Heretics and Freedom

My friend Pam recently had the opportunity to interview Spencer Burke, author of "A Heretic's Guide to Eternity". She has blogged about the interview at the Revolution Conference Blog.

And I have a cameo ;)

So I'm gonna expand upon the idea that "I owe my freedom to 'Making Sense of Church'.

Way back like almost 2 years ago, my faith got seriously messed up. Well, it was a gradual process. I think it began like when I was 17, but although I like to be "different", faith was one area where I was not going to "rock the boat" because it was such a deep-seated issue for both my family and my husband's family.

In the end things had to get pretty crazy in my life before I would begin to change. My ex-Pastor's wife says something like this:

"In order for people to change, the pain on the outside has to get worse than the pain on the inside."

I would love to own that quote, but I don't. I DO repeat it frequently,

In other words, the pain of external factors in your life (such as relationships, health, or finances) has to be worse than whatever your internal pain is in order for you to be able to change. One example - I knew for 10 years that I was at high risk for diabetes, but I was unwilling to change my lifestyle in order to prevent it. I was terrified of having to change the way I ate and exercised. I could easily play ostrich and not have to face it. But that day came when I was diagnosed and I realized that the physical symptoms and potential life-altering complications, I knew I could no longer pretend this problem didn't exist. The idea of losing my sight or my feet became worse than the idea of having to change my lifestyle. This same principle is true of emotional pain, too.

Anyhow, that happened for me in matters of faith. I pretended for a long time, I walked the walk and talked the talk and I became an "expert" Christian. All the while my spirit was dying inside. That's not to say that my years of my "love-affair"(as Pam puts it) with the church were all bad. I learned so much about the character of God, unfortunately that character was far greater than what the church taught me. I gained some really valuable relationships, I learned a lot about leadership - in other words what does NOT work when leading. I learned tons about the Bible from all the bible studies I took (even though I only took them because I was expected to). I guess you could say that if I owe my freedom to Spencer Burke, I owe everything I know about the bible to Beth Moore.

So it wasn't all bad, this love-affair, and I learned to be a very high functioning spiritual depressive - I stuffed all my disillusionment with religion and the church, and kept stuffing until the day when there was no more room. Hence the name "Decompressing Faith". I am trying to un-compress all the years of crap I had compressed down in order to be able to survive in the church.

I broke quickly. It was an avalanche - it only took a few weeks to go from highly involved and respected leader to pitiful, powerless heretic (as explained in my comment at the above-mentioned blog post).

And as I fell, I came across (somehow, an act of God, really - I don't even remember how) "Making Sense of Church" by Spencer Burke.

And suddenly I was no longer alone.

I realized there were other people who were unhappy, disillusioned like me. And although the book asks more questions than it answers, it was so healing for me to gain this sense of being part of something. These people gave me permission to feel like I was feeling. They gave me permission to ask tough questions. They allowed me to be honest with myself about the fact that church wasn't working for me. And slowly I became free.

This book didn't solve everything for me. But from there I found The Ooze. And from there Jordan Cooper. And from there TSK. And so on and so forth, till I had the courage to begin blogging for myself and I eventually found all you guys, my friends. And I was not alone.

The rest is history. I have no more answers than I did then, but I have come a long way. I have worked through bitterness and frustration. I have dealt with the fact that the church lied to me for so long about who God was and where my freedom really lay. I have released and forgiven more times than I can count.

But I owe it all to Spencer Burke.

Well, no that's certainly not entirely true . I have be careful here in order to avoid being labelled a heretic...

I FIRST owe IT ALL to God and His wisdom in allowing Spencer to write a book and allowing me to find it.

Anyhow, I haven't read 'A Heretic's Guide to Eternity', but please be careful how hard you are on him. I don't think he writes to please the theologians and scholars. I think he writes for the purpose of freeing people like me from the slavery of the church.

My $.02