🌵 TREE 632: JG – Disappearing God, part 1

You will be delighted/sad to know that this is the final week of my autobiography. I’m going to finish by telling you how I went from a radical-for-Jesus pastor to a whatever I am now.

51

It started when I was a kid. I asked my dad, ‌What if we’re wrong about all this stuff we believe? His answer was not completely satisfactory to me.

I remember realising as a teenager that all the -isms – capitalism, socialism, communism – had features we could learn from.

In my early 20s, when I was a youth pastor, my friend and coworker used to go downtown on every other Saturday night to talk to the teenagers that hung out there. It was an evangelism thing but more about having good respectful conversations and developing friendships. There were two girls, intelligent well-read atheists, that I used to talk with a lot. They gave me a book called Who Wrote the Bible? I gave them Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

Their gift had more influence than mine.

When you are a pastor, you get paid to study the bible a lot. One of the things that happens when you study the bible a lot is that you notice a lot of the Old Testament fits together weirdly. Who Wrote the Bible introduced me to the widely-accepted, strongly-evidenced idea that the first five books of the bible were not written by Moses – I always thought this was a bit tricky since it includes an account of his death – but that they were assembled from various sources by Jewish editors during the Babylonian captivity. It was nice to have a better explanation for the bible’s origins and quirks than these are God’s exact words written down by humans.

I’ve already told you how my son Teifion’s death dismantled my conviction that God would intervene on behalf of people who were fully devoted to him. In the years before we lost our son, our church also lost four people to cancer, a mum, a dad, a little boy and a grandmother. This shouldn’t have been surprising. Cancer is the second biggest cause of death. In all these cases the church rallied. We supported the families practically and, more importantly in our minds, we prayed and fasted for their healing. Our prayer accomplished nothing.

In all these things, I can see an internal drive for wholeness. I want my beliefs to accurately reflect reality. In some areas, I was seeking and finding. In others, I believed my beliefs could change reality, and reality was starting to show itself impervious to the power of my beliefs.

On Wednesday, I went to St Fagans National Museum of History near Cardiff. It might be my favourite museum. Here’s a picture of a modern tapestry showing an excellent scene from The Mabinogion.

Grow slowly
Jeff