here I stand ?

Well, James suggested that after a while of saying I didn't feel like an Evangelical any more, it was time to try to nail what the issue (or issues) is (or are).  I tend to be rather conciliatory when speaking face-to-face, and rather naturally slot into Evangelical language which is so deeply ingrained on my psyche.  So maybe a blog post will help.

The first problem of definition arises because a lot of the changes I've seen in how I believe are not so much rejections of old things as embracing of the new.  And where I do think I've stopped holding to the former things, it's often not so much an out-and-out repudiation, as a shift of emphasis.  Although I've realised in a few stark ways that people I once regarded as fellow-travellers I now regard with great suspicion, far more often I just want to replace a hand which holds tightly to some doctrine to one which has a looser grip.  Often I want to say "isn't there another way to look at this", or I'm just happy to replace certainty with doubt.

Doing such things doesn't immediately lead you to give up entirely on former understandings.  It's more about a way of believing than a set of beliefs.  And yet, for all that Evangelicals (and a wider Protestant church) have tended to define themselves by propositional statements and nice black-and-white answers, it is the way of believing which is just as important.  So I can tick all the boxes, and still not believe like an Evangelical, because I no longer have the same approach to what believing is all about.  Periodically I go and re-read the doctrinal basis of the Evangelical Alliance, to see if it's time to resign my membership.  I'm finding some of the clauses a bit shaky, but I don't actually disbelieve any yet - or didn't, last time I seriously considered it.  I just wouldn't sum up the faith that way.

I've never been entirely enamoured with such doctrinal statements: I remember my great amusement as an undergraduate at the DB being read aloud prior to the installation of a new OICCU president: the words seemed to be treated with more reverence than scripture.  And I was very enamoured of Rob Bell's illustration that doing theology ought not to be like defending a wall (made from bricks of systematic theology) but rather like jumping on a trampoline, and inviting others to jump too (the springs being capable of being taken out - in small number - and flexed, stretched, and investigated, without making the whole thing collapse).

I'm not likely to get thrown out of the church for stretching a few springs, but you might have guessed that I think there's more going on than that.  So, over the next few posts - which could take some time - I want to explore some totemic issues where my thinking has developed.  I think the list might be something like this (but this isn't necessarily a table of contents for the next few blog posts):

• the bible
• the gospel and salvation 
• prayer (perhaps a reprise of this post)
• belief (perhaps a reprise of several recent posts)
• existence
• spiritual formation
• the gathered life of the church
• sexuality

I feel as if this could be an awfully big adventure.  Perhaps there's a lot riding - for me, and my role in Northway Church - on what I say next.  But perhaps the time has come to start saying it and see what happens.