My spiritual journey out of evangelicalism, by Bob Carling
November 2020
[An earlier version of this appeared in the now defunct newsletter ‘Spirited Exchanges: Critical Faith’, issue 19, July/September 2010]
This is my own spiritual story. The very fact that I use the words ‘story’ or ‘spiritual journey’ probably marks me down with evangelicals as beyond the pale. It smacks of being a ‘liberal’ Christian, one who has (apparently) abandoned faith and compromised the gospel. But having struggled with the particular brand of Christian faith that evangelicals promote, I now undoubtedly count myself as on the outside of evangelicalism. This is not an idle admission; it is an extremely painful confession for me to make.
After many, many years of believing that evangelicalism has the answers, such a leaving has been akin to bereavement – one cannot just jettison 40-plus years of belief without a lot of soul-searching and pain – but more of that anon. A phrase that I have been using a lot about my own beliefs lately is ‘on the believing side of agnosticism’. If it was possible to have heard myself use that phrase just a few years ago, I would have been horrified. And I am mindful of the fact that this account may be very unsettling to those that know me personally.
I started out on my spiritual journey when I was a pre-teen, with a ‘born again’ conversion experience. After many years of going to Sunday School and church, I finally ‘found God’ at a Christian youth camp on a farm in Herefordshire when I was just 11 years old. After my parent’s marriage had started to crumble, my dad was given a New Testament gospel to read by one the camp organisers and he converted to the Christian faith. Although his marriage never recovered, his faith gave him a new hope and meaning to life. After that, my siblings and I started to go with him to the youth camp every summer, where we all had a fantastic time every year.
Following my dad’s conversion, my older brother and sister also became Christians and it transformed their lives. I guess I felt left out, and there was a powerful urge to want to belong, and for my life to mean something, even though I was only 11. So, in 1967, I decided to become a Christian. After this ‘born again’ experience, I lived the Christian life in the best way I could, with daily prayer and bible readings with Scripture Union notes, and getting involved in church activities, particularly those involving music. I truly gave my life over to God, to do with me as he saw fit, to go anywhere, to be anything that he wanted me to be. I meant it and I was passionate.
My family moved around a lot so I went to various churches, depending on where we lived. My father moved from job to job, including in West Africa (Ghana and Nigeria) where I lived for some of my childhood. My mum and dad finally divorced when I was in my late teens, which had a profound effect on me and my siblings.
When I was a teenager, I had an experience of ‘speaking in tongues’, which, at the time seemed very real, although I now have my doubts about whether I had experienced it because of peer pressure. But it was part of my own spiritual journey, and I was thus exposed to the huge inter-church debate in the 1970s and 1980s about the charismatic movement, and what it meant for the future of ‘church’.
I was baptised and became a member of the Apostolic Church, a charismatic church that grew out of the 1904 Welsh Revival, during which I was exposed to some pretty fiery preaching! I spent many years teaching in Sunday School and was increasingly involved in youth leadership. I have played guitar from a very early age, and I used my music to lead worship. I was even in a gospel band who played on the same stage as Graham Kendrick. When the time came, I deferred going to university for a year and spent that time working for an evangelistic conference centre in Kent, as a musician evangelist I had a fantastic time there working for Justyn Rees, son of the post-war evangelist Tom Rees. (Justyn too went through a crisis of faith as he tells in his book Honest Doubt, Real Faith: A True Story of Lost Faith Recovered.)
At university I studied zoology. I felt that God had called me to the world of science, encouraged by talks that I had heard and books that I was reading by scientists who were Christians. I remember being warned by a well-meaning lady in our church that studying that subject might mean the death knell for my faith because of the evolution/creation controversy. My reaction was to say that this was all the more reason to go to University to study the subject to be a more informed Christian about it. The right attitude, I still feel. I am so often distressed by the number of Christians who shoot their mouths off about a subject about which they know very little – and I often feel that what they are doing is reiterating what their favoured church leaders are saying rather than bothering to think it through themselves.
While a student, I was heavily involved in the University’s Christian Union and used my guitar in worship frequently. In my studies, I came across more and more good evidence for evolution and consequently felt a good deal of conflict between what I was learning in my zoology lectures and what (some) Christians were saying about God’s creation. But I kept on believing as a Christian. What kept me going was the fact that there were in fact only a very small minority of Christians who were anti-evolution and they were mostly non-scientists.
My father had given me the little IVP book A Clockwork Image by Prof. Donald MacKay, who was, as I found out subsequently, a very influential Christian evangelical leader and a leading scientist at Keele University; and Mackay was not anti-evolution. It was with huge relief that I also discovered the postgraduate professional group Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship (RSCF); the membership of this mostly was made up of active scientists who were Christians, including Mackay. And I lapped up – devoured even – books by folks like MacKay, Oliver Barclay, RJ (Sam) Berry, Michael Poole, Denis Alexander, Ernest Lucas, David Wilkinson, John Polkinghorne, and many others, i.e. Christians who didn’t take the naive view that the Bible was anti-science.
The RSCF, now re-named Christians in Science (CiS), was a professional group of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF), the over-arching organisation linking evangelical Christian Unions in colleges and universities – so pretty much slap-bang in the evangelical fold. (The RSCF/CiS has a strong crossover with the American Scientific Affiliation and the BioLogos Foundation.) When I was a postgraduate student, I joined the CiS committee that coordinated and ran its activities – a committee I was on for 13 years.
During my time as an undergraduate and on into postgraduate life, I read and studied in great detail the books of Francis Schaeffer – the man who established L’Abri and has been hugely influential on many evangelicals. I also read C.S. Lewis, Os Guinness, and many others … I was intrigued by the fact that they were intellectually bright and Christians. Taking these guys as my inspiration, I thus spent many years passionately believing that the influence of Christians in culture was a golden opportunity for me, indeed even a ‘calling’, particularly in the science/faith areas.
After my postgraduate studies, I continued with a career in biomedical publishing where I was able to encourage and influence many scientists who were Christians to follow their calling as scientists. I was hooked. I felt called by God. I had a job, which I loved. I got married, had three children. I spent many years in church leadership. Life had its ups and downs but was, on the whole, pretty good.
However, in December 1997 I made a huge career mistake in leaving one good publishing company for an awful one. And within just one week of me leaving the good one – and for which I had been working for nearly 10 years – the good company got sold, to an asset- stripping company. So there was nothing for me to go back to. I was devastated. But I stuck it out with the awful company I had stupidly joined (oh how I wish I had checked the company out more!). After 13 months of sheer hell, enduring a vicious hiring and firing culture, and with very little support from friends and family, the company sacked me (on my birthday, which was particularly nasty of them). The result of this was a steady slide into depression, and, despite working hard trying to develop a freelance career, I earned less and less with each passing year, not helped by my worsening depressive illness, and I ended up earning so little that I needed benefits to survive.
My calling seemed to fade with every application to Christian organisations. Although I did work for a Christian charity for a few months, this came to nothing and ‘secular’ salaried jobs seemed to elude my grasp, despite hundreds of applications and many, many interviews, again not helped by depression which sapped me of enthusiasm. I was either too experienced, or the experience and skills I had weren’t quite the right fit for the job. I almost got appointed to several dream jobs – including almost getting a lectureship at a Bible college – but the fact that I only nearly got them was extremely painful. It felt as though God, if s/he exists, was grinding my face into the ground to ‘teach me a lesson’, but it was a lesson I had no idea how to learn. And answers to prayers in all of this? They just didn’t seem to happen. He certainly didn’t answer my prayers about earning a living. I was desperately unhappy and lonely – and felt that God had abandoned me, or that s/he didn’t exist at all.
Because of my depression, my marriage severely suffered during this time and, painfully, my wife asked me to leave home, despite my having no job, no money and three teenage children. I adored them but I had to go and leave them behind. I felt that my then wife had abandoned our marriage vows – ‘in sickness and in health’ – and had failed to see my depression as an illness, in many ways no different to the more physical illnesses such as cancer, or pancreatitis, or even breaking a leg.
I had already experienced my mum and dad’s divorce when I was a teenager and I had vowed that I would never, ever get in that situation myself especially because I knew of the deep effect that their divorce had had on me and my sisters and brother, and I didn’t wish that on my three children. But despite working hard on my marriage, it fell apart.
Also, despite years of trying to get back into the publishing world, which I loved, I failed to do so. I was desperately ‘giving myself over to God’ and pleaded with him to show me the way forward. But nothing happened, and the weeks turned into months and then into years – of nothing. No guidance, no confirmation of my ‘calling’, despite having been exposed to decades of preaching about how God ‘cares for everything about you’ and has a ‘plan’ for your life. Huh! It seemed to work for some people but not me.
So there I was, deeply disillusioned by the fact that God seemed not to answer prayer. About my marriage. About my income/job. About my calling. Not surprisingly, perhaps, my faith – or at least my hitherto ‘evangelistic’ faith – eroded away. Despite the very best efforts of some very close Christian friends who encouraged me (and many of whom are still very close friends), and, in particular, the wonderful emotional support of my older sister, I could not see how a faith, which used to involve believing that God has the very best intentions for my life, could be sustained. It collapsed under the strain.
So I stopped going to church. I fitted into Alan Jamieson’s category of ‘disillusioned followers’ (although there are elements of me also fitting into his ‘reflective exiles’ and ‘transitional explorers’ categories, and, to a lesser extent, even into his ‘integrated wayfinders’ category!) – see Alan Jamieson’s book A Churchless Faith. To this day I still find it painful to set foot in an EPC (evangelical/pentecostal/charismatic) church, with all the ‘certainties’ that these churches represent.
And then I met a wonderful woman with whom I fell in love, and she with me. And my life completely changed. Maria and I are really happy, and are developing a wonderful life together. We got married and the celebration after the marriage ceremony – to quote my new brother-in-law – was not so much a wedding celebration as a music festival! One of the best days of my life. Maria is a recovering Catholic, hurt by her earlier experiences of church, and does not have an evangelical faith or has ever had a ‘born-again’ experience.
The fact that I developed a relationship with her, and married her, again marks me out as someone who has moved on from evangelical faith.
Our marriage was seen as a cause of great celebration amongst our friends and family, with a few exceptions. Maria and I have been deeply hurt by a close family member who refuses to see our relationship as valid, making no attempt to see the value of our loving relationship and our happiness, only seeing it within the narrow confines of an evangelical/fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity and ‘anticipating our marriage to fail’. That makes me very sad – and mindful of the need for organisations like Spirited Exchanges (an earlier version of this essay appeared in their now defunct newsletter) to exist and help people in their spiritual journey outside of ‘church’.
So, 40 years on, where am I now in terms of my beliefs? My phrase ‘on the believing side of agnosticism’ still fits where I am. My life experiences have convinced me that God, if s/he exists, is not the kind of being who is intimately involved with his creation, supposedly answering the godly’s prayers (‘what socks shall I wear today, Lord?’) moment by moment. I still believe that there probably is a God – mainly for philosophical/theological reasons (where on earth do goodness and morality originate from, if not from a benevolent creator?). But I cannot see how evangelicalism/fundamentalism can possibly be right. I now regularly smart at what is essentially a worship of what the Bible says (or at least what some think the Bible says) about traditional/conservative interpretations concerning homosexuality, about women priests, about substitutionary atonement, and about the ‘second coming’, which leads to frankly racist attitudes towards Muslims, etc. etc.
Having written and spoken and defended Christianity in all sorts of ways over the years, including reading about (and experiencing) the alternative worship movement, for example, I now believe that writers like Dave Tomlinson, Brian McClaren, Maggie Dawn, Tom and Christine Sine, have got it largely right. And having been so heavily influenced by Francis Schaeffer, not surprisingly I have been very interested to read about the perspective of Frank Schaeffer (his son) and I have come to very similar conclusions to him – see his books Crazy for God and Patience with God and his column in the Huffington Post. I have some problems with what has become known as ‘post-evangelicalism’ but I guess that’s more or less where I am at the moment. I was an avid subscriber to Third Way magazine (when it used to be published), and have been going to the Christian festival Greenbelt for many years, so am very much aware of what the ‘church’ is struggling with culturally.
Over the years, I have seen many changes in the way in which ‘church’ is being done. I still look forward to expanding and developing my own spiritual walk, but outside of evangelicalism, together with my close friends and family, many of whom are still ‘inside’ the evangelical church. I am delighted that I have many friends ‘inside’ who have and are mutually supportive of my wife as a non-believer (and me), which is as it should be.
Bob Carling, November 2020
[An earlier version of this appeared in the now defunct newsletter ‘Spirited Exchanges: Critical Faith’, issue 19, July/September 2010]