For and Against – on Identity and Conflict

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how we define ourselves, and more specifically how I have been choosing (consciously or not) to define myself.

Last Friday I got up early to work on my blog, and wrote a long response to Piper’s suggestion that Christianity has “a masculine feel.” I was frustrated by words that I thought were misguided and harmful, and felt I needed to say something.

I worked on it during breakfast and while I sipped my first cup of coffee, finishing as the sun began to shine through the trees, but when it came time to hit “Post” I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I shared an interview with Sally Lloyd-Jones about the power of Story.

The same thing had happened a few days before that, this time while I was drafting my thoughts on the controversy around Mars Hill, Driscoll’s marriage book, and some of his recent interviews. Again, I got part way through preparing my post and just stopped, unable to continue. Eventually I ended up posting something different that day as well.

Part of my hesitation was simply exhaustion. It is incredibly emotionally draining – at least for me – to sustain the continual outrage that sometimes feels like the only proper response to the damaging things I see being done in the name of the faith I hold dear.

But it’s more than that; I’m tired in a different way, tired of defining myself by what I’m against.

There is a place for that way of finding our identity I think, for a time.

A number of years ago I started to rethink the assumptions I had always held about of my faith – to question the theology, reconsider the social implications, reimagine what it might mean to take God and his Word seriously – and it was unavoidable and perhaps even necessary that at the beginning of that journey I would find my identity in what I was against.

For a time that may be a necessary part of our stories, if for no other reason than that we have no alternative narrative yet, only the knowledge of what we have chosen to reject.

The danger is that it’s easy to get stuck there.

It’s easy to go through life defining ourselves by what, or who, we are not.

I know it’s easy for me.

But I also know it isn’t healthy, not forever at least.

Eventually we must break away from the pull of finding our identity in conflict and opposition, and be for something.

There will be things that need to be spoken out against from time to time, but perhaps it is far more important, and far more effective, if we spend our energy creating something beautiful, powerful, and transformative.

We must start to tell another story, to articulate an alternative narrative that is shaped by what it affirms, what it creates, more than what it denies or destroys. 

My hope is that here at Deeper Story, in our churches, and in our homes, we can be a part of a community that reimagines the story, and that comes together to tell that Story in a way that brings hope and redemption.

Fighting is easy, building something new… that’s an adventure.