When I was in campus ministry, I met a student at Boston University who told me she had grown up Christian but was now an atheist.
I asked if I could hear her story, and she immediately started to tell me why she left her childhood faith.
It began when the senior pastor of her church invited her to talk with him after her high school graduation.
She arrived in his office, super excited to spend time with her senior pastor. She wanted his wisdom as she prepared to leave home.
He asked her what she planned to study, and she talked about her interest in biology.
Immediately, he tightened up and expressed alarm.
He told her, “No, I don’t recommend that. If you study science, you’ll lose your faith in God.”
That sentence rattled around in her heart and mind: If you study science, you’ll lose your faith in God.
She told me, “That moment was when I started to lose my faith in God. If my pastor believed that science disproved God, then why should any of us be Christians?”
This pastor’s fear of science is just one example of how some churches avoid difficult questions.
This week, I found another disheartening example.
It surprised me to see how church leaders in large denominations sometimes hide difficult passages in the Bible from their congregations.
It all started because I started to read what’s called the lectionary. It’s a pre-arranged schedule of Bible readings that covers much of the Bible over a three-year cycle.
According to Wikipedia, the churches that have adopted the most popular lectionary “represents the majority of American and Canadian Christians and has been widely adopted in Great Britain and in other countries such as Australia.”
In other words, the selection of Bible passages in the lectionary shapes the Bible reading for millions of Christians.
But the lectionary often skips over challenging verses!
For example, the reading for last Tuesday was Deuteronomy 4:15-20 and 1 Peter 2:19-25.
Do you know what’s missing? If you’ve been following the lectionary through Deuteronomy 14, it skips verse 3:
Your eyes have seen what the LORD did at Baal-peor, for the LORD your God destroyed every one of you who followed Baal of Peor.
Uncomfortable words.
So, out of the entire chapter of Deuteronomy 4, the lectionary editors left out only one verse… the hard one.
And when you turn to 1 Peter 2:19-25, you notice that it should have included verse 18, because its the crucial opening sentence for this section of the letter.
But here’s what verse 18 says:
Household slaves, submit to your masters with all reverence not only to the good and gentle ones but also to the cruel.
By omitting these challenging verses, church leaders hide the hard parts of the Bible from their congregations.
It’s sad. They invested so much effort in organizing the Bible into a three-year reading plan but didn’t trust God’s word enough to include the tricky parts!
Don’t we lose credibility when pastors fear science… or even the Bible?
I think this habit of running away from difficult questions is exceptionally damaging.
First, when churches avoid these questions, we’re less prepared to deal with them. We don’t even know they exist!
But eventually, we have to face them— at work, with our children, or in college — and find ourselves in a crisis.
Why didn’t they tell me about these Bible verses? Why didn’t we talk about science and faith? What else are they hiding?
I think this fear of questions contributes to the decline in church attendance that we’re seeing across the country.
A 2022 Pew Survey found,
As recently as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians.
But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians.
The change in America’s religious composition is largely the result of large numbers of adults switching out of the religion in which they were raised to become religiously unaffiliated.
. . .
In the U.S., people with higher levels of educational attainment tend to be less religious by some traditional measures, such as how often they pray or attend religious services.
Since high school, I’ve taken the opposite approach: let’s ask hard questions and search for the truth.
When I found the lectionary left out 1 Peter 2:18, I found it really upsetting.
So, I started to research the passage and then explained what I found.
You can find the post here: (What does 1 Peter 2:18-25 mean?).
Now, the next time someone wonders if the Bible endorses slavery, maybe they’ll do a Google search and find a community that’s not afraid to honestly wrestle with the hardest passages in the Bible.
I want to assure you: in Uncommon Pursuit, you can ask the questions you’ve been afraid to talk about.
If we never work out, our muscles atrophy. If we never question our faith, it gets weaker, too.
We worship a God who created everything from nothing, raised Jesus from the dead, and sent the Holy Spirit to live in our hearts. God can handle our questions, too.
So, whenever you’re ready, ask your question in the community.