So you think you want to try Christianity, huh? You’ve been casting about for some system of belief for years. You have what we might call a spiritual itch, and you’d like to try and scratch it. Only there are a few problems.

First, you aren’t sure if you believe in God. It’s an intellectual problem, really. You just aren’t sure if there IS a God. And if there is, you’re not sure you would trust the Bible to teach you anything about that God.

Second, you don’t know anything about the practice of Christianity, and you don’t

Christianity has a heavy presence in the United States. You can feel the weight of it like a quilted cloak draped over the people, bending their heads forward and pressing on their shoulders. The air is thick with Christian words. Bible phrases fill our literature and are baptized into our culture, peppering our speech with feeble reminders of a lost faith.

- She’s the salt of the earth.

- He has the patience of Job.

- It’s only a drop in the bucket.

The Christian Church in America is so symbiotically enmeshed with our culture that their hearts beat as one, and some people hardly know the difference between the two. The words of faith and religion have burrowed deep into the flesh of our language. They rise to the surface like shards of glass from a festering wound, reborn as oaths, obscenities, and vulgar expressions.

- Jesus Christ!

- God damn it!

- Oh my God!

Are the people who say these things praying?

When your holy names are born again into the rarified order of words used to express rage and anger, you know you’re deep into the culture. Down in the cultural unconscious, right on the edge of the place where myths are born. And these quasi-religious phrases may well outlast the American Church. Words and phrases are notoriously long-lived, surviving for generations after all remembrance of their original meaning is gone.

The Mission Trip: Part Two

Read part one

The mission trip plan was not complicated. Five of us would be dropped off at the University of Wisconsin, where we would walk around and tell people about Jesus, hopefully leading some of them to accept Jesus as their personal savior. The other five would go to a local community college and do the same thing. The following day we would swap campuses.

I was very uncomfortable about the whole thing. The idea of walking around striking up conversations about Jesus with strangers was frightening, so I was feeling high levels of anxiety. However, I had no way to think about that anxiety other than to consider it a personal weakness. If I loved God, certainly I would love these people enough to want to tell them the good news about Jesus. Of course I would. Otherwise they might go to hell. I felt that if I was a good Christian, I would be excited and happy about the task ahead. That I was instead plagued with a stomach full of butterflies was something that I would simply have to overcome. And I was determined to do so.

And so it was that on a March morning in 1982, a van rolled to a stop somewhere on the campus of the University of Wisconsin and dropped off five idealistic college students. The van drove away, and we were left to our work. We would be picked up late that afternoon.

It had not occurred to anyone to do any cultural research to see if the folks from Wisconsin might have some customs or social expectations that differed from ours. In most parts of Texas, strangers can and do greet each other. It doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes a total stranger will ask you how your day is going. A friendly response is expected. Usually that’s all that happens, but you can strike up a conversation if you’re of a mind to do that.

In the North and Northeastern parts of our country, people are more hesitant to start conversations with strangers. This doesn’t mean people are less friendly there. It simply means the social morays and boundaries are a little different. In crowded urban areas, personal space might be the only space you have. As it turned out, walking around the campus of the University of Wisconsin trying to start conversations with total strangers was not the thing to do.

I think we were all a bit hesitant and unsure of how to get started. People were everywhere, walking quickly to class. I did the only thing I knew to do, something that might work on the campus at Baylor. I walked up to people, introduced myself, and tried to get them to talk to me.

"Hi, how’r ya’ll doin? My name’s Gordon Atkinson. I’m up from Texas, just visiting the campus. Say, have you heard about Jesus?"

I did not get the response I was hoping for. A good number of people just ignored me completely, walking by without any sign that they had heard me. Others flinched and drew back, somewhat alarmed. They walked away looking back over their shoulders or whispering to their friends. “Who the fuck is that guy?”

We tried. God knows we tried, but no one would listen to us. Soon it was apparent that a handful of religious zealots were walking around campus, and people began to actively avoid us. I hated every minute of it. But still I felt that this was the right thing to do, so I forced myself to engage people, only to get the same response every time.

I particularly remember opening a door for a young woman. I held it open with my right hand and and motioned her through with my left. I had a big smile on my face. I thought she might talk to me after that. She froze in front of the open door and looked at me with obvious suspicion. She moved away and left the building through a different door, walking away quickly which her books clutched to her chest.

That’s pretty much how the day went. We were ignored or stared at. A few folks got verbal and told us to fuck off.

By noon, I was done. I was emotionally shredded. I couldn’t make myself talk to even one more person. I went into the cafeteria and hid there drinking milkshakes for the rest of the afternoon. As the day progressed I felt more and more miserable. I knew that Jesus must be disappointed in a pitiful disciple like me. The apostle Paul endured a stoning and beatings to tell people about Jesus. But I couldn’t bring myself to talk to college students because I was embarrassed.

The guilt and shame were horrible. I tried to drown my feelings of sorrow by slurping down several milkshakes. It helped a little - a good milkshake always does - but not much.

That evening the van returned and we wearily climbed aboard. In the whole day only three people had managed to have even a single meaningful conversation. And that was with one guy who was intrigued by our accents. He kept asking the girls to say “ya’ll.” He was mostly just curious about why we would do something this boring and awful during our Spring Break.

We got back to where we were staying to find the other group jubilant and celebrating. When we arrived they rushed over and told us with great joy that five people had accepted Christ that day at the community college.

I took the news rather hard, though I knew I should have been happy that five souls were saved. Their success only served to accentuate my own disappointment in myself. Maybe they were more persistent and focused on their task. Or perhaps they had faith enough to keep them trying. I was pretty sure no one on the community college team had spent two or three hours in the cafeteria drinking milk shakes.

I wanted to be happy for their success, so I shoved my own feelings aside, forced a smile on my face, and joined in a time of prayer and thanksgiving for what the Lord had done that day. By the time we were done praying, I felt better. What did it matter how the Lord’s work got done? We had brought the gospel to five people. The whole trip was worth that, wasn’t it?

The next day the other team went to the University and we went to the community college. The other team had set up tables with literature in the cafeteria and had done a puppet show the day before. I know that sounds lame, but it was actually pretty funny. They had expensive muppets, like the ones on Sesame Street, which they made sing and play instruments. I had seen them do it before. I liked the idea of sitting at a table so we could engage people who were curious instead of trying to hunt them down all over campus. I sat down and a few minutes later, two mentally-challenged young men in aprons came over, asking about the puppets. I told them the puppets wouldn’t be there that day. They were visibly disappointed.

Their names were Philip and Roger. The community college had a program to teach food service skills to mentally-challenged people. I assumed these two guys were in that program. They were extremely friendly, so I chatted with them for a few minutes.

Suddenly Philip said, “I’m not going hell. I’m going to heaven. Did you know that?”

I looked at him, quizzically. Then Roger spoke up.

“Me neither. I’m not going to hell. I’m going heaven with him.” He pointed at Philip. They were both beaming with happiness over this.

I got a very bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to believe what I was suspecting. I asked them a couple of questions.

“Philip, how do you know that you’re going to heaven?”

“The puppet lady told me. She said that if I said the prayer, I wouldn’t go to hell and would go to heaven. And I did.”

“Me too,” said Roger.

I spoke carefully and seriously. “Philip, do you remember the prayer you said?”

“No.”

“Do you remember even one word of it? Do you remember just one word from the prayer?”

His face went slack as he thought for a moment.

“No,”

Then he smiled and said, “I’m going to heaven.”

“Me too,” said Roger.

I forced a smile. “Yes, I know you are.”

I turned away from them and whispered softly to myself. My lips were barely moving.

“Please, tell me we didn’t do this.”

I asked Roger if anyone else had said the prayer. He pointed out three others, all of them mentally-challenged people who were in the food service education program.

I was so angry. Someone on the other team had manipulated these vulnerable people into saying a prayer, just so they could claim to have led people to the Lord. I had felt so guilty and ashamed that I hadn’t had their faith and persistence. I had worked so hard to put those feelings aside so that I could celebrate with them. But it was all a lie.

When the team gathered that evening I said nothing. I was the only one who knew what had happened. It probably would have been good to bring it up and talk about it, but I didn’t.

I was starting to feel a deep kind of sadness. A sadness that had little panicky undertones to it. It was the feeling of having your foundation shaken a little bit. It’s the feeling you get when something you’ve always accepted might not be true. It had never occurred to me that when the Church puts such high stock in converting people, things like this are bound to happen.

And it got me thinking about some other numbers I had heard reported over the years.

-----“35 saved last night at the revival. Praise the Lord.”

-----“14 souls saved at Vacation Bible School last week. Thank you, Jesus.”

-----"Our church baptized 150 people last year.”

It’s a question of numbers and time. If becoming a Christian is a thing that can happen in a single instant in time - in one prayer - then you have something that can be counted. And if something can be counted, we will count it. Because we like numbers.

Numbers look good on the church’s year-end report, though one wonders why a church would want or need such a report. But numbers are not good in any way that really matters.

For me this trip marked the beginning of some new ways of thinking. It wasn’t the last mission trip I went on. And there was a lot of deconstruction still ahead for me in the years to come. It was painful, but it was the beginning of my spiritual journey to find the place where authenticity and faith exist in harmony.

It is, I think, a journey with no end.

rlp

What if you and I could sit across the table from each other tonight, under the stars? What would you say to me? Some people say, “I’ve read a lot of your writing, you know?”

“Yeah?” I say.

There’s not much to say after that. “Thanks” doesn’t seem to work. “That’s cool” sounds arrogant, like it’s somehow cool to have read things that I wrote. Mostly I just hold still until the moment passes.

“Is that weird?” people sometimes ask. “Is it weird to suddenly find out that some stranger knows a lot of personal stuff about you, and you don’t know anything about them?”

This really does happen to me. It happened to me last week, as a matter of fact. A guy named Gary at a coffee shop. Really great guy. English accent. We ended up talking for about two hours.

“No,” I say. “It’s not weird because I don’t think about it. It’s like it’s not happening.”

That’s the truth. It’s as if someone said, “I saw you naked two weeks ago.” Yeah? Well, you’re not seeing me naked now, so I guess it doesn’t bother me too much unless we keep talking about it.

Now if I could ask you something – anything – I would say, “Do you believe in things that we might want to be true, but for which there isn’t a lot of hard evidence, maybe no hard evidence at all?”

I’d be trying to ask if you are a faith person. Any kind of faith person. Maybe you believe in Buddha, or Jesus, or God, or Allah, or any number of other ideas about an eternal being or beings. And if it turned out you were a faith person, I’d like a follow-up question.

What kind of faith do you have?

Is it frightened faith? You need the comfort of believing in the stuff your parents taught you about God, and you’re scared shitless that someone is going to talk you out of it? That’s okay. I've been there myself. I’m just trying to figure you out.