Real Questions of Postmoderns

I found this cool website about Christian apologetics in a postmodern culture. It's called bethinking.org and you can check it out by clicking here.

Postmodern people like myself have a lot of questions. Even for those of us who have grown up in the church, we still have a no holds barred attitude toward questioning our faith. And that's the thing. We're questioning
our faith. Or more accurately, I'm questioning my faith, not yours.

Don't get bent out of shape by my questions. When I ask my questions, I'm not drawing your faith into question. Rather, my questions are growing my own faith and spirituality.

Worse yet, don't answer my questions for me. Remember, they're my questions. And to be honest with you, no matter what answer you try to give me, it is always going to be your answer. So don't tread on me.

But the worst thing you could ever do, is pose my questions for me. You don't know what my questions are. Unless, of course, you actually listen to me ask them. And remember, when I ask them, don't give me your answer.

This reflection sums up several of my experiences lately of churches reaching out to postmoderns. I've attended several worships and ministry events this past month, some non-denominational some denominational, and all of them advertised something like: "Got Questions?" or "Is Church Relevant?" or "Real People with Real Quesions."

Each time, I thought to myself: "sweet! I'm finally going to find a group of people with whom I can be myself, people who are authentic enough that I might risk the vulnerability of sharing my questions." Well, each time I went to one of these events I returned deeply disappointed.

If I were more jaded and less in love with Jesus' church, I might have even been offended. What an ugly act of violence -- inviting me to explore my questions, only then to have the preacher (a) tell me what my question is, because that happens to be the question he prepared for in his sermon, and then (b) tell me what his answer is to my question, which isn't even mine.

Vomit.

These are modern wolves dressed up in postmodern sheepskins. Bless them for trying. But stop. Please.

Instead, invite me into an open and structurally flat conversation in which I can really raise my questions. Then let me hear your questions without trying to answer my question disguised in the form of your own.

Let's share our questions, because questioning is the journey. And for me, the journey is what it's all about, not rushing ahead to the destination beyond the horizon. Along the journey is where the action is. That's where we see God at work in our lives.

So please, I invite you to connect with me on my journey. Like most postmoderns, I'm yearning for authentic relationships. In the end, we may not come away with neatly packaged answers. But we'll have discerned together what God is up to in the world these days. And with that, by the end of our time together we'll go back along our separate paths on our own journeys, now with a witness to share of experiencing God's saving presence along the way.