The Thrill of Christian Faith

This past week of chaplaincy at Kwantlen overflowed with a huge variety of experiences. My Fleetwood CRC chaplaincy committee visited the campus early in the week. Together we explored both the physical and spiritual space of Kwantlen, with its well-designed libraries, classrooms, offices, and cafes, all the while imaging and sharing our sense of the deep spiritual desires and questions that this community of learning is wrestling with. We asked ourselves, how can our Christian chaplaincy make a home and hospitable centre for this piece of God’s creation?

I met some students for the first time who came to the Multi-Faith Centre with a spiritual intensity and questioning mind that led to very fruitful and exciting discussions. I thought long and hard about the importance of the Multi-Faith Centre, about how it can be both inclusive of all perspectives and religious traditions as well as allowing for the distinctiveness of thought and practice that each of those traditions has to offer, whether explicitly religious or secular. I met with Kwantlen representatives to discuss and think about that very issue. I connected with other Christian Reformed campus ministers, sharing stories, ideas, and encouragement. And I even encountered some disagreement this week, a difference of opinion on how the Multi-Faith Centre should function.

Many of these experiences were spiritually intense and charged with an excitable energy. Some of my week was lower key, writing emails and doing online research about Multi-Faith Centres on other university campuses.

But whatever the energy level or emotional impact of these varied experiences, I am increasingly convinced that the Christian life is exciting. Thinking, practicing, and living out the Christian faith is not simply about ordered and proper theological frameworks, church structures, or ethical systems. While all of these things are important, they are only so insofar as they are caught up in the thrill, danger, and excitement of following Jesus.

In his book “Orthodoxy” G.K. Chesterston wrote something that continues to haunt me: “There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.” Orthodoxy he is talking about, the rich, thick tradition of Christian faith. Not the thrill of heresy or being supposedly ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ and rejecting Christian institutions or traditional doctrines, as if Christian tradition were dull, uninspiring, and in need of science or secularism to jolt it out of its slumber. Instead, Christianity carries within itself the seeds of its own destabilization and unsettlement.

It is Jesus who jolts both the church and the world out of its passive slumber. Jesus calls us to the excitement of love, justice, joy, and creativity. And not only that, but the Christian tradition is deeply invested with working out who Jesus is and what it means to follow him. We are caught right in the middle, not of bland doctrines, but of exciting tensions that lie at the heart of the Christian faith: Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, the Kingdom of God is both now and not yet, the Church both receives the love of Christ and gives the love of Christ. And Jesus himself formulated one of the most paradoxical and exciting teachings of all: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Through this past week I have been struck by how this thrill of Christian life can make its way into both the menial and more inspiring tasks and experiences. Every moment of following Jesus is centered around living in the exciting and fruitful tensions of power in weakness, of giving to receive, of divinity and humanity. As his followers we are at the heart of this orthodoxy. Of course, we often fail to live out of this energy; the tasks of the world drain our energy or we are tempted to close down the thrill for the sake of safety and security. But if we continue to try to follow Jesus and be inhabited by his spirit of life, then the excitement, peril, and joy of Christian faith will always be as close as our very selves.