I was asked recently by someone why I believe what I do…this was my response:
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I was raised Roman Catholic in the sense that we were Irish/Italian so we had to be Catholic. We never went to church as a family. My dad was agnostic and my mom just never went. She would send us to Cathlic school (my parents we divorced when I was 5) and so this was my primary exposure to faith from Kindergarten through to Grade 9…from Grade 10-13 I went to a public high school. My mom had us baptized at Sacred Heart Catholic church by Fr. Stinson when I was 12.
When my sisters and I were young (between the ages of 5-10) we were exposed to a number of different protestant traditions simply because my mom would send us with whatever relative would take us to church on Sunday. I think this was her way of trying to teach us morality. For a couple of years we went to a Pentacostal church where we were exposed to hardcore pre-millenmial dispensationalism and speaking in tongues. We went to a Salvation Army Bible Camp a couple of years in a row and attended a Baptist church for a while as well.
As I grew I drifted away from thoughts of God, faith and religion. It just wasn’t talked about in our home (it was assumed). By the time I was in university I enjoyed faith from the perspective of a gadfly constantly trying to lure unspecting Christians and Muslims into debate and lead them into unanswerable questions (I was a jerk).
After university I got married, got a job and forgot about God completely. When I was 27 my first son was born and this led me to wonder about the moral & ethical framework I would weave for him. I didn’t feel I had one and I felt that letting culture weave it for him was fairly dangerous.
This started me thinking about God again…I was a classic agnostic at this point and that was becoming increasingly unsatisfying – like sitting on the fence and not coming to any conclusions on things of eternal significance one way or the other.
Well – in the coming years we moved to Florida where I worked for a major IT research firm and had brought myself to a point of making a firm decision in the direction of atheism. The decision was brought about by frustration and not by thorough thinking and research which was unusual for me because I would spend weeks researching the purchase of stereo speakers but I literally spent minutes on this. I remember it like it was the proverbial yesterday – I was standing on our porch looking at the Florida stars and I asked myself two questions – “Do I believe there is a God?” “No.”; “Do I believe that Jesus was God’s son?” “Well if there’s no God He couldn’t have had a son so – no.”
These decisions were designed to make me happy and end the spiritual angst of not making a decision but all they made me was miserable. I felt hopeless. I felt like there was no point to existing at all without God. I mean, why bother suffering through this world and dying for nothing and then blinking out of existance? This was where my mind was.
Realizing I had been intellectually dishonest I commited myself to doing some hardcore research/reading. I read some of the major faith’s primary sacred texts – The Koran, The Book of Mormon, Buddhist and Hindu writings etc. I also decided I should commit myself to reading the Bible cover to cover to give Judeo-Christianity a fair shake.
I was reading books by Elaine Pagels at the time (The Origin of Satan, The Gnostic Gospels) and so I e-mailed her and asked what translation of the Bible she would recommend to someone like me on a quest like mine. She graciously responded and recommended the New Revised Standard Version which I bought. I also picked up a New American Standard Bible for a more literal text and away I went.
During this we started attending a non-denominational church that met in a school gymnasium led by a couple of ex-Baptist pastors. There were about 50 people and they were some of the most loving folks you’d ever want to meet.
I decided we should go primarily for the social interaction. A couple of months into our attendance I took the pastor aside and said:
“I think we’d like to get our son baptized or whatever it is you guys do?” We needed the cultural rite of passage.
He responded by saying they did not baptize children but did perform a ceremony called a child dedication and wanted to come over and talk to us more about that. I agreed and he came over and had coffee with us and chatted. At a certain point in the conversation he began to sense that we weren’t like the average attendee at the church so he asked a fairly risky question that I honestly am not a big fan of but for his purposes it worked quite well:
“If you were to die tomorrow do you think you’d go to Heaven?” (see Bill Bright, Campus Crusade for Christ for source of question).
My response: “Well, I’d be a fairly arrogant guy if I told you I knew where I was going after I died (I didn’t want to tell him I was an atheist). I said I figured that I was generally a good person so on the scale of good and evil I was more good than evil and would probably end up in Heaven.
He decided that he and I should meet regularly for breakfast and chat a bit about what they believed so we didn’t dedicate our child into a faith we knew nothing about. I agreed and looked forward to some good sparring like the old university days.
In the meantime I was still reading through the Bible (cover to cover) as well as reading C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity and John Stott’s book Basic Christianity. I also received a copy of Lee Strobel’s book The Case for Christ from my wife’s grandmother which was weird because we never talked…ever…and she decides I would like this book because I was once a reporter with The Ottawa Citizen and Strobel was a reporter as well. So I read that alongside the Bible, Stott and Lewis. It was a powerful combination.
I kept challenging the pastors and other folks at the church we were going to about their faith and asking tough questions about where good people like Gandhi went when they died and why, if God was so loving was there suffering, and how can the Bible be the truth simply becuase it said it was, etc. They were gracious and patient in the responses and if they didn’t know the answer they simply said they didn’t know.
Well – I neared the end of John Stott’s book and at a certain point he writes that if I (the reader) had gotten this far and agreed with what he had been saying about Christianity and God that maybe I might be willing to accept the whole thing and possibly even try praying to this God I had doubted so much. He suggested I might even converse with God about how I actually believed and maybe thank God…I realized at that point that at some point in the journey I had crossed an imaginary intellectual faith line into belief and so I prayed there alone in my living room.
About two months later I was baptized in a trailer park pool in Florida (I still have the video) in the presence of my wife and two kids and in the coming months watched my wife’s childhood faith move out of infancy and blossom. I became a small group Bible study leader because those ridiculous pastors in Florida were willing to trust a new guy like me for some reason. Eventually I became aware of a gnawing tug pulling me in the direction of full-time pastoral ministry – I wanted to teach…I just had a great passion to teach and preach.
I told my wife and my pastors, my family and friends. We all prayed for quite a while. My pastors did their best to talk me out of it. They told me being a pastor these days was no picnic. The culture was leaving the faith. They told me these things but I was not persuaded and told them so. Eventually they relented and told me they thought I would head this way. My wife told me she somehow knew as well. Everybody was supportive.
It meant I had to go back to school though. I decided if I was going to be leading and teaching people about Christianity I owed it to these people to have a solid grounding because I did not grow up in the faith. I decided to pursue a Master of Divinity, Pastoral Studies. I looked at a lot of seminaries and settled on Tyndale in Toronto because it was “trans-denominational” and meant I would be exposed to professors from a variety of denominations. We sold our home in Florida, we sold our home in Ottawa and I worked for two more years at a software company in Ottawa to save money while we lived in my mother-in-law’s house.
We moved to Toronto and rented a house about four kilometres from Tyndale. We attended and I worked as a maintainance guy at a Christian & Missionary Alliance Church called Bayview Glen. This church used to be the Avenue Road church started by Charles Templeton who eventually lost his faith and became a famous atheist. The church was also pastored by A.W. Tozer. It had some serious history.
Well I went to Tyndale full-time straight through the summers and graduated with my Master of Divinity, Pastoral Studies. I had profs who were Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal, Alliance, Salvation Army, and two spectacular United Church pastors…Victor Shepherd and Andrew Stirling (pastor of Timothy Eaton United Church in Toronto). Gary Hauch, pastor of Church of the Ascension Anglican in Ottawa was my Old Testament studies prof – fantastic.
Well – by the end of my seminary studies I had come to realize that I was closest in theology to the Christian & Missionary Alliance. I was invited to become Pastoral Intern at Bayview Glen and eventually called to Morden, Manitoba where I am Associate Pastor for Youth & Young Adults at Morden Alliance Church (a wonderfully supportive and loving congregation). My daughter Isabella was born in the midst of all this.
This is my story to date. It’s still unfolding. I wrestle with my faith every hour of every day. This coming Sunday I am baptizing my son. I am blessed.
Harnessing Chaos 
What a fabulous story – there is a portion of it that brings back such wonderful memories for me of you, Carla, Matthew, and Caleb, of course little Bella we did not get to see as she was still in the womb.
I love you guys.
And now, pray tell, who could resist growing in faith with a guy that has a background like yours?
the answer . . . . . .
only a fool, no doubt.
^_^
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小跑过来看看~~~~
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Great testimony.
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I read a story a long time ago–hope I tell it right: Giving a lesson on a beach with ocean waves splashing to and fro, a teacher told his student, "I want you to fill this sieve with water." Handing the student a sieve and cup, the teacher watched the student chasing the waves to fill the cup he then poured into the sieve. In vain the student hurried with cup after cup, but the sieve never became full. In disappointment and frustration the student gave the objects back to his teacher. "How can this work–this thing is full of holes?" The teacher threw the sieve into the ocean. "That is how."
Seems like you also threw yourself in, completely. But have you discovered yet that the Nicene Counsel was wrong to squash Origen? If they had only incorporated his genius and insights he was given by the spirit, I believe we would have a completely different world and thriving Christian church. Instead the Roman Catholic Church became the beast that once had its head cut off which miraculously grew back. Nearly every Christian church today still holds fervently to the first counsel of Nicea, unbelievably forgetting about the unholy bloodshed and dark ages that sprang from it. Slowly and unwittingly the church (both Catholic and Protestant) is returning to some of the beliefs Origen taught. But as long as reincarnation is completely rejected, the church will always see the Kingdom as a carrot just a foot out of reach or like through a dark glass. And it will cling to a schizophrenic god (Geburah and Gedulah of Jewish mysticism) or a doctrine of dualism that accepts Satan as a formidable influence over this (ultimately schizophrenic) god.
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Good morning! Thanks for a great blog jog this morning! Or maybe that should be!!!!!!! & ! for the heck of it. I\’ll be back.
j
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