I spent Saturday at the Journey Warehouse getting to hear from Pete Rollins. In all, it was a fantastic day. Besides getting an entire day to hang out with adults (without the kids) and getting to listen to Pete, I got to hang out with really cool people. It was great to see Laci Scott again and to finally meet Glenn Barbier, and Adam and Brooke Moore. Good times.
But of course the point of the day was to listen and learn from Pete. Which was of course amazing. It was refreshing to be around someone so unapologetically intellectual. At one point I asked him how those who aren’t intellectual or cultural creatives find a voice in his community Ikon and he simply replied that he just makes them that way. That he believes that all people are capable of creativity and thinking, all they need is encouragement. For once it was just stinking nice to not hear excuses or apologies for thinking deeply. And there was a lot of deep thoughts being thrown around yesterday. I’m not going to bother trying to summarize his talk – just highlight a couple of things.
I loved his portrayal of the church as a fetish. He describes our approach to church as like a child to a security blanket – something that protects us from dealing with life as it really is. We use church to escape from reality instead of engaging that reality. So we sing with certainity about justice but don’t actually do it. The church is actually what stands in the way of our transforming the world. Pete insists instead that church needs to become the place where there is no certainty – where we are free to doubt and question and seek. But that as we enter the world we are to live with certainty – to live as if God exists (no matter what we believe) and to live by his call to justice. It is our everyday lives that should be lived radically for transformation. We need to get over church as an impotent force that inhibits life, but make it alive by making it unstable and unsure.
I also was intrigued by his challenging of fellow Belfast native C.S. Lewis (and Chesterton) on the subject of longing for God. As Chesterton suggested that every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God, but Pete asked “what if he is really just looking for sex?” He explored how we often use God as an excuse for our longings. We desire comfort or meaning in life and so find that in church but give it the name God (relating back to the fetish thing). This actually dismisses God and belittles him. The point isn’t that we all have a “God-shaped hole” that causes us to long for God, but that when we long for God he shows up in the form of the God-shaped hole. The idea isn’t “seek and THEN you shall find” but that the seeking is the finding. The need for God is created by the desire for God. The illustration Pete used was that of parents who say their life was incomplete before they had kids. But technically before that point their life wasn’t really incomplete. We can’t go around saying that single people are incomplete because they don’t have kids. But the statement is true in that once the couple had a child, the incompleteness appeared retroactively. Once they have the child, and only then, they can truly say that their life was incomplete before. Once we seek for God we start seeking him. I liked this take on things because it helps get around many of the imperialistic overtones to evangelical discourse. Instead of telling people that we understand their desires better than they themselves, we can start to understand them as they are. It moves us from a position of superiority to that of friend. But at the same time I find it so hard to question ideas that are so ingrained in evangelical thought (especially for a post-wheatie) that they are assumed to be biblical.
Okay I should probably stop rambling and butchering these ideas and just tell you to go hear Pete or read his books. What he’s saying is brilliant – it challenges assumptions but also pushes us out to live rightly. This is intellectualism – but real life intellectualism. Thinking deeply about real life and how we live – this is the stuff we all need, even when it shakes us up.