"I was living in the last of a series of missionary outposts that had filled most of my twenties. This one left me in the former Yugoslavia, beneath the flight path of NATO war machines preparing to bomb Serbian troops in Kosovo.
This thought, I can’t believe anymore, had been buried deep inside me for close to a year.
This final outpost was the last stop on what I had often described as a great adventure. It was exotic. I was a driven young man, driven by a desire to make a difference in the world. I was also driven by an obsession to prove myself. I had to prove myself to my church, to my dad, and ultimately to my God. Obsessions snowball with time. So I took harder and harder assignments in Europe’s complicated and pain-filled corners. This drive was both intoxicating and addictive. And like all addictions, it left me with a dead soul.
My last year on the field, I kept this sorrow—secret hidden deep inside me: I had stopped believing. No one knew. No one could be allowed to know. I would lose my job. I would lose my whole world as I knew it.
What possible place exists for a missionary who doesn’t believe?
A cadaver soul impacts everything. It makes faith impossible. It makes prayer impossible. But that is only the beginning.
It also makes kindness almost impossible. It makes true compassion impossible.
In my case, it also led to acts of manipulation, anger, and emotional abuse. It is a great irony that I had been commissioned to support and protect, but instead I became an instrument of hurt and chaos.
In what can best be described as a mercy killing, those under my charge turned me in. They demanded that I be removed from my post and ultimately from the mission field. Months later my leadership finally determined that I needed to return “home” to heal, which meant Oregon, a place I had left long before.
They said I needed to find the faith I had lost.
I was sentenced to a Christian seminary.
I spent the next year, from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, sitting at plastic—topped tables, under fluorescent lights, surrounded by taupe—colored walls.
I needed my professors to meet me in the very midst of my lost faith.
They couldn’t, so I sat silent, like a man in solitary. At the time, I didn’t know if I could survive in America, a world I had long forgotten. Academia, strip malls, and big—box stores were like sound pollution after my years in the developing world.
How could I find a way station of relief?
Relief soon came. After class I would escape to a British pub a couple of neighborhoods away from campus. My inner screaming eased in the mostly empty, cavernous, dimly lit, dark-wooded world of the Horse Brass Pub.
Back on campus, I had nothing to offer my fellow students. I did not have the language to explain that I could not share their hope and idealism. It was different at the Horse Brass. My company instead became the sort of nonreligious ragamuffins who frequent a British pub at three in the afternoon.
I had a favorite table. It was under the large, dark-framed window at the pub’s north end, my back situated against the street and my face toward the wraparound antique bar. There were thick rafters and rough—hewn pillars on every side. Occasionally, Dennis the bartender would give me a chin nod, and on the really great days, he would come around the bar and sit awhile, often bringing me a joke.
My routine solidified quickly. Dennis would catch my silhouette as I came through the heavy double doors. Most days I couldn’t even get to the end of the bar before Dennis had already poured me a chewy India Pale Ale in an English pint. I would collapse behind my computer and thick theology texts, all spread across the long, skinny table. A couple of deep breaths, and then I’d dive into my studies.
Each day, inevitably, someone would come and distract me from my studies. Occasionally the person was tipsy and lonely; usually he was just friendly and bored.
My studies would sit on the table like a quivering puppy, begging to be included in the conversation. They could not be ignored forever. Eventually my pub friends would ask what I was reading or writing. They wanted to know about me. They wanted to hear what I was learning.
I would begin sharing safely, staying in the world of ideas. Eventually, I would tell them about my years overseas.
I talked about my secret sorrow.
I told them that I was a theology student but that I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. This confession always seemed to release delight in my companions. It is funny; after years of having all the answers, I discovered how attracted people are to someone with honest doubt's and real questions.
This was when something magical would happen. Every time it startled me. They started to counsel me, counsel from their stories, from their hurt, and from their own faithlessness.
I cried out to them. I told them I was at a precipice, at a watershed, teetering on a rooftop: Jesus on one side and the desperate unknown on the other.
The more I would share, the more they would enter my hurt. They would tell me to “fall toward Jesus.”
Over that next year I did discover faith again. Not only did I find faith; I found a mostly satisfying sort of Jesus-faith, based in a communal God who loves me and suffers for me. This God was creative and unshackled.
This was a God who is, as the Scriptures say, “not far from any one of us; for in him we live and move and have our being.” He is “over all and through all and in all” and “in him all things hold together.”
This faith I discovered was unapologetically Christian, rooted and dependent upon the holy Scriptures and the historical and global church, but at the same time, fresh and fueled from unexpected sources.
This rebirth did not happen in the classrooms of my religious graduate school. It did not happen in the pew of a local church.
It primarily happened in a nicotine-saturated beer hall.
My priests were not pastors or professors; they were pub folk: people who would never call themselves Christians, nor would they visit a Christian church, but they were the gospel to me all the same.
This pub story barely scratches the surface of a much larger journey. Many of my spiritual heroes have been unexpected. (Neighbors and Wise Men: Sacred Encounters In Portland Pub and Other Unexpected Places. Tony Kriz.)
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