pick and mix
Posted on September 12, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson
Filed Under Emerging Questions
Real scenario (19yrs old) edited for grammatical reasons
“I hear a lot of people talk about finding Jesus, or getting saved. I am a person who is really questioning a lot of things in her life and also wondering if religion can be a new part of my life? How do you know what’s right?
A question I want to ask and I know it may sound silly, but how do I know if Christianity is right for me?
I sent away for a New Testament- it should come in 4-6 weeks hmmmmm - I think I may go buy a Bible tomorrow morning. I feel this kind of rising feeling in my chest even as I write. its as though Something is bursting inside - OK that probably sounds crazy - but its almost like this overwhelming sense of hope - I don’t know where it came from hmmmmmm. Sorry that probably sounds weird.
My main question is: how do I know this is right for me?”
I was fairly stunned when this cropped up on a Christian youth discussion board that I follow, excited yes, but baffled. How do you answer to such a very post modern search for right?
About Rebecca Matheson
Rebecca is a 21 year old communication design student who gets forced to post on amateurtheology.org as a condition of her marriage to Geoff. She leads a youth girls small group at Yarra Valley Vineyard and has been blogging about God stuff for almost 3 years.
Rebecca's site: http://allsaidanddone.com
Comments
6 Responses to “pick and mix”
Leave a Reply
Bec - there’s no need to pretend we are talking about someone else. You are among friends here. I know a great guy in your area, I think you know him, Geoff? I recommend you spend some time with him. I’m sure he would be happy to speak with you about all of your questions.
Seriously, good question and I think I am not capable of having the required conversation via the web. I’d want to speak directly with that person or connect them with someone else near them.
Me, if I had the opportunity to start the dialog, I’d start with asking them, “you tell me, how do you determine if anything is right for you?”
It sounds to me like all you need to do is reflect back to her what she is already saying about how she feels. I know it seems like a strange way of putting it… but the same approach that teenage boys use to coerce teenage girls into sex could work remakably well… “Try it once, and see what you think.” It might not be an exceptionally theological response… but a simple ‘give it a go and see’ kind of attitude could be worth a try.
Of course it begs the question… what is Christianity exactly… and how do you innitiate someone into it? Does becoming a believer in, and follower of Christ then have to result in attending and conforming to a particular sub-cultural group and their social norms? (Yeah, I mean a church).
What do we even actually believe will change about someone’s life when they decide to ‘become a christian’?
Is it about:
> Eternity?
> Community?
> ‘A good life’?
> Happyness?
> Satisfaction?
> Moral High ground?
or is it simply and solely about redemption?
How much of what we call ‘a christian lifestyle’ is about Christ at all?
Tackling the ‘postmodern’ end of it a little more directly… it is interesting that the question has been asked as “is christianity right-for-me.” I think Bec, that you already believe that Christianity is right for this person… so perhaps a more useful question for guiding your response might be:
“What kind/style/flavour/approach/version of christianity would be best for (me)?”
That’s approaching it from an absolutest point of view, on the assumption that christianity is always right for everyone.
If you want to tackle the postmodern question in type… that is, you want to approach it with a post-modern answer, then you have to allow the posibility that christianity is not right for some people. Within the existentialist constraint, what becomes important in answering the question is no longer the absolute truth, spiritual or factual basis for christianity, but rather the simple question of whether this particular individual is choosing authentically.
Specifically in this context: is she being true to her interests and her sense of self in exploring how she feels and what she might believe about God, and even more specifically, about God interpreted through a christian worldview?
While it seems like a remarkably silly exercise if you are personally certain about the absolute truth of christianity, a postmodern response actually completely circumnavigates the need for long arguments about geology, evolution, perception etc… because it heads straight for the part of her that already wants to know, and is already thinking and feeling her way into a christian worldview.
I’m pretty sure all I’ve done here is badly plagiarise and paraphrase Brian McLaren’s “More ready than you realise”, and I think he’s probably a lot more coherent than me. Worth a read if you haven’t already.
The question is a port-modern question. It’s not one that would have been asked 40 years ago. I don’t see it as a question of what kind of Christianity. This is a question about the kind of spirituality she wants to include as part of the identity she is constructing for herself.
The response to try it is not a bad response. But by try it, I don’t mean try church, I mean read the Book - the bottom line of our faith. I say that because I would agree with the Christian philosopher Van Til, that because the scriptures are God’s word they are “self attesting”. Thus if they are read with an open heart and mind, God will demonstrate the power and reality of his word. A closed mind approach (e.g. Richard Dawkins)would not of course yield such a response.
oops, post-modern question
[...] big discussions on Monday evening in our small group when we were planning on discussing Bec’s “Pick and Mix” post. The conversation was hijacked and diverted to the point that we were talking about one of the big [...]
The root of postmodernism is “I”.
Rick’s right: how do YOU feel about it?
What else convinces you of anything?