A Flexible Faith

One of my closest friends in college was a socialist, vegan biology major who was raised in a pretty conservative Catholic context. I was a libertarian political science major maintaining a love affair with dairy products—oh, and I grew up in mostly Baptist churches where we weren’t 100 percent sure Catholics should be considered Christians.

Suffice it to say, we were an odd couple, but we got along famously, united by our shared interests in trying new foods and studying day and night so we could graduate a year early. Somewhere in there we found time to talk theology, and my friend shared her dilemma: She loved the church in which she was raised and she didn’t want to leave. But she couldn’t bring herself to stick with a faith that required her to believe the world was just a few thousand years old or that, as a woman, she must set aside her career ambitions to be a homemaker.

She felt torn between two sets of convictions, and she was worried that if she couldn’t accept what she’d always heard was the Christian perspective on evolution and roles of women, she’d be forced to abandon her faith.

If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s increasingly common, particularly among my generation, millennials. As numerous polls and studies have shown, millennials are at the forefront of a rising population of religious “nones” in America. It’s not that they’re leaving the Church because they’re converting to another religion—they’re just opting out of organized faith altogether. When you ask what their religion is, they simply say, “None.”

In a landmark study of the state of American religion in 2014, the Pew Research Center found the number of nones jumped from 16 percent of U.S. adults in 2007 to 23 percent just seven years later. As cultural shifts go, this is a big and speedy one, and a single generation, millennials, make up nearly half—44 percent—of the nones.

Reflecting on those numbers, author and pastor Andy Stanley makes a key point. “The dechurched who grew up in church exit because they find the version of Christianity they’ve grown up with unconvincing, uninspiring, and irrelevant,” he says. But it’s “important to recognize that millennials don’t perceive their understanding of Christianity as a version of anything. For them, their version is the only version. The version of Christianity they were raised on is Christianity.”

So when, like my friend in college, millennials realize the Christianity of their childhood is “ill-suited for the undeniable realities, both scientific and sociological, of the world in which they find themselves,” Stanley adds, they think this means it’s time to quit their faith. If they can’t reconcile, say, the understanding of evolution they’ve learned as a biologist with what they’ve been told about the creation story in Genesis, well, Genesis must go.

For my friend, college turned out to be an eye-opening experience. She learned the version of Christianity she’d heard as a kid was far from being the only expression of our faith. She found out that there are Christians—even in her own Catholic tradition—who share her views on the origins of the earth and how women are supposed to behave. And she ultimately decided she didn’t have to leave the faith she still held dear despite all the reasons she’d been given to become one of those nones.

Too many other millennials (and Christians of all ages) won’t get that same opportunity, and even those of us who don’t face a similar dilemma tend to never look beyond our own version of Christianity. After a lifetime in one particular tradition, the church down the street may feel as foreign as another religion entirely. Just like the dechurched millennials Stanley describes, we unconsciously start to think our version of the faith is Christianity.

The problem is, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, church history is full of one argument after another, as faithful Christians have sincerely (and yet vehemently) disagreed with one another about a huge range of issues, from the meaning of communion to what hell is like, from why we practice baptism to, yes, what women should be allowed to do in church. (In one early disagreement, gangs of competing Christians actually roamed city streets singing songs and making graffiti about why they were right!)

Christians are still having these debates today—though usually not with the songs and graffiti. And what we all too often forget is that even in really serious disagreements, both sides are still Christians. Maybe they can’t attend the same local church, but they’re equally part of the Church universal. Maybe they’ll never agree on a single version of Christianity, but that’s okay.

A vibrant diversity within Christian orthodoxy—which is simply to say a range of different ways to faithfully follow Jesus—is a strength of our faith, not a weakness.

Now, that’s not to say Christianity should be randomly bent to fit any preference or lifestyle. We can’t set ourselves up as individual arbiters of what’s right and wrong, true and false, deciding that Christianity is whatever we personally want it to be. Diversity within orthodoxy still has its limits. For instance, one of those singing gangs thought Jesus was divine, but not equal to God the Father; and after a bunch of prayer, study, and debates, the early church determined that was incorrect—Jesus is fully God as well as fully human—and that this issue is too important to simply agree to disagree.

But the same can’t be said of every theological question. The stuff that was troubling my friend in college, like the role of women, is obviously a big deal, but it’s not on the same level as whether Jesus is God. Christians can and do disagree about whether a woman can pastor a church, for example, but we can’t disagree about the divinity of Christ. That’s the very center of our faith. It’s our defining conviction. Throw out Jesus and there’s really nothing left—no churches for people of any gender to pastor.

So to understand that difference and figure out how it applies to other parts of theology, I like to use a system introduced to me by Greg Boyd, a pastor and theologian where I live in Minnesota who is also the author of the foreword of this book. Picture concentric circles (like the Target logo). In the middle, in the smallest circle, is Jesus. He’s the heart of our faith—and this isn’t just our belief that he exists and is God, but the actual person of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, who wants to have a relationship with each of us that can transform us and even the whole world. The life and character of Jesus tell us what God is like and how much he loves us. Jesus is the nonnegotiable anchor of Christianity.

But then there’s the next circle, which is a little bigger. In this circle are what we might call dogmas, a very limited set of basic beliefs about God and what it means to be a Christian. A good summary of Christian dogma might be the Apostles’ Creed, which is believed to be the oldest extrabiblical statement of faith we have, developed within the first hundred years after Jesus. Here’s what it says in a modern translation:

You might notice there’s really not a lot of detail here. For instance, the creed doesn’t have anything to say about baptism. It never mentions whether God picks and chooses who is a Christian or if we have free will to make that choice ourselves. It doesn’t specify how or when God created the earth, only that it happened. And because all those answers—and many more—are left out, the Apostles’ Creed can be universally accepted among orthodox Christians. Ask a Catholic, a Presbyterian, and a Baptist if they can endorse the content of this creed and they can all say yes. That’s dogma.

But all those missing details matter, too. Those go in the next concentric circle, which is bigger still, and contains what we can call doctrine. These are the sorts of issues that divide denominations. For instance, the Presbyterian will disagree with the Catholic and the Baptist on the question of free will, while the Baptist will disagree with the other two on how and when baptism should happen. Those are doctrinal differences.

The last and biggest circle holds opinions, where differences of belief can peacefully coexist within the same denomination or even congregation. This could be questions like the age of the earth, whether there are animals in heaven, or what happens to people who never hear about Jesus.

The concentric circle scheme helps, I think, because it finds a middle ground between insisting my version of faith is Christianity, on the one hand, and making our faith totally open to everyone’s individual interpretation on the other. It lets us say diversity within orthodoxy is a good thing, especially for Christians like my friend who have become uncomfortable with what they were taught as kids.

I’m passionate about theological diversity because I don’t want to see my generation leaving the Church over an unnecessary misunderstanding. I don’t want to see Christians becoming nones because they’ve been falsely told there’s just one way to follow Jesus. That’s why I think there’s a lot of value to introducing Christians to our siblings and even distant cousins in the faith, particularly if that’s what it takes for some to remain in the family. If there’s a version of Christianity someone can accept, why would we present them only with a version they have to reject?

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to miss this diversity, though it stretches back through church history and across the range of Christianity today. As wonderful as my Sunday school teachers were, they left a lot out—and I’m betting yours did, too. We can get so stuck in our own little pool that we never notice the stream of orthodoxy is wide and deep and beautiful. Without even realizing it, we can become convinced our own tradition is the one Christian alternative to nonbelief.

That limited perspective is dangerous for the convinced and the doubtful believer alike. For the confident, it makes it difficult to work across denominational lines to serve a hurting world and share the gospel message. For the confused, it suggests that losing conviction in the exact theology of one’s youth or conversion means losing faith altogether.

These are both avoidable tragedies, and that’s where this book comes in. It’s designed to be an easy introduction to the many ways one can follow Jesus, a friendly tour guide to the wide range of views Christians have long held on key issues of the faith.

Here’s the plan: I’ll run through seventeen big theological questions and for each one explain the main ways Christians have answered over the last two millennia. In some cases, there will be as few as two options, but most will have three or four. Every option I present is safely inside the range of orthodoxy—in other words, they’re the sort of thing where one Christian might say to another, “If you believe this, I think you’re wrong,” but never the sort of thing where we might fairly say, “If you believe this, you can’t be considered a Christian.” These are doctrines and opinions, never dogmas.

With topics where I’m particularly enthusiastic about one perspective—we all have our pet theologies, right?—I’ll share with you where I land. Of course, my goal is to be as fair as possible to every view I describe, but just in case my bias gets the better of me, I want you to know where it might be creeping in.

I’ll also include a few discussion questions for each of the seventeen issues in case you want to use this book for personal reflection or in a small group study. Plus, every topic chapter will have a brief historical profile of an interesting person from church history who is relevant to the issue at hand, as well as a list of resources to point you in the right direction for learning more on your own.

In between the topic chapters are five-question Q&As, profiles of more unusual types of Christians—for instance, we’ll meet a Benedictine nun, a racial reconciler, a member of a Latin American base community, and more. These are people many of us will never have an opportunity to meet in real life, but their lives are a fascinating and important part of our faith. They’re each living out a way to follow Jesus that might not be for everyone, but their unique version of Christianity is part of what makes the universal Church so incredibly multifaceted and appealing to all sorts of people.

Finally, I’ll end with a guide to major Christian denominations in the United States today. The idea is that we can move past superficial differences like worship style or church architecture to get a better understanding of what that church down the street is all about. If you’re confident in your current church context, think of this as a family reunion where you catch up with cousins you haven’t talked to in years. Or, if you find you’re no longer comfortable with the church you grew up in, use this guide as a handy introduction to new denominational options you might want to explore. To that end, the same chapter starts with a brief guide to choosing a church.

My first working title for this book was 200 Million Ways to Follow Jesus, because it’s a rough calculation of how many different combinations of beliefs any Christian could select from the options I present for all seventeen topics. (Well, the real total was 201,553,920, but that’s a mouthful.) As we move on to examining this diversity within our faith, remember the sheer size of that number. It gives a little glimpse of how following Jesus is a big, weird, amazing thing that individual believers, movements, and denominations have expressed in remarkably different ways over the centuries.

As the Apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthian church, we as the body of Christ are not “made up of one part but of many” (12:14)—and this book is about telling the foot that the elbow exists.