From “Everything Good about God is True: Choosing Faith” by Bruce Reyes-Chow
Some of you reading this book have been deeply hurt by the church. You may have been taught a faith driven by fear, guilt, and shame. You may have been taught a faith that preached blatant and subtle exclusion: racism, misogyny, queerphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia. And you may have been taught that the only way that you or anyone could ever truly know God was through confession that Jesus was your Lord and Savior. (Spoiler alert: I will argue later that Christianity is a way to connect to God and not the only way to connect to God.)
To be abundantly clear, I and many others reject and repudiate this version of the gospel. The theological stream I just described and that we looked at in the first chapter is more about justifying the perpetuation of power and domination and less about seeking love and liberation. If you are moving out of this kind of space, I grieve your experience, and I commend you for being open to the possibility that there is another way – a more loving, humble,just, and nuanced way – to believe in God.
Or perhaps your faith has become stale, disconnected, or calcified. Maybe you have been living your faith by osmosis, passed down and borrowed from generations before. Some of you likely grew up without any religious or spiritual presence. Your parents or guardians or caregivers allowed you to search out faith entirely on your own, and so now you are doing just that.
No matter how you are finding your way toward God: Know that this pastor encourages your exploration and curiosity. Seek out your own path with the Creator. There is no one right way to do this, so don’t let anybody tell you that the only way that you can truly be a believer is to claim a particular doctrine. Of course we can do certain spiritual disciples and religious practices to stretch and change and expand our understanding of who God is. But those are not prerequisites for having a deep relationship with God.