Sharing My Faith Door to Door
And coming to grips with how it shaped my faith and the way I see the world
Note: This piece is not a tell-all or expose of any kind intended to show the deep pitfalls of the evangelical movement on mainstream Christianity in the 1990s. Instead, it is a reflection of how one aspect of this influence shaped my faith development in my teen years. I have a lot of grace for that girl. I have a lot of grace for the adults who shaped my faith journey during those years. We were all doing the best we could with the information that we had, and I honestly don’t know if I would have been better off without these experiences. (This is also why the initial preview for free subscribers is minimal.) That’s just the nature of being human; we can’t undo the past or see alternative timelines. But we can seek to do better as we move forward.
Additional note: I knew that I needed to write this piece, but I had no idea what to do with it. I didn’t want it to become some kind of juicy piece revealing dark secrets. Instead, I wanted this to be about my own growth as a Christian human trying to figure out the world. Reading this recent piece from Sarah Bessey helped me recenter what I wanted this piece to be.
Our family’s move from Illinois to Wyoming was the first time that I can ever remember questioning the existence of God.
And over thirty years later, it is hard to know if I was questioning the existence of God or just so angry at Him that I started questioning everything that I ever had been taught about Him or believed.
To be honest, my anger and frustration with my parents lasted far longer than my questions about God. Within a year after our move, I was surrounded by a strong faith community that accepted me into their circle and gave me the tools to explore my faith in new ways, beyond anything that I was doing in confirmation classes and occasional participation standard youth group activities.
But the activity that really transformed my faith walk was my participation in a national evangelism youth organization associated with my church body. It was officially a service organization funded primarily through offerings at congregations served by the organization.
While this youth organization included people from across the country, it was small and relatively insignificant. When we gathered for our yearly summer “training,” the largest gathering I experienced involved about 300 youth and adults split across approximately twenty or so teams. By contrast, when I attended the national youth gathering in San Antonio the summer before my junior year of high school, there were over 25,000 youth and adults in attendance.
The participation differential was not lost on many of us, although at the time our biggest concern was how we could convince more people to join us in diving deeper into their faith and learning how to share it with others.
