Cages, Stages, and the Life of Faith
Wait and see? Or dive right in? Is it your personality or just this season?
Last evening during The Understory’s book discussion zoom with launch members, I had occasion to share that since childhood, I’ve been a part of seven distinct and different denominations and spent at least three years and at most ten in each of them. I wasn’t a casual observer of the Charismatic movement or the neo-reformed revival or the Mennonite way, or more, I was all in—either because that’s where my family was or that’s where I’d chosen to plant myself. I say that, while also needing to add that despite my “all in” in each of those ways of thinking and believing and acting, I was still very much a skeptic and figuring out my way all in.
It’s a running joke in our family that I will get my hooks into a subject and it’s going to be near impossible to distract me from it. I believe the kids are calling it hyper-fixation these days. Whatever it is, I jump in with both feet, try to see a thing from every angle, understand it, try it on with my words, see what works, what doesn’t, envision myself wholly given to it, and usually end up, at best, getting bored with it or, at worst, seeing how the sausage is made and saying, “Nope, not for me.”
Church (and whatever its particular local brand of doctrine, orthodoxy or orthopraxy) tends to be the same for me. For a long time—and I couldn’t exactly name this until I was far removed from it and the benefits it offered—church was more social security for me than it was the gathering of the people of God united around Jesus. Once that social security was gone though, I was left standing there going, “Wait, what do I believe again and why and what bearing does it have on my actual life and the people I love?” It wasn't a deconstruction process from Christianity (I’d already gone through that in my late twenties, eventually coming to see I hadn’t actually ever put my faith in Jesus alone), it was a deconstruction process from the church, or, at least, whatever church looked like in my life at that point.
Anyway, the point is, some people won’t dive in the deep end until they know how to kick their feet and move their arms and hold their breath and swim, but I dive in with both feet and then learn how to swim. I don’t think there’s necessarily a more right way to do it, but if you’re a wait and see kind of person, you might think a dive right in person is a lot more confident in the things they’re doing and saying than they actual are. And if you’re a dive right in person, you might think that a wait and see kind of person is a lot more wise and patient than they actually are.
Years ago, a friend recommended a book called The Critical Journey to me. I looked it up online and bought a copy to peruse at my leisure, not knowing that years later, my graduate program would use it as part of their curriculum. Of all the books we read in our program, The Critical Journey, while not the best, most well-written, organized book of them all, remains one of the most helpful in my actual life today. Namely because of its use of the stages of faith. Some might find security in knowing where they land in The Critical Journey’s grid of stages, but I have found the most helpful part of it to be the growth and understanding of others in whatever stage I perceive they’re in.
Here’s the stages as Hagberg and Guelich outline them, along with a brief description of each stage, what it looks like when we’re caged at that stage, and why this can be incredibly freeing for people of faith: