I'm back!!

I am re-activating my blog! It has been a while since I’ve written for public viewing, as I’ve had to deal with personal issues.

An update on my life: I am back from Arizona and living at home, trying to find a job. After much irritation, I have graduated from Calvin College with my BA in psychology. I have been accepted to the Masters of Divinity programs at Trinity Evangelical, Western (Holland), Princeton, and Fuller, and the PhD. in clinical psychology at Fuller.

Due to the life-altering events of the last several months, I have re-evaluated my priorities, and that has implications on my future. When I decided to study religion and be pre-seminary, I did so without clear career objectives in mind. Being a minister/ pastor never seemed right for some reason.

When I got to Calvin, I wanted to explore my potential call to ministry, which had happened the year before. I was very focused on theology—I didn’t go to churches that believed in traditional gender roles/ women not being pastors. I became fixated on the issue of women in ministry, but I wonder now if that was merely a front for the possibility that I was not being called to ministry. It’s possible that my frustration about gender and the church was an excuse because I actually didn’t want to be a pastor.

I did the Jubilee Fellows class in the spring and did my internship that summer. Heartland was the best experience of my life. I came to this church that was so genuine and raw. The people I met were unabashedly struggling, perhaps with alcoholism, family issues, financial problems, whatever, but they were followers of Christ. They really believed Jesus could save them from it all—and often, He did.

For the last year or so, I had found “Christianity” to be synonymous with “fake” and “inauthentic.” This refreshingly real church provided healing to my soul. At the end of the summer, I went to a Celebrate Recovery conference at Rick Warren’s church in California. There, our group had a bonfire, at which we all told how God had delivered us from our struggles.

I wasn’t planning on telling them anything. I was used to hiding my secrets from others, and this was no exception. Somehow, however, it came out… my pent up pain, my “secret.”

I was convinced that everyone would judge me, now that they knew. All I got were hugs and Kleenex for my tears. They accepted me, and they told me that God accepted me. That moment was pivotal in my life. Never before had I met Christians who were so real about their issues and didn’t try to sugarcoat the hell of addiction. It was around then that I started planning to go to Arizona as soon as I graduated (although it didn’t exactly work out that way).

At that moment, theology became a real love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus was not some fake happy person who wanted me to just “man up” and be happy because Christians shouldn’t have problems. He felt my pain, on a gut-wrenching, visceral level, and He loved me even in spite of this.

Over the course of the summer, I began questioning my love of theology, perhaps as a career.

At the church, I realized how easy it is for my to over-intellectualize God, rather than dwell and live in Him. Knowledge about is not equivalent to knowing. I knew a lot ABOUT God, but I didn’t really know Him.

Rockford was a very blue-collar town, and no one had much theological training. Yet, these people KNEW God in a real way. I learned there that theology can be a stumbling block. I can read 5 commentaries about the book of John, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I can live out and BELIEVE the Jesus portrayed in the book of John. Theology can be an idol. Jesus most criticized the Pharisees, those who knew so much and didn’t put it into practice. Jesus loved when people just trusted and followed Him—people who had the faith of a child running into Father’s arms.

Maybe I knew a lot academically, but I was realizing how much I didn’t know about following Christ.

That summer, I got a lot of feedback about tasks at which I excelled and didn’t excel. Heartland was large enough for me to get involved with a variety of projects. My favorite was Monvee, new spiritual growth software. I also worked with the head of pastoral care, and I enjoyed that very much. I gravitated, interestingly, to most of the non-pastoral roles in the church. I was interested in research-related projects, ones in which I could combine theology and psychology.

People who worked with me validated my academic inclinations and propensity to look deeply into the underlying theological-psychological aspects of the church. It was obvious that youth ministry was not my thing, and neither was business.

I came from the church convinced that true Christianity was about surrendering all over to Christ and following Him every day. I believe that people who don’t understand the Trinity will go to Heaven. Yet, I am not sure that the skeptical person who knows every intellectual model for the Trinity but doesn’t really believe in God will go to Heaven. Theology is not nearly as important as life change.

That fall, I wanted to find a church at Calvin that was like Heartland—a church that wanted people to address their issues and follow Christ. I threw the “women’s ministry” issue out the window. If a church loved Jesus and believed in traditional gender roles, I would attend it. Gender roles are secondary to the Gospel.

I wasn’t in Grand Rapids for long after finding a solid church. I soon left for Arizona. My program in Arizona was Christian-based, and we had daily chapel. All of the staff were Christian, and most of the patients were Christian.

There, it became even more evident to me that theology is nothing if not met with devotion to Him. I met girls who loved Jesus but were struggling with the same things I was struggling with. The faith here was so raw. There were few discussions about eschatology or church politics or gay marriage. It was more, “How can I get through this day without doing behaviors? Can I trust God with my life?”

Intellectual arguments rarely win people over to Christ. Those who aren’t Christians can list off a string of problems they have with doctrine. Yes, these questions should be addressed and answered, but it is not about intellect so much as it is about the heart.

The people I’ve met who don’t follow Christ often have:

- had a bad experience with another Christian/ group of Christians, and they don’t want anything to do with it

- no desire to follow God because there’s no reason for them to- they have faith in something else- reason, science, the government, an addiction whatever

- negative feelings toward God- something has perhaps happened to them/ a family member and they are angry at God over it

Those are the real reasons they don’t follow Christ.

I am interested in the 3rd reason people aren’t Christians. This is the boy who has prayed for years that God would take away his chronic pain and He hasn’t… so he stopped pain. This is the person caught in the thrust of addiction, who can’t see a way out. This is the woman who can’t wake up each day because she’s so hopeless, and God is so distant. This is where psychology and theology start to interact.

Mental health and religion are directly correlated. Mental illness is a nasty thing, and it takes sufferers away from God and the life He has for them. The church can have issues addressing personal problems inhibiting them from following Christ.
It is easy to cast psychological issues as faith deficiencies (“If I trusted God more, I wouldn’t worry”), rather than addressing the possibility that anxiety and depression might be from biological problems. Other churches don’t address psychology at all, leaving that to the “secular realm.”

For spiritual growth to happen, however, congregants must be psychologically healthy. It is an issue that impacts the church.
I wrote my senior thesis last year about biblical counseling, which describes conservative evangelicals’ issues with psychology. Some people dismiss psychology as a godless discipline and promote Christian counseling instead.

Now that I’ve viewed Christianity from many lenses, I believe the integration and interaction between psychology and theology is shaky, at best.

I have pretty much ruled out the possibility of being a pastor, and I believe getting a doctorate in theology will still not be the right path for me. I am hoping to go to Fuller Theological Seminary next year to study clinical psychology, hoping to bridge the gap between solid clinical psychology and theology and the church. At Fuller, I would still get a masters in theology, so I would get both psychological and theological degrees.

I have yet to make up my mind, so stay tuned.