One of my deepest recurring struggles as a pastor was getting my identity and vocation confused. My identity was ‘God’s child,’ but I related too much through my vocation as God’s employee. If I was not diligent, I would focus more on my work than my relationship and slip into a pattern of proclaiming God more than enjoying God. I consider vocational ministry to be a great privilege and I love getting a front row seat to what God is doing in our people, but I was surprised at how much my vocation jeopardized my faith.
Over time I noticed gaps between what I believe about God verses what I experienced from God. I was curious if my congregants also experienced a gap and I began to ask them. After a few dozen conversations, a common theme and more poignantly, a commonality of experience emerged. My congregants didn’t struggle with the same vocational tension of course, but they did share the same gaps in their faith. They expressed gratitude and relief that a pastor would share his own gaps because it gave them permission to share theirs. After surveying hundreds of people about the gap between their belief and experience, I identified the three most common gaps:
- I believe God loves me but I don’t feel it.
- I believe God is with me but I don’t see it.
- I thought I’d be further along by now.
These are three gaps that reveal the tiny, vast space between our belief and our experience. What were we doing about it? What could we do about it? Honestly, for a struggle that is so universal to us all, I wasn’t hearing much about it.
In 2019, I wrote Managing Leadership Anxiety to help pastors find relief in their vocation. I wanted pastors to feel seen and understood and I also wanted them to experience some breakthrough in their stuck patterns and help integrate their vocation and identity in a healthier way. In that book I offered a combination of theology and psychology along with practical tools that pastors could try. As I dug deeper into the dynamics that keep us spun up or stuck in our human relationships, I was surprised to discover that these same dynamics infect our relationship with God. By this time I was a few years into asking people about the gaps in their faith experience and it became clear to me that our faith gaps are linked to relational dynamics. Of course, ‘relational dynamics’ is a broad field, but my specialty focuses on four particular aspects: assumptions, reactivity, predictable patterns and attempted solutions. We bring all of these dynamics into our faith relationship and they can block our enjoyment of God.
One assumption I have explored is that we we think Jesus is our deepest, most core belief. As I dug into these gaps and why we experience them, I uncovered that for most of us, perhaps all of us, Jesus is not, in fact, our deepest belief. Jesus is our most precious belief, that is true. Jesus is more precious to me than anything else, but what is also true is that I have deeper, more core beliefs that I hold, and often, have a hold of me. Some of these beliefs are conscious and many remain unexplored, but if I am unaware, they show up and get in the way of Jesus’ truth. One simple belief that has hold of me is ‘I must make whoever is in front of me like me. I must make everyone I meet feel better.’ A deeper belief that it look a while to locate is, ‘I am not worth people’s time, don’t bother anyone.’ These beliefs can sound innocuous as first, but it doesn’t take long to discover they are antithetical to the message of Jesus.
No wonder I have ‘head beliefs’ and ‘body beliefs.’ My head believes in the peace and freedom of Christ but my body betrays that belief. I became convinced that what we need is a simple path to integrate our head beliefs into our body, to allow our precious belief in Jesus to seep deeper into our core.
This work became a book: The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space Between Our Beliefs and Experience of God. I wrote it to help not just pastors, but also our congregants to get past our attempted solutions and experience real transformation and relief. If you would like to do a church wide series that helps your whole church discuss their own gaps and ways to relax into God’s presence, you can access sample sermons and a series guide here.