Christian faith is sometimes presented as though it begins with answers. We are told what Christians believe, what the Church teaches, and perhaps what we are expected to accept. But for many of us, faith begins somewhere rather different. It begins with a question.
For me this journey began with a nagging question in my head that was brought to a head when I witnessed a very traumatic event, and then an invitation to a church and a Christian community of love and listening.
Faith did not arrive for me as a complete package of answers. It began as something to be explored. There were things I was beginning to believe, but there were also questions I could not easily resolve. Looking back, I think the willingness of that Christian community to make room for those questions mattered enormously.
Perhaps that is one of the difficulties we sometimes create for people who are exploring Christian faith. We can give the impression that faith is primarily about arriving at the right answers — accepting a set of beliefs and becoming certain about things that previously seemed uncertain.
But is that really how faith works?
The Gospels suggest something rather more interesting. Jesus certainly taught, but he also asked questions — a remarkable number of them. He invited people to think, to look again, and sometimes to question assumptions they had lived with for years. “Who do you say that I am?” he asks his disciples. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks Bartimaeus. “Which of these three do you think was a neighbour?” he asks after telling the story we know as the Good Samaritan.
There is something wonderfully spacious about this. Jesus does not seem frightened by questions.
Faith and certainty
One of the things I have come to recognise is that faith and certainty are not quite the same thing. We can be deeply committed to following Jesus while still having questions about what we believe, how we understand Scripture, or how Christian faith speaks into a world very different from the one in which the Church first took shape.
Indeed, perhaps questions are sometimes a sign that faith is alive. They arise because we are taking faith seriously enough to wrestle with it. The world changes. Our experience changes. We encounter people whose lives challenge our assumptions. Things happen to us that do not fit comfortably with the answers we once accepted.
At such moments we have a choice. We can push the questions away because they feel threatening, or we can allow them to take us more deeply into faith.
That does not mean that anything goes, or that Christian faith has no centre. For me, that centre is Jesus. Again and again I find myself returning to his life, his teaching, his way of relating to people, and above all to his proclamation of the Kingdom of God.
Perhaps a wider faith is not therefore a faith with fewer convictions. Perhaps it is a faith spacious enough to ask difficult questions while remaining rooted enough to know where to return.
An invitation to explore
Christian faith has been a journey for me, and it continues to be one. Some questions have found answers along the way. Others have changed as I have changed. And some remain open.
What I have discovered is that I no longer need every question to be settled before I can continue the journey. Faith can involve trust as well as understanding, listening as well as speaking, and sometimes the willingness to live with a question long enough for it to change us.
That is part of what A Wider Faith is about. It is a place for exploring Christian faith with openness and curiosity, while remaining rooted in Jesus and attentive to the way faith shapes the whole of life.
There will be questions here about what we believe, but also about how we live. Questions about Scripture and Jesus, but also about relationships, community, creation, healing and wholeness. I don’t expect that we will always arrive at simple answers.
And perhaps that is all right.
What questions are shaping your faith at the moment?
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