campus crusade for christ

As part of the program that I’m a part of this year in Orlando I attend a weekly connection meeting where we continue to process our lives and the situations and relationships that brought us to this point – both good and bad. Many people (myself included) have arrived immediately after or in the midst of difficult parts of life – team dysfunction, former bosses who had irresponsible leadership styles, family turmoil and personal burnout are just a portion of the types of things that have landed some of my new friends here.

Today we had Sam Osterloh the national director of Ethnic Student Ministries for Campus Crusade for Christ speak to us about things that he learned through and in his 10-year-long “desert period.”

He shared something that he attributed to psychologist and prominent relational-health speaker Henry Cloud, this is something that (as far as Sam knows) is not in any of Dr. Cloud’s books nor in any of regular talk subjects. It has led Carrie and I to suspect that he may have related it from a third party whose name has been lost in the telling.

The 4 Stages of Faith

  1. No Faith
  2. Institutional Faith
  3. Desert Faith
  4. Mature Faith

These “faiths” may apply to a person’s faith on the whole or to individual areas of that faith – to situations and the subject’s faith-reaction to them.

No Faith

This is the initial stage in an life or situation. It’s not necessarily a disbelief, but more of a lack of application of any type of faith in relationship to a situation or life in general.

Institutional Faith

This is, for most people, the first stage of any sort of life-changing faith. It can be something that is accompanied by a significant experience or life-change because life that once was lacking direction now has meaning and direction. It’s not “institutional” because it’s necessarily attached to a larger organization, but because it’s primarily concerned with finding the right answers – the faith itself is the institution that is re-ordering the subject’s life around it.

In its infant stage this is the faith that is asking a lot of questions due to a re-alignment of world-view and a need for linchpins to tie it to. As this stage gets older it hardens and becomes a strict black and white only faith. There must always be an answer to every question – it cannot abide open-ended questions or gray-area. The annealed Institutional Faith is unyielding even to the person and character of God – it’s the proverbial faith that puts God “in a box”.

“God is the great iconoclast, He is always shattering my view of him.”C. S. Lewis

Desert Faith

This is the illustration of the most-identifying story of the Hebrew scriptures.

This is the faith that comes when God utterly destroys the box that we have “placed” Him. In doing this he has smashed the icon that we have placed in His placed. We make idols of God in our lives every time we think we understand exactly what God is like and what He will and even more what He definitely will not do.

This is what happens when our children die, our job evaporates, our spouse leaves us or we hear the doctor say the words “untreatable.” This is the place that the theologies of J.O. and other prosperity preachers have no place for. Deserts in their views are only “opportunities to prove to God our faith.” (I actually heard these words come out of J.O.’s mouth on Sunday night.) The problem is that these deserts may not only last a week or a month or a decade – how about 40 years? How about God allows everything you own be destroyed, your children to all be killed and your body to be infected with sores that are never without a sting?

Where do we go from here?

That’s the important question, because the Desert Faith can only be a transitional faith. From here we can go one of three places. We can go backward to “No Faith” and abandon the God that we’ve come to believe has abandoned us. We can go back to our old and cold Institutional Faith; stuff the hurt & questions, ignore the pain and try harder and don’t let your heart change – become even more rigid in your faith and the answers than you were before. Own the faith of a Pharisee and a Fundamentalist.

Or…

Or you embrace the freedom of the Desert. Embrace the fact that you don’t have all the answers, that God is not encompassed by your maxims of Truth and allow Him to become new and fresh for you.

As Job said toward the end of his eponymous book:

2I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
4 ‘Hear, and I will speak;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.’
5 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you;
6 therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”

Job comes away from his trial with no answer as to why these things had taken place, but with a new type of faith – a faith that was willing to wrestle with a God that he trusted was good and powerful, but One that did things that were too “wonderful” for him to begin to understand. This is Mature Faith.

Mature Faith

This is the only place that we can land after tragedy with any hope of growth.

He smashes our images of Him because it’s only through that destruction that we can have any hope of knowing Him. This is His stated reason for sending Israel through their Desert.

In his final book A Grief Observed, Lewis writes a curious line, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time.” In the loss of his beloved wife his faith is shattered, but reconstituted into a faith that follows after a God who is no longer an idea, but One whom he knows.

This may be summed up in the positive name that God gives His people: Israel. “Those who wrestle with God.”

This is what he calls us to as well – to interact, to wrestle with God knowing that what is important is not winning, but holding on to Him even if we’re injured by it and barely holding on anyhow.

All of this is not about the answers, it’s about the wrestling.

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Today starts my second week in my cubicle.

I’m working at Campus Crusade for Christ’s headquarters in Orlando, FL. The position may only be for a year (10 months, really), but we’ve really moved and it’s a real change and challenge for my wife and I.

We’ve developed friends here already, but (so far) they’re shallow (as in “not deep”). I enjoy the team that I’m working on and really believe that it’s will be a good fit – there’s sufficient freedom to work as well as a decent amount of structure to help me know what my job really is. The members of my team (I’m working in the US Communications group and working on web publishing) are fun and the right kind of dissimilar to make it a lot of fun.

We miss friends from DC and from our neighborhood in Arlington. A lot.

Even now I’m a little teary thinking of the people who left before we did. The teammates that we worked closely with – laughed, debated and fought with.  I am tempted to want to “go back.”

I miss our small group, the friends that we’ve now had for 2 1/2 years and the ones that we met 6 months or just under a year ago. I miss my unofficial small-group men who helped to heal my heart and to rile my debating nature.

I miss the sweet Pakistani family that lived below us – mom, dad and 4 kids. I miss helping with math & social studies homework. I miss trying to explain what it means to be a good tipper and a good grownup – but in a way that doesn’t communicate that those things are what determine your value and worthiness as a person.

I miss the church that has been the perfect imperfect home for us for three years.

I’m looking forward though. To an opportunity to do church different than we usually have. To work in a job that is more defined than I’ve ever had, yet as free and open as well. I’m looking forward to new friends that we may have to let go in a year (in the normal CCC fashion).

Ultimately, I am learning to trust God with my past and my future. It will be good.

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The Connect Deck

July 23, 2009

in everything

I am really encouraged and excited about the tech-direction of Campus Crusade for Christ in the next few years.

I just got out of a Social Networking seminar that (though sparsely attended) was headed in very good directions helping our staff to think about blogging, Twitter and Facebook and how they can be used to bring more students into the conversation on campus about Jesus.

There were older staff who were interested in starting blogs and asking great questions. There were staff who were even asking for what hosting service they should check into. These are huge steps. I underestimated us significantly.

There were also at least 25 staff who probably just signed up for Twitter.

The largest, and most encouraging thing is the Connect Deck. There are 5 of us at each main session who are monitoring the Social Media streams (Twitter, Facebook Chat, SMS) and pulling things out of it to put into the conference itself. It’s been great to be seen as some sort of authority on it – and I think I may be within our organization. I have felt behind the larger curve, but I am ahead here.

How do you think we could be using these technologies better?

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Do I have what it takes?

June 29, 2009

Do I have what it takes? This is the question that rattles through so many minds; from my experience it does so for males far more often than for women. I’m not saying that it never barrels its way through the heads and hearts of women, I have just heard and seen its effects in [...]

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I underestimated

June 28, 2009

As the Campus Crusade for Christ Mid-Atlantic Regional techi nerd-type guy. I underestimated the amount that the ministry on the whole is “with it” as far as upcoming technology is concerned. I’m realizing that it may be just some of the people that I know in our region who seem to distain technology, or maybe [...]

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