Telling stories.
Powerful, personal, “God at work in the messy real world” stories.
In the buttoned-down, orderly Presbyterian world, that doesn’t always happen.
But a new survey indicates that many believers have stories to tell about how God or things they can’t explain have transformed their lives. And in some places — in books, in churches, on the Internet — Presbyterians have begun to tell their own stories of faith, stories of doubt and searching and power and peace.
Author Anne Lamott, a Presbyterian from California, in 2005 released the best-selling book “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith,” which is studded with stories of everyday life, of struggle and joy and a hard-won faith in God.
Preachers often weave stories into their sermons — sometimes recycling anecdotes that have made the rounds, but other times drawing from their own encounters with ordinary people searching for meaning.
And some Presbyterian congregations have encouraged people in the pews to share their own faith stories — stories which make it clear that for many folks the walk of faith comes complete with detours, dead-ends and surprising, joyous discoveries.
“To be a Christian is to see your life as a part of a story much larger than yourself — a story that has as its central episode the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,” wrote Dan Bonevac, https://www.fpcaustin.org/stories/story6.html one of six parishioners from First Church of Austin, Texas, who’ve posted their faith stories online on the church Web site.
Bonevac writes of growing up in the church, being nurtured in Sunday school, but how, as an adult, he and his wife attended a church for a year where no one but the pastor ever spoke to them. “We grew discouraged, stopped going, and started spending more time with the Sunday paper.”
But he knew he couldn’t deepen his faith without the support of others — without being enmeshed in God’s bigger story — so Bonevac and his wife got up one Sunday and tried First Church. They found a faith community that challenged them to think and ask questions, that nurtured them through the losses and pain that life inflicts — and where Bonevac could be reminded that “ultimately, it’s not about me, but about God, who has matters well in hand.”
Encounters with God
A survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and released in December, https://www.news.uchicago.edu/releases/05/121305.norc.pdf concluded that experiences of “religious transformation” may be more common than some might expect — with about half of Americans saying they’d had such an experience, and with many describing how that transformative experience, often unexpected, led to other changes in behavior and faith.
The results are based on a 2004 survey taken of 1,328 randomly-selected adults who were taking part in the broader General Social Survey, which is a representative survey that’s conducted every one to two years and is used to study the attitudes and behaviors of American adults.
The researchers asked survey participants if they’d ever experienced a “turning point in your life where you made a new and personal commitment to religion” or had a religious or spiritual experience that changed their life or a “born-again” experience.
Just about half said they had, and the survey found no meaningful differences in answers based on age, gender, marital status or socio-economic status.
There were some differences based on race and geography. More African-Americans than whites, Asians or Hispanics reported having experienced a religious or spiritual change, and reports of transformative experiences were most common in the South (about 60 percent) and least common in New England (24 percent).
People active in churches, and particularly fundamentalist or evangelical churches, were most likely to report having experienced a religious turning point (close to three-fourths of them said they had), but about 45 percent of those in moderate denominations or liberal churches said they had as well — as did nearly 30 percent of those with no religious preference.
Some had more than one transformative experience, and most often it happened in early adulthood — nearly 20 percent said they were under age 18 at the time of the experience, and 41 percent were 18 to 29.
And the most common events people listed as preceding the change were either involvement in religious activity — praying, going to worship or a retreat, being involved in a small group — or facing some kind of personal problem or big life change. People got sick, crashed their cars, lost their jobs or their marriages, had a baby, watched someone they loved die or faced death head-on themselves.
And along the way, they experienced God.
In “Plan B,” Lamott writes about when her dog Sadie died (“I always told people she was like Jesus in a black fur coat”); about feeling so angry at her son, Sam (and about how parents don’t usually talk about that kind of anger); about washing the feet of a friend who had cancer.
She writes about meeting David Roche, who’s pastor of the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity — a church that’s not a physical place, but something he’s built inside himself, Lamott says — a man whose face has been severely disfigured by a tumor and who speaks of the “soul disfigurement” in us all.
“We in the Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity don’t believe in miracles,” Roche tells Lamott. “But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen. When God opens the door, you’ve got to put your foot in.”
How people change
In the survey, some people reported distinct physical experiences — seeing an angel, hearing God speak directly to them, seeing a bright light, feeling like they were floating out of their body.
And in response to what people had experienced, they changed. They reported appreciating life more, improving their relationships with others, getting closer to God, re-engaging their faith. For many, the report states, those changes were important and enduring.
In New Covenant presbytery in Houston, lay ministers visit patients at local hospitals through the Presbyterian Outreach to Patients program https://www.popministry.org/index.shtml — and the program encourages patients with life-threatening illnesses to tell their own healing stories. Writing one’s own story can bring clarity; can help people reflect on where they’ve been and where they want to go; to feel connected, not isolated, a whole person, not just someone with an illness.
Judy wrote about a night when her body crashed because of the effects of chemotherapy, when it seemed she might die — and the peace she felt when she decided that she was in God’s hands.
Corinne, a 41-year-old mother of three, wrote of the blessings she found in praying for others’ needs during chemotherapy.
Bill Lucas, another of the story-tellers from First Church in Austin, writes https://www.fpcaustin.org/stories/story4.html of “playing church” for years — of showing up, going through the motions, serving on committees, teaching Sunday school, but never really feeling like he belonged.
After many years, after his kids grew up, after losing a marriage, after leaving church and coming back, Lucas went on a men’s retreat at his girlfriend’s request. He’d been “playing church” again and he dreaded it.
But “a strange thing happened” that weekend, Lucas wrote. “God worked in my life like never before.” He realized men from his church had fears and anxieties and doubts, just as he did, and that “God loved me and could forgive even the things I had done.”
He repented, he felt loved and accepted.
God opened the door. He walked through.
Things were never the same.
