Challenged and Changed

I want to share  a story about how we are challenged and changed as we go down our journey with Christ.  … where those challenges can come from, what they can be asking of us, what they can be calling us into …

Bill White was, still is I imagine, an Evangelical pastor in North America. Clear and firm on what he believed was a faithful way of living. Bill White, because of his own upbringing and interpretation of his own experiences and ways of reading scripture, was sure that particular forms of sexuality were inconsistent with a faithful Christian life. The challenge for Bill arose when his son Tim, progressively came to the conclusion that his sexuality was that his father had a problem with.

In a New York times podcast, Pastor Bill describes what this challenge meant to him. He was forced, painfully, to re-evaluate what he had believed strongly until that stage in his life. This led him to decide that had been seriously misguided. It was not just a matter of his own beliefs but his leadership of the church. He writes “People were leaving in droves. People were cussing me out from the left and from the right. People were calling for my ordination to be suspended, trying to defrock me. I was going to lose the church. I was trying to figure out my calling, my job, my relationship with God… Everything was coming apart. It was ugly for a long time. It was so ugly.”

But he stuck at the challenge. He talked deeply with his son, as he described his own journey of faith. In the end, Pastor Bill ended up leading a church with a very different orientation.

Bill White now describes being grateful for those challenges – not because it challenged his assumptions about sexuality, but because it helped him grow in his own understanding of God, God’s way in the world. What was particularly moving about the podcast was that it was co-narrated by his son, who was able to describe what this journey, alongside his Dad, meant for him.

I related to the account because it reflected aspects of my own journey: having the same ideas about sexuality, professing them to people who I did not realise at the time in fact had those sexualities – they are rather sickening memories for me – but through their forbearance and the Grace of God, I have ended up in a different place in the world.

What I want to emphasise here is that I am not thinking about theology and sexualities – what I am thinking about is how we are challenged and grow in our faith as the years go by.

Challenge and change is generally not a comfortable process. The older we get, the more stuck in our ways we can become. The more change can feel challenging.

Challenges are hard for us as they are not just about theology, beliefs or behaviours – they are about how we understand ourselves. They can be about practices, ways of thinking, ways of relating to each other, that are as natural and unquestionable to us as breathing – yet God can be asking questions of us – not directly like a burning bush, but in the gently of wind of things said to us, things was see that have us questioning something of us. I sing a song, about God ‘kicking at the edges’ of our lives … prodding us to consider how we live, the assumptions that we make, how we respond to others …

With the help of the bible readings of recent weeks, we can understand these challenges as more that a secular form of personal development, but part of our relationship with God, as God leads us – that these times can be hard, because in one sense they are a form of discipline by a loving God – not to beat us into submission and conformity but to help us change and grow.

I suspect that our journey as Christians in the world is mostly about learning about Grace: what it means to receive Grace from God when we have not deserved it, to live in Grace alongside those who we are close to and others and offer Grace to those we find difficult.

May you be open to the challenges and rejoice in God’s grace as you change and grow.

Greg