Articulating the Mystery

When I was 19 and a new sophomore transfer student at Texas Christian University, I was invited to a bible church in the area by some friends in my dorm who grew up in the same Protestant denomination as me. I didn't know what a bible church was and soon I became a regular attendee of their college worship service, a contemporary worship service with a praise band, an engaging minister, and nothing serious theologically. It was church fluff and it was fun. I was completely unprepared for what happened to me over the next 8 months. Eager to be a part of what seemed like a cool church, I volunteered to be a middle school youth group sponsor and started going to the "regular" church service, not just the college service. Slowly, in the regular church service and my youth group sponsor training, I was told more and more things that I found troubling, but didn't stop me from coming every Sunday. I heard that women couldn't be ministers in the church (except to children and families) and the theological reasons why women did not deserve an equal place alongside men in the church. I heard that people of other religions needed to be shown the truth and that without this, they would not receive God's love. My brain heard these things and thought inwardly, "That's just stupid. I know that's not true" and yet I kept going to that church. I even found myself committed to a spring break trip with the church, where I thought we would be building a playground and helping a children's school in a small town in Guatemala.

How I found myself in this situation makes no sense if you know me. I was raised in a progressive Protestant church in Nashville, TN where I was taught about different religions in Sunday School. My youth group took field trips to the local Greek Orthodox church, the Hindu temple, and the synagogue and Catholic church down the street. My church participated in a yearly Brotherhood Sisterhood dinner where we broke bread with our neighbors from a local synagogue and mosque. I grew up in a church that taught love, acceptance, and respect towards all people. The joke in my denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), is that you don't ask a Disciple about a Bible passage, because we can't rattle off scripture like other Protestants can and we certainly don't carry a Bible around with us. I was fortunate to grow up in a religious bubble in the South where I only knew religious pluralism and acceptance, thanks to my church and my parents, who were adamant that I would not have the judgmental, everyone-is-going-to-hell-but-us experience that they had. As wonderful as my early faith education was, I was ill-prepared for a church that masked conservative theology underneath fun contemporary praise music and I was unable to handle what this conservative theology meant for my own understanding of being a Christian.

A few months after I first heard these troubling theological statements at the bible church, I found myself in Guatemala being told I had to evangelize to Catholics and that much of our trip would actually be walking around the town square asking people if they knew Jesus and then of course, making sure they knew the right Jesus. I was angry and upset, but I knew that I had put myself in this situation. I had known better and yet here I was. I found myself getting into an argument with the college minister I had once found so cool and engaging. He told me that not only could I not go to divinity school unless it was to be an associate minister for children and families (and I could only go to certain divinity schools), but that one of my close friends since fifth grade, who is Hindu, would not be going to heaven and neither would my uncle and cousins who are Buddhist. I tried arguing with him, telling him that God is love and Jesus teaches us to love our neighbor, that God's love is not about hate or judgment, but he came back at me with scripture after scripture telling me how I was wrong, naive, and most importantly not a real Christian. I came home sick in body and mind from that experience. I was so angry and confused, but the one thing I did know for sure was that if what I had just experienced was the real Christianity, then I wanted no part of it.

Fortunately, I was not willing to give up so easily. I emailed the minister from my childhood, Dan Moseley, who was by then teaching at Christian Theological Seminary in Indiana. I told him what had happened to me and how angry I was, how I was confused and didn't understand how this church could condemn everyone who didn't believe like them. I still have Dan's email responses and eleven years later, I still keep the print-outs of his emails in my journal. Here's some of what Dan said to me: "You are a Christian--the best kind. You have heart--and you have a mind. You work to bring those together to serve a God of love and justice for all people--a distinctively Biblical concept. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise...I believe that God is merciful and forgiving. I believe this because I am a Christian. I believe that God receives all unto the divine self. I believe that we humans are not capable of making judgments that the divine can make. Therefore, I am not one who thinks that there is only one way to God."

I was fortunate to have Dan and others in my life, including my religion professors and campus ministers at TCU, to help me through my spiritual confusion and the anger and hurt that I experienced early on in college. Their support and challenging questions led to my passionate interest in religious studies at TCU and later at Vanderbilt Divinity School. As I stood in my cap and gown on Vanderbilt's graduation day in 2008, I thought back to that bible church and their college minister and I laughed. I laughed knowing that he probably thought he had gotten the last word and that in my anger and hurt, I had succumbed to his narrow-minded understanding of Christianity or maybe had left the church as a whole. But, he didn't win. Not even close.

That anger and fire stayed with me through a brief stint in social work graduate school, where I read about the social worker's role as an advocate for immigrants and people of faiths new to America, who are unable to explain in English that their faith does not allow them to eat certain food in the hospital. That anger stayed with me during my time teaching World History and American Government, when I spent a good part of my lessons teaching about world religions and our nation's history of religious freedom. That anger led me to Interfaith Youth Core, where I work now, a Chicago non-profit whose goal is to make interfaith cooperation a social norm in our society. IFYC works with colleges and universities to train students to become interfaith leaders and help campuses create climates of interfaith cooperation, where every student feels welcomed and respected. Many people who work in interfaith and ecumenical groups, including those I work with at IFYC, have had negative experiences with religious groups, but it doesn't stop them. Instead, it adds fuel to the fire about why it is so important for college students to have knowledge about different faith and secular traditions and to use that knowledge to spread the message of interfaith cooperation.

I am thankful that today I still call myself a Christian and that I was able, through the help of many people much smarter than me, to articulate an understanding of my faith that involves respect for all religious and secular traditions and an acknowledgment that we are all on the same journey. Dan wrote to me, "I do believe that God is the ultimate mystery. I believe that humans seek to find ways to articulate that mystery. We all see and know from our own cultural context. If God is incarnate--that is, if God is present in human form--in community, then I believe that God is in all human community. How humans articulate the nature of that mystery is conditioned by their incarnate reality." I still get angry and choke up thinking about my experiences at that bible church, but I have finally found a path that allows me to use that fire to help others learn that there is more than one reality in which they can live out their faith.