How can you be friends with an atheist?

Another interesting question my friend asked me this weekend was how my Christian friends would respond to me being good friends with an atheist.  He seemed to think that this might cause some controversy.

He's definitely right that in some circles my having a close friend who doesn't even believe in God's existence would be a huge problem.  Thankfully it's not something that my closest friends fear or don't understand.

It makes me wonder though where that controversy comes from.  I definitely have belonged to Christian groups in the past where it would be a big deal.  I think that in part it goes to a person's interpretation of being in the world but not of the world--that desire to be separated and holy and pure.  Is there a fear of contamination or of allowing yourself to be corrupted by the world?  I don't know.  But I can't make that approach fit with what I know about Jesus, who sat with tax collectors and sinners and spent much of his time with the people that religious people despised.  He was in the world but ever calling and inviting people into a deeper and more meaningful life of service and sacrifice.

And so on a daily basis I follow Jesus into the world and seek to love and listen to and serve people the way that I see he did in Scripture.  I can't help but think of this song by Gungor...

I do find Jesus in the prisons and in the streets and with my non-believing friends.  Learning to love and to relate and to listen and to serve calls me ever deeper into being transformed to be like Christ.  Yes, sometimes it's difficult.  Yes, sometimes it is uncomfortable.  Yes, sometimes I put my heart and soul at risk.  But I'm not happy with the antiseptic life that's lived within the walls of a Christian community that will not reach outside of itself.  I have been there too, and I have found that life wanting and more dangerous than anything I have encountered on the outside.

A prayer for the church

If there's one thing we can't escape as Christians it's that how we live and what we say affects how people view God.  God kinda set it up that way with his people long ago, calling first Israel and then the church to be his image-bearers and ambassadors in the world.  I so often wonder why he did that as I think we often end up preventing people from having a fair chance of seeing God for who he is.

When this image-bearing goes right, it can be a really powerful thing.  You can have people who don't even believe in God questioning their beliefs or at least willing to talk with you about the possibility of God's existence.  When we live like Jesus and love and serve and protect and sacrifice and love and love and love, people can be drawn first to us and then to him.

But when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong.  It devastates a person's desire or ability to seek God or to follow him.  It creates animosity.  It creates barriers.  And over time, the wealth of injuries the institutional church has caused to humanity's ability to see God is overwhelming.  It seems like it's impossible to get over.

I had a conversation with my atheist friend yesterday--a really long conversation and I'll probably have post after post of things to say as I process the conversation.  But this is the first of many things that sticks out to me.  His objections to God are actually objections to the God that the church has preached through her actions and through her words.  It's not the God that I know or run after.  But I find it overwhelming and nearly impossible to think of how to overcome all that history of all of us Christians who have lived lives aimed at having as little pain as possible and protecting ourselves from what we perceive as the taint of the world.

God, we have failed you.  We have put our need for comfort and safety above all things.  We have so often been filled with a passion to preach or convert but not to love or to serve or to sacrifice.  We have not cared about justice.  We have not loved the outcast or outsider.  We have wanted our own place in society to be preserved at the cost of inviting and sharing and being hospitable.  We have been threatened by people who believe differently.  We have allowed race and social class to divide us.  We have been like the pharisees instead of like the fishermen.  God, transform us, the church.  Make us over in your image and in your likeness so that we can be the picture that we are supposed to be of who you are and what you care about.

Preparing to share...

I've been working on formulating the story of my whole spiritual life to share with a friend who considers himself an atheist this weekend.  I am very much looking forward to the discussion--both to sharing my own story and listening to his.  But it's different than sharing with anyone I've talked to before.  Most of the people I have known in the past have had some sort of religious experience or position.  It's somewhat intimidating to think of sharing with someone who doesn't share even the basic assumption that there is a God in the universe.

I mean, how can I explain why I've done the things I've done?  How do I explain how I've interacted with God?  How can I explain that I sense God leading me to do certain things at certain times?  How can I explain what a relationship with an invisible God looks and feels like?

I think it's really important to share my struggles with God over the years.  I think it's important to be honest about the questions I've had and the questions I still have.  I think I have to own my doubts and my issues and my fears and my frustrations.  I think it's important that I don't pretend that I have all the answers--because I don't.

It kind of has me wondering though--what's the core of this whole relationship-with-God thing?  What is the most important thing to communicate about it?  I know that I don't have to take responsibility for presenting God in a certain kind of light--he's God and he can defend his own honor.  But I don't want my own human questions and frustrations to get in the way.

I've done the preparation of thinking through my journey and the spiritual signposts along the way.  I've thought through the major events of my life, spiritually and otherwise.  Now I'm simply praying that when I describe my life and what I perceive as God's interactions with me, God will be able to speak through me.  And I'm praying that I'll be able to hear his questions and objections with a humble and loving spirit.

It's such an amazing gift to have friends like him and to have the opportunity to share so deeply from my heart.  If you're reading, I hope you'll pray with me, that the Spirit will lead and guide and be present in our interaction.  If he doesn't mind, I'll try to debrief the convo afterward here.

Harold and the Purple Crayon

If you struggle to conceptually understand the different between a modern thinker and a postmodern thinker, this link may help.  It's a video remake of a book that was written over 50 years ago.  It's about a little boy who creates his own reality by drawing what he wants to see and experience.

I don't want to say much more about it because I think to truly see the differences in the ways of thinking, you probably have to experience the book yourself.  But it's as good an example as I've seen of postmodern thinking.  The book itself is available here.

marching to the beat of a different drum

I've talked before about how I believe that doing what I call the works of God helps to authenticate the message of God.  I would count things like taking care of orphans and widows, loving neighbors and enemies, living within a community of people dedicated to loving and serving one another and the world as works of God.  In my own life, I would also see working hard to help the community find justice and protect people from oppression as something that falls right in line with God's character of loving justice, which also serves to authenticate the message of God.

So I haven't been surprised when, as I have conversations about spirituality and my own relationship with God that these are the things that people who are not Christians appreciate about the way I live my life.  I have not been surprised that they sometimes want to communicate a deep respect for those activities and the kind of person that God has made me.  Now they would never put those words around it of course--they usually give me the credit instead of God.  But that always gives me the opportunity to share that it really is God working in me that allows me to do what I do even in the midst of struggle or even when I don't see the results that I would want to.

What's been surprising to me is actually that I'm finding more affirmation and acceptance and even love from people outside the church than I ever did from those inside.  The person I am becoming because of God's transformative power in my life is inherently attractive to many people outside of the church.  They want to spend time with me.  It's kind of shocking, particularly in light of how on the fringes I always felt within a church community.

And the funny thing is that my values and activities and actions don't necessarily match the people's who appreciate who I am.  I am still very much living counter-culturally and marching to the beat of my own drum, as it were.  I suppose the reality is that I'm also living counter-culturally to the culture of the general West Michigan church.  But inside the church that life creates controversy or discomfort.  Outside it appears to be intriguing and somewhat attractive.  I wonder why that is.

on blogging

I had a conversation with a friend a couple of days ago that reminded me how careful I need to be when I am using language to describe my perception of reality.

This blog is an attempt to observe and describe my reality, particularly as it relates to having spiritual conversations in everyday life.  But in order to do that, I find myself having to draw bright lines around categories of people - people who are "outside the church" or who are "post-Christian" or who are "unbelievers."  The very need to label and categorize people is counter-cultural and makes me very uncomfortable.

Yet I find that in order to share what's going on and to analyze what's happening and to perhaps suggest some things that might "work" or have a positive effect in the real world, I have to do it.  But I'm always afraid that I'm going to violate the privacy or trust of someone I love.

So I find myself walking a very thin line.  I want to be able to talk about what's going on in my world because I think that the successes and mistakes can be instructive for my future actions and those of anyone who might be reading the blog who cares about the same things I do.  But things said on a blog can't really be erased and there could be a few people reading who come to their own conclusions about what's being said without ever asking for clarification.

I guess what I'm saying is that I realize that this medium lends itself to conversation without relationship.  Part of my hesitancy in writing the last month has been trying to balance that.  I don't want to alienate the people I care about by what I might flippantly say on here.  And no matter how carefully I word things, it's still possible to say something the wrong way.

And I guess what I'm asking is that if you're reading this and you're a friend of mine, then I'd like for this to be a dialogue instead of a one-way conversation.  I actually want to know what effect my words might be having and I want to be able to clarify if I haven't been as careful or as precise as I should have been.  I really don't want to alienate people or make friendships impossible because of how I speak about what I observe and experience.

on universalism and evangelism

In this article, Dan Kimball expresses a concern that I share: that in the firestorm of discussion about heaven and hell and universalism, the need to walk beside people on their journey toward faith is being lost in the fray...

That said, I think the article misses something that Rob Bell probably does bring to the table, which is a desire to focus on what it means to walk with Christ today.  In his Rob Bell way, he seems to be trying to point people toward the fact that eternal life with Christ is supposed to make a difference today. 

And the reality is that, in my world, having spiritual discussions centered around what will happen when everyone dies is less than worthless.  It's just not where people are at.  It's so much more relevant to talk about what life with the eternal one looks like now--today. 

I think that's ok.  There may come a time in a person's faith journey where they have to work through the theological issues of heaven and hell and eternal judgment and the possibility of grace and mercy that astounds and surprises.  But I don't think that discussion is essential to the question of what it means to walk with God today.

Walking with God is hard.  It's all-consuming.  The sacrifice of just following the commands to love God and love your neighbor is a lifetime's worth of challenges.  So here on the ground, that's where I'm choosing to spend my time when I have the opportunity for spiritual discussions.  And I so wish that the community of Christ-followers would be spending its energy on thinking and praying about how to speak about that in a way that's understandable within today's culture.  All of this time, and all of these resources, and I'm walking around here on the ground bumbling through these conversations and relationships hoping that somehow God will be able to work and speak his invitation of life with the eternal one to those around me.  I long for the community of Christ-followers to rise up and put its resources and energy into answering those kinds of questions.