I'm Not an Actor

Lots of thoughts in my head right now. Just went out to wings with my roomate and some guys. I guess I have been feeling really challenged by the people up here in the Boston area. The Christians are unlike any I've ever met in my limited 7 or 8 years as a Christian. They think a lot. Many of them are intellectuals (grad school does that to you). They question. They think out what they believe and say. They don't follow the normal stream of conservatism I have always encountered. Much like the hippies, this has challenged me.

Tonight I was talking for awhile with a guy named Brian. He is married, 25, and is curently in grad school pursuing his masters in psychology and is doing clinical hours and will go on to his PhD in that field. We talked at nights end about the fact that he is wrestling with inerrancy and interpretation of Scripture. We talked at length about homosexuality and his friends who are practicing lesbians who live together but are believers. He is wrestling with a lot. A lot of people here are. My roomate Dave was telling me about how he was wrestling about Protestantism and considering converting to Catholicism awhile ago. The people at the hookah place question the existance of objectivity and God in general.

Now I know what any conservative believer reading this is thinking: oh no, liberalism is causing John to question his beliefs. No. That is not true. Nothing I believe has really changed, although I feel God is opening me up to a conviction of more socio-economic issues and poverty that I haven't had. No, I am not question my faith, innerancy, Protestantism. Heck, I am not even questioning Calvinism. It is just refreshing to be around believers who are open and honest about these issues. About their faith. They are wrestling with life, many of them in intimacy with the Lord and going to Him with their questions.

I guess the Christianity I have been exposed to so often seems to scripted. If someone came up to me after a service at MBC and talked about these issues, it wouldn't be a huge deal, but it would clearly be out of the ordinary. I think in DC most people at MBC are so consumed with their own jobs and life they don't care that much about some of those issues. If they talked to me about it at Liberty, they would me labeled as liberals and heretics. What I find rediculous is that we all have our answers to all these questions, scripted in a lot of ways by our apologetic arguements, but deep down many of us wrestle with the issues of God's sovereignty and AIDS and the evils of this world. I think in the end, it comes down to two facts. Most of the Christians I have met are too consumed in their white, middle-class American lives to even care about some of the deep issues, or they are too scared to speak up around conservative believers who can be very judgmental.

In the end, I still obviously argued tonight with him for innerancy and against all of our rediculous sinfulness. But I appreciated his honesty and willingness to have converse with another believer about something. I am tired of groups of Christians where we have to act like we are all doing well and are happy. At Liberty, my prayer groups were so forced. No one in those groups cared about what was going on with other believers there. We pretended to. Maybe we even prayed down lists of those people's requests. But we didn't share any of ourselves. And we certainly didn't question anything. We all read our lines and the play was over. I just hope to develop relationships that are more genuine than that. Hope this communicated itself alright. In the end, I have a lot of thinking to do.