The Desire for Security and Being Evangelical
Everyone has a story including a movement
Part I: My Story of Becoming
a Christian and Evangelical
Written By Dan McDonald
I once read something about how we
look at families and the varied races within humanity that made so much sense
that it helped me look at the world with a little bit more understanding, or at
least I think it helped me. The author,
I don’t remember the author’s name or the book just the thought, said something
that I came to realize was extremely insightful. He pointed out that there is a natural
tendency to look at groups that you aren’t part of, and see the individuals by
their connections to the group’s characteristics. But if you are a member of a group you feel
how distinct you are from others in your group.
We look at people in our own groups as distinct individuals connected to
us by a shared bond. But as we look at a
group that we are not part of, we see individuals as blurred parts of that
group.
When I read that author’s ideas I
thought of the Henson family down the road from where I lived. The Henson family had seven or eight
children. Their Dad was red-headed,
their Mom was red-headed, and everybody in the family was red-headed and full of
freckles. One day at school I heard a
teacher say to one of the Henson children, “you must be a Henson.” The young child was amazed and I think a bit
freaked out by the teacher’s ability to know exactly who he was. He asked, “How do you know?” But here is the thing. We all sort of knew a Henson as soon as we
saw them in our little school. But that
same little Henson boy, whom we all just categorized as a Henson, could easily
tell you if you had asked him how no one else in his family was like he was. Looking into a group from outside we tend to
see the similarities of characteristics about the group. But if you were part of a group you thought
of your relationship to the group by how your individuality was distinct from
everyone else’s.
That is part of a problem with
writing a series of blogs on how Evangelicalism within my Baby Boomer
generation seems to have placed a priority on discovering a sense of
security. But if you are a boomer and an
Evangelical, you’ll likely say – well it sort of can be abbreviated similarly
to a BS degree. But maybe after we establish
that each Evangelical is a unique person, we can sort of begin to try to figure
out how non-Evangelicals looking in at us as a group might see us as people for
whom having a sense of security means a whole lot. That is something I wish to address. But I want to do it in a way that affirms
that each of us has a unique life story distinguishing us from everyone else
you ever regarded as an Evangelical.
Then I want to speak as an Evangelical with other Evangelicals to say
that there are real reasons why when people look at us they think we have a
really strong desire and characteristic among us of craving security. I think if I write this blog well enough, we
who are Evangelicals will understand more about ourselves as a group with
certain tendencies, and others looking on at us from their differing
perspective will be able to appreciate just a little more what drove and shaped
us. To that end, I will devote this
first blog to how I became Christian and how that led me to find Evangelicalism
a decent fit for me, especially in the beginning of my Christian life. Then in later blogs I will develop how I
think our generation’s experiences shaped us to value security perhaps beyond
the place we should have given it. I
think enough time has gone by in our lives to begin to see that we have had
something to say about Christ, but we have also like most any other Christian
movement in history had our faulty ways for we are but men and women struggling
in the wilderness to hear and follow Christ within our own frail individual
expressions of humanity.
This is my story of how I became
Christian and how that led me to finding being Evangelical a sort of natural
fit back when I was taking my place in life.
I grew up in a family where “good morals” were taught but we never
attended church. My Dad was especially
respected for being a hard worker, an honest man, and someone whose word could
be absolutely trusted. There had been a
time when our family went to church but that was before I was born. There was never much said negatively against
church, religion, or anything like that except maybe something the like of “our
family doesn’t need a crutch.” But there
would also be confirmation at other times that religion should be respected
because it taught people to do “good”.
The day came in my life when a
neighbor lady asked my Mom if she could take me to their church for Vacation
Bible School and then to Sunday school. My
Mom approved and I can remember feeling like a kid held hostage going to a
church instead of with my Dad to the Four Corners Restaurant, where farmers hung
out for coffee, some eggs and hash browns, and to get up on the latest rural
neighborhood gossip. Of course men, as
you know don’t gossip but sort of talk over things, important things. But sometimes the talk got almost like neighborhood
gossip. After getting hauled off to
church and having to say goodbye to the eggs and hash browns I met new kids in
a different way and heard about Bible stories.
Bible stories seemed to hold my attention. As time went on I started reading Bible
stories. I didn’t know about
concordances, so the only way I could find the different Bible stories I liked
was to read the whole Bible until I found them.
I always started by reading right there at Genesis. For the most part I
never got past the Old Testament. I read
it probably four times during my grade and high school years. But I never much read the New Testament as a
kid.
Part of the reason why I never
started to read the New Testament was that most of the people in my church
talked about how different the New and Old Testaments were. I think as I read the Old Testament I began
to feel like if there was a god, this was him speaking. I figured if the New Testament was so
different from the Old Testament then maybe it wasn’t really the word of God
like this Old Testament so often said. I
thought the prophets were especially amazing, the way they were willing to take
a message from God and speak it to people who so often then turned around and
ridiculed them. Wow, the prophets were
amazing.
Then one day in my senior year in
literature we had an assignment to read the Sermon on the Mount as part of
world literature. I was amazed. I remember thinking, “Jesus speaks like one
of the prophets.” I began to read the
New Testament and without knowing what words to use to describe what I was
reading, I couldn’t put it down and it tore me up. I felt like the way Jesus described being
righteous was something far from anything I could do. I felt as if God and I were as far as part as
we could ever be. Then I picked up a
book, not really all that good of a book, about prophecy and how the world was
coming to an end; and all that sort of stuff but it described to me how Christ
died for sinners. Wow that was a
concept. Suddenly God wasn’t this ogre
that wanted me to live one way when I had been created with an impossibility to
live that way. God had created me one
way, I had gone the other way, but he had so loved me that he had become man
and had died for my sins so that I could be returned to God. I struggled with these thoughts for a few
months. There were sins I wanted to
involve myself in that I knew weren’t right according to the Scriptures. It all came to a head one day in a
conversation with some people my age.
This gal in our group commented on how she didn’t believe in God, in
Christ, the church or any of that stuff.
I had wanted to impress this gal up until then. I was wavering between my desires for those
sins I recognized I wanted to do and following Christ. I felt, right there in that conversation, the
words of Christ telling me how we could not have two masters. I felt the words of his telling his disciples
and those who heard him that if we confessed him before men he would confess us
before the father, but if we denied him… what did he expect for me to say
something right there and then about Christ.
It seemed like eternity was right there before me, being decided on what
I was about to say. I managed to say
something very close to this: “I don’t know about the church, but I do believe
that Jesus Christ is who he said he was, the Son of God.” I walked away from that conversation feeling
extremely overwhelmed that God had allowed me to believe in Jesus Christ and to
confess him before this group of people when that had been the furthest thing
from my mind when I had gotten together with them that day. The next day I felt as if everything about me
had changed.
I was about to head off to
college. I was a bit worried. How would God lead me when I was away from
home? What was I to do as one who
believed in Christ? I was pretty sure
the Bible would be a part of that. When
I went to college I discovered or was discovered by some Evangelicals. It was pretty much a fit for me. That is my story. If you have been around Evangelicals you know
each of them has a unique personal story of how they came to believe in Jesus
and what made them realize that Jesus had come into their lives and how this
meant everything had changed. There is a
unique story for each one of us. I know
that is how I as an Evangelical see other Evangelical family members. But for you who aren’t Evangelicals you
probably see us not so much as individuals but as a group, and there are things
you aren’t comfortable with as you see us.
One of those things is how we have divided ourselves off from the rest
of humanity as if we were looking for our own secure world, while we seemed to
have looked down upon the rest of humanity not as human beings, but as a threat. Some of you see us that way, and for the
first time in my life I feel like “yeah” I can actually understand that. We’ll start talking more about how we got
that way in our next blog.
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