I spent my entire 20s complaining about the lack of community at my church. I grew up at that church. From the age of 9 to age 29, I went to the same church. And I never connected solidly to a group of people except for a brief two year period from 19-21. During that time, I was a part of a home group for college aged guys, and that was decent (I mostly enjoyed it).
But I never felt like I fit in. The people were all so different, but they shared one common thread that I did not: the belief that all one needed was to firmly believe when in doubt, as though one could will one’s self into deeper faith.
Go to these people with any problem, and they had no real answer 99% of the time. They had no solid foundation for everyday issues. No answers. Just pray and believe. Pray and believe.
That’s not good enough for me. Maybe it will be someday, but I doubt it. You have to know something to believe it. So many of these words are interchangeable: trust, faith, belief, confidence, conviction, etc.
Then there are the stupid things pastors and youth pastors teach people which are solely based on opinion and can severely damage a person’s ability to deal with real world situations. For example, my youth pastor taught me to believe that God takes people with skills and puts them in situations where their skills are irrelevant, so they will depend on God for everything. This teaching was based on the youth pastor’s interpretation of Paul being called to the Gentiles and Peter being called to the Jews.
He said that Peter was a fisherman, a common man, with little education to help him discuss Scripture with the educated Pharisees, Saducees, and everyday Jews. He said Paul was an ex-Pharisee type, meaning he was overqualified in Jewish culture and not prepared to evangelize the ignorant Gentiles. He said that God doesn’t want us to depend on our gifts, talents, and abilities, and will therefore put us in positions which require complete and total dependence upon him.
Sadly, I just recently revisited that memory and realized that he was wrong. Paul was perfectly positioned to speak to Gentiles. The Jewish believers feared him for all the times he persecuted them in the past. Sure, they probably got over that eventually. But Paul was a Roman citizen, fluent in the primary Gentile language and educated in some Roman/Greek philosophy. He was ideally suited to preach to the Greeks, who always pondered new ideas.
Peter was no idiot, but he was definitely less cultured than Paul. That makes him more ideally suited to relate to his own people.
Translation: I grew up expecting God to screw with my life because one youth pastor misinterpreted and misapplied Scripture. God gave us the giftings and abilities we have so that we would use them for his glory… that we would be good stewards of our talents. I can’t be a good steward of my talents if my situations never call for the use of my talents.
Whatever. Now I have to go back and see how that one bad message has affected my entire way of thinking, believing, and living. Who knows how many stupid decisions I have made because of it.
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