Varsity Faith: A Thoughtful, Humble, Intentional, and Hopeful Option for Christian Students

Copyright © 2013 Trevor T. Hamaker

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-9122-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9123-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013906659

WestBow Press rev. date: 4/17/2013

CONTENTS

An Open(ing) Letter To Youth Pastors

Introduction: What Is Varsity Faith?

Chapter 1 Will You Stay Or Will You Go?

Part One: Alive

Chapter 2 Choose Life

Chapter 3 Life Together

Chapter 4 Homecoming

Part Two: Echo

Chapter 5 Gardens & Thorns

Chapter 6 Something Better

Chapter 7

Chosen

Part Three: Seeking Sophia

Chapter 8 Who Is Sophia?

Chapter 9 Lend Me Your Ears

Chapter 10 Walk Wisely

Part Four: Tempted

Chapter 11 Spin Cycle

Chapter 12 Breaking The Cycle

Part Five: Refresh Everything

Chapter 13 Dreams & Visions

Chapter 14 Flash Forward

Epilogue: Keep Calm & Carry On

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For Tyson and Reagan…with faith, hope, and love.

One day the choice will be yours.

AN OPEN(ING) LETTER TO YOUTH PASTORS

Students who profess Christian faith are dropping out of the church and leaving the faith at a staggering rate when they get to college. The statistics are widely available in plenty of formats so I don’t need to get into the definitions and details here.¹ Suffice it to say there is a growing need to help Christian students continue believing and practicing the faith as they become adults.

Much of the teaching that students receive at church is slanted too far in one of two directions. It leans either too far toward the practical (at the expense of the theological), or too far toward the theological (at the expense of the practical). Either way, after the church has invested countless hours and dollars to teach them, students are not prepared to meet the academic, social, and experiential challenges that await them in college. We need to find a synthesis that brings faith to life in the real world in a meaningful way.

I wrote this book to help students connect the dots between the theological and the practical. Helping students make this connection, between head and hands, is essential if they are to continue believing and practicing their faith as they become adults. Pulsing in the middle of it all is, of course, the heart. Students, like all of us, devote their attention, energy, and praise to the things they value most. I believe that practical theology can blaze a trail into their hearts and help them (re)discover the truth that St. Augustine confessed in the fifth century: You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.

Many students find themselves in a challenging place today. Questions start to creep in, the answers being offered don’t satisfy, theology loses its connection to reality, and doubts gnaw away at the faith they once claimed as their own. But it’s important to recognize that the questions and doubts are not the problem. There’s no reason to oppose them because their presence is not a sign of faltering faith.² In fact, some kinds of doubt can actually be good, and some amount of disorientation and questioning is inevitable for students as their minds develop, bodies grow, emotions mature, and hormones rage. What we should oppose is our own unsatisfying responses that cause those questions and doubts to persist until they become a student’s reason for abandoning the faith. If something’s got to give, it shouldn’t be a student’s faith; it should be the trite answers and simplistic solutions that don’t satisfy anyone—especially not today’s students. These responses fail to satisfy because, in large measure, they allow theology to stand disconnected from reality. Practical theology is essential for students, then, because it prompts interaction between faith and life without shortchanging either.

A 16-year-old was talking with me recently about some of his questions. Eventually I asked him why he hadn’t asked his youth pastor those questions. He said that he had asked, but felt like the youth pastor gave him a superficial cliché and sent him away to invite his friends to the next big event on the calendar. This should not be happening. Students who are working through the questions and implications of Christian faith should see the church as their advocate, not their adversary. We must create environments where students can openly express their questions, doubts, and struggles without feeling shamed, ostracized, or put aside. That student is among the many students I’ve talked with who are experiencing a thick sense of cognitive dissonance. Our claims about God don’t seem to match their experience, and they don’t know how to respond. Unfortunately, because many of these students have been taught to think about faith with only in or out, all or nothing categories, they feel like they have no middle ground on which to stand and think and pray and believe… so they leave.

Students need to know that strident fundamentalism and loose relativism aren’t their only options. There’s another way, the way that I call Varsity Faith. This is the kind of faith—thoughtful, humble, intentional, and hopeful—that I seek to demonstrate with the practical theology offered in this book.

I’m not foolish enough to think that my words are the last, or even the best, to be had on these topics. But they are the words of someone who has found a way to remain faithful in the face of the same questions, doubts, and challenges that many students are facing today. I hope that you will offer this book to the students you lead—especially those who are about to graduate or have recently graduated. It has the potential to open up avenues of reflection and conversation about important topics that can radically affect the ways that students choose to live their lives.

Practical theology, authentic engagement in students’ lives, and receptivity and responsiveness to their challenges, questions, and doubts will go a long way toward developing students with Varsity Faith. And it’s my contention that students with Varsity Faith will continue believing and practicing the Christian faith as they become adults.

May God bless you in the work you’re doing with students. It is a high calling and a worthy cause.

—Trevor Hamaker

    Advent 2012

INTRODUCTION:

WHAT IS VARSITY FAITH?

Varsity Faith is my shorthand way of describing a kind of Christian faith that is thoughtful, humble, intentional, and hopeful. These particular qualities are especially helpful because they are ways of being, rather than stages of accomplishment. That means there isn’t a time when we can put a checkmark next to thoughtful and move on to the next thing. All of us will always have room to grow in these areas, even as we see ourselves becoming more thoughtful, humble, intentional, and hopeful along the way.

The open-ended nature of these characteristics matches the observation that our lives are dynamic, not static. Each day offers unique possibilities that call for different responses at different times. Tally sheets and checkmarks won’t help us find our place in what is essentially a narrative existence that picks up the past, lives in the present, and looks toward the future. So these four ways of being have an ongoing, participatory quality that meets us wherever we are on the journey of faith to point us in the right direction.

Because these qualities are so important, I want to unpack each of them for you in a little more detail:

Being thoughtful could be taken in a couple of ways, but here it means involving ourselves in careful thinking. I have in mind a faith that seeks understanding. This doesn’t mean that everyone should be a scholar; it means that we take a second look, from a different angle, at the stories and actions with which we’ve grown familiar. It’s a reflective approach that understands the power of ideas, and recognizes that truth isn’t determined by the volume of someone’s voice. We ask questions in order to gain understanding and clarity about what is said and what is meant. Thoughtful people are the kind of people who wonder about why things are the way they are, and seek to articulate their views in meaningful ways.

Being humble is about holding a realistic view of our own ability and knowledge, and also giving others the benefit of the doubt. This requires us to admit that we don’t know everything, can’t do everything, and have a limited perspective through which we view the world. God sees things exactly as they are, but we aren’t God. Such a posture of humility can go a long way toward breaking down walls of hostility. It can also motivate a willingness to contribute toward the common good with people who are different from us. Humble people are the kind of people who recognize their own strengths and limitations, and look for the good in others.

Being intentional involves paying attention and applying effort to the private things that make a public difference. It considers not only who I am and who I am becoming, but also who we are and who we are becoming. Because personal identity and group solidarity are important and fragile, special attention must be given to the development of disciplines that are necessary to sustain our particular vision and vocation as Christian people. Boundaries must be drawn and goals must be defined because identity and solidarity