It was two years ago that I ended up in Calgary Alberta, 4000 kilometers away from everyone I knew, back in a church to give this ministry gig one more shot. Eighteen months prior I had left my position as a youth pastor in a great church in Ontario to find something that was a better fit. 6 months at Best Buy selling televisions and 10 months of data entry for Hydro One here I was about to try again. Two years on I’m still here today, though everything has changed at least a couple times over. I find myself leading a community of people struggling to find an unedited spirituality. I find myself discovering my voice as a communicator. I find myself asking the same questions all over again but this time there is a difference. This time I’m comfortable with the ambiguity.

It’s not that ministry didn’t really work my first time through. In fact I really enjoyed a lot of what I did. My perception, however biased, was that the people I worked with and for seemed to enjoy my work as well but there were questions. Lingering doubts that I just couldn’t put out of my head long enough to settle into the role.

There was a time in my life when my greatest doubt was around my understanding of the universe. I was completely comfortable with the presupposition that God was up there, somewhere. I believed that beyond any shadow of doubt. Of course I had doubts but they revolved around my understanding of God. Was Christianity correct? Did I have my theology in order? Did I really believe the propositions of the denomination I was affiliated with? These were the extent of questions that bounced around in my head.

But something changed a long the way for me. At some point in the experience of carrying out the will of God I realized that I wasn’t all that concerned with his will. I was consumed by my perceptions of success and by the stated goals of the organization I worked within I become acutely aware that I had become little more than a producer in the religious economy. Was this really what I wanted to do with my life? All of a sudden the questions about correctness that had consumed my energy fell away and I started to wrestle with the very core of my faith. Did the teachings of Jesus really mean anything to me beyond the trappings of the religious economy? If I had nothing to produce and no one to consume my thoughts did I still believe in these ideas? In fact if I was going to take Jesus seriously was I willing to transition my faith from a model of communicating mental ascent to theological truths into an active participation in what I was increasingly coming to understand as a call not towards belief but towards co-creation. Outside of the need to produce engaging sermons and exciting events I found myself captivated by Jesus’ idea of the kingdom of God, not as a future life-after-death but as a present reality brought about in the practice if our lives. These ideas started to influence the core of my life. I found myself disinterested in the institutional church and longing for meaningful relationships. I found myself disinterested in the celebrity of preaching and looking for ways to influence the people in my immediate life. I started making choices about the way I was participating in the economy. I choose not to support companies that profited by exploiting people and the planet and began removing my investments from companies that I didn’t see as ethical. I started to read the words of Jesus not as some hidden code to be deciphered, a guide to proper thought, but as a radical call to change the world. A challenge to create this kingdom he described. Forget whether or not I had all the answers I was looking for, I was coming to realize that I had been asking the some of the wrong questions to begin with.

While I had always been taught that these ideas of the kingdom of God as social change were somehow a distortion of Christ’s message by the “liberal” church, they found a resonance with me that I couldn’t shake. The amazing thing was the more I wrestled with my faith the more I found that I really did believe in these ideas. In a more significant way than I had ever understood it before this interaction between my personal relationship with Jesus and the kingdom of God was changing me. Beyond the questions of theology that still bounce within my head I found a deep trust in the kingdom of God, a profound belief that the teachings of Jesus really were somehow connected to the truth of the universe. In losing my need to make sure everything in my theology was correct I found real sense of faith in Jesus, a conviction that was shaping my life in ways I hadn’t imagined before.

Now that brought up different questions and new struggles for me. What did faith look like if it wasn’t focused on proselityzing? Was I able to put my faith into something I could no longer explain satisfactorily to myself? So much of my systematic theology was built like a house of cards. One proposition supports another which in turn supported another. To pull out some of those blocks had major ripples that spread through my mind. While I held on to this central idea of the kingdom of God I found myself with new doubts around the nature of truth and the very existence of God. Somehow in embracing the implications of Jesus teachings I found myself questioning the answers that I had been giving out for years. And to my surprise I found that I was okay with it

Truth is my theology doesn’t work as well as it did a few years. There are ideas in my head that don’t play well together and yet as I have come to understand Jesus in my life I have found a place of faith that allows me to embrace the mystery of believing in God. He doesn’t fit into my categories. He doesn’t work in my logic. And yet he is where I choose to place my faith. I was asked a couple months ago what my greatest doubt is as a Christian leader. As I pretended to think about my answer I thought about the implications of what I was about to say. My greatest doubt is God. I am wholly committed to the ideals of Jesus’ kingdom. I have decided that this is how I want to live and yet there are times that I wrestle with the idea of a God beyond my experience of this world. Was this okay for a pastor to admit? What are the effects of sharing this kind of doubt with others? In the end I have decided that effects of sharing honesty are insignificant to the damage that is caused when we refuse to acknowledge our questions. Faith is about questioning.

Frederick Buechner said it this way, “Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal Himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

This is the place of faith for me today. Not the confident assurity of the modern church but the humble acknowledgement that while we can’t answer every question and while we still wrestle with the very big ones, we choose to believe. That interaction between my questions and my faith is somehow the place that I connect to God. He doesn’t force my hand or destroy a part that is very core to my sense of identity. Instead he embraces me unedited and invites me towards him in the same manner.

This series of posts is going to be exploration of the ideas that are shaping our faith community in Calgary AB. Some of it comes from my mind, most of it has developed from the thoughts of others, voices both from within our community and from others who have influenced us from the outside.