Still Thinking  - Choosing Freedom

I was 16 years of age when I first responded in a Baptist church to an invitation to follow Jesus.  It took a lot in me to overcome my embarrassment at claiming my private conviction in such a public way.  Some would say that that is the point.  There are no secret followers of Jesus, so overcoming one’s natural shyness catapults a person to a new and higher level of religious commitment.

After this first time, it got easier to come forward in response to the preacher’s call.  In fact, I made quite a habit of “walking the sawdust trail” as the Southern Baptists have called it.  Partly, as a deeply religious young person, I was always seeking a kind of religious perfection.  I knew that I was not as faithful as I could be; I knew that I had been sinful and failed to meet God’s standards.  But really, preaching about sin to adolescents is like shooting fish in a barrel, you know you will always hit a good number of them.

As I reflected on those experiences some forty years ago, I realize that they probably kept me in the church, but sadly truncated my experience of life and of God, Jesus and the Spirit.  It took some years to experience what the apostle Paul called in Romans 8:21, “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”  That experience came with the realization that it was not so much that I need to be “saved,” but rather what I craved was to be liberated; to be set free from that which bound and limited me in my spiritual and daily life.  And one of those things I needed liberation from, as I discovered later, was religion.  Now that may sound strange coming from a minister, but if we recognize that Jesus never established a religion and was in fact critical of binding oneself to rules, codes and religious practices, then freedom from religion is the goal of the good news that Jesus preached.

Don’t get me wrong I love the church.  I love the rich and diverse history that covers the last two thousand years.  And I am very aware that we need an institution that gives shape to the Body of Christ. However, if the church is a formal, boundary setting, belief testing institution, then we all know it is off track.  But if it is the living, breathing spirit of Jesus, alive in the world, then we are on track. 

Religious educators tell us that young people need strong, challenging and decisive institutions that give them boundaries and yet freedoms within those boundaries.  Young people want to be part of a movement, but they also want to know what the ground rules are.  As they mature they crave that strange paradox of wanting to belong and yet desiring unlimited freedom.  We know that young people, particularly young males are risk-takers and this can cause them and others a lot of heart ache.  But it really can’t be any other way and the church needs to provide for both aspects of youthful maturation.  While what we call “conversion” is an important experience for young people it should be associated with claiming the good news of life lived fully through Jesus and not the limited moralist, sin based view that many of us passed through in our teenage years.

Christopher