Am I even a Christian?

“Are you even a Christian?”, he asked with a smirk from a self assumed position of authority to assess. He asked it in a way that left it obvious that his mind was already made up. “Making a weapon of words that are supposed to invite and to heal”, as my friend Tabatha put it. The impact of those words wielded so crassly by a man I don’t even know left me puzzled & shocked.

That’s how my Tuesday night ended. Tuesday’s at our church are quite different than Sundays. On Tuesday’s we don’t sit in rows facing a stage looking at the backs of peoples heads. On Tuesday’s we share a meal together & after that, an extended time for worship/prayer where everyone’s welcomed to contribute as the Spirit leads. That’s followed by a number of learning opportunities involving group discussion & guest facilitators.

That night, during the learning time, someone asked about hell. They asked if there would be any point to evangelism if hell didn’t exist. I offered my perspective, paraphrasing Rev. Jacqui Lewis by saying, ‘even if hell wearn’t a physical place Jesus still wants to love the hell out of this world & sharing that news is important because Jesus wants more people to be about that work’.

Was that what prompted his question? Was it something I posted online? Who made him the ultimate gatekeeper of my atonement? Why was his critique absent during the decades I’d spent living out a dead faith which bore no fruit whatsoever? How to properly respond to a question without context. Is he even an authentic conversation partner? I responded with a simple “Yes” & left it at that.

But I didn’t leave it at that. My mind spent that night & much of the next day searching for the motivation behind his question as the inner dialogue responded to him over & over again in new ways.

Wednesday night I met with my friends from InVerse, another faith community that I’m involved in. It’s a community of gentle loving folks committed to unlearning & healing from the impacts commitment to Empire have had on our faith experiences. After our zoom ended, we unpacked the Tuesday night interaction together on WhatsApp. Tabatha said she’d be praying for him & I both.

Wednesday morning I got up early, planning to go into work early & catch up on some things. A new podcast episode from the Jesus Collective had just dropped so I gave it a listen as I got myself ready. Not the Jesus Collective choir from South Africa, but the Anabaptist think tank folks. It comes across to me as white centric like lots of stuff out there, but they do offer ideas I find worth thinking about.

That episode was on building healthier communities in North American churches. They spoke of living in mutuality instead of defaulting to the individualistic mindset dominant culture offers & shared strategies on creating spaces for this.

Good stuff for sure, but something was missing. Zero credit was given to Black thinkers who shared this philosophy of Ubuntu so freely. There was no mention of parts of the global church where living in mutuality is the norm. There was no mention of the marginalized communities here in North America working together to make it through another week.

As I continued listening on the drive into the office my mind drifted, contrasting the experiences my Tuesday night & Wednesday night faith communities offered.

I arrived to the office & to a text from my wife with a heads up that our friends needed help. They’d been holding space all night for a dearly loved family member with terminal cancer & when morning came they found their car had been towed.

Off to meet them I went, listening to the podcasters talk about community as I drove towards members of mine. I picked them up, then on the drive to the impound, we shared a powerful sacred moment together. A moment so special it flushed all the toxicity from my spirit which had been lingering from that Tuesday encounter.

I dropped those friends off, then I reached out to my friends from InVerse to offer them an opportunity to cover the impound charges. They jumped at it, not as an act of charity but as an act of solidarity & support. My friends accepted, not because they couldn’t afford to pay for the tow but because we are in community & being in community means being there for each other.

These dear friends just celebrated their wedding. A wedding our community worked together to organize. The whole evening was a tribute to, and an example of a community working together.

This community are in the midst of some extremely hard times but we are facing them head on through deep love, enthusiastic laughter, fierce resistance & unshakable dignity in the midst of dehumanizing circumstances.

Loving the hell out of this world is hard work so this wedding was a deeply needed opportunity to celebrate. Oh & did we celebrate.

I’d noticed back in the late 90s that there are deep down systemic systems which are causing great harm but I’d never done a thing to change them. My cultural christianity was simply about believing the right things & behaving myself so I’d fit in at church. That individualistic faith wasn’t threatened by the status quo in any way.

That changed when the events of 2020 shocked my conscience. A period of listening & learning let me to Trouble I’ve Seen, a book by Dr. Drew Hart. In the last chapter I was challenged to, as he put it, “Follow Jesus into forbidden spaces we were socialized to avoid”.

As we follow Jesus into the world, we must join with racially oppressed communities. We must so deeply identify with them that their struggle becomes our struggle. Christians do not merely watch as distanced spectators. We are dropped right into the conflicts of the world, & with Jesus we march right toward confrontation with our own Jerusalem-like establishments, where prophets are killed & power is concentrated.

When the lockdown ended I sought out ways to live into this, serving under the leadership of people already doing justice work for their communities. As expected I learned to apply what I’d read in Drew’s book, but I had no idea this would lead to much much more.

I’ve found people who have my back, who refresh & recharge my spirit when church lobby encounters leave me shell shocked. I love how God provided a non-church space to offer healing from a church space interaction. God’s got a great sense of humour, one which combines the sharp wit of the woman who officiated that wedding ceremony with the unrestrained joy behind that beautiful bride’s laugh.

So, am I even a Christian? Perhaps I’m not the one to ask. Perhaps we should go ask the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, the sick, and the prisoners if they know Michael.

I’d hope they’d vouch for me. Can’t say for sure. What I can say for sure is that Christ’s loving me through some of them. What I can say for sure is that I long to love them well, through Christ.

Thanks for reading.