Why are we people of faith so anxious to convince the world that our faith is believable? Those of us who are conservative Catholics or Evangelicals work hard trying to prove that the Bible is compatible with science and history and that its ethical teachings apply today as much as ever. Those of us who call ourselves \u201cprogressive\u201d or \u201cliberal\u201d try to speak the language of today’s culture and show that we don’t need to believe in a whole list of impossible things in order to be Christians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All this belongs to the branch of theology we call “apologetics”. We point out, of course, that “apologetic” is not used here in the common everyday sense of “saying sorry”, but in practice it slips very easily into meaning just that. We seem to be telling the world, “We know you think we are deluded, superstitious, out of touch, hypocritical, judgmental or whatever, but if you listen to us and let us explain ourselves you may find we are quite reasonable really.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the story in Acts (1:7-8), when Jesus gave his disciples their final commission, he didn’t say, “you will be my apologists” and certainly not “you will be my defenders”! He said, “you will be my witnesses”. Later, we hear Peter and John saying to the powerful religious leaders, \u201c\u2026 we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard\u201d (Acts 4:20). For them, the message was something exciting that they couldn’t keep to themselves. Perhaps we need to search our experience and our hearts to find what we are really bursting to say, what our story is, what makes us tick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, we are not all gifted storytellers or poets. But we all have a story to tell that makes us who we are. We may tell it untidily and awkwardly. We may tell it not in words at all but in painting, craftwork, knitting, cookery, home-building, friendship \u2013 doing whatever it is we do best. But if is our own story it can be more powerful than any creed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ray Vincent is an Associate Chaplain at the University of South Wales<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why are we people of faith so anxious to convince the world that our faith is believable? Those of us who are conservative Catholics or Evangelicals work hard trying to prove that the Bible is compatible with science and history and that its ethical teachings apply today as much as ever. Those of us who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions\/235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chaplaincy360.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}