Answering questions. Or not.

Years ago a friend—let’s call him Matty—led the college-age small group at his church. (Not my church; not my denomination either. They’re Christian though. I knew Matty from school.) They’d meet and chat, he’d give them some bible lesson, they’d pray, and at the end he liked to play Bible Answer Man for a bit—he took questions.

Most questions were easy, with nice short answers. But sometimes they needed a more detailed answer, so Matty would put a pin in it, and make it the subject of next week’s lesson, where he could spend a half hour or longer on it. Which, he admitted, he appreciated; sometimes he didn’t know what he was gonna talk about next week, but “God provided.” (Well, when his topics weren’t all that profitable, I’m not so sure it’s God who provided. But whatever.)

So… one week the question had to do with women in ministry. The scriptures have no problem with it, and therefore neither does Matty, so the next week he made a thorough biblical argument in favor of it. Thing is, his church is sexist, so you can already see where this was headed: Someone at the small group who disagreed with him, tattled on him. In their denomination the board, not the pastor, runs the church; and the board decided Matty ought not teach the college-agers any longer. So he didn’t.

Here’s the thing: The young’uns still had questions, and since Matty was the answer man, they’d bring them to him, class or no class. Pastor got wind of this, called Matty in for another meeting, and told him, “You gotta shut that down.” Shut what down? These kids and their questions. If they have questions, they’re to take it to one of the pastors. Not Matty. They didn’t trust Matty.

I’ll be honest: This’d be the point where I left this church. But Matty had a lot of years invested in this church, so, y’know, sunk cost fallacy. He felt he oughta be a team player, so he agreed. Whenever the college-agers had questions, he now said, “Oh, you should ask Pastor.” So they did. Then they started leaving the church.

Matty ran into one of those young people after she’d left their church, asked her what’s up, and got the whole story: Seems when Pastor got a question he didn’t like, his response was, “You ought not ask such questions.” The frustrated young people recognized a red flag when they saw one, and soon left that church. Some of ’em sought and found a church where pastors do answer questions. But more of ’em simply presumed Christianity didn’t have answers, and quit church altogether. (And I find if you grew up in one of those Fundamentalist churches which loudly declares or implies every other church is misled, too liberal, too heretic, or otherwise dangerously wrong, you’re likely to despair: “There are no other churches I can go to,” and likewise quit church altogether.)

There’s more to this story, but I wanna stop here to say this is the point of this article: When churches don’t or won’t answer questions, they’re gonna lose the people who have those questions. And rightly so. I’ll be blunt: If you aren’t allowed to ask questions in church, it’s a cult. You should leave.

Legit questions, versus challenges to authority.

To be fair, there are cases when a “question” isn’t honestly a question: The questioner already has their mind made up, and the point of the question isn’t to get information, but to pick a fight. They wanna debate you. Back when I taught at a Christian school, I’d have kids who claimed they “just wanna ask a question,” but really they wanted to disagree with, or pick apart, some assignment or requirement or rule. Kids with this agenda are really easy to detect; adults are sometimes much more subtle. But after a bit of discussion, anyone with half a brain should be able to tell what the questioner is up to.

Cults don’t really trust people to have half a brain. They simply shut down every line of questioning. To them, Christianity (really their hold on power, disguised as Christianity) is a Jenga tower, and if you knock out just the right block, the entire structure will fall. You cannot question church doctrines. You must only accept them by faith.

Ideally blind faith: This way you’ll easily accept any rubbish they feed you, on blind faith. Cults thrive on people who are willing to accept everything, including ridiculous things, on blind faith. Who never, ever ask questions. Who are shamed into never asking questions: “Why are you doubting? Don’t you have faith?”

But lots of ’em don’t have to be shamed into anything. Because they don’t think. They don’t have a deep faith. They don’t think all that hard about anything. You can kinda tell this by their career, their politics, their relationships… everything in their lives runs on minimal brainpower, and they’re happy with that. Try to go any deeper and it agitates them: “Why d’you gotta make things complicated? Why can’t you be happy with simple? Stick to simple. Jeez, you’re ruining everything.”

Problem is, God didn’t make every human simple. (In fact I’m pretty sure most of us aren’t.) Some of us want more than a simple faith, than the same stuff we believed as children. We’ve put away childish things, 1Co 13.11 and want an adult understanding of the things we believe. We wanna know why, and how, and what for, and who says so. “The bible tells me so” is nice for children’s songs, but now we wanna know why the bible can tell us so—why’s it an authority? And does it actually tell us so, or is that that thing you claim it decrees, based on a faulty interpretation of what it really does say?

Deconstruction happens, folks. When it does, we’re gonna have questions. Sometimes a few; sometimes lots. Sometimes they’re serious worries; sometimes they’re mere curiosities. Either way, we should be able to bring these questions to our fellow Christians—particularly the elders and leadership of our churches. And these fellow Christians need to take these questions seriously. And try to provide reasonable, helpful answers, based on valid interpretations of bible.

If they’re not capable, if they don’t want to, or worst-case (like Matty’s pastor) rebuke the questioner—don’t be surprised when these people don’t wanna stay in church anymore. Who might leap to the conclusion these Christians are fools, the pastor’s a con artist, this church is a scam—heck, maybe all churches are a scam!—so they’re out of here.

To be fair, sometimes those Christians are fools, the pastor is a swindler, and the church is a cult; and the way the Holy Spirit reveals it to people is by giving them their doubts in the first place. But more often, none of these things are true. Okay yeah, it was extremely foolish to not help answer people’s questions, but the rest aren’t true—but you do realize the devil is trying its darnedest to get doubtful Christians to leave their churches, and unhelpful Christians are simply handing the devil some gasoline for the fire.

There has always been an exodus of people who had questions, couldn’t get answers from their churches, and left. Its rate has simply grown greater over time, as more and more churches have wrongly decided there are certain questions we cannot ask. Lately it’s been, “How can you support political positions which run so contrary to the Sermon on the Mount?”

I mean, if you wanna talk about an honest question which instantly gets misinterpreted as a challenge to someone’s authority, it’d be that one. And partisanship regularly gets Christians who are ordinarily very rational, to justify all sorts of ungodly reasoning and behavior. Evangelical churches which are very much not cults, suddenly rage like full-on cultists in the face of this question. Still an honest question though—and it’s why a startlingly large number of “ex-vangelicals,” who can’t bring themselves to switch to liberal churches which make the same mistake in the other party’s direction, throw up their hands in despair and go to no church at all.

Matty’s solution.

Yeah, I know you wanted me to finish this story. So the young ex-churchgoer whom Matty bumped into, asked him since his pastors are no longer her pastors, is it okay if he answers her question now? “What was the question again?” asked Matty—and answered it. It had a surprisingly easy answer.

But he took her loophole and ran with it: If anybody else who quit his church, or had no church at all, or even went to other churches, had a question, maybe they could meet, and he could provide answers. So he created an informal group which met at the local coffeehouse. The owner closed at 5pm anyway, so Matty’s group met there after hours. Yep, he had an unsanctioned, unaffiliated-with-his-church small group.

And you know it got back to his church. He got called into another meeting, in which the board ordered him to shut it down. This time Matty refused—this wasn’t a church thing; this was his own thing. Lots of people in the church had businesses and outside-the-church ministries, and the church didn’t boss them around, did they? Except, well, the board members liked to imagine they very well could boss them around, if they felt the need—if you’re cheating customers, shouldn’t your pastors be able to rebuke you? (And yes, cults can and do take this to crazy extremes.)

But in the end, Matty refused to shut down his small group, and told the board if it meant he was kicked out of the church over this, so be it. The board decided meh; not worth the fuss, and let him stay. Matty stayed there—kinda uncomfortably—for another three years, and goes elsewhere now. His small group has been around nearly 20 years.

This isn’t a happy ending. See, Matty’s group grew—at the expense of his former church, and any other churches which do the same thing. In those last three years, Matty was kinda passively moving them to his group: They’d have questions, which Matty wasn’t allowed to answer, which the church leaders didn’t answer, but the youngsters knew if they quit the church, they could now go to Matty’s group and get those answers. You see how dysfunctional the whole setup was.

There’s already a big exodus of young people from lots of churches, for lots of reasons. Kids who were never really Christian, and now that they’re adult, they stop pretending. Kids who wanna sin, feel too guilty to stay in church, and find excuses to not go. Kids whose work schedules conflict with the worship services, and they make no effort to still stay connected. Or good old-fashioned apathy. Doubts and deconstruction don’t have to be one of the reasons; Christians can help them through their faith crises way better than anyone else. Matty’s old church is hemorrhaging more kids for a totally preventable reason.

These youngsters who went to Matty’s group, who got answers, didn’t necessarily go back to any other church. Some of ’em think of Matty’s group as their church—and it’s not. Might grow into one; some small groups have evolved into churches over time. But they don’t do holy communion, don’t have any ministries; they’re not set up as any kind of Christian support system, and don’t even exist outside of the hour a week they meet. They don’t exist when Matty goes on vacation either. He’s taken summers off. No church should shut down like that.

And this group shouldn’t even have to exist, seperate from a church. Okay yeah, this blog exists separate from a church, but not because my church and its leaders don’t take questions. They publicly do! But I suspect most of the reason I get questions is because of this very problem: People don’t feel they can question their current churches and pastors and elders. So they gotta email some stranger on the internet.

I’ll give answers, but really you should have someone safe in your church you can go to. Every church should be able to answer anyone’s legitimate questions about God and Christianity. If it avoids and shuns that kind of thing, there’s something wrong and unhealthy with that church. If it rejects and rebukes that kind of thing, it’s a cult.