Aliens Sit at This End of the Bus

Hope on the Other Side of Doubt

If you’ve ever been made to feel like the alien, the other or the stranger, Anna Scott’s response in Patrol magazine (Life as a Leaver) will add fuel to your alienation/otherness/strangeness. Ms. Scott was responding in turn to an article in Christianity Today (The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church). After dealing with the article’s pointing toward moral compromise, among other things, as the reason for leaving the church, the bulk of her argument is a cry to recognize difference. And not just recognize difference and set it aside, but to recognize and incorporate. To set a place at the table for those who would help re-imagine what it means to be a Christian and to be together—not just for the same old male faces that show up when the hierarchical-authority bell is rung. To set a place for women to lead, for instance. Or for divorced folks to be full-fledged participants rather than living with what many evangelical churches treats as an unforgivable sin. Or even just to cultivate listening to the folks in the pew.

She wrote from the perspective of a person immersed in faith—a “real” believer, as one might say. But the difficulties of life changed how she saw things. Ms. Scott’s article is worth reading, as is the original Drew Dyck article.

My point in highlighting this discussion is to say I resonate with her argument. The plight of young skeptics is more than skin deep. It is more than a matter of an easily dismissed people who are “morally compromised” and/or utterly self-focused. My point is that of agreement with Ms. Scott that the “world is complicated, unpredictable, volatile and tragic” and that the church needs to be immersed in many conversations that bring to light some of the mystery of this ancient faith, conversations that honor the shades of gray that disappeared during recent decades when we smugly thought we knew everything.

There is actually another entire category of “old skeptics.” Real believers who have been immersed in the system for decades and now sit idly by for many of the same reasons: the complicated, unpredictable, volatile and tragic world did a number on them, but the depths of their pain and experience have no place in the current sanitized conversations and full-throttle programs.

Conversations with skeptics could be very productive, because they could begin to unearth the concrete hope that can sustain real people living in a complicated world.

conversation is an engine