Someone says “Did you hear about the
pastor who became an atheist after 25 years in ministry.” People
gasp and a hush comes over the room. Someone tells the story about
the article posted on Facebook. Slowly the conversations resume, many
about the details just shared. The people interject statements like,
“I can't believe it, a pastor” and “after 25 years, how could
you believe for that long and then loose faith.” Many of the people
reassure themselves that they would never doubt their faith, that
they would never abandon their faith after so long.
Sadly, however, many of the Christians
in that crowd probably experience a bit of hesitation and anxiety
when thinking about a long term pastor leaving the faith. Some of
them will probably think, if he abandoned his faith, what keeps me
from doing the same. After all, pastors are supposed to have more
faith, and much stronger faith than that of regular church members.
If a pastor with 25 years of experience looses his faith after
reading Richard Dawkins, then what hope does a regular Christian
have?
If a
seen like this actually happened, I don't have any knowledge of it. I
read the article about Jerry DeWitt on Facebook after some friends
posted it but I can't say that I'm surprised.When you dig a little
deeper into the article you find that within a few weeks of having a
conversion experience he was asked to preach to his church. He got an
emotional high out of the experience and that was, apparently, his
call to ministry. DeWitt never went on to complete a college
education and from the article it appears that he had no formal
seminary or religious training.
So
someone who had served in ministry for a number of years but had no
formal training for ministry, and no formal education beyond high
school comes in contact with educated and intellectual atheists and
has a crisis of faith. Why would we be surprised? Richard Dawkins and
Daniel Dennett are not stupid. They are both highly educated and very
intelligent men. I had the pleasure dining with Daniel Dennet. We had
a good conversation and I do not doubt his intelligence, his argument
against Christianity, however, I find deficient. But if I did not
have a certain level of training in philosophy and logic, I might
have been persuaded. My case, and many others like me, is one in
which education preserved my faith, instead of destroying it.
You
see, when I sensed God calling me into ministry, it was something I
struggled with. I was part of a church and wanted to be more
involved, but I also had other plans for my life. I had a job and
wanted to earn a lot of money. When I got the sense that God wanted
me to serve him in ministry, I did not feel elation, but more of a
dread. Why would God choose me? What would this mean for my family? I
struggled with this for a while and talked with my wife and some
friends who were in the ministry before I finally acknowledged that
this was where God was leading me. For those of you who know me, I am
a bit of a geek. So one of the first things that came to my mind was
“I have no idea how to serve God in ministry.”
I
grown up in a religious area and I had gone to church from time to
time but I was not raised consistently in a church. The first thing
that came to my mind is that I have no skills that I would need to
work in a church. At that point, when I knew God was calling me into
ministry, I began to search for ways to get the training I would need
to be able to serve. And so, I went to seminary and completed three
advanced degrees. Along the way I learned a lot of things about the
way the church works and about the difficult issues that Christians
have to understand and have to be able to deal with if they want to
be honest with themselves.
Christianity
has hard issues. Some of the questions that atheists like Dawkins and
Dennett bring up our genuine questions. There are some difficult
issues that we have to settle in our own minds if we are going to
accept the idea that an infinite God took on humanity and lived as a
human, died on a cross, and was raised on the third day. Too often we
think that answers to these types of questions are simplistic. Too
often we relate these types of answers to emotional experiences that
we had. The challenges that come against Christianity from
intellectual atheists are real challenges, but that does not mean
that they are unsurmountable.
A
large number of thinking Christians have read and responded to the
arguments that Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett leveled against
Christianity and have found them to be lacking. This does not mean
that every Christian should try to understand Dawkins and Dennett and
respond to their charges, but they should at least know that some
have. I think we may have missed opportunities to minister to those
in our congregations when we ignore the genuine challenges to our
faith that are being leveled from the secular world.
As
Christians, we should not shy away from challenges to our faith. We
should not act as if we are supposed to have some kind of a blind
faith. We were never called to have a blind faith. We have reasons
for the hope in us. In our churches we should not settle for a
simplistic faith that denies any substantial challenges and claims
that "everything will be all right" if we just believe. Our
faith should be founded on the hope we have in Jesus Christ and the
robust intellectual tradition that we have as Christians.
But
what do we do with stories about people like Jerry DeWitt? How do we
handle the questions about church leaders who abandon their faith
after a number of years? The first thing is that we don't hide from
it. The earliest church had to deal with apostasy, and so do we. I do
not know whether DeWitt was a born again believer who lost his faith
or if he was someone who never had genuine faith to begin with.
That's something that I can't possibly know or determine on my own.
But I do know that John wrote about people who had left the church
and abandoned their faith in his day. He writes:
“Dear
children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the
antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is
how we know is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not
really belong to us. For if they had belong to us, they would have
remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belong to
us.” 1 John 2:18 – 19
So pastors and church leaders who
abandon their faith after years of service may never have been
genuine believers in the first place. Or it could be that they are
believers who are simply having a crisis of faith. In either case we
should not try to deny the existence of apostasy. Our churches should
have a way of responding to it.
So how should churches respond to
apostasy? In the article about DeWitt there are a number of instances
where he received threat and ridicule from his community. As
Christians, that is a response we cannot allow. Someone who has
abandoned their faith should not be ridiculed, they should be shown
love. I know that we tend to think that someone who has left our
group has betrayed us. But someone who is left the church and
abandoned Jesus Christ has not betrayed us. The church is supposed to
function as the community of God on earth. For someone to claim they
no longer believe is not an offense to a local congregation, it is
between the individual and God.
So as a church we should pray for
them. We should live our lives as an example of the gospel. We should
love them as much as we love any other person that we do not believe
is a follower of Jesus Christ. We should witness to them with our
lives and show the hope we have within us by the way we live, love
one another, and love them.
So for Jerry DeWitt, and all those who
have left the faith and been treated poorly by those who claim the
name of Christ, I wish to extend my apologies. As Christians, we
should be better than that. I hope that we can all come to a point of
caring for, rather than glaring at, those who do not share our faith.
