"Seeker" Service

I talked to Thea today, who attended last Sunday's service at St. Stephen for the first time. Thea is a true "seeker," exactly the sort of person that we in the church really don't know how to serve. All the church growth literature these days talks about "seekers," a generic term for people looking for God, but who have needs that we "traditionalists" don't address very well. They may believe in God, or not; or consider themselves Christian, or not; but for whatever reason "church" doesn't seem to meet their needs.

Thea is probably the most genuine "seeker" you'll ever meet--she's even blogging about it, www.theameetsgod.blogspot.com . She's a divorced single parent, between jobs in a bad economy, with lots of worries. She's sought God in all sorts of ways. She attended one mainline denomination and was on the path to be confirmed but was told she had too many questions. She has tried prayer and other spiritual practices. Now she's decided that she's going to study and attend a different religion a week and blog about it.

What's hard for her is that she's in an emotionally difficult position and doesn't "feel" God there--God seems detached, indifferent, perhaps even non-existent. I can relate. Several years ago, when I was having a very hard time at a church, I started struggling with the same doubts. Why was it that things I was trying to do to serve Christ and benefit others were turning out so badly? Why was that things were going personally so badly for me? Why did God seem "so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?" (Psalm 22: 1) I had no sense of God's presence or God's answer to my prayers.

I developed an interest in Christian mysticism at that time. I was deeply moved by John of the Cross, a 16th Century Spanish mystic who wrote "The Dark Night of the Soul," about his struggle with exactly that issue. But his struggle made mine sound like a walk in the park. Here was a man whose life was dedicated to prayer and service of God, and he described such a deep pit of despair that even in my darkest moments I could not grasp--what we moderns might call anhedonia, a complete inability to take pleasure in anything, no doubt a side effect of a deep-seated case of depression.

John had based much of his certainty that God loved him and was with him on feeling that God loved him and was with him, a feeling that he got from prayer, from worship, from doing good things for others. But now the feeling was gone. Had God abandoned him?

Despite this deep Slough of Despond (as Bunyan calls it in Pilgrim's Progress), John refused to give up. He challenged the still-popular notion that feelings of God's nearness are either our reward or our indication that God is with us. Faith, he taught, is deeper than feelings, deeper than thought. Somehow he learned to have faith that God was near him even when he felt the distance was impossibly great. He somehow believed that God loved him in spite of his overwhelming feeling that this was impossible--that he was too great a sinner, that God not only was not near him but had in fact rejected him. He continued to pray, to worship, to do good works, despite the fact that he felt no sense of pleasure in them but often only burden bordering on despair.

My despair wasn't as great as his, and trust me, my faith isn't as great as his, either. Nonetheless, I was taken by his point: the greatest faith we can have is to believe that God loves us despite the fact that our feelings, our mind, our experience--our everything--tells us this just couldn't be true; to believe that God is near to us when we know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that it couldn't be true.

Thea and I talked about this, and about other things. My sense is that she, and other "seekers," are frustrated by the same thing about churches--our presumption that we have the answers and our refusal to tolerate much questioning. She seemed to represent well a demographic that Christianity is failing to reach--intelligent people who are turned off by Christians who promulgate a literalist interpretation of the Bible at the expense of modern science; good people who are turned off by the exclusivity and cruelty of many Christians toward gays or people of other faiths; people longing for a loving, accepting God because they themselves feel abandoned or alienated. Most of all, they want to go someplace where they are welcomed with all their questions, flaws, and quirks, as children of God, beloved of God, by people willing to get to know them in their uniqueness, and to love them for it.

In that sense, aren't we all seekers? The challenge is to be the church that does that.