New York: Alyson Books, 2007.

ONE

The Transcended Christian

What do you do when you've outgrown your religion? When your life experience exceeds that of your clergy? When the learning that life forced on you challenges your religious beliefs? When you can no longer deny that something new is afoot and your church is out of touch?

The Current Spiritual Challenge

Many people today are in this exact situation, and for many different reasons. I know a wonderful woman who stands for the best of what Christianity means, who no longer goes to church, and who now has grave doubts about all religion. Her father was a minister. She grew up in a devout and genuinely good home. Her dear, aging mother, loving but confused, continued to pray for her, anxious and fearful about the daughter's eternal damnation. This woman herself is the finest of people, concerned, helpful, honest. She is a highly successful professional, and the whole of her work at non-profit organizations is dedicated to helping other people. Who could be more Jesus-like?

But her marriage became unworkable. All efforts to salvage it failed. Even her deep concern for her son could not justify staying in that relationship. So she divorced—and she was summarily ostracized from the church that had professed for years to be her “Christian family.”

She was no longer welcome. She had suddenly become a “wayward daughter” and a “lost sister.” Now she found neither understanding nor support in her church. Already hurting deeply from the divorce and agonizing in conscience over the religious implications of her decision, she was left without the encouragement and spiritual counsel that now, of all times, she really needed and that the church always claimed to provide.

Her experience forced her to look at things differently. She believes in God and loves Jesus and respects all the positive values for which religion stands. But the course of her life made her unable to deny that much religion is simplistic. Oftentimes, life just does not follow the rules that religion lays down. Unexpected twists of fate bring on complications that religion is not willing to address. So anybody living a real life is liable not to fit into the standard religious picture.

Being an intelligent woman, she read, talked with people, attended conferences, and joined a spiritually based, non-denominational support group. Gradually, she put together a new outlook on life and a new understanding of spirituality. She salvaged the goodness of her upbringing and whatever wisdom she gained through religion. She combined these with her new learning and forged her own spiritual position.

The Transcended Christian

That is what my friend did when she outgrew her religion. Through her actual living and continued seeking, she took her religion to the next level. She went beyond the Christianity of her up-bringing and morphed it into something new. She became a transcended Christian. She remained a genuine believer—she grew up a Christian and remains a Christian. But her life experience forced her to sift through her Christianity. She retains the valid spiritual core of her religious up-bringing, but she has moved beyond the limits of institutional religion.

I believe that she represents the new wave of religious believers. She is part of the next generation of Christians. She is the kind of Christian who can live comfortably in, and contribute generously to, a pluralistic world and even secular global society of the twenty-first century. But, of course, most churches today will have none of it.

No doubt, it was her religious upbringing itself that allowed her to make this step forward. Her religion instilled in her the moral commitment and supplied the spiritual insight that carried her through the crisis of her divorce. Indeed, I would say that in her case religion did what it is supposed to do: It pointed out the stepping stones that lead to spiritual maturity.

Religion is not made to serve itself. Its goal is not to rake in a higher collection each week. Like families, religion is supposed to help us grow up and move on. Religion is supposed to foster spiritual adulthood and free us from the necessary but limiting confines of spiritual childhood. In fact, then, my friend was a stunning religious success. The tools she got from her religion allowed her to honestly and lovingly deal with her life. Now she is a blessing to all she meets. Broken out of a religious cocoon, she is a butterfly of spiritual beauty.

But, of course, she is no longer at home with the church, nor can she be comfortable with her family when questions of religion come up. She cannot discuss her spiritual life with any of them. Daughter of a respected minister's family, she lives on the fringes of organized religion. In general, church goers in the Bible Belt put her down. Naively they invite her to church. They offer their sugar-coated candy religion as an enticement. Sincerely, presumptuously, and blindly, not recognizing Jesus when they see him, they tell her that her life would be so much better if she'd only come to church with them and turn to Jesus. She tells them that "God makes house calls," and they are baffled. She and they are living in different worlds.

My friend grew beyond her religion because of a personal crisis. The religious rules she was taught did not square with the real life she had to live. Many people begin to question their religion because of personal crises. But today, spiritual questions and religious doubts affect all of us, personal crisis or not.

We live in difficult times. I doubt that any period in human history has known as much turmoil as our own. Because of TV, movies, the Internet, and easy travel, our world is becoming one global village. We know about different countries, different cultures, different religions. We cannot avoid them. It would be rare today to find someone who does not personally know at least one person of a different religion. And when we get to know those others, we are challenged. Not only do they believe differently from us; they also often turn out to be good people. Sometimes they downright inspire us—like a remarkable Japanese woman I met in Mexico who reverently gave a coin to every beggar who asked. We can't just write those others off as “heathens” the way cocky preachers might do. If we have any decently in us at all, we need to take those people seriously. But taking them seriously, we cannot help but begin to wonder about our own religious beliefs.

Religions differ. We know that fact. We know it all too well. But the religions also all claim to be true, especially the Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Still, they cannot all be true when their teachings differ. Even the many Christian churches have different beliefs. So we are left wondering whether any of them is true. Is there even such a thing as truth? How does one know what to believe? Unless we are sure that our beliefs are true, they don't serve us very well. What good is a belief if you really can't rely on it? Nonetheless, heartlessly, our pluralistic world is forcing us to question our beliefs. Like it or not, if we are at all in tune with our world, we are thrust into a crisis of faith. Spiritual crisis is symptomatic of our age.

Some people resolve their crisis by going fundamentalist. They shut their eyes to other religions, stop questioning and thinking, hold to their own religion unbendingly, and walk lock-step in the security of the company of their fellow believers. One Bible-believing woman I knew dealt with her divorce in just this way. For the well-being of her children, she had to get away from her husband. Bravely she did, but thinking that God operates on unbending rules, she lives with constant guilt, prays that God will forgive her, and, compelled by her religion to also point out other people's "sins," she consoles herself and softens her rebukes with "We are all sinners."

More thoughtful, more insightful people cannot go that route. Religion itself has taught them to be honest about the facts. Even in the name of God, they cannot just shut down their minds and package up their lives. They want to continue living, exploring, growing. They learned that God is good. Precisely because they are religious, they want a life about which they can rejoice, be thankful, give praise. So they suffer a spiritual crisis because most of the churches have not yet stepped into the twenty-first century.

This book is written for that dear divorced friend of mine and for so many other good-willed people who have outgrown their religion. In these chapters I have applied my own experience and my broad education to the meaning of Christian belief in the contemporary world. This book addresses the questions that arise in the minds of deeply spiritual people who can no longer find nourishment in that “old time religion.”