I Know God...Kinda.

The complacency of growing up in church | Part 1

Recently, a question has been gnawing at me. What prevents someone who has known about God for a long time, someone who grew up in and around christianity, from giving God a serious yes? Is it pride, is it lack of understanding, or is it complacency?

Let’s talk about it…

I grew up in church and was baptised at 10 years old of my own volition but there came a time when I wasn’t walking with God the way I should have been. The way I am now. I attended many different churches as a child both visiting and attending regularly. Anyone with Christian Caribbean parents knows that if you’re visiting relatives at the weekend, you go to their church when you’re there. I say all of that to emphasise that the level of exposure I had to church culture growing up was vast. In that time, I observed many things but the main reality I wish to explore for the purpose of this article is the complacency of growing up in church.

“…having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power…” 2 Timothy 3:5

When you have been immersed in something for as long as you can remember, you just know information about the topic in question. Or better yet you think you know. It is your default and it is therefore easy to take for granted the gravity of what you know. Yes, I know that Jesus is God. Yes, I know that Jesus died for my sins, yes I know I am supposed to live a certain way and not engage in certain things but…but what? What is the barrier? Maybe it is because there is too much knowledge and not enough understanding of who God actually is. Too much religion, not enough relationship. That can cultivate an unhealthy fear of God because you’re so focused on the rules that you miss the gift. This is where I will place some onus on the church.

Growing up, I heard so much: you should not dress like this, or you shouldn’t be doing this or that. Don’t listen to secular music, y’all shouldn’t be watching this as believers. And it’s not that they were necessarily wrong but there was so much focus on legalism and making sure young people didn’t backslide, that the elders forgot to talk about the importance of cultivating a true intimate relationship with God. What it is like to have God as a father because when he is your father, you develop a healthy fear, a reverence i.e. a respect for him that no amount of fear-mongering can produce. When the Holy Spirit dwells in you and you are seeking a relationship with the Father, you will naturally feel conviction about what you do and in my experience, its often gentler than the rebuke that you get from man. When Jesus is your Lord and Saviour you naturally want to be more like him. In an effort to keep young people on the straight and narrow, church has sometimes repelled them with rules instead of luring them with relationship.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20

God pursues us and loves us in spite of our flaws and mishaps, he knows what we are going to do before we do it. But if all you know as a young person is that being a christian means I cannot watch what I want or listen to what I want to listen to, then rejection of this God you think you know is often imminent. Instead of building an understanding of who God truly is, we enforce rules and force bible verses without full explanation or context.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

What does that even mean to a young person? God the creator of the universe who is not mandated by anyone or anything and has ultimate power, loves you. No matter what you do or say, he will always love you. You are not too broken for him to love. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, there is an order to this thing we call life. Both this realm and the spiritual realm have their own modus operandi. However, because we don’t always operate in alignment with the order of things, a price had to be paid in blood as blood is the currency of the spiritual realm. In this case the ultimate sacrifice was paid by the one who loves you the most, Jesus.

It would also help to humanise the elders in church. When the people that are delivering the message seem so far removed from the struggle of everyday life, it’s easy to dismiss the message. Now I am not suggesting that y’all start telling all your business, but it would be helpful to know that brother so and so and sister so and so and aunty and uncle so and so are actually human. Dealt with temptation growing up, wrestled with faith. What is your testimony? What made you give God a serious yes? Without the connection of humanity, it is bound to breed distance and complacency. If God humbled himself to human form for our sake, I think the church aunties and uncles will survive being real with young people every so often.

With all that being said, ultimately we all have to make a choice just like I did. I came to a crossroads in my life where I had to hold up a mirror and decide, am I going to continue living the same way, doing the same thing expecting different results which is the definition of insanity. Or am I going to explore who God is for myself, because here is the thing, I never lost my faith, I just had so much junk thrown on me by life, that my vision became blurry and I forgot who I was. That was my experience, it may not be yours. You may just not feel like you need God because life as far as you can see is working perfectly fine for you without him. Maybe you have gone through life largely unscathed and adult life is also working well for you without God. You’ve got the house, the car, the job, the girlfriend or boyfriend. Either way the complacency is still very much prevalent.

If that is you, I challenge you to challenge God. *Gasp “You can’t say that Grachael Dara!” Well I did. Challenge God. Ask him to reveal himself to you because if your life is going swimmingly, you by all accounts have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. One of two things will happen, either the God that you kinda knew growing up, will show himself, at which point you have the choice to explore or ignore. If nothing happens, you can continue to go about your life as you have been doing, reaping the benefits of God’s grace, mercy and favour without saying thank you. Now that is just rude but who am I to say anything when he gave us free will.