Faith and doubt — a church for the hurting

According to the 2001 census, 70% of people in Britain consider themselves to be Christians — but only 10% (according to other surveys) go regularly to church. 60% of the population of the UK reckon to believe, but without church. Of course, some people consider themselves to be Christian because Britain is (in their words) "a Christian country". But talk to people for a while, and there are many who say "I used to believe, but I don't any more."

If you are one of them, these pages are for you. And, as it happens, so is Stechford Baptist Church.

On these pages we could talk about sin, God's mercy, forgiveness, perseverance. But we're not going to. These words are great for committed Christians sorting themselves out. But if the whole world of God and Jesus has become unreal to you, these words probably are not going to help.

If you're in that position, you probably don't want to read a load of Scripture verses at this point. So we are going to look at faith and doubt as a journey, and we are going to take as our guide a medieval Arthurian romance called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Even if you disagree with the conclusions, you should at least enjoy the story.

Understanding the journey

Some people talk with great delight about their journey from doubt to faith, from sin to forgiveness, from confusion to certainty. Their journey sounds straightforward— a simple tale with a happy ending. We don't hear so often about the opposite journey— from faith to doubt, from certainty to confusion, from a set of comfortable, easy answers to no answers that satisfy at all. From youthful ideals to a more measured, perhaps even cynical, but more mature view of the world.

People with dramatic conversion stories are often from non-Christian backgrounds, or have gone through times in their lives where they were absolutely certain they were on the wrong track. But what about people who have come from strong church backgrounds, have led an 'upright' life (at least until they lost confidence in the notion of 'upright'), have been brought up with certainties, and are now left wondering if everything which seemed so strong was nothing more than an illusion, a childhood fantasy, a comfortable delusion shared by people who would not look properly at the world?

Whose journey is the more authentic? It's tempting to say that the second is more 'real'. But, surely, both journeys are equally valid as journeys, if they really represent the lives of the people in them.

Part of us wants to be happy to embrace the full reality of a world that can include both journeys. But another part of us rejects the idea that two journeys which are so opposite in character can both be 'right'. And, naturally, the journey we are on now is the one which definitely feels the most real.

In the fourteenth century Middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain, a knight of King Arthur sets off into the bleak winter landscape towards apparently certain death — to be beheaded by a giant as a return blow for something that happened at Arthur's court. He fights wolves, wild-men, enemies at bridges, but the poet tellingly writes "war did not wrack him so much that winter was not worse". Just as Gawain is on the point of despair, a castle appears before him, offering all the delights and comfort of home. Gawain's situation seems (for now) to be saved. But little does he know that his sternest trials and temptations are about to begin.

Gawain's journey may be like your journey, or it may not be. For all the delights of Camelot, we can't help feeling at the beginning of the story that it is a shallow place. The adventures (read "hardships and despair") that Gawain goes through take him to a much deeper understanding of what it means to be a Knight. Part of the problem for many of us who were brought up in Christian families, or who went for a long time to lively churches, is that we were buoyed along by the faith of others. When we had questions, we sometimes got fairly shallow answers — but it didn't really bother us because it didn't seem to bother our friends or family. By the time that we realised the answers were not enough, there was no-one around with both the certainty and the intellectual or spiritual depth to give the answers that we really needed.

Is this you? Like Gawain, you may feel yourself to be in a despairing winter-land of equally unattractive choices, where the challenges are themselves less challenging that the bleakness of life. Or, like Gawain later, you may have found a comfortable place — not "home", but a refuge from the winter, something less demanding, less rigid, and without the ideals that seemed to make Camelot both so attractive and yet also so shallow. And, like Gawain, you may be facing in that place choices that will either leave faith behind more or less for ever, or will bring you back to the underlying ideals, if not the glib answers, of the place you started from.

Do glib answers invalidate my childhood faith?

It's true that some churches actively discourage critical thinking of any kind. Asking too many questions — and not being satisfied with the "correct" answers — marks you out as a bad inflluence. Equally, particular streams of Christianity have focussed on God as Judge, at the expense of Christ as Saviour — in other words, we hear a lot about right and wrong, but not much about grace and forgiveness. And, again, a very large number of churches seem to major on areas in which they are not experts — the theory of evolution, the European Union, politics, etc — giving answers which are not satisfying but clamping down on the debate before it starts.

But do these glib answers invalidate your childhood (or young adult) faith? Maybe, maybe not. It depends perhaps a little on what you actually believed.

Part of the problem of the journey (and Gawain's problem too) is that it is possible to move not from glib, false answers to true answers, but from glib, false answers to more sophisticated, but equally false answers. One direction of travel for a lot of people leaving university is from "evangelical" to "post-evangelical". It's not important if neither of those terms mean much to you. The "Post-evangelical" movement sees the "evangelical" movement as theologically uninformed, and out of sync with post-modern times. It's quite easy to laugh at some of the things evangelicals do — clapping out of time to badly played guitars, holding Bible studies which seem to pool ignorance, supported by simplistic Bible Study notes, making judgements about lifestyles they don't understand.

But, to some extent, this is a matter of perspective. It's equally easy to laugh at Post-evangelicals doing weird things in 'alternative worship', or scurrying round trying to buy politically-correct birthday presents from fairtrade sellers. More seriously, the down-to-earth 'pooled ignorance' of a group Bible-study is often replaced with a veneer of theological knowledge, but without anything more substantial underneath it.

Perhaps all this seems a little dry and judgemental. Perhaps it's just something to notice on the way.

Burned by Christians — what now?

Or you may be (or perhaps, 'and you may be') someone who has been burned by Christians. You may still agree with Christian principles like "love your neighbour" and "do to others what you would have them do to you". But the reason you stopped believing was because Christians did exactly the opposite. Maybe not all Christians, and maybe no Christians all of the time, but, at a crucial moment in your life, when you counted on Christians to support you, you found they turned on you, or sold you out, or ignored you, or let you fall.

Worst of all, maybe this seems to invalidate the whole of the Bible, because the Bible doesn't give you a picture of this happening. Famous passages like Psalm 23 suggest that God (and, therefore, also God's people) will pick us up when we are down, will be dependable when everything else fails, will give themselves for us.

What can be said to this? It's easy to share encouraging stories about the good times, but heartbreak and disappointment are deeply personal things. Nobody else (or no human being) knows what you have been through, and no-one else can share your pain.

Except one person, perhaps. Even if you struggle now to believe that he ever existed, it's worth re-reading the account of Jesus running up to the crucifixion. Read it as a story, as a work of literature if you have to. Here we see a man who, at the crucial moment in his life, was sold out by one of his friends, denied by another, deserted by the rest, handed over to a mob, and left to die almost alone.

Ultimately, everyone faces heartbreak, even though everyone's heartbreak is different. At a particular moment, you have to separate the facts out, and see that it doesn't really affect things that much whether you were burned by Christians or secular people. The real question is, is there some place to stand and look at the world which at least makes sense of this? And, again, the answer is, maybe, just maybe, it's standing next to Jesus Christ.

Happy now — why go back?
Let's go back to Gawain in the Arthurian poem for a moment. Having almost reached total despair in the wilderness, Gawain is now in the castle of a knight who calls himself 'Sir Bercilak'. Bercilak is supported by a hideous old crone, and by a beautiful young woman, his wife. In the castle, Gawain is able to rest, recover his strength, eat as much as he wants. In the mean time, Bercilak goes out hunting. To make the time fly by, Bercilak offers Gawain a game — whatever Bercilak wins at hunting, he will give to Gawain. Whatever Gawain wins in the castle, he will give to Bercilak. While Bercilak is out hunting, Bercilak's wife comes to try to seduce Gawain. On the first day she only gets as far as giving him a kiss — and solemnly Gawain passes on the kiss to Bercilak when he returns, as his 'winnings' for the day.  On the second day she manages to give him two kisses, and he solemnly passes these on as before. On the third day, when she finally realises that she won't succeed in seducing him, she kisses him, but she also gives him a green belt, which she says will protect him from anything, including from beheading. Gawain is still very much afraid of the ordeal that is to come. When Bercilak returns, he passes on the kiss, but keeps the belt — even though he is breaking his promise to do so.
When all this is finished, Gawain sets out to meet the Green Knight. He arrives at a sinister place called 'the Green Chapel', and waits while the Knight sharpens his axe. When the knight finally appears — a giant with green skin — he makes Gawain put his neck on the block. He goes to strike off his head, and then draws back, accusing Gawain of flinching. He goes to strike again, and once again pulls back, accusing Gawain of flinching again. Exasperated, Gawain says "unlike you, I can't put my head back on when it has been struck off" (this is what happened when Gawain gave his blow at the beginning of the poem). The third time the giant strikes, nicking Gawain's neck, and thereby fulfilling the bargain for a return blow. Gawain jumps up and grabs his sword, ready to defend himself, but the Green Knight leans on his axe and laughs at him. He explains that he is Sir Bercilak, and the first two feints were because Gawain faithfully fulfilled his bargain on the first two days. The third was a little nick in the neck, because Gawain had not given into temptation to betray his host by committing adultery, but he had nonetheless failed to keep his promise completely.

Dejected and ashamed, Gawain returns to Camelot, where everyone marvels at how well he has performed (and that he is still alive).

What's all this got to do with me? Many people who have to some extent abandoned Christianity and have gone through profoundly troubling experiences find a place where they can be comfortable — like Bercilak's castle. It is a temporary respite from the struggles and sufferings of life: it certainly seems far better than nothing. But, at the same time, we recognise that it is really no better than the place we came from. As long as Gawain stays in the castle, he is not completing his journey, and his ultimate (although painful) goal is not fulfilled. Gawain can in principle stay there as long as he likes — but only at the cost of being true to himself. What Gawain doesn't see — and what we often don't see — is that there are hidden dangers in the 'comfortable' place. Often these dangers are not that much different from the dangers Gawain was facing. There are lots of 'former' Christians who somehow regret not having lived a looser life in their youth. Some of them blame God, or their upbringing, or faith generally, for preventing them from 'enjoying themselves' as teenagers, students or young adults. If you are in a place where you are angry with God, or disillusioned with Him, or simply don't believe any more, it is very easy to decide to give into whatever sin you struggled so hard to avoid. But, as we get older, 'sin' (whether you call it 'sin' or not) has more complicated consequences. What was — at college — a simple choice between 'sex outside marriage' or 'no sex outside marriage', becomes a question of 'am I going to cheat my best friend by flirting with his wife (or her husband)?' or maybe 'am I going to betray my husband/wife by going off with someone else'? Whether or not you intellectually believe in God at this point, you know that starting a relationship with someone who is already in one is betraying somebody. This is exactly the temptation Gawain is facing. Gawain can say — with many people today — "I wouldn't even be in this mess if I hadn't been trying to do what I thought God wanted me to do earlier on" and he can also say "I've suffered so many hardships, don't I have a right to some pleasure — haven't i earned it?" But, just like thousands, maybe millions of people who have used those very same words, Gawain knows, deep down, that giving into the temptation destroys everything he stood for.

Face the giant, return to Camelot

Gawain escapes as much by good fortune as good judgment. The lady switches tack and offers him the magical belt just at the point when he was weakening. But there's still the giant to face. In our own personal journeys, most of us have a giant we have to face: a test we have been avoiding, a final certainty which seems almost certain to destroy any faith we have left. For many people, this involves finally facing up to all their doubts, perhaps examining the evidence for the Gospels, or exploring the moral basis for Christian faith, or facing up to whatever it was that first pulled us away. We recognise that we can't return to Christian faith without it, but we also can't continue as successful atheists or agnostics without facing it. What's more, we know that once we have faced it, we will either be compelled to return to the Christian faith (even if we really don't want to) or compelled to abandon it utterly (even if we wanted to cling on to it to some extent for a rainy day). But, at the same time, there is no other real choice. We can resist the temptations of the moment, or we can give into them, but neither resisting or giving in will take us through that ordeal.

Is it worth resisting the temptations? In the poem, it's fairly clear that if Gawain had committed adultery with Bercilak's wife, Bercilak would have chopped his head off without any mercy. But Gawain does not succeed entirely in identifying the temptation for what it is, and therefore lacks the will to resist it. For most of us, if we set out on a journey away from Christian upbringing because we were looking for something more authentic, then we probably will manage to keep enough personal honesty not to betray our best friend, husband or wife, or whatever. But, at the same time, most of us can point to a series of failings where we knew we could have been more true to ourselves and were not.

It is  worth resisting — even if you don't right now see any God-given reason why you should. If right now you feel that God is very distant, it's not necessarily easy to understand why you should behave as if there were a God (and, in any case, committed Christians seem to behave often as if there were no God). But, if you want to really face the test of authenticity, and really put your hopes and your doubts to the test, you will find the test very, very hard if you have already effectively burned your boats. It is possible to commit adultery (or whatever sin troubles you most) and rediscover God having faced your doubts squarely, but it is much less likely that you will ever dare to venture out of the safety of the castle. It's much more likely that the knowledge of failure will keep you there, making excuse after excuse about why 'it isn't the right time' to really check things out.

Perhaps the hardest part about completing the journey is understanding that it is a round-trip. Gawain sets off in the belief that he will either return to Camelot triumphant, or he will be killed by the Green Knight, his honour still intact. He has to go back to Camelot neither dead nor in triumph.

If you've been through a terrible spiritual journey, where you have faced all the doubts, looked at all the intellectual, moral, psychological or spiritual issues, and come out the other side with a genuine, authentic faith which is far deeper than anything you had as a younger person, you will still recognise that you need to return to being part of a church. But you know that you can't return as some kind of spiritual giant, who has faced the worst and come out triumphant. There have been too many compromises along the way, and the story is too complicated. Like Gawain, you are probably thinking 'What will people say if I start going to church again'. At least in Gawain's story, there is some hope here — although Gawain feels ashamed of his adventure, the people of Camelot honour him for it. Christians who have returned to Christ, at the end of a world-changing spiritual journey which has taken them through suffering, despair, maybe atheism, have often discovered that other Christians honour them for it. Sometimes the journey — no matter how despairing and unplesant at the time, and no matter what failures there were along the way — was nonetheless an essential part of God's work in your life.

Stechford Baptist Church • Victoria Road • Stechford • Birmingham B33 8AH. Map. Stechford is in the Stechford and Yardley North Ward, and is close to Hodge Hill.