Tag Archives: God’s love

Book Review: Faith Shift by Kathy Escobar

Posted on February 3, 2016 by | 6 comments

Oh man, oh man, do I love me some Kathy Escobar!Faith-Shift

I started reading Kathy’s blog a couple years ago, and I was hooked.  I don’t have too many blogs that I read EVERY.POST.THEY.EVER.POST.  But I wouldn’t miss anything from Kathy!  Her stuff is pure gold.

In late 2014, she published a book, “Faith Shift: Finding Your Way Forward When Everything You Believe is Coming Apart”.  I had it on my wish list for a long time, finally purchased it with birthday money in September, and FINALLY had a chance to read it a couple weeks ago.  I devoured it.

“Faith Shift” is a book of hope for “spiritual refugees, church burnouts, and freedom seekers.”  In it, Kathy maps out stages of a faith shift, giving language to the painful experience of fundamentally changing from a faith that is certain and features strong affiliation and conformity with your faith community, to a faith that is freer, more mysterious and diverse.

Kathy’s stages, Fusing-Shifting-Returning or Unraveling-Severing-Rebuilding, resonated deeply with my own experiences over the past several years, as well as my long-time love of stage theory and psychology.  In Evangelical Christianity, there is a skepticism with secular fields of psychology, sociology, etc.  There is a push towards Biblical Counseling rather than listening to liberal, humanistic psychobabble.  I made sure to read the two negative reviews of “Faith Shift” on Amazon to see what concerns others may have with this book, and they were primarily along those lines.

If I hadn’t been so focused on becoming a missionary or church musician when I went to college, I probably would have studied psychology.  In hindsight, I realize I hadn’t even considered other pathways to ministry because of the complementarian church culture that I was raised in.  Deep down, I wanted to do Kingdom work.  The only women I had seen doing Kingdom work (that was OK and celebrated in my tradition) were missionaries, musicians, and Women’s Bible Study authors and speakers.  Oh, and let’s not forget mothers, the hands that rock the cradles.

During my freshman year at Gordon College, I took Psych 101 as an elective and loved it.  A lot of my college education is a blur now, but I remember what I learned in that entry-level Psychology class.  So I made sure to take the Psychology elective offered when I was in seminary.  We read a book by James Fowler, “Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning“.  This is one of my favorite books from my seminary education.  Fowler maps faith development in similar ways as Kathy, from assimilation and certainty to “the wall” to a more open, gracious, loving perspective on faith and others.  In a similar vein, I often send an article to friends by Rich Vincent, “Stages of Faith: A Map for the Spiritual Journey“, when I feel they are struggling and need some perspective that they are in process, that it will all turn out OK.  Shorter and easier to read than a book!

As much as I have appreciated Stage Theory and how Christian authors have related this theory to faith development, I could never personally relate to the middle stage, “the journey inward,” or “the wall,” the season of doubt.  My faith had been strong and sure most of my life.  My Fusing stage lasted about 28 years, I would say, and Affiliation, Certainty and Conformity describe those years beautifully.  There were bumps in the road, like when I was afraid that my faith would not mature if I continued to have a “perfect” life, so I prayed for hardship.  Soon one of my best friends died at age 21 and I felt responsible and walked through a deep depression.

Then some more bumps came.  Pretty traumatic ones.  My home church chewed my family up and spit us out (at least that’s what it felt like).  I was rejected by the people who were so much a part of my identity.  My “perfect” family was imploding. God called me (a complementarian!) to pastoral ministry.  I began reading about women in ministry and was warned about the “slippery slope” that I was on.  My affiliation, certainty and conformity were being compromised!

I was Shifting and I didn’t know it.  I wanted people to be real (Authentic), I was baffled to learn that my favorite theologians had said misogynistic, sexist things while I was beginning to see God’s vision for equality and partnership between the sexes, which led me to be uncomfortable with authority figures (Autonomy), and I felt like I needed to study EVERYTHING.FOR.MYSELF (Uncertainty), while again, being real about my struggles and weaknesses–no more projection of perfection.  I became an Ex-Good-Christian-Woman (my FAVORITE Kathy Escobar post!!!).

The way that Kathy writes is utterly gracious.  She never categorizes any part of a faith journey as bad, or better than, or wrong, or anything.  She just lays it out.

Are you experiencing this?  Here is some language to help you understand.
You are not going crazy and you are not alone.   

There was a profound change in the way that I saw God a few years ago while I was watching Brennan Manning preach on YouTube.  I wept as he poured out God’s love and grace in his message that God loves us just as we are, not as we should be.  I have always believed that God is love.  But I think Affiliation, Certainty and Conformity were chains that kept me from experiencing God as love.  There were always rules and expectations and pressures and systems that kept me in check, that made God’s love seem conditional.

Because God’s love is unconditional, I can ask questions without fear or guilt.  I utterly Severed from my Fused faith as I let Brennan Manning confer a God of grace and freedom to me.  I am Rebuilding my faith around this new understanding and am seeing things through this new lens.  I expect to make mistakes and to be a work in progress.  I am full of gratitude to God for being bigger than any box that I had ever put Him in, for loving me and pursuing me and holding me safe.

And I am thankful for Kathy Escobar’s writing and this book in particular, that has helped me to understand my faith development and trust that change is a natural part of being in relationship with God.  Kathy closes “Faith Shift” by saying,

Trust the path ahead, even though you aren’t sure exactly where it will take you.  You’re not lost.  In fact, you’re on a road toward a bigger, better relationship with God, others, and yourself that will continue to develop.

The world doesn’t need more fear-filled, insecure Jesus followers.  It needs more peace-filled, secure ones.  It doesn’t need more people deciding who’s in and who’s out on earth and in eternity.  It needs more men and women who are passionate about drawing everyone toward the love of God.

Throughout the years, I have seen over and over again how this path leads to new beginnings, not endings, if we just keep walking.

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The Ragamuffin Gospel: Chapter 1 – Something is Radically Wrong

Posted on April 15, 2015 by | 2 comments

As I promised on our Facebook page, we will blog ragamuffin gospelalong with our small group discussions of Brennan Manning’s book, “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” Amazon’s number one best-seller under the category of Christian Discipleship.  Now is the perfect time to pick up a copy – it is on sale!  Last April, I blogged about listening to Brennan Manning’s sermons during Lent and how I was impacted by his message of God’s unconditional love.  You can read that post here.  Our group is meeting the first and third Fridays of the month, slowly discussing “The Ragamuffin Gospel” chapter by chapter.  So April 3rd we talked about chapter 1, “Something is Radically Wrong.”

This chapter in a nutshell is talking about American Christianity’s tendency to talk grace but walk works.  We preach a Gospel of grace – “the total sufficiency of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on Calvary” (pg. 15) – but our lives tell a different story.  We have “twisted the gospel of grace into religious bondage and distorted the image of God into an eternal, small-minded bookkeeper” (pg. 16).  We are all striving, striving, striving for approval from God and from our faith communities, emphasizing personal effort over grace.  There are different classes of Christians, where some are given special status because of their works and charisma while others are ignored altogether for their ordinariness.  We hide our darker side from each other and live in a constant state of “existential guilt…[and] Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency.  Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut” (pg. 17).

GUILTragamuffin guilt 1

This was the word that we danced around the most in our conversation, and I have been keenly aware of its presence in conversations with others over the past week.  Guilt is a huge issue for men and women alike, but from a woman’s perspective, I see how guilt has become a perpetual state of being for many of us.  Yet our feeling of guilt–that we are not doing enough as Christians, as parents, as spouses, as family members, as employees, as citizens of the world–is a blatant rejection of the gospel of grace.  The solution is to admit our “shadow side” and accept that there is nothing we can earn by works.  All is a gift.  We must find our identity in our acceptance and love from God and not in how we perform.  Manning expresses this beautifully in this quote from page 25:

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes.  I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty.  I am trusting and suspicious.  I am honest and I still play games.  Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark.  In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.  As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.”

The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes.  It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches.  For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift.  All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God.  While there is much we may have earned–our degree, our salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite, and a good night’s sleep–all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love.  We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh.  We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt.  This and so much more is sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfulness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer.  Even our fidelity is a gift.  “If we but turn to God,” said St. Augustine, “that itself is a gift of God.”  My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

ragamuffin guilt 2

Let me leave this post with a few more quotes:

“Justification by grace through faith” is the theologian’s learned phrase for what Chesterton once called “the furious love of God.”  He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change.  He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us.  He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners.  False gods–the gods of human manufacturing–despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do” (pg. 20).

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there.  No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle (pg. 23).

As a sinner who has been redeemed, I can acknowledge that I am often unloving, irritable, angry, and resentful with those closest to me.  When I go to church I can leave my white hat at home and admit I have failed.  God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am.  Because of this I don’t need to apply spiritual cosmetics to make myself presentable to Him.  I can accept ownership of my poverty and powerlessness and neediness (pg. 23).

Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted (pg. 28).

Often I have been asked, “Brennan, how is it possible that you became an alcoholic after you got saved?”  It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure; because I got discouraged, uncertain, guilt-ridden, and took my eyes off Jesus.  Because the Christ-encounter did not transfigure me into an angel.  Because  justification by grace through faith means I have been set in right relationship with God, not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table” (pgs. 30-31).

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The Search for Identity: Healing Our Image of God and Of Ourselves

Posted on September 28, 2014 by | 5 comments

We primarily associate the search for identity with a phase of life occurring during the teen years.  Young people are expected to be “finding themselves,” questioning the messages they receive from authority figures, pushing boundaries, etc.  My experience is showing me that the search for identity continues beyond adolescence and may be a life-long process.

We are all asking the same existential questions:

What are we about?
Why are we here?
Where are we going?

And to answer these questions, we invest our energy in these things:

We are what we do.
We are what others say about us.
We are what we have.

As long as we are experiencing success and people are saying good things about us, or we are living comfortably and enjoying good relationships, we can feel OK.  But when we face failures, when others’ disapprove of us, when we lose people and things that are dear to us, then we may experience an existential crisis.

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My earth-shattering existential crisis occurred when I was 30 years old (four years ago…in case you were wondering!:).  There have been small bumps and jolts along my journey that have caused me to question things before, but at thirty I faced a tidal-wave of paradigm-shifting crap heaped up on my life that turned everything upside down and left me at ground zero.  My greatest discovery as I rebuilt my life was that I was finding my identity apart from God.  I was finding my identity in what I did, what others said about me, and what I had.  All my life, I have loved God and His Church.  But for the first time in my life, I am now living as one beloved by God.  And I am finally experiencing fullness of life and freedom in Christ!

All humans are created imago dei (in the image of God) and only in finding our identity in God can we experience life in all its fullness.  We need to recover the image of God in our lives by finding our ultimate identity in reflecting and representing God on earth – as His beloved children.

Living imago dei means finding your identity “from Him and to Him and through Him” (Romans 11:36).

To understand what it means to live imago dei, let’s first look at the Creation account in Genesis 1.  Verse 27 says,

So God created humankind in His own image, in the image
of God He created them; male and female He created them.

Conservative scholars agree that the author of the book of Genesis was Moses, writing around 3,500 years ago.  This was during a time when emperors placed statues of themselves throughout their kingdoms, signifying who was in charge.  These statues would loom over town centers and were often made of precious metals and stones.

When my brother and I were backpacking through Europe, we visited a museum of communist and Nazi statues from the mid-20th century.  These huge statues had been formidable, oppressive symbols for the people who lived with them in their midst.  When Sadam Hussein’s regime fell, I have vivid memories of watching newscasts of people tearing down his statues, with tremendous effort and emotion.

Statue of Saddam being toppled in Firdos Square after the US invasion

Statue of Saddam being toppled in Firdos Square after the US invasion

When we think of these images of emperors being a normal aspect of life during the time of Moses, the beauty of God placing humankind as His image on earth is astounding.  We were created to represent God’s glory and diety on earth.  In heaven, it is clear who is in charge as God sits on His throne and is worshipped in a non-stop chorus of hosannas.  On earth, God has given us the choice to worship Him or not.  And He has given authority to humankind to rule and steward His creation.  And yet, unlike the emperors’ statues, who were made from precious metals and stones, we were made from the dust of the earth.

It is important to recognize two things about humanity from the Creation account:

1.  We are made for DIGNITY – to represent God’s glory and diety on earth
2.  We are HUMBLE creations – made from dust, not diety ourselves

Whether or not we are living our lives in devotion to God, every human being has dignity and value as image bearers of God.  This is common grace for all.  To live fully imago dei, however, goes beyond our creation as God’s image bearers.  It also means finding our identity as image bearers, living “from Him..to Him…[and] through Him.”

Living imago dei means finding our source, purpose and meaning in God

There are three aspects to finding our identity as image bearers of God:

1.  Live in communion with God
2.  Live in community with others
3.  Steward creation the way God does

In struggling with our identity, we tend to start in the opposite order:

Do something…
Then ask for help from others…
Then, in a last ditch effort, quiet yourself and spend time with God.

So the first step towards living imago dei requires knowing God.

In healing our image of God, we heal our image of ourselves.

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“We have seen His glory, the glory of an only Son, filled with enduring love.” (John 1:14)

“May Christ grow in your heart by faith, and may love grow…that you will be able to grasp how wide, how long, how high and how deep is God’s love which is beyond all knowledge, that you may be filled with the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17-19)

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God…for God is love.  By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.” (1 John 4:7-9)

God is love — and you are God’s beloved!

In healing our image of God, Jesus frees us from fear of the Father and dislike of ourselves.  If not, you still have not accepted the total sufficiency of His redeeming work.

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The problem: our image of God (how we see God) reflects more of our experience with humankind.

god-in-mans-image

In this short video, Greg Boyd explains why it is that many of us picture God as angry and vindictive, and how any conception of God that is other than what we find in Christ is a mischaracterization:

http://view.vzaar.com/1971665/flashplayer

(Or see it here: http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/making-god-in-our-own-image).

If we do not know God, then we cannot live fully imago dei.

Not only do we believe lies about who God is – but we believe lies about who we are and where we “should” be finding our identity.  These lies come from our society at large, the media, our families, our faith communities, etc.

Stop Shoulding Yourself

Lies make us feel as though we are less than, unworthy, freaks, frauds and failures.  While God loves us as we are and not as we should be, we get a different message from society.  We “should” find our worth in our accomplishments, appearance, education, gender, feminity or masculinity, occupation, race, sexuality, social networks, spirituality, wealth, etc.

The reason these lies are so ingrained in our psyches:  SOCIALIZATION.

We are socialized to believe certain lies about our identities through three processes:

1. Modeling (how we observe others behaving)
2. Overt Instruction (how we were instructed to behave)
3. Reinforcement (positive or negative responses to our behavior)

Our socialization results in cognitive lenses through which we understand the world and ourselves.

Socialization is POWERFUL.  Through our cognitive lenses, we learn to associate or assign meaning to words in a process that occurs in one-seventh-of-a-millionth second.

For example: when we hear “woman” we may associate that (in less than one- seventh-of-a-millionth second!) with “helper.”  This association comes from the most common translation of ezer from the Creation account.

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable (ezer kenegdo) for him.'” Genesis 2:18

Early translators viewed the Bible from a cognitive lens of gender hierarchy as God’s design (through the influence of St. Augustine’s writings, who describes Plato–a philosopher who saw educated, wealthy men as the pinnacle of society who ought to govern over the women, slaves and children–as the lens through which he understood the Bible).  So although other instances of ezer throughout the Old Testament show God swooping in as a warrior in battle to “help” turn the tide towards victory, the translation chosen denotes subjection and male authority.  A truer translation of ezer kenegdo would be “corresponding strength,” with Eve as co-warrior alongside Adam.  As women, we have valuable strength to contribute to our churches, families, and communities.

These are helpful questions to begin to peel away the onion-layers of lies that have influenced our identity formation:

What are my cultural lenses?
What has my role modeling been?
What has my instruction been?
What has my reinforcement been?
How has my socialization impacted my search for identity – the purpose, meaning and goal of my life?

Christian women in Western society have been socialized to believe that a feminine, nurturing and submissive homemaker is the ideal Christian woman.  Rather than finding our identity in God and living boldly and freely as ezer-warriors in authority over Creation, we are socialized to live small, inhibited lives, so as not to rock the boat or make waves.

Kathy Escobar shared these lists on her blog, comparing Good Christian Women to Ex-Good Christian Women.  Which list do you identify with more?

i know these are generalizations, but in my experience a lot of “good-christian-women”:

  • rarely engage in conflict
  • are terrible at saying “no” because it feels selfish
  • know how to say the right things, do the right things, to keep the peace
  • continually strive–and i do mean strive–to be a better wife, better mother, better christian
  • live with a feeling that God is disappointed with us somehow
  • feel a lot of shame for who we are and who we aren’t (but rarely say it out loud)
  • doubt our leadership, feelings, gifts, dreams
  • dwell on the things we should be doing differently or better 
  • view anger as sin
  • always seek permission 

here are some characteristics of those of us with the “ex” added.  “ex-good-christian-women”:

  • are learning to show up in relationship instead of hiding
  • engage in conflict instead of avoid it
  • say “no” with less-and-less guilt and say “yes” more freely, more honestly
  • tell the truth
  • respect anger
  • are honest about shame
  • live in the present 
  • are beginning to believe we are “enough”–here, now
  • open ourselves up to dreams & passions & living out what God is stirring up in us
  • lead & love & live in all kinds of new ways, with or without permission
  • are discovering that God is much bigger than we were ever taught & loves us more than we ever knew

Our sisters, both locally and globally, need us to step into our calling as ezer-warriors, living fully and abundantly as beloved and equal daughters of God, creating a ripple effect that erodes the lies from our neighborhoods and the world at large.

Living imago dei means finding your identity
“from Him and to Him and through Him.” 

God loves you as you are, not as you should be.
We all need to learn to live for an audience of One,
and “stop shoulding on ourselves.”

The best summary I can come up with is this Love letter from Jesus:

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With much love,

                   Jesus

This post is adapted from a talk I did at a women’s retreat earlier this month.  I shared the books, sermons and articles I referenced in this post, Imago Dei Resources.

On the retreat, it was much more of a conversation with dialogue about lies that we struggle with.  Please feel free to join that conversation in our Comments section!  What lies have you been trying to peel away, that keep you from living fully imago dei?

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