In this episode Glenn Packiam and Andrew Arndt sit down to talk about how to walk wisely, compassionately, and pastorally with people experiencing a crisis of faith.
I want people to know when they come to me that they are okay and that they are not the first people to wonder about these things… that it’s okay to be where you are, and that’s why we need one another…
The struggle with faith is itself a good struggle… Christian faith grows out of the root of Israel… Jacob wrestles with God and God blesses him and changes his name to Israel which means “he struggles”…
I always want to bless the struggle for people, because for me it has led to some of my greatest breakthroughs and insights, and has led me out of small ways of thinking about God and into the wide open spaces of who God is…
Many times people aren’t rejecting what is central to Christianity but they are rejecting the trimmings or the packaging [without realizing it]…
At every stage of our lives, we have mental containers to try to hold the ineffable reality of God… the deeper we go with God, the more those containers will start to buckle and quake… pastorally, we need to be able to bless that process…
One of the things I’ve learned is that sometimes when we think about faith we think about it purely as a cognitive act where if we don’t believe it at a certain level of intensity, we aren’t truly in the faith anymore…
What happens when we surrender to Jesus is that we are bound together in the cords of covenant love, which means that not just on a cerebral level but on a bodily level, we are bound to him… sometimes the feet can fill in where the mind is failing…
Most people belief that the church has a lot of institutional arrogance, so when a leader comes to them and sits with them in their pain and says, “We didn’t do a good job” or “I didn’t do a good job,” that is so rare… but we should be good at that… we believe that we are being sanctified and that we have a lot to repent of…
There are some versions of the faith that do need to be deconstructed, and if it means rebuilding on the rock Christ Jesus, then yes, let’s do that…
Pastor Glenn’s Article – https://www.missioalliance.org/radical-hospitality/
Pastor Andrew’s Article – https://www.missioalliance.org/holding-faith-and-doubt-in-community/