatic. Interestingly, I found that if I
kept quiet about my theological views and pretended I meant the same
things they did, and that I had the same goals they did, and went
through the same (albeit toned-down) charismatic motions, then people
accepted me and let me carry on belonging. I even continued to
fellowship and heavily participate in a charismatic church up to three
years after I left the Bible college. That’s how strong a desire to
belong can be. But it was merely an illusion of belonging, as I finally
discovered.
Recognition
As I said before, no one pushed me out, deliberately made me feel out of
place or unwanted. Rather, in a way that is hard to put my finger on,
there began to grow in me a vague, unexpressed feeling of tension. The
reason it’s so hard to pinpoint is because it’s a culmination of a
thousand little things that on their own might be okay, but taken
together create an ultimately unbearable pressure. Slowly and without
recognising it for what it was, I began to feel frustration. I’d join a
worship band or a home group with the best of intentions, but always I’d
end up feeling out-of-place and frustrated. Somehow I was just not on
the same wavelength as everyone else. Often this made me negative, and I
chided myself for feeling so critical about such obviously well-meaning
people. It’s not that people weren’t caring and accepting, but rather
that I just seemed to have so little in common with them.
I no longer shared the ‘worldview’ of evangelical culture. ‘Worldview’
is a concept used to sum up all aspects of the belief and practice of
either an individual or a group. It is quite literally the way a person
or group sees the world and their place in it. It is a particular answer
to the ‘big questions’ of life, such as, ‘Who am I?’, ‘What’s life all
about?’, ‘What should I do?’ and so on. The worldview of a group has
many interrelated aspects, including the core beliefs of a group, its
language, its practices, and its goals. Looking back now at the last few
years of my time in the charismatic-evangelical church, I can see how in
each of these four aspects, my own worldview and that of
charismatic-evangelicalism were light-years apart.
1. Core beliefs. These include both the plainly stated theology of the
church and those other beliefs that largely go unspoken or unarticulated
but are nevertheless just as important. The core beliefs are so
fundamental that it is taken for granted that as a professed member of
the community you also share them. They are presupposed. For example, in
the evangelical church I attended, the inerrancy of the Bible was a core
belief. From this sprang a host of sub-beliefs about all sorts of issues
ranging from the theoretical to the practical. Personally, I had already
abandoned the inerrancy doctrine and had questions about biblical
authority. So I found myself not only in disagreement with many things
that were taught in the church, but also in disagreement about the very
basis of those beliefs. Two Christians who agree on biblical inerrancy
but who disagree on some matter or other can at least debate their
points of view from the their shared view that they must strive to be
faithful to the Bible’s teaching on the subject. Their foundation is the
same. My problem was not so much that I disagreed with certain
teachings, but that my reasons for doing so were completely alien to
everyone else. Of course, because I ‘belonged’ to the church it was
assumed that I also held to biblical inerrancy, so I often held my
tongue rather than risk scandalising people with my views.
I mention just this one belief as an example, but you can imagine that
my ideas on many subjects differed with the evangelical worldview. More
significant than any specific belief, however, is the general
evangelical perception that everything is a black-and-white issue. For
an evangelical, something is either good or bad; but which ever it is,
they are absolutely certain about it. Evangelicals feel they have the
truth because they have the inspired Word of God in their Bibles and the
right interpretation of it. But through my studies in the philosophy of
knowledge, I had come to the belief that human beings simply don’t have
access to absolutely certain knowledge about many, many things, not
least certain knowledge of historical events such as those recorded in
the Bible. Moreover, I believe that the things we know are shaped by our
own individual perceptions and interpretations. So for me, ‘the truth’
was a grey area, ambiguous at best. In a culture where everyone seemed
so damn certain about everything, I felt pretty uncomfortable!
2. Language too was a problem. Each group has its own jargon. Just think
of your workplace, or your club, or even your own family, and you will
know what I mean. In such places, people use words that would mean
little to those outside. This is normal, and there’s nothing wrong with
it as long as we take care not to exclude others. But I had, through
long exposure to it, come to strongly dislike charismatic-evangelical
language. If someone enjoined me to ‘be set on fire for God’ or to have
a ‘passionate personal relationship with Jesus’, I found this turned me
off. The jargon seemed overused and banal. On the one hand this is a
matter of personal taste, so I tried to endure my revulsion. But on the
other hand, the implication behind the language of ‘personal
relationship’ and ‘passion’ seemed to imply things about the Christian’s
religious experience that at best seemed to me misleading. In the end I
came to realise the power of personal taste. It is not to be
underestimated. The dislike I had for the language of evangelical
culture began to fatally affect my ability to enter into the life of the
church.
3. Practice. I found aspects of charismatic style excessive. I felt it
was wrong to put such store by the sorts of religious experience and
emotions we were encouraged to have. On top of this I found I could no
longer really relate to the whole ethos of charismatic worship. Sunday
worship, it seemed, had come to consist of a marathon singing session of
often vacuous and repetitive ‘contemporary worship songs’, and a
revelling in the emotions thus produced. It was as if ‘worship’ and
‘singing’ were synonymous. As CS Lewis has said of communal church
singing, ‘I do not yet seem to have found any evidence that the physical
and emotional exhilaration which it produces is necessarily, or often,
of any religious relevance. What I, like many other laymen, chiefly
desire in church are fewer, better, and shorter hymns; especially
fewer.’ I echo those sentiments; and Lewis should be thankful he never
went to my old church! Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy singing. And
meaningful lyrics and powerful music can stir me, for what that’s worth.
But on the whole I found the singing sessions we engaged in to leave me
feeling hollow. My spirituality had changed with my beliefs. I longed
for an intellectually engaging form of worship with time to reflect and
pray. I was hungry for it; but left each service feeling unsatisfied.
4. Goals. Part of a worldview is its aim: its view of what the community
should be striving to achieve. I think the goals of the church I
attended were well-meant, and not too far wrong. On the whole the idea
was to make the gospel known to those who don’t know it -- to draw
people in to the Kingdom of God, to reach out to them. Nothing wrong
with that I think. But I suppose I felt at variance with the details of
how the church tried to achieve its goals. Prayer meetings, building
projects, spiritual experiences, worship services. These things, I began
to realise, were not really for me. Not the way that church did them
anyhow. The more I tried to make the best of these things, and to
reinterpret them or see the good in them, the more I began to feel a bit
of a fraud doing them. Perhaps I didn’t even believe the same things
were important anymore, let alone the methods. For example, an
evangelical friend of mine once enthusiastically asked me if I’d
considered going to the church’s new charismatic prayer meeting. It
shocked me as I suddenly realised that I’d simply not given it a thought
-- dismissed it out-of-hand. And when I asked myself why, I found that
the best answer I could give was that I wasn’t sure there was any point
in the meeting at all and that I knew I’d hate it.
So, in all these ways I came to recognise that I didn’t belong in
evangelicalism any more. I understand that many of my opinions could be
wrong. But the key factor is that for me they are much more than mere
intellectual disagreements about theological or ecclesiological
specifics. Rather, this is a matter of personal identity. I had become,
body and soul, a quite different type of person than the good people in
that community. I still had a Christian faith. But the shape of that
faith was, I finally realised, just too different from the shape of that
community. I no longer belonged there. It took years to get from the
changes that took place at Bible college to the day I finally left
evangelicalism behind. It was a fight between my desire to belong and my
inability to belong. But it finally became apparent to me that the
struggle to belong was futile. It was wearisome and it was making me
unhappy. So I left. Now, I have now found a church where I feel more at
home, and it has been such a relief to me to break away from the
frustration and tension I knew for so long.
My hope is that my story will help you to understand where you are at
and whether or not you belong where you are. I sincerely hope you do
belong. It’s simpler that way. But on the other hand, you might be
struggling within yourself about this issue, and can relate to my
feelings of tension and frustration. Maybe you’ve been feeling like that
for a while but you haven’t yet figured out why. Or maybe, like I was,
you are too scared to admit it to yourself. In that case, you might find
it helpful to think about the core beliefs, practices and goals of your
church or style of Christianity, and decide for yourself whether you
really share them. I know that it took me a long time before I was
mentally and emotionally prepared to leave my old home behind. So I’m
not asking you to make any quick decisions or to jump ship on the
strength of what I have said. I left when I was ready, and so should
you. You know your own heart. Whatever you decide, peace to you.
©
P James Bowen 2005
