Changing Beliefs

I think at the moment I'm in serious detox-mode: I've just been fed so much garbage from the institutional church, that I really don't know what's right and what's wrong anymore. I hold fast to the message of grace, of course, but am still unsure about a lot of things such as the role of prayer, healing, miracles, prosperity and so on.

I believe what’s helping me at this stage in my life are the podcasts I am listening to. I've been listening to Growing in Grace, The God Journey and The Free Believers Network: "Into the Wild". I've downloaded as much as I can of these podcasts and am mostly listening to Into the Wild. This podcast does "sail close the wind", but I feel I'm in serious need of Christians being totally genuine and down-to-earth; instead of Christians who are puffed-up with all kinds of unrealistic goals and talking about incredible miracles from fifty years ago.

I'm absolutely amazed at the frankness of these podcasts, especially The God Journey and Into the Wild. I also enjoy the humour of these people. I thought it was rather weird at first because the first five minutes or so of the podcast which just everyday chit-chat. But I got used to it and rather enjoy it now because it sort of relaxes you and “tunes you in” to the discussion. I also like the way that it is not a direct teaching like most Christians are used to: it is just a discussion, a conversation of ex-pastors and people who have been disillusioned by the institutional church.

I like the way that the hosts of these podcasts admit that in a lot of areas of Christianity they don't have the "right" answers - and that is acceptable. When it comes to Christian formulas and pat answers that we have been used to in the institutional church, I particularly like the Into the Wild podcast entitled The Unteachable Truth.

For a long time Christians have been trained to believe that they have to have an answer for absolutely everything. It amazes me that the and even books in Christian bookshops that give quick, pat answers to difficult questions of life such as abortion, euphemism and the like. But the attitude that I gather from the hosts of The God Journey and Into the Wild, are that it's okay to not have answers to everything. I get the impression that these hosts have only just discarded all the religious nonsense that they had been programmed with for so long; that there are still many Christian concepts that they are still unsure about such as healing, miracles, prosperity and so on.

Darin Hufford likens institutional church concepts to a huge web of tangled lies that have been constructed over years to support one concept after another. But as soon as you see just one of these concepts as being a lie, it causes you to also question many of the other concepts that you were told true. I agree entirely with what Darin and the hosts of these podcasts say in that as soon as you start looking at some of these traditional Christian concepts through the lens of love -- you see them in a completely new light. It seems to me that for too long, the church has been substituting love and living according to what your heart tells you is right, with principles, rules and formulas.