If you’re a regular human being, the idea of an hour-long commute, one-way, probably sounds ghastly—and I wouldn’t blame you.
That’s unfortunately what I had for an internship the summer after my sophomore year. While I lived with family in downtown Portland, I took the bus to and from work every day, with multiple line switches and a fair amount of waiting at stops in the heart of Portland, Oregon. It was quite the commute—but I loved it.
For one, the cardinal rule of public transport is that you don’t talk to anyone, so I was free to have my headphones in without fear of being rude. For two, when you’re not the one driving, you don’t have to think about anything—and so my mind was free to wander.
I’d never been a big podcast-listener prior to that summer—I’d never had that much dead time before—but I began searching out things to listen to on my commute; and to my surprise, my absolute favorite discovery quickly became Michael Gungor and Mike McHargue’s The Liturgists.
I can’t in good conscience recommend the podcast anymore—there’s been some changes in the content & administration that have gone too far for most of its former audience, myself included, to feel comfortable with it—but the first couple of seasons were absolutely life-changing for me. So what was The Liturgists?
In short, the podcast started out as a platform for both Michael and Mike to share their journeys with leaving Christianity and then finding it again. That was what hooked me, and that’s what I think of when I remember the show now. Hearing two people talk openly about really, really hard questions they’d had about the church, how they fell away from God, and how they slowly journeyed back was astounding. I can’t put into words how incredibly impactful it was to hear that you could be intellectual, engage with hard things, maybe even fall away, and come back better for it.
I’ve written about the concept of deconstruction in a Christian context before, back when Josh Harris’s announcement rocked social media; entirely inspired by my time with The Liturgists, I wrote possibly one of the pieces I’m the most proud of, ever. In it, I concluded that being allowed to ask questions was one of the most important things to foster in your life, whether it leads you to or from Christianity.
If your child is told, “That’s an awful question!” when they ask something about a controversial church topic, that’s not going to push them away from their question—it’s going to push them away from the Church.
The Liturgists’ first couple of seasons engaged with some of those hard questions really openly and honestly, ready to engage with wherever the truth might lead even if it was uncomfortable. Topics of discussion included the Young & Old Earth debate, radical politics in the church, and contemporary worship—things I’d wrestled with a lot before, and things that it was really refreshing to see fellow Christians also wrestle with without the worry of “what if I get an answer I don’t like?”
I describe all of this because, at the end of it all, I came out of that summer with a sense of freedom I hadn’t experienced before. It was no longer a deterrent to me if a question I asked made me feel a little uncomfortable—I knew I could engage with it, because at the end of the day, truth was truth, and it wasn’t going anywhere. It was this sense of peace, of feeling comfortable with asking uncomfortable things, that I entered my junior year of college.
As I sat staring blankly at the city blocks rushing by, I had no idea what really uncomfortable questions I’d be asking over the next year—questions like, “By what authority do Protestants interpret the Bible?” or “Was Peter the Pope?” or “Did I really experience God when I was younger, or were those just emotions?” Instead, I toyed with less Protestant-shattering issues, like “What do different Christians think about violence?”, “How can we understand sin and scrupulosity?”, and “How many stops away am I from the office?” But thanks to some Christians who’d gone before me, I knew it was entirely possible to ask some really hard questions and still come out with faith in Christ.
And so I proceeded.
Next post in this series: Authority (coming soon)
Previous post in this series: Sola Scriptura
