We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.
Tips on what NOT to say to someone struggling with their faith
Neal Fowler via Compfight
Here’s a post from a year ago from Elizabeth Esther on What NOT to say to someone struggling with their faith. Historically, the church has been a very unsafe place for people expressing doubts or struggles. Let’s be safer than this.
From the blog post:
- “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!” This nice little cliche manages to be both offensive and dismissive all at once. It assumes the listener has abandoned important aspects of their faith and belittles the honest struggle of re-examining once dearly held beliefs.
- “When’s the last time you read your Bible?” This question is used as a litmus test; ie. if you haven’t been reading your Bible daily, well, OF COURSE, that’s why you’re having problems. This question exposes a dualistic mindset that seeks easy answers to complex problems.Not only is this question hurtful, it presumes every spiritual struggle can be simply diagnosed and resolved with a few predictable, formulaic steps.
Check out the blog post to read the other eight points.
Related Reading
Hearing and Responding to God: Part 3
We decided to change the title of this series to better reflect it’s content. Hope that’s not confusing. Greg continues his thoughts here on hearing when God speaks to us and being willing to respond even when we’re not completely certain. You can view parts one and two here and here.
The Lord of Legend and Love
However secularized a person may be, if they have any sense at all that life has a meaning, they know it must have something to do with love. Indeed, one could argue that all of our intuitions about morality and the meaning of life are at root an intuition about the supremacy of love. At…
The Bible is Infallible NOT Inerrant
While the cruciform understanding (explained here) of the “God-breathed” nature of Scripture is in tension with the way most talk about inerrancy (See previous post on inerrancy), I do not believe it is at all incompatible with what the Church has always sought to express by affirming the “infallibility” the Scripture. The core conviction is that Scripture will…
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 8
This is the eighth of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg gets into the nitty gritty of why portions of the birth account are not the dumbest lie ever. If you missed the first seven installments you can…
Video Q&A: Faith and the Historical Jesus
Greg is trying something new in order to answer more of your questions. He’s going to be taping himself addressing your questions with no polish of any kind: raw and unedited. You’ll notice in this first one that he’s pretty low in the frame of the camera, and we’ll be tweaking this as we go,…
Why Isn’t God More Clear?
Ever wonder why God isn’t more clear and obvious? Here’s Greg’s take on that question.