Preaching until you Mean It
Shane Raynor is again stirring things up with a post on a Toolkit for Radical Methodists. He has proposed the idea of preaching faith until you have it, rather than waiting for faith.
Since I recently posted some about doubt, I was interested in his phrase “wearing [your] doubt as a straitjacket.” I wonder if one could distinguish acknowledging doubt as opposed to wearing it as a straitjacket. Might it be possible for there to be healthy doubts, doubts that lead you onward as opposed to unhealthy doubts that keep you from taking action?
This is one I’m still thinking about.
In my experience, this is a risky strategy. I remember speaking to a Mormon missionary and, after half an hour of swapping sophistries, I worked the conversation round to the point where he admitted he wasn’t convinced that God existed, and was basically doing his missionary service “just in case”. Needless to say, this conflicted somewhat with the more strident claims he’d been making earlier.
Preaching faith until you have it is probably quite effective, in a tribal kind of way. But until you have that belief, your preaching is incredibly dishonest. Any recipients who spot this are likely to react negatively, as I did.
Personally, I find this kind of self-brainwashing deeply scary – like something out of the last couple chapters of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. And I’m rather disturbed by the thought of people publically urinating in the fountain of truth (to paraphrase Terry Pratchett). It’s bad enough to force yourself to believe something despite your own skepticism, but to then inflict those pseudo-beliefs on others… there’s a word for that.
Yes, this whole topic is one that makes me think. I will preach even when I doubt, but I try to be honest about where I have a hard time with a concept.
If I spoke without considering all these things, in other words off the cuff, I would say, “Be honest about your doubts. Don’t be afraid of your doubts. Don’t let your doubts keep you from action.”