Deep questions of meaning and faith are not easily addressed through simple creeds. Sometimes we gain simplistic pictures: God as a cosmic Santa Claus; God as all-loving; God guiding us through every situation for our good. The questions these assertions raise can challenge us to abandon God altogether - or reshape our faith in light of present realities.
Many Australians need to lose their faith, to let go of truths they learnt in childhood, whether in Sunday School or through a churchgoing parent or grandparent. They need to discard that which no longer fits reality. But many who profess to have lost their faith have really only grown to resent it - more particularly the baggage it has left. The materialistic detest its echoing calls for stewardship and care for the poor, the morally liberated its apparent moral stricture; those who are comfortable struggle with its challenge for growth and change. Curiously, the fact that they still push against religion shows they haven't entirely let go of its spiritual foundation.
Yet when one shapes to discard what one has stored for some time, it is important to reconsider its value. Through the centuries the church has periodically undertaken this very process, reevaluating doctrines and practices in changing times. The institutional church tends to be slow in doing this, and quiet about saying that it lets certain things go, lest it be seen to weaken the sense of eternal in the truth it teaches. And yet the very process of change allows eternal truth to be grounded in present realities.
As a young adult, I began to read the Bible afresh, with troubling questions in my mind. I wondered whether an historical faith had relevance to my life. I read of the Israelites' early belief that as they wandered God led them in a cloud and would dwell beside them in a tent. After they settled in the promised land it seemed anomalous for God to dwell in a tent while they lived in houses. So a house of God was built. A tent-dwelling God was inappropriate for a city faith.
I noted that the disciples of Jesus would never have qualified as scribes and Pharisees, considered not good enough to be used by God. But Jesus chose them. Though rejected by institutional religion, they were fit for Jesus. The disciples learnt the faith of Jesus over the faith of Israel.
I read of Saul's encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road. Saul, who had persecuted the church because of her willingness to embrace what he saw as ungodly, was shown what it meant to be really godly, and his faith was transformed. Through re-reading, I discovered a much more complex and flexible God than I learnt in my youth, finding a freedom and vitality, a compassion and grace not reflected in the church's pithy creeds (themselves a response to questions from different eras). I discovered a God resistant to being boxed in and restricted: a hazard that plagues church and non-church folk alike. Much of what I had believed was taught by Sunday School teachers it was really their faith. But it didn't fit me. I needed my own faith.
Today I encounter people who proudly trumpet, "I don't believe in God any more." When I ask them to tell me about the God they don't believe in, they are often surprised when I respond that I don't believe in that sort of God either.
It is too easy to collect the faith of others rather than build our own. We don't wear other people's clothes, why would it be comfortable wearing the clothes of others' faith?
This is not an invitation to be careless, but to be full of care; not an invitation to be wasteful but to cherish and sift. We gain strength and focus through reflecting on others' journeys, through the community of faith, through the scriptures, and through our experience of God. As we have learnt to adapt techniques and understandings of science and the arts through the years, so too need we adapt our understandings of faith as we grow. Some things may need to be discarded, others re-shaped, others laid aside for later in the journey.
Jesus said, "Whoever seeks to lose their save it." And "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." Sometimes we need to lose faith in order to find it.
Rev Gary Heard is pastor of the West Melbourne Baptist Church.