|
My Christian Faith Journey Timothy D. Henze March 7, 2002 You
might say that my faith journey has meandered a bit before coming to where I am
now. I would prefer to say it has
been weaved. And thus I look back
and see it is woven into a fabric only God could have imagined. Only
God could use my liberal education to nurture me into the born again evangelical
Christian that I am today. I
was baptized as an infant in a Presbyterian Church in New Jersey.
When my family moved to the suburbs of Chicago at age 4, we began
attending the local United Methodist Church because it was 6 blocks away as
opposed to the twenty miles to the nearest Presbyterian Church.
So I was raised and confirmed in the United Methodist Church. Youth choir
and youth fellowship were very much a strong part of my upbringing in the
church. During high school, I was
very interested in environmental and social justice issues.
I frequently called upon our pastor in the evening to chat about these
issues and their place in the Christian faith.
The biggest question for me during this period of my life was, “Is Gandhi in heaven?” or “Do good people who are not Christians go to heaven?”
With the guidance I received at the time, I concluded, yes. For
my freshman year in college I commuted to the south Loop of Chicago to school. I
was going through a span when I was having trouble controlling my temper back
home. An important role in helping
me to deal with this problem came from a contemporary history / current events
class where I was exposed to the life and writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I found my heart resonated so strongly with the idea of love as a force
or power that could make a huge difference in the world.
I decided I wanted to commit myself to non-violence.
In
the fall of my senior year in college I attended a United Methodist retreat
weekend called “Walk
to Emmaus.”
Walk to Emmaus is a United Methodist Cursillo. During that weekend God’s
grace and the power of His love became real to me but still as a means to an
end. I kept trying to squeeze God
and Christ into my social justice agenda without realizing the full power and
presence of the Gospel in my life. Out
of that experience, though, I did commit to attend seminary in the future. After
I graduated from college, I got a job in Denver working in an art gallery.
I decided I needed to look for a faith community and went to a Unitarian
Universalist church one Sunday. I
was attracted to the liberal intellectual climate that was part of their
identity. Their Sunday service
lacked what I describe as that wet, marshy, tactile darkness one feels as they
enter into mystery and ritual. The
UU church felt too sterile and lacking warmth.
I started looking for a Walk to Emmaus community in Denver.
I got the name of the United Methodist pastor who was the spiritual
leader of Walk to Emmaus in the area and attended his Sunday worship. It was there that I hooked up with Reverend T.L. Phillips at
Grant Avenue United Methodist Church and he would become my mentor and friend
for many years. After a miserable year working in an art gallery and seeing the excess and abuses that go on in the name of art in the private sector, I began making arrangements to enter the Iliff School of Theology. While driving up University Boulevard in Denver with my brother once, we drove past Denver Seminary and my brother sang it’s praises as the place for Christian learning in Denver. Then a few miles up the road we drove past Iliff School of Theology where my brother mentioned that it was a weird place that for all practical purposes was New Age. And I remember saying to myself, “That’s the place for me.” Very
quickly I found Iliff, to be all I had hoped for and all about confirming the
liberal beliefs that I already had. My
first year at Iliff started in the fall of 1990.
It was during the events leading up to and the start of the Persian Gulf
War. Of course many people
know the unspoken major of many Iliff students was protesting, marching and
stirring up trouble. We did much of
that. But I remember
specifically one protest against the war that I witnessed but was not involved
in by members of a Christian community (a pseudo monastic commune of sorts I
suppose) from outside the Boulder area. I
was taken by the fact their faith in Christ was the grounding principle in their
actions. I had recently studied
Bonhoeffer’s Life
Together with T.L. Phillips and was quite taken with the notion of Christian
community and living together as a people faith. I was also involved in a
Catholic Worker soup kitchen in the Five Points community of Denver.
It was there I felt closer to God and people than at any church as I
watched people work and serve together.
All that we did there was for the glory of God and caring for his lost
people. It
took about a year or so before it became evident that politically correct
language and thought was the mask which everybody was required to wear at Iliff
to make them appear peaceful and homogenous, but things were not that peaceful.
Flap over the selection process of a professor split the community and
split the faculty not necessarily into just two factions but a multitude of
little groups. There was a great
deal of underhanded dealing by all sides and by people I had trusted. Any sense of community was sacrificed for power and control.
I felt the relativistic theology and situation ethic being taught at
Iliff was used to justify all sorts of things.
The administration and faculty who prided themselves on sensitivity,
diversity and open-mindedness consistently demonstrated paranoid panic.
The justice they taught in the classroom was not the justice they
practiced when the heat was on. I
remember two particular events that got me critically thinking about my
experience at Iliff and what was being taught at Iliff School of Theology.
The first event was a weekend seminar with Sojourners
founder and editor Jim Wallis who without blinking to this group of idealistic
liberals and a syncretistic Native American Professor said that any effort for
justice must be founded in unwavering faith in the resurrected Jesus Christ. This was said to many who I am sure believed the life of
Christ to be a noble myth and did not believe the resurrection to be historical
fact. The second event was when
Iliff’s Cuban Tibetan Buddhist
Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Jose Cabezon as a guest lecturer in a
theology class discussing the issue of religious pluralism said, “The reason Christian’s have to address the issue of
pluralism is because Christianity is illogical. Buddhists have no trouble with pluralism because we know you
are going to do it over and over again until you do it our way.” (This is not an exact quote
but is close to what I remember him saying)
What struck me was the arrogance and the confidence in which he said
that. The idea that a Buddhist
could make such exclusive claims and a Christian could not without being labeled
“intolerant” bugged me. I wanted to be that sure of my Christian faith as he was of
his Buddhist beliefs. I began to see how my liberal theology was really
short-changing me. During
my first year in Scobey, Montana, (my second year of parish ministry after being
ordained a deacon in the United Methodist Church) I began to question just how
open minded I had been. I noticed
many evangelical pastors reading and engaging liberal authors, but not visa
versa. In the spirit of being truly
open and wanting to be secure enough in my Christian faith to not fear being
challenged I began reading more evangelical authors like Richard Foster and
Phillip Yancey who both began to shake my core. That year I was also involved in a very formative weekly
prayer group that helped me to build and maintain a routine of daily devotional
time for my life. In
the middle of my second year in Scobey, on my way to connect with a colleague
and travel together to a lecture series, I flipped my car in the ditch after
driving through a snow filled bridge at 75 mph at 7 p.m. in the evening.
I was eleven miles south of the town of Opheim on a windy snow-blowing
night where the air temperature was ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit before
factoring in the wind chill. I had
my seat belt on and I was okay. The
car landed upside down in deep snow. I
immediately got out of the car because I feared gasoline spilling and catching
fire. Needless to say it was cold.
There was nobody on the road that night. News stories of people being found froze to death after
accidents or car trouble are very frequent in northeastern Montana. There were
some farm buildings a quarter of a mile off the road.
I was hesitant to walk to them because I would miss a car driving down
the road while I walked to the buildings. So
I jogged in and found the house locked up with no one home and the farm
buildings had no phone or radio inside. I
quickly made my way back to the road where I paced about a thirty-yard stretch
back and forth near my upside-down car. It had been forty-five minutes to an hour when a sense of
fear and dread came over me. I was
convinced that I was going to die that night along side the road, when a voice
or a feeling came to me and said, “So
what if you die, you’ll
be with me.”
A great sense of peace came over me and almost in that very instant the
whole puzzle of the Christian faith I had never truly clung to before made
sense. The experience seemed to
confirm and in the time of a moment pull all the missing pieces of the puzzle
together to where I knew I believed that Jesus was the Son of God and that he
was raised from the dead. It was
like everything that I read about Justification and Assurance and Sanctification
suddenly made sense and was confirmed as true because it happened to me.
It came into focus where for the first time I could see it applied and
working in my life. It provided an
unquestionable assurance in my heart that what has been laid out in the Bible as
to our salvation was ultimate authority and truth.
It was very soon after this experience that a car came down the road with
a friend from Scobey behind the wheel. It
is with this experience I mark the beginning of my Christian life after 3 years
of seminary and two years as a pastor. I
have found being more grounded in orthodox protestant thought and more
traditional interpretations of the scripture really has opened up room for the
Holy Spirit to move in and work within me.
I have found more power in my preaching and more passion for evangelism
as I want everyone to know they don’t
have to wait until they die to experience the joy of eternity, but it can be
part of their lives now, this very moment. That
was six years ago. Right now I am
well into the stage where the faith journey is no longer filled with dramatic
experiences everyday, but I am learning to let faith propel me forward rather
than being dependant upon that feeling of constant assurance.
I am feeling God calling me to new challenges that make better use of the
many gifts he has given me. I want
to continually devote my gifts and talents in one way or another to carrying the
light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Timothy D. Henze March 7, 2002
View My Philosophy of Ministry
|
| Home Prairie Praise Photography Music Layout Design |