Ep. 182: Why Are They Leaving?

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guest who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks for joining us on this episode of indoubt. My name’s Kourtney and it’s so good to have you with us. On this week’s episode, Ryan talks with guest Dr. John Neufeld. Dr. John is a Canadian Bible teacher and he’s been a guest on indoubt several times and we’re glad to have him back. In this episode, he joins us to discuss the issue of deconversion specifically asking why do you people leave the church. Through real life stories and examples, Dr. John touches on why people leave the church and how we can help them in whatever place they’re in. By taking the time to learn and ask questions, we’re able to answer the tough questions and face the issues of today knowing that God is with us in everything we do.

Ryan McCurdy:
Thanks so much for being with us here on indoubt. My name is Ryan the indoubt host. So, Dr. John, thank you so much for being here with us.

John Neufeld:
Great to be with you, Ryan.

Ryan McCurdy:
Love having you. So, today, I want to talk a little bit about people who struggle with scripture and maybe grew up in the church and then end up leaving the church or leaving the faith and articulating that they’re “deconverting” from Christianity. From what I understand, a majority of this is surrounded around the authority of scripture and their loss for the value of God’s word. What do you say to that?

John Neufeld:
Well, there’s so many different stories that I’m hearing and so, yeah. People doubt the scripture. Although I’m going to say, not always sure that they understood the scripture given the appalling level of just biblical illiteracy and often when I speak to someone like that. Let me give you a foolish example but it went like this. Kid says, “I don’t know if I believe the scripture.” He looked about 17, 18. I said, “Oh, tell me why.” Well, he said, “My friend is really into Klingons, Star Wars.” You got that whole Star Wars crazy people, right? So, this is what he was getting into. He was comparing the scripture to I guess there was a book of Klingon. I don’t know these things, right? So, I said to him, “Tell me what you know about the Bible.” “Well, it just claims to be the word of God,” he say. “You know anything about the history of it?”
As an example, I regularly go to Israel. The place where we usually start is I mean in a place called Caesarea. Caesarea was built by Herod the Great. It is the very harbor that the Apostle Paul sailed out of, but it was only a generation ago when people were saying, “Well, all these biblical characters didn’t even exist. Pontius Pilate, I mean, who is that?” Well, as they’re excavating Caesarea, they find this large stone written in Latin Pontius Pilatus with a lot of other stuff about him which corroborates that everything that the Bible speaks of happened in a real place in history.
Now this young man at 17 or 18 did not know that. He was actually raised in church and did not know that you’re looking at a historical document, didn’t know the difference between a historical document and fantasy, and having no place to put the Bible, don’t understand what it was, it was easy for him to abandon it because I would suspect he’s never read it and if he has, it’s just small portions of it. David up against Goliath so the little guy wins over the big guy. That’s the life lesson he thinks he’s learned. So, he gets a bunch of stories and the stories happen in his mind apart from a historical context. Doesn’t understand any of that and like some other stories better.
I think it came down to that in his case. Not saying they’re all that way. Anyway, often, I think that the deconversion that’s happening comes out of an appalling void of not only what is the Bible but what is the Christian faith, what is the church, what is the history of our movement. All of these things are just a blank slate, so you’ll typically get a high school student that was raised in church. Sometimes they didn’t even … well, they weren’t even in the service because they got kid’s church where they’re doing fun stuff, right?

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah.

John Neufeld:
Then they get out to university and suddenly they’re being asked questions that they’ve never been asked in their lives. They find that they got nothing in their armory to actually fight that. So, that’s the deconversion that I know of. It’s really a statement about how badly we have trained a generation.

Ryan McCurdy:
So, how have we trained a generation?

John Neufeld:
I think we have for a generation already talked about the importance of relevance. We have stressed relevance far more than we have stressed what authentic Christianity is. What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to walk with Christ not knowing that? Rather than rooting ourselves into the history of our movement, we’ve tried to root ourselves into this culture. It’s almost a me too movement. This is me too. You know what? We’re cool, too. I’m going to say we’re finding out that we really can’t out-entertain the world. So, I think to a large degree this constant drive towards we can be relevant to this culture rather than we can present an authentic word from God to this culture I think has made us irrelevant.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah. It’s so ironic the pursuit of relevancy makes you irrelevant because that’s the moment where you lose your tact. You lose your saltiness. You lose the sanctity of the truth that you’re communicating. We live in a culture that is very humanistic. Well humans can solve human problems. Human can solve actually more than human problems. Human can solve all human problems but the problem with that line of thinking is that humans can’t actually solve the problem with God. I can resolve a problem I have with my neighbor, my friend or somebody that I work with because if there’s been an offense, I can speak to them and I can bridge that gap. I can ask for forgiveness and they have the power as a human to forgive me of that offense, but the person that can forgive me of my sin, it’s not a problem that humans can fix. It’s a human problem that only God can fix.

John Neufeld:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Ryan, I think that’s not only right but I think what’s behind that question also is the question of human sin, being able to define what we mean when we talk about sin. I think we ought to probably have taught all of our young people to define sin almost in their sleep. They ought to be able to come up with a definition of sin that actually matches the Bible definition. So, that when you’re in psychology class and you hear Christians just make you have a poor self esteem by all this sin talk, the good Christian student would immediately say, “I know exactly what we’ve been talking about by sin and I know that my prof is not talking about what we’ve talked about, so it’s not defining me at all.”
There are other issues as well. I think there are apologetic issues that we should have been addressing. God and the problem of evil. There are good biblical answers. How is it that God is good and that God is all powerful but yet that evil exists? There are great answers to that and they deal with the sovereignty of God and they deal with a whole bunch of stuff, but we ought to have helped our kids through that, so that they don’t encounter that stuff the first time. Then of course, the sexual … well, we live in a sexualized culture where the idea of the Christian morality that the only proper expression of our sexuality is within the context of heterosexual marriage. That’s what we believe. Now, a lot of people say, “Well, that’s just horrible.” Then again, they’ve never heard the biblical justification and have not heard the apologetic for our view of sexuality. I’m going to argue that the view of sexuality that our culture presently holds is a view of sexuality that will eventually lead to the decimation of this culture. It cannot survive this and that we’re on the downgrade slope. That every culture that’s on it’s way up, has always held a high view of marriage and the stability of the home. Now we can argue for that. We can say this is the biblical world view. We can say that it has always been the biblical world view, but it’s being challenged at every level. So, all of these things are things that our kids are going to face and we would have trained them and could have trained them and we should have trained them and we would have far fewer kids leaving the faith.

Ryan McCurdy:
What do you think is at the very essence of these deconversion stories? I talk with people that come to the young adults group that I pastor and they say, “Oh, I grew up in the church and I left when I was about grade 10. I’m now 19 or 20. My friend invited me to church but I don’t really buy it.” The questions surrounding them are deep rooted for a lot of these individuals. So, my question for you is, what do you think are these questions that people are asking? Are they looking to the wrong place for the wrong answers?

John Neufeld:
Well, I think the sexuality question in our day is huge. It just is. It’s very difficult for a great many people to think of what they believe to be a restrictive view of our own sexuality. Also, because we have placed a high value on people’s feelings over truth and once we buy into that feelings trump truth, we’ll again be in a place where we can’t win on that one. The reality is that there are things in the Christian faith, when God says, “You’re a sinner;” you don’t become a Christian until you confess your sins. It was Augustine who said the first time we say I’m a sinner is the first time ever that God and I agree on something. It’s my first point of agreement.

Ryan McCurdy:
That’s good.

John Neufeld:
So, there’s a long way to go from there, but it’s a wonderful point of agreement, but it is … I would argue sin and sexuality are probably the primary issues that people are facing. A lot of the stuff that we’re hearing are just computations of the same theme over and over and over again. Let me say, I mean, I read a recent article of a guy who had written a lot of worship music that’s being played in churches and that he had deconverted. So, I had never heard of the guy before. So, I went online and I looked at … I didn’t play the stuff. I just looked at the lyrics of what he had written. Ryan, there weren’t anything Christian in those lyrics. If we’ve been singing them in church, my response is, “Which church were they being sung in?”
So, if he said he was deconverted, I don’t know that he was converted. So, I wonder how many of those stories actually go with that, but there are others as well. One of them is I came from a fundamentalistic background. I was restricted in every single way. I’m just so tired of living by all of these rules and never getting to express myself as I truly am. So, we find a probably a restrictive less grace-filled but highly law-filled view of the Christian faith and eventually we rebelled. Again, I would say, “What did you buy in the first place and what is it that you’re rejecting when you deconvert?” As I would always say, “Articulate for me what it is that you’ve rejected.” Many times it’s personal hurt. Huge on personal hurt, right?

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah. That’s been what I’ve seen a lot of in the ministry that I’ve been part of and that actually is part of my story. That’s part of my faith. I grew up in a church and family and school where my experience, whether it’s true or not, but my perception of my experience was that it was very closed-minded. I didn’t feel the freedom to express my faith and distill down the truth of the gospel into my life without fear of not doing it properly. This idea of this law-filled over grace-filled and the balance needs to be very important, but what happens I think a lot of times is young people either grow up in a very let’s say law-filled type faith or an extreme grace-filled type faith and the temptation is to swing the pendulum over to the other side. That swinging once it starts is hard to slow down.

John Neufeld:
Now it has to be admitted however that even though that’s the case, there are a great many places where the Christian church has sinned. If we just look at what has happened in Catholicism, this rampant abuse of children, there is real anger and the anger is real and it’s felt and it’s justified. Same is true as well where there has been a Christian church where there has been leadership that’s been oppressive. So, there’s not an intellectual basis for the faith. People aren’t taken into a depth of understanding of what faith actually entails. Instead, they’re given laws and any time you break one of those laws, they come at you with gangbusters and people feel constantly maligned and hurt and abused. I don’t blame them for leaving that. There is a reason for that and some places, a lot of places, the Christian church itself needs to go into repentance. We’ve sinned. We’ve driven people out the door, just the case.

Ryan McCurdy:
Presented in a false view of what it means to be a follower of Christ.

John Neufeld:
Yeah. Then trying to hide that false view with our own authoritarian natures.

Ryan McCurdy:
So, people leave, and they say that, “I’m leaving the faith.” Maybe they’re leaving a type of leadership or a type of rendition and if they really and truly knew the gospel without the human sin component filtering through the lens-

John Neufeld:
Well, we’re always going to get that.

Ryan McCurdy:
Totally.

John Neufeld:
I think there’s this wonderful self-realization when I come to the realization not only have people sinned against me, I’ve sinned against them. It’s just part of human nature. I take note of all the things that are done to me. I tend to discount or at least give myself a pass when I’ve done something evil to someone else. The reality is we need to also confront our own sin. This is the uncomfortable part of the Christian faith. We need to come to terms with the fact even those that are leaving the Christian faith need to come to terms with the fact that they need to own some of this stuff. Just reality.
So, I want to say both ways but then again for those people that have been sexually abused, I have nothing to say outside of my heart is broken that this kind of activity should be allowed among the people of God. I would argue that if we need to do anything, when there is an individual who acts sexually inappropriately in the church, that we give them no more access to teaching, to leadership of God’s people in any way. Yes, we can provide redemption but we never put them back in a position of authority ever. I think we’ll go a long way if we just simply took that tact.

Ryan McCurdy:
So, maybe somebody’s listening and maybe they’re in their own life, they’re struggling with this idea of maybe it’s doubt or maybe it’s feeling pulled away or not pulled away, feeling like they’re drifting away from God and they’re being bombarded or maybe they are friends with somebody who is going through that type of experience let’s say. How would you encourage them?

John Neufeld:
I would say it would be a really good thing. Depending on where you’re at, find a good book and read it. Tim Keller’s Reason for God, excellent book. Read it. Hear it from a person who fits well within the center of the Christian movement and who gives an understanding of the Christian faith. I love some of the stuff that’s out, that Lee Strobel has written. It’s a little older now but still it’s very relevant: The Case for Christ. Take the time and actually hear what is the evidence for the Christian faith. So, there’s two books, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel or Reasons for Faith by Tim Keller. Either one of those would be excellent begin to at least open your mind to saying, “Perhaps there were things that I never learned about the Christian faith at all, so that when I rejected it, I rejected a pseudo faith and not the real deal in the first place.” At least be open to that possibility. I think it’s a place to start. I would also argue it has to be relational. Somewhere along the road, I mean it’s good to connect with an authentic Christian. Someone you can trust and someone who’s loving and who also has a knowledge in the Word. It might revolutionize everything you thought a Christian might be. This might be very helpful.

Ryan McCurdy:
So, to you John, as you teach the Bible and as you’ve pastored for many years, how important is the reality of an individual and personal relationship with Jesus?

John Neufeld:
In the end there will always be a difference between the Christian faith and a philosophy class. We’re not dealing with just ideas here. We’re dealing with a living God. The living God who sent his son into the world, who lived and died and rose for us and, because he is alive, can be encountered. So, the living God calls upon us to come to him and to repent of our sins and to embrace him, so that it is he whom we want and he whom we live for. Therefore, the life of devotion, the life of prayer, the life of just simply allowing myself to be open to the Spirit of God leading me and to be aware of the fact that I live in a world in which everything is being ordered by God at every moment and then to begin to have a life that responds with thanksgiving, deeply grateful to God for all of his goodness in our lives from every breath that I breathe to the fact that every encounter that I have throughout the day is ordered by his gracious hand.
Even to the point that if I go to the doctor and find I have cancer, that when I recover from my shock, I go before him and say, “Oh Lord, even you have ordered this and I will give thanks because I know that you’re working in my life something which you are ordering from my long term eternal future.” It is constantly going through life and responding to the hand of God in everything that we do, never being outside of his presence. See in the end, it’s got to be more than exactly as you said the tenants of the Christian faith. Now people will often reject the tenants of the faith and Ryan they don’t often reject the living reality of Jesus. They’re just not so sure that it is Jesus they’re encountering. They’re just not sure.
I think in the end of the day I’m going to say that it is important for individuals because we’re talking about extremes here. You get somebody who’s just intellectual and you got someone who’s just emotive. You’ve got to say in the end of the day regardless of where you fall on that, if in the end of the day you are not living in the presence of God and learning his life of love and responding to him and his graciousness in our lives daily and if prayer is not a part of your life, you’re not living the Christian faith at all. I think it was Luther that says to believe is to pray and I’m sure that’s the case. We can’t believe and not pray. So, these are some of the things that come to my mind if you ask this.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, because the belief is so often I think of church culture has been growing up for me it was lift your hand and say a prayer and you’re a Christian. The prayer obviously entails a level of confession, but one of the challenges is, “Okay, now what? What about after we believe?” We spend a lot of time emphasizing evangelism which we should rightfully so, but discipleship, sanctification, what now that I’m a believer, what’s important now? N.T. Wright has a book called, After You Believe. He pretty much lays out, “Hey, your faith doesn’t stop when you become a Christian. It just begins. Now its a process of being sanctified, being renewed, growing in the likeness of Christ.” I think this is when I hear of people deconverting. This is what they’re leaving. They’re leaving an idea or a set of rules. They’re not leaving a life-giving vibrant healthy relationship with the living God.

John Neufeld:
I don’t know of anyone that had a healthy relationship with a living God that deconverted. That’s quite a thing to say, but I would say, “What do I do now?” You’ve come to faith in Christ. It’s very important to know what to do now. I always say number one, go get baptized. What most churches will take you through basics of the Christian faith and you’ll now stand in the presence of others, an entire congregation and maybe you’ve invited friends which you should anyway and watch you stand in the baptismal tank and hear the words, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works? Do you believe in Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God? On the basis of your faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit.” There is something about the act itself which I’m going to say is grace-giving. Then of course, there are what I would call disciplines of the Christian life. We live by discipline. Now look, everyone has habits built in their lives. There’s no person in the world that can live without habits. I eat at certain times the day. I sleep at certain times of the day. There are things that I habitually do. It’s important. Every single Sunday, you’re in church. You’re a believer. Don’t miss. Don’t ever miss. You say, “Well, I’m on holidays.” Go find a church somewhere. Make this just bedrock in your life and then make sure that you are in a community of believers. Make sure that you have a time set aside each day for reading your Bible and for praying.
Now, I’m going to argue we learn to pray as we live constantly responding to God, constantly speaking to God, but set aside that time. Ryan, one of the things that I say to people is you have trouble praying, you just “I have trouble.” So, find a place where you’re alone. You read your Bible. You pray. You say, “I don’t do that well.” So, put up a stopwatch and make it 10 minutes. You know what? You’re not going to get off. No matter how hard you struggle, your mind is wandering all over the place and you don’t know how to do it. You’re not going to get off your knees for 10 minutes. You know what? As you begin to do that, it’s amazing how in some of these disciplines, suddenly to our astonishment, we find God entering into them. We find them to be places of sacredness and encounter and just living habitually is a part of living the Christian life. There is a disciplined life that Christ demands of us. It will take us through the long haul.

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah. That is the difference between relationship and fellowship.

John Neufeld:
Yeah.

Ryan McCurdy:
I relate to someone. I have a relationship with my wife, but I could not spend any time with her and she would still be my wife, but the life of our relationship comes, the joy comes, the intimacy, the knowledge of one another and the growth comes, the more we spend time with each other. Listening to each other, hearing, encouraging, loving, sharing, dreaming together, planning together, parenting together. It’s life that we do together with one another that strengthens our relationship.

John Neufeld:
Yeah and that I think is not a bad example because there is a discipline that oversees all of that and that is the discipline of the vows that you made at the altar. You said that you weren’t going to leave one another so you’re stuck with each other. She might as well get along, right? So, there is a formality that overarches your relationship, your intimacy, the love that you share with each other. So, in a sense you’re forced to it, but you say, “Well, I want to be forced to it.” I want to love you but in sickness and in health, right? I watched and it’s a good example of Christian faith. My wife and I walk every night. The other day we’re walking along and I see a couple. They’re a Chinese couple. They look about I’m going to say in their late 80s. They’re walking.
As we were walking by, I realize she’s blind. She’s got her arm around him. He’s holding her hand. They got their arms locked with each other and they’re walking. I thought to myself, see, I don’t know if this guy helped her fulfill her life expectations or anything else, but he did one thing. He said to that woman, “I’ll never leave you in sickness and in health.” Man, he fulfilled that. I’d say our Christian faith is like that. There is this commitment that we make. The Lord says, “I’m entering into a covenant with you. Never leave you or forsake you.” We commit ourselves at our baptism that we are now locked into Jesus. Once we lock into Jesus, through sickness and in health and we find the richness of that relationship but we’ll never find it when we’re saying “I might dark at any moment.”

Ryan McCurdy:
Yeah, totally. This idea of running away or deconverting or drifting away, it confronts this very notion of being in a covenant or relationship. A vowed relationship with another person like your spouse but also a vowed relationship with the living God. He commits to us. He calls us to pick up our cross, follow him even when it’s uncomfortable. So, John, I appreciate your insight into this.

John Neufeld:
Glad to be here with you.

Ryan McCurdy:
It’s always a joy.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thank you so much for listening today. It was really good to have Dr. John with us and he’ll actually be joining us again next week as we go to the foundation of our faith and ask questions about the Bible:a why we trust it, how did it happen and when was it written. If there’s anything you’d like to share with us, please do. We’d love hearing your stories, topics that you’d like to hear more about or things that we can do better. You can send us a private message on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter or you can email me at info@indoubt.ca. So, join us again next week for part two of the conversation with Dr. John Neufeld.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.