the richest blog entry i've read all year:
by joshua david brown
www.joshbrown.blogspot.com

I'm not sure why or how or even when for that matter, but somewhere about 3 or 4 years ago I began to lose my faith. Not in God. But in people. Church. Christianity as it has come to be called. The answers that Christianity gave me for the questions of life became to crack at the foundation. I began to become disillusioned with the current model or paradigm or whatever you want to call it, that couched God. Its not that I couldn't, I just chose not to believe what I believed before. I was tired of weak answers. Simple prayers. Trite comments. At the time, I felt like I was losing everything that I had come to know. I felt like a heretic and an outsider. I questioned everything and everyone. Later on, as I learned some big words, I realized what I was going through was a kind of deconstruction of my view, my theology, my faith. I was reacting against and critiquing things. It had to be that way. But it was scary, frustrating, disheartening. I wanted to still believe in God but I couldn’t do so in the way that God was being presented. I just didn’t feel like believing in a Santa Claus God anymore. One who rewarded “good” people with good rewards and “bad” people with switches. A God who relentlessly talked about love, compassion, grace, and justice. And a Christianity that was quick and thirsty for war. I didn’t want to mimic conservative Republican politics. I didn’t want to believe in a god who hated homosexuals and cared more about the 10 Commandments in the courtroom than social justice. A God who hated a hand of poker, a good beer, and anybody other than a Baptist. I got tired of this kind of God. He wasn’t compatible with what I read in the gospels. I got tired of all the talk about heaven and clouds and cities of gold. All this talk about the future left me wondering what type of role my faith played in the present. I got tired of listening to Calvinists, Armenians, and talks about superlapsarianism. I got tired of talking about justification, sanctification, and glorification. I got tired of having to believe right before I could live right. More so, I got tired of excluding everyone from community who didn’t believe “our” (whatever that means) theology and methodology. I got tired of the way evangelism and missions is done (as if the two are separated). Like a cheap sales pitch. Pedaling Jesus like a used car. I got tired of reading the Bible like a self-help book, devouring it for easy answers and quick fixes. Turning it from one of the most sacred, poetic, well written stories of all time to a book full of formulas. I got tired of talk about Hell. And how God was essentially a manic depressive nut job who was going to zap you if you didn’t believe like you wanted. Giving us free will and telling us to believe in Him, but if we didn’t, he was going to fry us. I got tired of televangelists, pastors, people who begged for tithes and offering. People who were so wrapped up in their own particular ideology about war, homosexuality, denomination theology, that they couldn’t shut up long enough to ask what God wanted. There was never a conscious decision on my part to begin a journey that would lead me to reject all of that and towards something more hopeful. It sort of just happened. It was painful, it was messy, it hurt. But last night, and I have no idea why last night over any other night, but I felt like I was finally on the other side of it all. I’ll still be deconstructing, but I finally feel like I can begin to reconstruct my faith and do so in way that is much more faithful to the way of Jesus. I don’t really know why I’m writing this. As if anyone out there really needs to know this much about me and my weaknesses. But I have a good feeling that there some out there who are beginning to ask the same type of questions. Who are taking their first little baby steps in the direction of Jesus. Trying to find out if they can still be a Christian or God-follower in the midst of Christianity and the church. Trying to find some answers that actually make life, the world, faith . . . make sense.Its kind of like a giant puzzle I think. A puzzle that was put together and then set on the ocean. The water over time has pulled the pieces a part. Things are drifting. Disconnecting. Fragmenting. The puzzle is not making much sense anymore. One puzzle piece may make sense but its to hard to reconcile with another piece of the puzzle. Or in a worse case scenario, there was no water. The puzzle just exploded out and the pieces went everywhere. I finally feel like all the pieces to my faith are starting to come back towards one another instead of away from each other. I highly recommend everyone read anything by Brian McLaren or Don Miller. They helped articulate what I was thinking and feeling, especially McLaren. There is hope. There is something better out there. Christianity doesn’t have to suck. God doesn’t have to be disconnected or marginally associated with your life or the issues of this world. He’s actually closer than we think. We’ve just lost sight of the real thing. The real faith. The real agenda. There is a new way. Or better yet an old way of being a Christian. It is possible I’m finding.