Father David’s Step Two post in this series is FAITH CAN MAKE YOU WELL. The moment I read this heading a thought came to me. Not just faith, but it must be a healthy faith. This series is all written in the context of the Christian faith in specific, therefore, I am going to address this in the same. Before I actually address the podcast and the worksheet, I have a commentary to make.

There are Christian faiths in the world that are not healthy. They are themselves highly dysfunctional and will keep you locked in the wrong thinking that fueled your addiction for decades if you do not come to recognize what they are teaching is pure poison to your soul.

There are two kinds of dysfunctional churches in the world. The first and most egregiously wrong are those who present God as the abusive parent. He is cold, harsh, distant, and if you make a wrong turn – BAMMO! – He is on you with a stick to beat you. He is just like the abusive father or mother you had as a child. Oh, they may make passing reference to God as love or the “love of God,” but the centerpiece of their sermons is that God is ever on the lookout for the slightest deviation from the right faith and the right practice. He is the Ever Angry One. A large part of the struggles I have with my faith in Christ come from decades of sitting under this sick preaching. I was young, I was trusting, and I did not know that the God they were presenting came from their distortion of the Scriptures in order to satisfy their agenda. Let me give you an example:

Fundamentalist Baptist types are fond of having, from time to time, a visiting evangelist to come into the church and preach a series of messages designed to rouse up the sleeping troops. These messages are always condemnatory of anyone and everything not approved by Baptist teaching, and boy oh boy, is God ever mad at people who do things such as have a bit of wine with dinner, men who have long hair, women who wear pants, or Christians who dare go to the *GASP* movies. I don’t know if Bob Jones University or Liberty Baptist are still teaching these ideas, but I heard a lot of it when I was younger and it set a warped image of God in my mind.

One of these “revival meetings” sticks out in my mind in particular. It was “Tithing Night,” the night for the evangelist to get on people about their lack of giving money to their church, and he told the following story:

“A man who was a faithful churchgoer and tither was having a spell of financial difficulty and decided to skip his weekly tithe. The next week, his car broke down and the cost of the repair came to exactly the amount of his weekly tithe. TO. THE. VERY. PENNY !“

The evangelist drove home the point. If you don’t give God what is rightly his, he will get it some other way. As a very young man who had recently by God’s grace repented and come out of a life of horrendous sin, I trusted these men. I believed every word they said and trusted they were speaking “the Word of the Lord” to me. For decades after that night I never missed tithing my weekly income, even when we were three months behind in our bills and I had to beg help from my parents. I was scared to death not to do so. The message worked, at least on me, and perhaps some others who were also struggling with their vision of God as the ever angry one who would get you if you didn’t do the right thing.

This isn’t God and this isn’t the “Word of the Lord.” This is nothing less than theological terrorism and religious bovine excrement passing itself off as Christianity. It is dysfunction on steroids, yet I was too young and uneducated to see it. But here’s the problem. This sort of thing gets into the soul and leaves a deep impression, a stain that is not easily washed away, even after one has left the abusive family he had as his church home. As my former spiritual director told me one day, “It took you decades to get this way. Don’t think you are going to be healed overnight.” Overcoming this sort of poisoning of the soul can take a long time. Even today, the little voice in my head tells me that if I don’t give faithfully to my church, bad things will happen to me financially. ¹

The second dysfunctional type of church that exists in Christianity is the church that will not help the sinner overcome his addiction. There is no call for repentance, and often there are outward expressions of approval for behaviors that the Bible terms to be sin. If the Westboro Baptist Church is way out of line with their “God Hates Fags” signs, these churches are also out of line as they fly Gay Pride flags over what they call their altar. The Christian life is about love, and love always wants the best for the object of its affections. To leave a person addicted to behaviors that the Bible and the Church condemn is not love nor helpful to that person at all. Christ did not come to leave us in our misery. He came to take on human nature and make us like himself. The Orthodox Church has a saying: “What Christ is by nature we become by grace.” We are to be deified, to be made like Him in every way except being of the essence of God. We are called to have victory over the passions that drive us to do wrong. This is the work of the Church. The tools she has for this are the ascetic actions of fasting, prayer, alms giving, and especially the Sacraments. And the most important Sacrament, one that will come up shortly in Fr. David’s series, is the Sacrament of Confession. We confess what we have done wrong and receive forgiveness. But if we are not confronted with our wrongdoing, if we think that we are fine just as we are in our chosen addiction, then we can never be made well. This is the failure of the second kind of churches.

Neither one of these two types of churches can bring to the soul the healing that it needs. In the first kind, you will never be able to have that healthy relationship with God because you are ever afraid of Him. And in the second, you will never be healed and brought to health because they infer by what they preach, teach, and do, that you that you don’t need to be healed. You are fine and God is happy with you just as you are.

And both of them are LIES!!

1. Yet, as if to show me what a complete crock this is, the Lord allowed me to get into some deep financial problems last year, problems so bad that I was thousands of dollars over my head in debt and simply could not give to my parish. Did God smite me? No. In mercy I was able to obtain extra work that I wasn’t expecting from a job that paid an extraordinary amount of money. That “little voice” in my head is none other than the Evil One, smearing the character of my loving heavenly Father. I will do well to remember this time and ignore the accusations of the devil. ↩︎