Big Shifts in my Faith: Youth Groups and Unconditional Love

I mentioned yesterday that, during my family's hard time in the early nineties, my father (once a Southern Baptist pastor) found himself on the wrong side--the moderate/liberal side--of the denomination's shift to the right. No pastoring jobs were to be found. As a result, our family had to shift from "preacher's family" to "lay-folks-struggling-to-survive-during-a-recession family." My mother went back to teaching high school. My father went back to being a custodian at the town's university-affiliated Baptist church.

And that, too, was a very new thing for us as a family: being members of a church in which Daddy was not the pastor, Mama was not the pastor's wife, and my sister and I were not PKs.

There were other differences. The congregation was much larger than what we were accustomed to. The people--many of whom were faculty, staff, and alumni of the Baptist university across the street--tended toward a higher economic class and educational level than we were used to. The economic difference felt particularly sharp given our family's financial difficulties.

One more difference: although, as I have mentioned, my parents were never exactly conservative Southern Baptists, this church was decidedly on the liberal side of things. Even a Baptist university has some liberalizing effects on the culture. Women participated widely in church life (save, of course, for the position of pastor). The sermons tended toward thoughtful re-readings and explorations of scripture rather than literal "Bible-readings." And the youth leader...well, Paulann's influence on my faith was the second major shift to come from this period of my life.

Paulann at the time led the church's well-developed youth program. She taught Bible lessons, led guitar-accompanied sing-alongs, promoted various ministerial activities, took us to Falls Creek (and groused with us about the fundamentalist messages promulgated therein), and most of all shared her vision of who God is.

For Paulann, God's defining feature was passionate, unconditional love for each of us. Now, that was not anything I hadn't heard about previously. Everyone in my faith tradition grew up singing "Jesus Loves Me." John 3:16 talks about how much God loved the world. The love of God as witnessed in Christ's sacrifice on the cross forms a central narrative point in the salvation pitch of conservative evangelicals.

What made Paulann's version different? I think part of it has to do with that word unconditional. Again, the word itself as a descriptor of God's love was not unheard-of in my Baptist life. But somehow the divine love operating in the get-out-of-hell story that drove my childhood faith seemed less than unconditional.

In the Baptist image of God that I initially learned to serve, divine love was caught up in--even overpowered by--divine disgust with humanity's sin. Experiencing that love required that I internalize a deep sense of my own wretchedness, and an even deeper sense of obligation toward God's grandiose act of sacrifice on the cross to atone for my sins. That love felt sick, contaminated by negative feelings. I could never love God nor think about how much God loved me without also feeling guilty, enslaved to a debt I could never repay, and frankly frightened that this all-powerful Being might judge me insufficiently grateful.

Paulann's version of God's love purged that emotion. God loves you, she told us repeatedly, more than we could ever love ourselves. Before we knew God, before we knew anything, before we existed, God adored us. And we didn't have to--couldn't--do anything to make God love us. Nor can we ever do anything to make God stop loving us. God's love for us is fearsome, not a tame thing, passionate, refusing all limit or boundary, intrusive, insistent, constantly knocking at the door of our heart.

She defined for me what unconditional really is, what the fact of an all-powerful God who loves me really means.

And not once did she mention hell. Not once did we dwell on the final judgment. Fear for the destination of our eternal souls simply played no part in her argument about why we should follow the way of Christ. Not that this was a whatever-we-want-God-to-be faith. God's essence as love was for Christians an imperative to love. We were to love everyone as unconditionally and as fully as God. Sin, for Paulanne, was anti-love, disruptions of or failures to love as God does. Nor was love easy. Paulanne did not hesitate to press her youth to harsh self-reflections, honest confrontations with what was most difficult in our lives.

I remember one Friday evening at Falls Creek--not in the main tabernacle watching weeping preteens stumble down the aisle to be saved, but on the rooftop patio of our sleeping quarters. Paulann asked us to reflect on what God was doing for us in our lives, adding that she expected to hear us talk and would keep us there until we did. That night was one of the deepest, most soul-wrenching communal experiences I have ever had. There were tears, silences, admissions, questions, doubts, songs, lots of hugging. It left us shaken but stirred.

That was another thing I learned from Paulann: it was possible for love to be difficult, painful even, without being life/soul-threatening. We could doubt, we could get angry--we could even get angry at God--confident that nothing we could do or say, think or feel could separate us from God's all-powerful love. God's perfect love cast out fear.

This love that Paulann taught, this love that Paulann showed, this love that I realized had lain all along at the heart of my family--this was the love of God, the substance of Christianity.

This love saved my life some years later.

More tomorrow,

JF