{"id":4047,"date":"2017-06-06T15:48:12","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T20:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedisciplemaker.org\/?p=4047"},"modified":"2017-06-06T15:48:12","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T20:48:12","slug":"why-i-had-to-deconvert-to-find-my-back-to-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.navpress.com\/sites\/thedisciplemaker\/2017\/06\/why-i-had-to-deconvert-to-find-my-back-to-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Had to Deconvert to Find My Way Back to God"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

Some people come to faith easy. Some people come to faith hard. I was one of the hard ones. I was not an easy believer. I was a hard study. Rebellion runs in my veins and rushes through my brain. I went through the wringer, and I put my parents through the wringer.
\nMy rebellious nature put every member of the family through that wringer in one way or another. My first seventeen years of life I lived the Christian faith through the loins and lens of my parents, mainly Mother. But when I was seventeen, I dramatically deconverted.<\/strong>
\nI wish I had a deconversion story worthy of Augustine, but I don\u2019t. Augustine was brought up by a Christian mother (Monica) in the hills of Numidia, now eastern Algeria. He was deconverted by reading Cicero\u2019s Hortensius, and finding the literary and moral standards of Cicero superior to what he found in the Scriptures, for example, polygamy in Genesis and differing genealogies in the Gospels. He could not shake off the faith of his mother, and eventually he reconnected to Christianity.
\nI don\u2019t have a testimony that glorious, but I can date my deconversion down to the song and verse and one particular never-to-be-forgotten moment of decision. I was playing the organ for the \u201cGreat Preaching\u201d Sunday morning worship that concluded the eight-day Pine Grove camp meeting that the Genesee Conference of the Free Methodist Church conducted each year at Saratoga Springs, New York. In the front row sat Linda, the girl I was dating. I thought I was pretty hot stuff, and I couldn\u2019t wait until the end of the invitation song to get what I thought would be my good-bye kiss.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nOn the third of six verses of the invitational hymn \u201cSoftly and Tenderly,\u201d out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mother\u2019s best friend Ruth get out of her seat toward the back of the tabernacle and \u201chit the sawdust trail,\u201d as they used to call it. I couldn\u2019t believe my eyes. Ruth Kuhn was the closest thing I knew to a saint, next to Mother. She was the one I called on the phone when I feared that the Rapture had taken place: If she answered, I would quickly hang up and breathe a big sigh of relief, knowing that we had not been left behind.
\nRuth, the person on whom I banked all my eschatological hopes, was making her way up to the altar. But then she kept going, coming right up to me. She threw herself on me and got medieval:<\/strong> \u201cNow is your appointed time, Lenny! Now is your time!\u201d She began pulling me off the organ bench onto the altar below.
\nWhat\u2019s the worst thing that can happen to a seventeen-year old? Especially one who is dating the district superintendent\u2019s daughter? At first I tried ignoring Ruth, hoping she\u2019d go away. I had years of practice ignoring pulls at heart strings. \u201cI shall not be moved\u201d was my theme song growing up, my fingers rooted in the back of the pew, while listening to the yammering and sometimes hammering of the most heart-wrenching altar calls ever given.
\nThe cold shoulder wasn\u2019t working on Ruth, so I tried reasoning with her. \u201cIf I were to go to the altar with you, Ruth, who would play the organ? We\u2019d have to end the service.\u201d
\nHer entreaties only became louder: \u201cThe Lord will provide, Lenny. You just go. The Lord will send angels to play in your place. Now is your appointed time!\u201d
\nI tried shoo-shooing her away. But the more I tried to push Ruth away, the more determined she was to haul me to the altar.\u00a0That\u2019s when it hit me: You\u2019re playing for your own altar call!<\/strong>
\nRuth kept wailing and wrenching me off the bench. I keep playing and singing inside, \u201cI shall, I shall, I shall not be moved.\u201d The harder she pulled, the louder I played and inwardly sang. When we arrived at the third verse, she suddenly stopped. She shook herself off, turned around, and retraced her steps back to her seat. About a third of the way down the center aisle, she stopped, hung her head, and shook it emphatically a couple of times.
\n 
\nWhen I saw that shake of her head, I knew the semiotics of what that meant. Ruth was symbolically releasing me to the devil. In her mind I had quenched the Spirit, the one unpardonable sin, and from now on I was on my own, with no protection from God.
\nWhen I saw her do that, I said to myself, I\u2019m out of here. I no longer believe there is a God, but if you do exist, God, I hate you. I want nothing to do with you. That was the moment of my deconversion, my faith-toppling moment\u2014during my own altar call.
\nThere are thresholds we can cross. We have a language of never-agains which demonstrate this:
\n\u201cThat\u2019s one time too many.\u201d
\n\u201cYou\u2019ve pushed me on too far.\u201d
\n\u201cYou went over the line this time.\u201d
\n\u201cI\u2019ve had it up to here.\u201d
\n\u201cThat\u2019s the last straw.\u201d
\nThe shaking of the head pushed me over the threshold.
\nWhen Mother came up to me afterward, it was as if I had contracted Tourette\u2019s syndrome. I couldn\u2019t stop swearing; I spewed out every swear word I had ever heard but never uttered. For those present, my flood of filth just confirmed the verdict of the shaking head.
\nI never saw or heard from Linda again.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\n 
\nSome people plant wild oats. For the next six years I planted a prairie.\u00a0I became an atheist who told people\u2014even told God\u2014that I didn\u2019t believe in God.
\nThe irony was that it was only after my deconversion that God started working on me big time. I was no longer talking to God through my parents. I was talking to God directly.<\/strong> I was now engaged in a conversation, and that conversation was the beginning of a relationship that has brought me to where I am today. What does God want more than anything from us? A relationship. And even an argumentative and negative relationship is better than rote and ritual obedience.
\nThe minute I deconverted, I began a very passionate and personal quest to determine what was truth with a capital T. I went on pilgrimage, visiting Marx and Mao, Buddha and Krishna, rock and pop, Eastern religions and no religion. As an apostate reprobate, that impenitent thief on the cross was one of my heroes, my patron saint, even: defiant, glacial, impermeable.
\nTo say I broke Mother\u2019s heart with my rifts, ructions, and rebellions would be an understatement. My rejection of faith was a double blow: Because of her gender, she could not fulfill her mission, but I could. It hit me one day what was at stake for Mother: Sometimes she would break down and let me know how hard she was praying for me. \u201cIf I don\u2019t,\u201d she said with fear in her eyes, \u201cI may never see you again.\u201d
\nThe key component of every liminality, as anthropologist Victor Turner noted, is that river water that has become murky wetlands or swampy streams keeps tracking with the river. In liminal stages of life, you need to leave the main river so that the toxins can get removed and the water cleansed. But all the while that purifying process is taking place, you must keep tracking alongside the river so that you can return to it. And when you return to the river, you enter it with a higher degree of passion and purity than when you left it.<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s what happened to me during college and graduate studies. During my six years of atheism, I stayed connected with Christianity in a unique \u201ctracking.\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m no longer in that river,\u201d but I kept engaging it intellectually.
\nDuring my seminary education, I had a requirement of field education, meaning I had to work in a church setting. My major faculty mentor invited me to be his teaching assistant so I wouldn\u2019t have to do church work. But the dean of students, a chain-smoking Episcopal priest named Joseph A. Pelham vetoed the exception.
\nSo there I was, headed to a Presbyterian church for supervised ministry when I wanted nothing to do with the church. I was not happy, but I wanted my A, so I had to do what I was assigned. A marvelous pastor, C. Frederick Yoos, helped me fall in love with Jesus and the church again. He was a wonderful preacher, a fantastic pastor, and a skilled mentor. Under his tutelage, and that of a Lutheran campus pastor Fred Lassen, I saw how the church is the sleeping giant of our time\u2014the most underrated power for good in the world today.<\/strong>
\nOur head wants to know God, but our heart wants to be known by God. The more my head was buzzing, the more my heart was growing in its desires.
\nOne day Pastor Yoos sent me on a blind pastoral call to someone in need. I had no idea what I would find. He just told me I was going to have to handle it pastorally. I was sent to the home of Margey Wilke, and I found her crying when she answered the door. It was the anniversary of her husband\u2019s death in Vietnam. I had a number of friends that had been killed or maimed there, and it suddenly hit me that Margey\u2019s husband could have been me. But for the grace of God I could have been killed in Vietnam. Why was I still alive, when so many I knew weren\u2019t?
\n

\"\"<\/a>
Click to keep reading Mother Tongue.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\n 
\nAs I started to minister to Margey, she ministered to me. And I ended my first \u201cpastoral call\u201d on my knees in her living room, asking God to forgive me and for Christ to come into my life.
\nBefore I deconverted, I was nominally a disciple. I was living a religion through my parents. I had a hand-faith, a faith that went through all the motions, but with no head and no heart. It is now clear to me that I had to go away in order to come back.<\/p>\n
\n

You’ve been reading from Len Sweet’s Mother Tongue: How Our Heritage Shapes Our Story<\/em>. Keep reading here <\/a>or visit Len’s website at preachthestory.com.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some people come to faith easy. Some people come to faith hard. I was one of the hard ones. I was not an easy believer. I was a hard study. Rebellion runs in my veins and rushes through my brain. … <\/p>\n

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