Author: Zack Newsome

My good friends Travis, Dave, and I were hanging out a few nights ago over bad cigars in Camarillo, CA when Travis mentioned that he felt incredibly conflicted these days.  Travis and his wife Jyll are a month away from having their first child and three months away from moving across the country to begin a new community of faith in Jyll's hometown of Providence, RI. There's enough to be conflicted in those realities alone! But that's not really why he felt conflicted.

His "inner conflict" was coming from stepping away from an identity he has known for so many years. With his upcoming move, he is leaving an existing church to initiate one from scratch.  He is leaving the known for the unknown.  He is leaving a church that operates (like many American churches these days) with an assumption that if they just do things well (worship service, spiritual services to offer members, etc.), the people of their surrounding city will be interested and "come and see" what this Jesus is all about.  He is moving to cultivate a new community of faith in a part of the nation that for the most part isn't in any way interested in this brand of Christianity.  He can no longer assume that people "will come and see".  His paradigm of the church must change – and it is.  These are all tied to his identity.  Over the past 5 years or so, he has found fit and favor within groups of people who see faith playing out through a similar lens.  He finds himself feeling as though he is on the edge of a cliff ready to jump.    I give him some major credit putting his feet to the edge.

I think most of us have felt as though my friend Travis does.  Our identity is tied up in what others think about us.  I know this from experience.  For the past year, I have wrestled with the expectations of others.  As our family walked away from missions organizations and denominations, I often felt (and still at times do) that we were walking out on our ecclesiastical families. I felt as though were were being viewed as liberal crazies who where abandoning all common sense.  As we asked theological questions that we felt comfortable asking, we felt as though in the eyes of others we were "flipping the bird" to our conservative evangelical roots.  Maybe we were.  We felt really alone at times – stuck between being the people we felt was calling us to be and the people everyone expected us to be.

But why are we so afraid of this "inner conflict"?  Why do we feel as though it is always better to fit within some existing groups of thought or faith.  Don't we each have an obligation to wrestle with God (and life) as individuals and to come to our own conclusions?  And if we are truly honest and always on journey (growing, evolving, changing) aren't we always going to discover conflict within ourselves? For me that fact is reflected in my choice of blog title, "Confused Clarity".  Just as we grasp the idea of Jesus, we have to reframe our understanding with the perspective of his relation to the trinity.  Just as we clean up one area of the messiness of our lives, we discover four more.  Just as we come to terms with our imperfection, we run across Jesus' charge to be perfect (Matt 5:48).  In conservative theological circles (and I suspect most other theological circles as well) there is pressure make our complete understanding of God all be able to be wrapped up in a nice package that can easily be labeled.

Maybe our inability to flee from conflict speaks of our relationship to God as humanity.  God obviously has a handle on the things of the world – he created them.  But we are so far from having a handle on most things.  We are most definitely not God!  So maybe we should take more comfort in this "inner conflict" and in fact expect it. Maybe we should become worried when we have periods where we don't feel this sense of conflict instead of when we do feel it.  Maybe we should learn to expect it and even pray for it.  Maybe it is a gauge of the journey we are on.

In the past week, I have run into three conversations with strangers about faith, spirituality, & the way of Jesus. Spending so much of my time on developing a community of faith here in Phoenix, I often have these types of conversations with people I meet. As people ask the obligatory, "So what do you do for a living?" it inevitably launches the conversation deep into spiritual territory. But I have conversations like this once or twice a month and they typically last 3-5 minutes. This week I have had three of them each lasting 30-45 minutes. I haven't done anything different this week – I haven't worn any "I love Jesus, ask me about it" t-shirts or got out the old, "Know Jesus Know Peace, No Jesus No Peace" bumper sticker. I have just run into these interesting (and welcomed) conversations. With each new person I talk to, I learn more about the local perspective on things of faith, on the church, and on Jesus. Here are some themes I am hearing consistently:

• people are interested in faith, but not actively pursuing it in their lives.
• in most cases, people see the local church as a necessary piece of human spirituality and if they don't like it for some reason, development of their spiritual life dies with their church involvement.
• most people don't think about faith outside of religion, but they like the idea when it's presented to them.
• people aren't anti-Jesus, just anti-church (which for them is the clearest representation of Jesus)
• a lot of people are deeply (more that I could have imagined) interested and intrigued in the Kingdom way of life.
• hypocrisy, judgement, lack of acceptance, financial irresponsibility, all talk-no real action, and the politics of the church are all barriers that people mentioned in response to the question, "So why don't you attend church" – interestingly,one person I talked to articulated that the mission of the church these days seemed to be a different one that the mission of Jesus – something I often feel as well.
• people would follow (or at the very least investigate) the way of Jesus if they had a safe, accepting, relational, community to join in the pursuit with.

I should qualify that the people who I have had these discussions with would be considered non-Christians by a conservative, evangelical crowd (they don't go to church and can't articulate that the death of Jesus of the Cross and his subsequent resurrection are events in which they trust as the necessary substitutionary death for forgiveness of their sins and a redeemed relationship with God). I am assuming that these voices represent the larger voice and perspective of our local culture here in Phoenix. I will continue my research :).