See, I set out on a personal journey about 11 years ago to pursue honesty, integrity, transparency and authenticity in my own life. I was a Christian youth pastor at the time and up until then you might have called me a fake if you knew me well. You would at least think that I had some sort of split personality if you knew me that well, but the truth is, barely anyone knew me that well.
I myself had a little trouble figuring out who I was back then. I blame the church's approach to holiness doctrine mostly. At least the church I had gone to prior to that. It was a Nazarene church that subscribed to holiness as a way of life. Sanctification, according to the church is a gift you receive shortly after becoming a believer that effectively seals you for work inside the kingdom of God.
So, once a person is sanctified, there is no turning back, they are now holy, set apart for all practical purposes. Except that after I declared my sanctification to the world around me at the tender age of 18, I didn't exactly feel any different. It was embarrassing. Other members of my flock who received sanctification had become perfect models of Christianity, but me? I was the same old John. The same guy that made mistake after mistake and chose selfish behaviors over Jesus-like actions all the time.
So what did I do to remedy this? I began acting holy. I figured I could fake it until I made it, ya know? I mean I already knew the language of church, and the culture and what was expected of me. So I talked the talk and talked some more, never really able to walk the walk of true holiness. That did not seem to matter to my Christian friends however. They accepted the "new" me and rewarded this behavior by giving me high-praise for my apparent piety.
It wasn't until I started going to a different church (The Vineyard in 2003) that people started calling me on my holy behavior. They asked me questions like "Why do you do that?" They challenged me on things like art and music and culture in general. One pastor pulled me aside and asked me point-blank why I only listen to Christian music. I gave him the standard answer I had learned from my past and he seemed baffled.
This conversation led to other conversations whereby I started to pick apart the armor I had been wearing - that I myself had donned on a daily basis. One article at a time came down and I began to realize that I used these concepts and actions that appeared holy merely to mask who I truly was inside -- that scared kid that had been mistreated by not only imaginary beasts and monsters in my childhood, but who had also been brutally mistreated in school by a number of bullies and at home by his own brother; that kid who had never been nurtured, loved, cared for; the one who had anger issues and bitterness towards men and women. I had covered that kid up for so many years (since I was about 16) and did such a good job of it I was surprised when he actually surfaced.
He was even more angry than I could have imagined having been ignored for so long by me. But I decided then and there I had to deal with him, nurture him and become more like him than the fake super-Christian I had created. This came as a bit of a shock to people who knew me before, but in 2004, I made an active decision to never be a fake again. I would be who I was, who I was meant to be and if that rubbed people the wrong way, well then so be it. I stepped down from ministry at the Vineyard and pursued authenticity and transparency full-time.
This also meant that I was questioning everything. My faith, the way I talked and walked and thought. Everything was up for grabs, everything had to be reconsidered and evaluated. Nothing could be overlooked. If I found I did anything one particular way because I wanted people to think I was something that I most certainly was not, I would strike it out of my life.
This period for me started back in 2004 and is still going on today. It took me 38 years to become that way, and it will take many more years to weed out the false-piety I had grown so accustomed to. Because of the fact that this fake-self so impacted my life and because of all of the work I have done to recover from it, I have an aversion to anything that appears fake or phony when it comes to faith -- and there is a LOT of that going around. A lot. I will usually expose it for what it is when I see it for that reason.
So considering all of that, I have re-approached the subject of God very slowly. And I refused to accept the blanket answers to things offered up by my fellow fakers and their predecessors. I wanted to know the truth and I wanted to know now. What I guess I didn't realize is that there is no proof, no concrete anything, no way of showing the results, recording the findings. God is subjective to everyone.
Ask anyone who claims to believe in god, and you will get differing accounts of god even within the same peer group of the same denomination of the same religion. I had to either accept god's existence based on my own subjective observations (knowing full well I could not prove god to anyone and that I could just as easily be mistaken), or reject god's existence based on objective physical evidence alone.
More on this later...
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