“Pastor, I’ve been a Presbyterian for 87 years, and I still don’t know if I believe everything I should.” Elanor’s eyes looked into mine, and she gripped my hand with a force surprising for a woman dying of pancreatic cancer.
Her comment touched me and echoed a concern I had been wrestling with in my own faith life: Are questions allowed? I offered her the peace I felt God gifted me, “What if your questions are as important as your beliefs?”
The relief on her face was immediate and profound. At that point, I understood how seldom we make room in our churches to question in a meaningful way.
The Reformed tradition takes pride in its intellectual strength. Our theology traces back to John Calvin, who started his Institutes by claiming that true wisdom involves knowing God and knowing oneself. But over time, many of us have changed this search for wisdom into a hunt for certainty. We’ve traded the sacred unease of questions for the simulated comfort of rushed answers.
The Bible is full of people who ask God tough questions. Job wants to know why he sufferers. The psalmist asks, “How long, O Lord?” Even Jesus on the cross quotes Psalm 22 and asks, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” These questions do not demonstrate weak faith. Instead, they show a real connection with God — one strong enough to handle doubt and not knowing.
Maybe we don’t like living with questions because we don’t like feeling exposed. Questions show what we don’t know. They point out the holes in what we understand. They highlight our lack of knowledge. In a world that values expertise and surety, saying “I don’t know” feels risky. And for ordained and lay church leaders, questions can seem like risks.
It was during my time sitting with people like Eleanor — people facing life’s hardest moments — that my perspective began to shift. I witnessed how honest questions often led to deeper connections, both with God and with each other. Stories from Scripture reminded me that faithful questioning has always been part of our tradition. Through prayer and reflection on these experiences, I gradually came to wonder:
What if our questions aren’t roadblocks to faith but instead lead us towards it? What if God cares less about our certainty and more about our inquisitiveness?
Reformed theologian Karl Barth once said that faith doesn’t mean having no questions but having the guts to live with them. When we accept our questions – even the ones that bother us most – we give God a chance to connect in an honest way.
In an effort to embrace the vulnerability and reality of questions, my church has started to explore what we call “question liturgies.” These are written segments we incorporate into our Sunday worship services every two weeks where, instead of stating what we know about God, we collectively ask our questions out loud. Sometimes they follow a responsive format:
Leader: “In times of suffering we ask…”
Congregation: “God, where are you in this pain?”
Leader: “When facing those who harm us, we wonder…”
Congregation: “How can we love people who hurt us?”
Leader: “Standing before mystery, we question…”
All: “What does resurrection mean right now?”
Other times, we provide a moment of silence where congregants write their questions on cards, which are then gathered and a selection are read aloud as part of our prayer time. These written questions become powerful community prayers, honest and unfiltered.
The effect of these group questions has transformed our worship. One elderly member told me after service, “For the first time in decades, I felt I could bring my whole self to church.”
This approach isn’t about praising doubt just to praise it. Instead, it recognizes that faith growth doesn’t follow a straight path from doubt to certainty but twists through periods of confidence and questioning. Our questions don’t show a lack of faith but open doors to deeper faithfulness.
“But,” an elder asked during our last session meeting, “doesn’t this approach undermine the certainty we’re supposed to have? Doesn’t the Bible say that ‘faith gives us assurance about things we hope for and makes us certain of things we don’t see’?” It does. Yet this assurance and certainty don’t have to rule out questions. In fact, I think the strongest faith is the kind that makes room for questions, checking its base and finding it firm.
Thomas Parker, a Puritan leader from the 1600s, said, “God allows us to interrogate our faith because true faith can withstand such interrogation.” Our questions don’t weaken our faith; they give it honor. They change faith from a passed-down custom to a real-life experience.
As Presbyterian communities, we shine brightest when we build sanctuaries not just to worship but to marvel – places where people welcome questions as gifts, as mysteries to explore. When we welcome sacred questioning, we show a faith strong enough to admit its limits and modest enough to stay open to the unexpected.
Eleanor died three weeks after our conversation. At her funeral, her daughter told me that their final conversations had been filled with questions they’d never dared to ask each other before. “Mom said you gave her permission to question until the end,” she said. “Those last talks were the most honest we’ve ever had.”
Perhaps that’s the greatest gift questions offer us – not just a pathway to God, but a bridge to each other. In our shared wondering, we find not only divine connection but also profound human community. And there, in that sacred space of collective questioning, we might just glimpse the face of God.
