Faith at the Pub

The weeks running up to Easter were busy for me, as they always are for those of us for whom life and faith revolve around the events of Passover 29AD. But there was one April challenge that I could have cheerfully put aside, if I could have. Part of the assignment load for a Masters paper I am doing at the AUT Business School is to look at diversity and marginalisation, by intentionally engaging in a personal experience of being a minority:

“You are to deliberately put yourself in a situation that you do not usually experience, where you are a minority, e.g. white person at Maori hui or Pacific Island church or cultural event, Pacific Island woman in white suburb shopping enclave, heterosexual at ‘gay’ bar, women at male sporting event or become a person with a visible disability for a day
… describe the experience.”

The assignment involves more than that of course, we need to engage with the literature and reflect on our own identity in that light, and then we get to do a pictorial representation of that identity, which should be fun for a scrapbooker! I might post more about that, when I’ve done it. But for now, I thought I’d have a go at writing the summary of what I did, because it was actually quite amazing.

I considered various possibilities, like going to a football match, or a Hindu temple, but both of these were thought to be a copout by my family, who were helping me decide. They know that as a pastor and funeral celebrant, I have had to engage with all sorts of people from all sorts of cultures, and that even going to worship of a different religion would not faze me too much. So then I shared with them a nagging thought I had had ever since the assignment was announced. In our round of personal introductions at the first lecture, one of my class had explained they are a rationalist and atheist, and that they regularly attend a group called Skeptics in the Pub. The whisper in my soul that said, that would be a place where I was completely out of my comfort zone, slowly became louder and stronger over the month of March. My family encouraged the option, so I asked this person if they thought my attending the Sceptics meeting would be appropriate for the assignment. (I had in mind that they could in turn attend a Christian event, but it turns out they have had an abundance of Christian experiences, which says a lot).

The date was set, and I came to terms with getting myself to Parnell for a 7pm start, a challenge in itself for one who avoids the motorways at peak times , and rarely goes into the city at night. Then shock horror, I got a message from the leader of the group; they had no speaker for the night, would I be it? I hadn’t even realised my classmate was going to tell them I was coming, but with some email discussion the invitation was firmed up. I realised I had to decide what to talk to them about for fifteen minutes, plus questions. My workmates and children thought it was a hoot, but I was quietly terrified. I am not a trained apologist, and have only a passing acquaintance with atheism as a philosophy.

Then it came to me (thank you Lord). For the last month I had been reading heaps about the Stages of Faith, using material from James Fowler and Scott Peck. I had written a booklet about the subject as our congregation’s first “Spiritual Practice” for the year, which was actually not a specific practice in itself, but the challenge to find out where you are at on the journey, because appropriate spiritual practices will differ at various stages. The booklet, which I called Seasons of the Spirit so as not to make people at the earlier stages feel inferior, can be downloaded from my Discipleship page, but for those of you who don’t know this material at all, let me summarise it in one sentence; people experience different seasons of faith or doubt, and God can use these to help us grow spiritually.

I realised that Scott Peck calls his third stage, a season of doubt and questioning, the stage of Scepticism. Here was a connection I could offer to the group at the pub. It’s a zone that many believers find uncomfortable, Alan Jamieson calls it Transition and I have dubbed it Curious Outsider. I used that term so people would know that when you are in this stage, its perfectly normal to want to step right outside the institutional church, but still be curious about the world and how it works and who we are as humans in it. It’s a stage where people have lots of questions – and doubts. It can be rough if we don’t recognise it as a natural adjustment after the Conventional stage of needing external authorities and black and white answers. You go more to the inner voice for authority and understanding. I told our congregation that people who search and question are sometimes thought to have lost their faith or be backsliders – and yet very often they are still growing spiritually. This was strategic, because not only do people in our church have children and spouses who are at stage 3, but some, even those in leadership, are in this season themselves. And that is okay. Even for sceptics.

I got myself to the Windsor Castle. passing a Catholic church on the way, and praying desperately to Jesus and John the Baptist and throwing in a few Hail Marys. I found the group comprised about twenty people, all ages but nearly all males, and mostly with interests in science, computers and debunking myths like crop circles. My presentation, carefully pruned of any Christianese, turned out to be a great starting point for a robust 30 minutes of questions and interchange. We covered faith, the soul, heaven and hell, the resurrection, evolution, Biblical inerrancy, the source of morality, and “those who have never heard.” It helped that I have read books like Why God Won’t Go Away, but I was out of my depth a number of times, though years of leading Alpha courses didn’t go to waste. And there were so many wanting to talk that when I felt I had given a half-decent answer, I moved on to someone else.

It felt okay! They were courteous and authentic, and assertive rather than aggressive, and we ranged over many themes. A couple of times they caught me out, for example when I used Mother Teresa as an example of a spiritually-advanced person and was informed of various human rights offences perpetrated by her and her organisation. I had to humbly admit they had gazumped me there, and also had to say “I don’t know” to one or two other questions of an academic nature. But mostly we had a good back and forth, and I was able to explain to them that most Christians today do not spend much time talking about hell, but for those who do, there is a vigorous debate as to what the Bible actually means by it. They also wrongly imputed to me a whole bunch of stuff like “every word in the Bible is true,” “all of them are going to hell" and "the universe was made in six days." One guy said I sounded like a liberal Christian, to which I quizzically responded "I'm a Baptist pastor." Another thought he had me on the ropes when he said “did I realise the Bible was written by dozens of people over hundreds of years, and that some of its material is found in other ancient documents?” He was taken aback when I said, “Yes I do, that is the basis of what we teach our people every Sunday!”

In the end we had to agree to disagree. But a high point for me was when I found myself saying: “I know lot about science, I know quite a lot about psychology, I know something about philosophy, but there’s a paradox. With all that scientific knowledge, I am still passionately convinced that a man who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago is alive, and a vital part of my every day experience.” They may not agree, they may not understand, but at least I got to say what is really important for those of us who follow Jesus.

To Chew Over: How would you respond to having to do this assignment? Why?

Christ is alive, and the universe must celebrate,
and the stars and the suns shout out on this Easter Day:
Christ is alive, and his family must celebrate
In a great alleluia, a great alleluia
to praise the power that made the stone roll away.

Here is our hope: in the mystery of suffering
is the heartbeat of Love, Love that will not let go,
Here is our hope, that in God we are not separate,
and we sing alleluia, a great alleluia
we praise the power that made the stone roll away.

Christ Spirit, dance through the dullness of humanity
to the music of God, God who has set us free!
You are the pulse of the new creation’s energy;
with a great alleluia, a great alleluia
we praise the power that made the stone roll away.
© Shirley E Murray