Fundamentally flawed...?

Dan (the pastor in Brian McLaren's book, A New Kind of Christian), is having coffee with his friend Neo, and he's talking about where he is. He says to Neo:

"Well, I feel like a fundamentalist who's losing his grip - whose fundamentals are cracking and fraying and falling apart and slipping through my fingers. It's like I thought I was building my house on rock, but it turned out to be ice, and now global warming has hit, and the ice is melting and everything is crumbling."

I found myself able to identify pretty strongly with that. The churches I've been part of would be termed fundamentalist - although the term is a label that might not have sat easily with us.

Fundamentalist - so sure of what I believed - everything seemed very certain. I think that my Christian Spirituality to this point was based around being able to put everything into neat little boxes and come up with biblical answers to everything. There was a formulae for everything (ok - that seems a bit harsh, and I know that that wasn't the intent, so I'm just as culpable in this, but looking back, that's how it was).

When I was confronted with big issues - war, sickness, sexuality, there was a standard answer - I didn't really have to think too hard, just talk to someone, or read a book, or listen to a tape, and I would get the easy to understand, biblically backed-up, nicely wrapped answer.

There was never really a need to think things through too deeply myself - and that suited me fine. I let others do the thinking, and then took what I was told pretty much at face value.

But I've started realizing over these last few years that life is too complex - people are too complex, get get it all down to pat answers and compartmentalized Christianity. There is so much I don't understand - so much that I used to be so sure of that now I question.

Some things are certain - I'm certain there's a God, I'm certain that I want to follow Jesus, I'm certain I don't want to repeat the mistakes I've made in my faith and my involvement in mainstream church again, I'm certain I married my soul mate, I'm certain I have so much to learn, I'm certain that my spirit gets stirred when I worship (but also when I listen to great music - not just Christian music, but some great harmonies in a James Taylor song, or a piano riff in a Deacon Blue song).

Life was so much simpler when I just accepted what I was taught, or what I read. I think it's part of modernity that we want to have neat answers for everything in our lives. But my post-modern spirit doesn't want to just accept the old answers any more. It's time to do more myself - time to do more talking - time to do more blogging.

When we had a fire in our house in the US and had to have most it re-built, it was really interesting, that it smelled of smoke even when they had ripped out all the walls and ceilings - but the framework still smelled of smoke. But when the new framework was put in - much of it new timber, the whole smell of the house changed. The smell of smoke was replaced with the smell of timber. Some of the old frame stayed, but a lot was renewed - some in the same shape but with new timbers, and in other places the shape was changed too.

So may be that's where I am - in the process of being re-framed? If so, then I want to smell the fresh timber. Oh, and I hope it doesn't take as long as it took our builders!

Peace.