Hey, we're going to start trying to pull
everybody together here.
I still have a little cough, so I might cough
into this microphone a great deal.
And this is being recorded, obviously.
This is also if I have a heart attack or something.
I feel like a robot.
Anyhow, that has nothing to do with gathering
you together.
My name is Richard Beck, and I am one of two teachers,
and my colleague David McAnulty is up here.
We are in the psychology department here at ACU,
and this is the standard 4:00 therapy session.
We're going to start going around saying our
name and why we're here and what we need help with.
It might take us a while.
I was startled to find out that we were in a heart,
and I thought it would be David and five other
people in here.
So I'm glad we have 100 people spread out.
It feels fuller.
We only have about 45 minutes.
They have also wanted me to let you know that
they're going to be setting up a dinner right
outside these doors.
I don't know.
Is it maybe tomorrow night?
They might.
If those doors close and you hear tables
banging around, that's a dinner out there.
But that might be tomorrow.
Anyway, welcome to our session entitled The
Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience.
Again, my name is Richard Beck, for those who
just wandered in.
I'm going to be talking today.
David will be following up tomorrow.
So let me give you kind of an overview of what
we're going to be talking about.
David and I both have a real interest in,
obviously, the psychology of the religious mind.
And especially we're going to be focusing on
the experience of religious doubt
and the kind of faith crises that are kind of
common now all around us.
Those of you that work with churches probably
have members in your churches expressing doubt,
faith crises.
Ministers are expressing faith crises.
I get many emails from ministers wanting
assistance and helping out with their own faith problems.
I have faculty members at ACU that struggle
with doubt.
It just seems to be a constant and a chronic condition.
You yourself might be a person that, if you're
like me, stays up late at night struggling with doubts.
And so, David, I want to talk a little bit
about that, about why that is, what has
happened that doubt has become so common.
But also some of the pathological things that
people might do in response to doubt.
Things they might do socially, they might do theologically.
And so I want to kind of just paint today kind
of a psychological and a sociological picture
of why doubt is so ubiquitous.
That's just a fancy word for common, very common.
And David will follow up tomorrow with some
case studies that therapeutic clients he's
worked with.
I don't know if any of the case studies involve congregations.
But the idea would be that for those of you
interested more of a kind of clinical or
pastoral kind of view,
actually kind of an incarnational vision of
what this doubt might look like and how it
manifests and things that might be done,
David will go through some actual case studies.
I'm going to be more in a theoretical
diagnostic mode.
David will get more practical tomorrow.
So there's just two parts to this.
Although I will make some vague, I'll point to
some vague positive directions today at least.
So welcome, we're excited that you're here.
Let me start and talk about why doubt is so common.
And I'm going to be borrowing an analysis from
a sociologist named Peter Berger.
Oh, the other thing I'm supposed to talk about
is the subtitle of this is the subtitle of a
book that came out by ACU Press.
And so the press just walked in and wanted me
to plug this for them.
So I'm not plugging it for me.
I'm witnesses.
They made me do this.
So anyway, this book, The Authenticity of
Faith, just came out last year.
I wrote it and the subtitle is The Varieties
and Illusions of Religious Experience.
Some of the things about winter Christianity I
want to be talking about, the graph that I'll
put on the board is actually in this chapter.
It might be the best chapter in the book.
But anyway, they also told me to tell you that
they're in the Hall of Servants and that I
think their prices are like $5 off this week.
So anyway, so if you want a more detailed
analysis of kind of the stuff that I'm just
briefly talking about, it will be in here.
And those of you that have read the book, I'm
not going to repeat much of it.
So this will be new as well, a little bit.
All right, let's start at the beginning.
Why does faith feel so fragile now, perhaps
more than any other time in human history?
Why is it that certainty is so fleeting?
The analysis that Peter Berger makes in a book
called In Praise of Doubt, which I recommend, a
book In Praise of Doubt,
he suggests we look at the difference between,
let's say, let's go back 500 years and compare
that to today.
What's changed over the course of 500 years
that might have caused the kind of epidemic of
doubt that we're currently experiencing?
Their analysis is this, that the main change
has to do with the degree of things in life
that have shifted from what they call the
background of our culture to the foreground.
All right, so in their analysis, I'll draw a
diagram up here.
The background of life, can you guys even see
that one?
I can't believe my phone's ringing.
Sorry about that.
The background of life is things that are taken
for granted.
These are things that we don't ponder or decide.
They're just kind of the cultural assumptions,
the givens of any given culture.
So when you got up this morning, you probably
made a decision about what you would wear.
So for example, when I got up this morning, I
had to decide, hey, I'm going to be speaking in
front of people.
I probably won't wear shorts, although that was
in play.
Who knows how I would show up dressed.
But generally speaking, I said I should try to
dress up today because of what I was doing, so
I decided that.
But it never dawned on me to dress up.
It never dawned on me to put clothes on.
That's just not anything I decide in the morning.
And if I'm making that decision in the morning,
I might need to see David later on for therapy
or whatever.
That we will get dressed up is a given.
What we will dress is a choice.
And so there's lots of things that function in
the background.
There are assumptions of our culture that we
don't even ponder or visit or even choose.
There are assumptions.
And then there are things in the foreground
that have to become the object of choice.
And Berger's argument, the argument that
sociologists make is that 500 years ago,
that the relative amount of things that were in
the background was much larger than it is today.
So for example, 500 years ago, you're some
medieval peasant.
Job or vocation? Foreground or background?
How much 500 years ago would being, could 500
years ago you're an adolescent working on a
farm in some shire?
Background, right? Thank you.
There weren't a whole lot of options.
You were going to do what your father did or
what your mother did.
You were going to work this land.
So in the background was something like a job
or a vocation.
How about something like marriage?
How much choice was marriage or that you would
get married?
Probably more in the background.
And there might be some choices in marriage,
but much of that was going to be kind of
regulated by the culture.
How about where you're going to live?
You know, obviously in the background people
weren't very mobile.
And finally, the point I want to get to is how
about what religion you would have?
What's the chances of a medieval peasant
running into a Buddhist or an atheist or a
Hindu or a Muslim?
The world was so circumscribed that everybody
believed pretty much the same thing.
And maybe at the most a Catholic might run into
a Protestant.
That didn't go well, but still it was a
Christian worldview that we shared.
My point is much of what keeps us awake at
night, existentially speaking,
much of what those of you that are students are
wrestling with,
what am I going to do when I grow up?
Who will I marry? Shall I marry?
What will my religion be?
What church shall I attend?
Where will I go to school?
Should I go to college?
What should my career be, my major?
All of these things that were kind of just
givens have now radically shifted.
And so very little now is in the background.
Because of the way the world has changed, is
there an E in foreground?
Oh good, I don't know.
I'm not a very good speller.
Think about the things that have moved from the
background into the foreground.
Things like job and vocation, things about marriage,
where you'll live, and ultimately issues of faith.
And this, Berger argues, is the problem.
This is the condition that we are currently in.
Things that used to be assumed, and assumed to
be not only assumed in my own life,
but assumed to be fairly common to the people I
lived around,
have now moved into an area where they cannot
be taken for granted anymore,
but they must be experienced as decisions.
That faith is now a choice.
And because it's a choice, and not taken for
granted, not a cultural given,
because it's a choice, it's now very fragile.
Because I have to choose it, but then I can
always opt out of it.
And because I can always opt out of it,
and because I'm meeting other consumers in the
religious marketplace
who have made different buys,
and I'm wondering about if I've had the best
deal on the religious market.
And so I have to constantly, not only do I have
to choose it,
I have to choose it again.
It will not stay steady, it will not hold, it's
not a rock,
it is something that's a little bit more
fragile now.
And so consequently, faith feels very thin and vaporous
because it's now moved from the background into
the foreground.
The technological and economic changes that
have happened
in the course of over 500 years,
and probably for the first time in human history,
can people now shop for faith.
So now what we're experiencing is not givenness,
we're experiencing this radical explosion of choices,
so we live in kind of a Walmart of belief,
and everybody's selling a product,
and we're comparative shopping.
The Buddhists seem really at peace.
The Muslims seem kind of violent, and
Christians, you know.
And so what happens now?
How do people manage the fragility?
Because what happens is, because faith is fragile,
my argument is that we're now experiencing,
faith can no longer carry the existential burden
that one's carrying.
If something is a choice, and we feel that is a choice,
I mean that's why it exists, I've chosen it,
then we can always wonder if it's true.
If it's a given, it feels more solid, it feels
more true,
but if it's a choice, then I can wonder about
my motivations,
I can wonder about my reasons.
And if I'm somewhat now questioning whether or
not it's true,
then that kind of stuff keeps you up at night.
It's the same thing that keeps you up at night,
my advising is coming up,
the students have to make their schedules,
and I have to declare them,
it's the same thing that keeps you up at night
as they have to decide, you know,
should I marry this person or should I not?
You know, I have to decide that.
My family isn't coming to me with a spouse that
I must marry,
I now have to decide that, that keeps me up at night.
We have to decide whether or not I want to do
this career or this career,
and there's no guarantee that I'm making the
right choice here,
and that keeps me up at night.
And those of you that have been in careers are,
you know,
we go through midlife crises and we revisit our careers,
and so the fact that we're constantly
revisiting these things over and over,
the fact that even in marriage now once I
choose it,
I can opt out of it, our culture of divorce,
we now have that kind of same issue,
should I stay married?
Now that's even a choice, everything is a choice.
And so consequently nothing seems certain or assured,
so we feel the sand slipping out from
underneath us,
and so therefore I think we're living with a
great deal of existential anxiety.
So we have a greater existential burden than
anybody's ever had,
I think, in the history of the world perhaps.
So the question is, what do people do to manage
that anxiety?
So my argument is that you see people do one of
four things in this age of doubt.
The first one, I'll write it over here,
the first thing that people do is just opt out,
move to Unfaith,
for lack of a better word.
So one of the consequences of this is that
we're seeing increasing rates
of people just giving up on religion, giving up
on faith,
just people start opting out.
And sometimes I think they opt out because they
get tired.
I've seen a lot of people, the constant effort
to re-exert faith
over and over again becomes too much, and they
get very tired.
Does anybody notice that people in their lives
are just getting very tired
of this whole faith thing?
The constant questions, and they read something else,
and Sam Harris publishes another book,
and you see some crazy Christians on TV, and
you're like, just ah!
It becomes so, it's so effortful now.
People have faith fatigue, because it's not
taken for granted.
And they opt out.
Now, that's not saying the only reason they opt out,
they can just opt out because they don't think
they have good reasons.
They think through their choices, and they
don't have good rationales.
They might read The New Atheist, find their
arguments convincing,
and opt out for rational grounds. That's common too.
But I also often see Christians just get tired.
They get tired of faith.
The next thing I think you see happening is the whole
spiritual but not religious thing.
You guys know what that is?
Spiritual but not religious.
This takes on, the idea here is that people
kind of opt out of organized religion.
That becomes too effortful.
And since there's so many choices on the market,
what tends to happen is people develop their
own kind of unique brand of faith.
They kind of shop around, and they borrow, and
they collect things.
And so many people in churches have kind of
their own personal faith collection.
It might be predominantly Christian, but it
might have a heavy dose of Buddhism in it.
I know lots of people that mix Buddhism in with
their Christian practice.
They might mix in other sorts of spiritualities
that they come across,
other philosophical positions.
And so they create for themselves their own.
They don't buy one product.
In the Walmart of belief, they just opt in for
lots of different products
and kind of compile their own unique.
It's like those candy stores.
My son Aidan is a big fan of the candy stores.
You can go around with a little bucket and put
in different kinds of candy
and collect your own.
That's what people seem to do with faith a lot.
And then they can't claim it as a religion, per se,
because this doesn't line up with anything.
So they just kind of describe it as, I'm a
spiritual person.
I read Jesus, I read the Buddha, I read the
Stoic philosophers,
and that's my religion or my spirituality.
Those aren't necessarily Christian moves,
and I'm not going to spend a ton of time on those.
The next two are the ones I'd like to focus on.
The third one is what I've called in this book
a winter Christianity
as opposed to what I call summer Christianity.
Summer Christianity are Christians that tend to
experience their faith
as a fairly certain thing.
They feel more convicted.
They tend to be more optimistic.
They tend not to have a lot of doubts because
of this.
So they have a sunny spirituality.
The terms here come from a book from Martin
Marty, Cry of Absence.
He talks about this kind of people with kind of
a sunny, bright spirituality,
summer Christianity.
These people obviously are not dealing a whole
lot with doubts,
and we can speculate why or why not.
But on the other side, he talks about what's
called a winter spirituality,
where laments and complaints and doubt are
regular features
of the faith experience.
And it's my assessment that winter Christians
are kind of on the rise
in our churches.
I don't know how well our churches have responded.
Our churches tend to be summer spirituality
kinds of places
in the way we worship and the way we treat Scripture.
And so consequently, I think you're feeling a
lot of winter Christians
feeling more and more alienation in our churches.
They begin experiencing our churches as not
honest or authentic
because no bit of negativity is allowed to
penetrate into the faith system.
A great quote in this regard is from somebody
you might have heard
of Walter Bruggemann.
Is he around today?
Some of you don't.
He didn't laugh.
He's upstairs, I think.
He said it's towards the back door.
Yeah, I mean, one of the quotes that Bruggemann's,
that I found very potent in his book on the Psalms,
is this one.
This kind of captures kind of the clash between
summer and winter spirituality.
I do realize I have glasses in my hair and on
my face.
Glasses in my hair is my way of getting away
with a headband.
This is from Walter Bruggemann.
It is a curious fact that the church has, by
and large,
continued to sing songs of orientation where
the world is lined up properly.
The good are rewarded and the evil are punished.
It's a world, though, that is increasing
experiences disoriented,
because the world does seem kind of falling
apart in many ways.
It's my judgment, Bruggemann's judgment,
that this action of the church has less to do
with an evangelical defiance
guided by faith than it is a frightened numb
denial and deception
that does not want to acknowledge or experience
the disorientation in life.
So his argument is that one of the reasons why
we're so happy in church
is that there's a deception and denial going on.
That's a harsh claim. It's interesting.
The reason for such a ruthless affirmation of
this orientation
that the world makes sense for us seems to me
not to be from faith,
but from the wishful optimism of our culture.
This kind of culture expectation that
everything should be fine.
I think that's one of the reasons why our young
people don't like church.
I think young people go to church and they're like,
all these people are fake.
Everything's fine. Everything's happy.
Everybody's cleaned up.
So there's this kind of falseness that they get.
Here's the thing. Like it or not,
authenticity is the coin to the round for young
people today.
Authenticity, and that's, I think, the one
thing the church isn't showing
a whole lot is authenticity.
Being real is the most important thing.
I think the generation before, the big thing of
the culture was being good.
Being good for this generation is being real,
being authentic.
You can be bad as long as you shoot straight.
That's what's more important, is being authentic.
I think some of our generational gap is in the
older generation
trying to get the younger generation to be good,
and the younger generation saying to the older generation,
but you need to be real.
And there's a disjoint there that I've gotten
off topic.
Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be,
is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users
given the larger numbers of psalms in the Bible
that are psalms of lament and protest and complaint
about the incoherence that is experienced in
the world.
I believe that a serious religious use of the
lament psalms
has been minimal because we have believed that faith
does not mean to acknowledge or embrace negativity.
There's no room for faith or negativity.
So we have thought that the acknowledgement of
the negativity
was somehow not an act of Unfaith.
It was an act of unfaith as though the very
speech about it,
the very speech in the church building,
to say the world is seeming a little out of control
and I'm wondering if God's left the building
and if he's paying attention or if he cares.
We thought that acknowledgement of this was an
act of Unfaith,
as though the speech itself conceded too much
about God's lack of control of the world.
The point to be urged here is this.
The use of these psalms of darkness may be
judged by the world,
and I think many Christians as well,
to be an act of unfaith and a failure,
but for the trusting community, their use is an
act of bold faith.
And so the idea of admitting the negative
into the religious experience is a form of
winter Christianity.
There's a thread that goes through the faith
that is constantly wrestling and coming to faith
from the experience of the lament psalms,
which there are more of those than songs of
orientation and praise.
And I think this, and so what you're seeing
here in winter Christianity
is people who are trying to figure out a way
to live with the fragility of faith,
to bring down alongside them as a constant companion.
I think that's key.
Not as a problem to be solved,
but a constant companion in the faith journey.
That never resolves itself.
It's not like I get to 70 or 80 and I'll no
longer doubt,
but I think many Christians are trying to
figure out how to do this,
and I will give an example of how this might be
managed in the church in a minute.
So I think many people are opting for that,
and I would say that's kind of the way I've opted.
I've opted to try to make this new thing called
winter Christianity.
And I think one of the problems with that
is how winter Christians and summer Christians
get along in the churches.
They don't often communicate well together.
They squabble in Sunday school classes.
For example, here's a classic summer-winter
Christian debate.
The binding of Isaac, the test of Abraham.
Summer Christians hear that Abraham takes his son,
takes him up on the hill, he's going to slay
his son,
and it's a monumental story of trust in God.
The winter Christians are appalled by the story.
Something emotionally sticks in them.
They can't get their heads around.
And when these two people are trying to wrestle
over this story
in a Sunday school class or as they hear sermons,
there's often this kind of disjoint in the
faith community.
Again, that's a side topic about how they all
get together.
I wish my wife had stayed,
but since she's gone, we can talk candidly.
But Jan and I, when we married, she was a
summer Christian.
And I was very much a winter Christian.
When we married, she knew I was a person of faith.
I was church-going, I was committed, and all
that kind of stuff.
But she didn't quite know that our experiences
were very different.
So we struggled to pray together.
We struggled to enjoy the same churches as we
would visit.
She was like, I love that worship.
And I was like, it's too happy for me.
Everybody was smiling.
Didn't like the same preachers.
So it was a struggle.
I still vividly remember the one day we were
driving in the Metroplex.
I was in graduate school there.
She said, we have not talked in quite some time
about our spiritual lives.
What's going on with you?
I was like, you don't want to know.
She was like, no, tell me.
I said, if I tell you, you can't freak out on me.
So I did.
I told her what was going on with me.
A lot of it is this doubt stuff.
And she freaked out.
I can't believe it.
We were driving to a small group.
We never arrived.
We just drove the city, talking it through.
And now it's an easier conversation between she
and I.
So I think now we've changed each other a
little bit.
So she's not as summery.
She's more like springtime.
She's more like wintery.
I'm more autumn.
I'm more of an autumn Christian.
I'm brisk in the morning, but I warm up by afternoon.
Don't talk to me about God before my coffee.
I'm like a new atheist from the time I wake up
until I get my caffeine.
And then after coffee, I will consider God and
find it very compelling.
My point is, winter Christianity is something...
And I think you see a lot of people trying to
figure this out.
I think a lot of the stuff that you see coming
out of the Mergent Church movement,
people like Peter Rollins.
These are people that are trying to work this
thing out.
You might find it compelling or not compelling.
So if you wanted to experience how this is looking,
like Rollins' last book was called Insurrection,
an attempt to kind of work through this winter Christianity.
So that's one thing that people do.
And the last one is dogmatism.
One of the things you can do is...
One way you can escape the bind is to believe
you're right.
That you hold the truth.
I'll give you an example.
I teach a Bible study out of prison on Monday nights.
I'll be out there tonight.
And one of the other chaplains was talking to
me about his Bible class.
He has a Bible class, I got his Bible class.
And we were talking about Christianity.
He said, you know, Christianity, there's all
these other religions,
but Christianity is not a religion.
It's not a religion.
And I was listening to that.
I'm like, well, some people think it's a religion.
But that kind of view.
There are religions and then there's the truth.
That's a comforting...
That's a way to go to sleep at night.
And that's one of the arguments I make in this
book is
there is an existential appeal to that.
And a lot of people say, you know,
and I think you see that around different parts
of the country.
I don't step on any toes in here.
But I think it's one of the appeals of kind of
the neo-reform movement
you see out of people like somebody like a Mark Driscoll.
This kind of hardcore doctrine-driven kind of approach
where there's no room for doubt.
It's either this way or the highway.
And I think that's one of the big splits
between somebody like a Mark Driscoll and the neo-reform
and kind of the emergence.
He sees their experiments in winter Christianity
as waffling on the truth, going soft on truth.
My point is people like Mark Driscoll's church
is growing with young people.
And one of the reasons why I think it is
is because it helps people go to sleep at night.
Now you might say, is it also true?
I mean, that's an excellent point.
The only thing I would like to admit here right now
is that there is an appeal.
There's a way to crack through it all
and be convinced that this...
But here's the problem is that if this,
and I think Dave will get into this tomorrow,
if this dogmatism that we have the truth
is driven by an existential dread or fear,
then the faith is built upon a deep, deep anxiety
that can have many different kind of toxic effects
because you're going to defend the faith
and you're going to respond to criticisms of
the faith
through fear, although you're absolutely convinced
it's not from fear, it's from the truth in that sense.
And so that's one of the things I think
Dave is going to talk a little bit about
what does faith begin looking like?
How does fear, a deep existential anxiety...
And I think you've experienced this.
Have you ever dealt with people that if you start
there's this whole kind of castle built
and if you kind of jiggle some part of it,
there's a massive defensive reaction to what
you're doing
and an inability to have a calm conversation.
You get that sense, you know,
whether there's smoke, there's fire.
When there's an anxiety and an inability
to have a conversation and anger
and people start getting red in the face
and they begin physiologically tensing up,
you're not having a conversation about truth at
that point.
Because if it's the truth, you're relaxed.
But if you're angry and you're upset
and the veins are popping,
that's existential anxiety going on,
in my opinion, as a psychologist.
And I've faced that many times in my life.
Now, let me pop back up and say something about.. .
Some of you might want to say,
well, so how do we cultivate this?
I think more and more often,
for those of you that have pastoral interests
in the church,
or you yourself are on a faith journey
and you want to kind of figure out
how to be a person of faith in this,
then what do we need to do?
And so I think obviously the root here,
I don't think these are great options.
I don't think this is a good option either.
So I think trying to figure out this winter
Christianity thing
is the way to go.
So how do you do that?
Let me give you a salute.
There's a graph in this book.
I'll try to recreate it up here.
One of the things you noticed in Bruggemann's
the last five minutes here, I want to talk
about this.
One of the things in Bruggemann's quote
is he suggests that we tend to work
with a view of faith that suggests
that you have unfaith on one end, lack of faith
and faith,
and any sort of complaint or doubt.
So there's high complaint over here
and no complaint over here.
And the complaint I'm talking about is this,
the complaint he's speaking about,
admitting negativity that the world doesn't
make sense,
that God seems absent, that sometimes faith is hard.
We work with this sense that complaining about,
so his point here is that we're working with
this idea
that if complaint is admitted, if negativity is admitted,
then it's an act of Unfaith.
As complaint goes up, as doubts go up, then
faith goes down.
Now pastorally speaking, if that's true
and somebody expresses doubt or complaint,
pastorally what must you do to restore faith?
Get rid of doubt, reduce complaint,
and how do you do that?
You have to give an answer.
You have to go through reasons for God's existence
or hand them a Josh MacDowell book or give an explanation.
And the idea is it has to be a fix, it has to
be a patch,
and that's the only way.
The trouble is that I think that's what
churches have done.
They've tended to shut down that complaint
or answer it too quickly.
Our young people or even our older people kind
of get a sense
that obviously these questions are not going to
be handled
in a very truthful or honest kind of way,
and so I'll just kind of go underground with them.
And that eventually leads people out the door
of the church
to get that sense that we can't have
an honest conversation here about this.
So what Bruggemann is suggesting is that maybe
complaint and faith
aren't antithetical to each other.
And so in the book, based on some research I've done,
I make a different kind of model,
which I build around the dimensions called
communion and complaint.
And communion is engagement with faith,
engagement with God,
engagement with the church.
That could be high or low.
Engagement and complaint could be high or it
could be low.
And what this helps us see is that the
complaint could be high,
but we can still be highly engaged with the
faith community.
There is a quadrant here.
Obviously this quadrant, high communion, high
engagement with God,
but very low complaint is the summer
Christianity we've talked about.
This is the summer experience.
I'm very engaged with God and I'm very happy
with that engagement.
I have very little complaints about it.
Lament songs are experiences of what I would
call the winter quadrant,
where the lament is being expressed to God in
prayer with engagement.
And even in most lament psalms, by the time the
lament Psalm ends,
after they kind of pour it all out, what do
they do?
They tend to come back to trust.
The biblical scholars call this the plea to
praise movement.
And I think Walter Brugelman earlier talked
about that.
There's this judgment and then there's this
turn, this kind of quick turn.
Not all the lament psalms make that turn.
Psalm 88 just ends with, I think Psalm 88,
since I'm the dark person,
it's one of my favorite psalms, because it ends
on the line,
the darkness is my closest friend.
If you're an existentialist, you love that line.
If you're kind of an emo teenager, it's like
your favorite psalm.
The darkness is my closest friend.
Nobody ever tweets that.
Nobody puts that on their Facebook.
It's always the summer Christian affirmations.
You should all do that.
Update your Facebook.
Psalm 88 is the word for today.
The darkness is my closest friend.
All your winter Christian friends will like it.
In the summer Christian person will clap,
do we need to talk?
Are you all right?
I'm sorry.
My point is, even in that psalm, it's still prayer.
Even in the middle of that psalm, it says I get
up and I pray.
Even though it doesn't end on praise,
one of the very rare psalms that don't end on praise,
it's still there's engagement, there's
communion with God.
And a lot of us, I think, winter Christians are
kind of like that.
So the point here is, let me end on this,
this offers a model of pastoral care.
This model suggests if we are afraid of complaint,
then the only way to manage the questions of
our teenagers
or the questions of our people is to just
reduce complaint,
shut it down.
That's when we start getting that inauthentic,
thin, happy, clappy Christianity.
But if complaint is increasing here,
we don't have to shut it down.
We can work this communal dimension to pull the complaint
into engagement with God.
Allow the complaint to be expressed in the
faith community.
Don't make them take it outside.
So for example, in Highland, just quick examples,
in Highland I did a class on doubt, the whole
series on doubt.
Doubters came and we talked and shared and talked.
The class I lead at Highland is a very winter
Christian kind of place
and people who are winter Christians kind of go
there for that kind of thing.
One of the interesting versions of the
spiritual, not religious kind of thing
is the religious but not spiritual rebuttal.
Have you heard about that?
There's lots of people rebutting that saying,
I'm religious but I'm not spiritual.
What you're seeing is some people are kind of
reclaiming the rituals of faith,
like the liturgy of the Episcopal Church, the
Catholic Church.
You're seeing a lot of young people being drawn
back to liturgy,
actual organized religious practices and
grounding their faith in liturgy,
allowing the liturgy to carry them through,
their faith through.
And so you often see the new monastics work
with structured prayer.
And so that's another kind of way of
maintaining faith.
The liturgy keeps you in communion with God.
So for example, I struggled great deal, years
and years, with prayer.
And I couldn't pray because my winter Christianity,
I couldn't, like, is God out there?
Is He listening? Something like this?
How can you pray when you're obsessing about?
So I don't pray without, so I'll walk around
with the Book of Common Prayer.
I mean, you know, I'll walk around with, this
is my new thing.
These are Anglican prayer beads, you know.
I mean, these kinds of things help me pray.
They pull me into prayer. And so it's not a
rosary, you know what I'm saying?
So what you're seeing there is people finding
ways through liturgy,
structured prayer, to keep engagement high with God,
but still never, because those questions I
think are going to be lifelong companions.
You know, I'm not praying this way because I
think at some point it will become easy.
It's because it will always be hard.
So I need scaffolding for faith.
And so I think that's one of the reasons why
Liturgy becomes attractive to people.
So kind of two options there.
David is going to get into, I said tomorrow,
kind of more some cases.
How many cases, David?
He's deciding. He's got many, he's got many.
David is a clinical psychologist with like over
30 years of private practice.
He's dealt with every kind of faith problem in
the world.
I'm an experimental psychologist. You can come
to me for help.
I'm like, whatever, I don't know what to do for you.
Although I have some surveys you can fill out.
We'd like to study you.
David actually helps people.
And so he'll share some kind of flesh and blood examples
of kind of what does faith look like when it
kind of gets dark
and maybe fear is the main kind of theme that
we're going to be talking about.
So we'll be back tomorrow visiting these kinds
of things.
I think our time is now up and we'll see you tomorrow.